The US Has Entered a New Phase of Political Violence | What America Can Learn from Iran’s Failure | The Future of American Cybersecurity | Harvard Should Prepare to Move Abroad, and more

predicament is thus a cautionary tale about what happens when loyalty to a ruling ideology—rather than capability—determines who runs a society, and when conspiracies, rather than reality, shape decision making.
The Iranian theocracy presents an acute case of this phenomenon, the early symptoms are beginning to manifest in democratic societies, including our own. Consider: Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has cast doubt on decades of scientific research on the effectiveness of vaccines.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has suggested that the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad did not use chemical weapons against his own people in 2017 and 2018, despite extensive documentation of the attacks, including by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the previous Trump administration. 
Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old recent college graduate who worked on Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the interim director of the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security, despite having no apparent experience in counterterrorism. 
Politicians have long rewarded their allies with plum positions. But when allegiance replaces proficiency as the primary qualification for advancement, and conspiracism replaces competency, disaster looms. Flunkies guided by regime ideology lack the capacity to understand and solve national crises. Just look at Iran.

RFK’s Loopy Approach to Vaccines Endangers Americans  (Economist)
Donald Trump’s health secretary undermines global public health, too.

Dismantling CDC’s Global Work is Dismantling Our First Line of Biodefense  (Stephanie Psaki and Nikki Romanik, Just Security)
The United States maintains more than 750 military bases around the world—not just to fight wars, but to prevent them. That same principle has guided U.S. investment in the global footprint of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—the agency tasked with protecting the health and security of Americans—to build and “forward deploy” critical defenses against biological threats worldwide.

It’s Time to Name Heat Waves Like We Do Hurricanes  (Eric Klinenberg, New York Times)
In typical years, more Americans die in heat waves than in hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined. Historically, though, the public, the media and politicians are quick to forget heat disasters — even where they happen most. It’s as if we have a will not to know about the brutal ways that extreme heat affects us.

Denial only makes us more vulnerable to the searing summers ahead. Between 1999 and 2023, heat deaths in the United States more than