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U.S. Vice President JD Vance

The Feigned Confusion of JD Vance: Erasure by Design

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Trump’s State Capitalism Marks a Radical Break in U.S. Policy

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Homelessness Just Declined in the U.S.–Trump’s Plans Will Take Us Backwards.

Citizens in Name Only: What the Supreme Court Can’t Fix

Citizens in Name Only: What the Supreme Court Can’t Fix

Podcast: Regulating social media

Podcast: Regulating social media
The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumMar 30, 2022
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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There are dozens of bills in Congress that would regulate social media in some way, but this week’s Civic Genius podcast guest has another idea to throw into the mix. Paul Barrett is Deputy Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, and his new report recommends that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regulate social media companies.

Could this proposal cut back online misinformation without running afoul of the First Amendment? Listen in to hear Barrett explain why he thinks so.

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President's Trump National Address On Iran Is Watched By New Yorkers In Manhattan
Ethics & Leadership

When Duty Isn’t a Priority: A Megalomaniac President Abuses the Nation

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Democracy

Democracy is a Responsibility, Not a Guarantee

The Pink Triangle: From Persecution to Pride
Community

The Pink Triangle: From Persecution to Pride

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America’s Data Crisis: Restoring Trust in the Facts That Unite Us
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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

America’s Data Crisis: Restoring Trust in the Facts That Unite Us

At a moment when Americans can’t even agree on the basic facts that mold our public life, the nation faces a deeper crisis than polarization alone. We are living through a collapse of shared reality. When people lose confidence in the numbers, surveys, and official information that once anchored civic debate, democracy itself begins to drift. Trustworthy government data isn’t a technical issue — it is core infrastructure that holds a self‑governing society together. And right now, that infrastructure is under strain.

The public has lost trust in government information on many levels and across the political spectrum. To restore that trust, we need to address the challenges facing government data — including low survey response rates, data protection concerns, and outdated or flawed statistical methods.

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Keeping Kids Safe Online?: Understanding the Debate Over AI Age Verification
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Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Keeping Kids Safe Online?: Understanding the Debate Over AI Age Verification

This nonpartisan policy brief, written by an ACE fellow, is republished by The Fulcrum as part of our partnership with the Alliance for Civic Engagement and our NextGen initiative — elevating student voices, strengthening civic education, and helping readers better understand democracy and public policy.

Key Takeaways

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Global leaders sitting around a circular table at the G7 Summit on June 18, 2026.

G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners and global tech CEOs attend a working lunch on innovation and AI at the G7 Summit on June 17, 2026 in Evian-les-Bains, France.

Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

At G7 Meeting, AI Titans Showed Themselves to Be the World’s New “Power Elite”

Seventy years ago, in 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published a startling exposé of the hidden forces controlling the government in the United States. What Mills labeled “the power elite” occupied leading roles in corporations, the military, and political institutions.

Mills’ book was designed to explore the shadowy world in which the power elite operated and to expose the enormous behind-the-scenes influence of a group whose decisions had great consequences for “the underlying populations of the world.” At the time it appeared, commentators credited Mills with “developing a theory of where the decisive power lies in American society, how it got there, and how it is exercised.”

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The U.S. Pentagon.

Buried in the 2027 NDAA, Section 224 could fundamentally reshape U.S.-Israel defense ties. Is Congress creating an irreversible military partnership?

Getty Images, Westend61

America Should Stay Single

As we wait to see what comes of ceasefire negotiations between the United States and Iran, the House just released its 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Buried within it lies Section 224, titled the “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” a provision representing what would be a radical departure from how we work with even our strongest allies, turning America’s relationship with a close collaborator into a permanent military-industrial integration. The U.S. has worked with NATO partners on co-production and shared supply chains in the past, but never like this. Many are calling it a merger. We should all be calling it off.

Section 224 could inextricably link the fate of our country’s defense to another’s. The Secretary of Defense would be directed to designate an executive agent to fuse ventures with Israel so significantly that it would touch almost every area of defense tech: AI, autonomous systems, energy, cyber, biotech, and beyond. It also proposes “network” and “data fusion,” which means, as the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute warned, “the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.” America First may soon sound more like a sarcastic punchline than a platform.

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