Skip to content
Project 2025
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories
A woman timing another women in the military as she does push ups.

Hegseth Made the Fitness Test Harder for Women in Combat Roles. Most Female Marines Are Passing.

​Paintings of Stalin

The Stalinization of America

American Flag, Capitol building and the United States Constitution

Lawyers Must Reaffirm Their Oath to Defend the Constitution

U.S. economic crisis as markets crash. Concept showing a slowing market behind a black and white United States Capitol

Our National Debt Won’t Bankrupt Us. It Can Still Paralyze Us.

Historical documents representing founding principles of United States on flag backdrop

Why the Constitution Remains Our Defense Against Tyranny

The Fulcrum's new executive editor: Hugo Balta

Hugo Balta
By Kristina Becvar,
Kristina Becvar

In her role as co-publisher of The Fulcrum and Executive Director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, she is a driving force behind collaborative efforts to transform our democracy. Recognizing that no single idea or organization can address our complex challenges in isolation, Kristina excels in blending intuitive leadership with data-driven insights. Her extensive background in operations and change management, coupled with her M.S. in data analytics and research methods, equips her with a powerful skill set. Kristina brings a focused approach to the essential work required for a thriving democratic republic.

See More Writings by author
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
See More Writings by author
Dec 20, 2024

As co-publishers of The Fulcrum, we are proud to announce that, effective Jan. 1, Hugo Balta, The Fulcrum’s director of solutions journalism and DEI initiatives, will serve as executive editor.

Hugo is an award-winning, 30-year multimedia journalism veteran with multiple market and platform experience, including leadership positions in NBC, Telemundo, ABC, CBS, and PBS, among other storied news networks. A nationally recognized diversity in journalism advocate, he is the recipient of the 2024 Cecilia Vaisman Award from Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Hugo is the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Hugo and his family live in Chicago.

He is currently the Publisher of the Latino News Network. LNN’s mission is to provide greater visibility and voice to the Hispanic, Latino community, amplify the work of others in doing the same, mentor and provide young journalists with real work experiences, and apply the principles of solutions journalism in producing stories focused on the social determinants of health, and democracy.

Hugo is also an adjunct professor at Columbia College Chicago, teaching journalism courses. He previously worked as executive editor at the Chicago Reporter, editor at WBBM News Radio, and news director at WTTW Chicago.

We’ve grown significantly in 2024 and, under Hugo’s leadership, we are confident that our growth will continue as we expand into new areas. We deliver more than 1.4 million web impressions monthly and roughly 380,000 page views per month through our daily newsletter, social media platforms, and numerous other national content-sharing relationships. In addition, in the first eight months of this year, our writings were picked up 3,549 times by local newspapers around the country, which added to our reach considerably.

The Fulcrum is now accredited by Apple News, MSN News, Smart News and the Latino News Network. They pick up our content daily, and we are working to expand our relationship with them and other national platforms in 2025 to engage more citizens on how our evolving democracy can better meet the needs of all the people. We do so by sharing many perspectives to build a pro-democracy constituency of millions of Americans by making it easier to find and act on local and national civic engagement opportunities.

In 2024, we strengthened our working relationship with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where young journalists regularly provided reporting for The Fulcrum We are also extremely proud of our working relationship with The OpEd Project, which offers The Fulcrum the opportunity to elevate the ideas and knowledge of underrepresented expert voices to accelerate solutions to the biggest problems facing our nation.

We’d like to give a special thank you to David Meyers, our current executive editor, who has been instrumental in the success of The Fulcrum. David’s vast experience after two decades at CQ Roll Call, a leading publisher of political news and information, was instrumental in guiding The Fulcrum team to the success we are now experiencing. David will be starting a new job in January with OpenSecrets as director of communications and marketing.

Despite our successes in 2024, we will not rest on our laurels. 2025 allows us to solidify further our position as a leading outlet for news and opinion so insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk and act to repair our democracy and make it work in their everyday lives. Our dedication to a solutions journalism model will continue as we explore what is dividing us on the issues, what information can be trusted, what is oversimplified about the issues, and the nuances and complexities of the many problems facing our nation.

Please contact Hugo at hugo@thefulcrum.us to submit your op-ed proposal, suggest news stories and news or ask questions.

Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.


Latest news

data server
Environment

The One Thing Both Sides of the Data Center Fight Already Agree On

​Young adult woman accessing artificial intelligence
Media & Technology

When One Person Can Do the Work of a Team

​Tax Word on Wooden Block With Calculator and Tax Form
Economy

$40 Trillion U.S. National Debt & Role of ATR Taxpayer Protection Pledge Shell Game

Read More

photograph shows a handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps

This photograph shows a handheld smartphone displaying the icons of some of the main artificial intelligence based apps, including LLMs, chatbots and generative AI, with logos (from L) of Proton AG's Lumo, Meta AI, Mistral Vibe (formerly Le Chat), xAI's Grok, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, Deepseek, OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google's Notebook LLM and generative AI music app Suno, in Saint-Mande, east of Paris, on July 15, 2026.

Photo by Martin LELIEVRE / AFP via Getty Images)

The Second AI Election: Testing the Safeguards Before November

The 2024 U.S. presidential election was supposed to be the “first AI election.” Experts warned that generative AI could flood voters with deepfakes and fabricated evidence of fraud, U.S. intelligence officials declassified intel reports on foreign influence operations already experimenting with the technology, and leading AI companies pledged to combat deceptive election content. But foreign nations faced significant barriers to deploying AI to influence that election, according to the now-shuttered U.S. Foreign Malign Influence Center.

Two years later, the picture looks very different. AI tools have become far more sophisticated and widely available. Russia, China, and Iran are deploying a wide variety of cutting-edge AI tools in more sophisticated ways in foreign influence operations aimed at the United States and its citizens, among others. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has itself used AI in misleading ways, while at the same time dismantling or defunding the federal and independent bodies that identified and countered election-related influence campaigns. With the potential for AI-driven misinformation campaigns to escalate sharply in this year’s midterms, we tested some of the most popular AI models to learn how they can be exploited to peddle false election narratives. The results are clear: AI companies, lawmakers, and civil society must do more to blunt the threat ahead of elections this November and in 2028 to help ensure free and fair elections. We outline the steps they can take to do so below.

Keep ReadingShow less
Robot Holding a Resume Doing HR Work Vector Illustration

AI résumé screening can filter out qualified candidates before a human ever looks. Here's why transparency and human oversight in hiring matter.

nicoletaionescu/Getty Images

When AI Screens the Resume, Who Gets a Fair Shot at Work?

A job seeker can spend hours tailoring a résumé, checking qualifications and writing a thoughtful application, believing the next step will be a person deciding whether to schedule an interview.

Increasingly, that assumption may be wrong.

Keep ReadingShow less
President Trump answers questions from reporters.

U.S. President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters before boarding Air Force One on August 21, 2026 in Joint Base Andrews, Maryland.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump’s White House Press Ban Violates 1st Amendment

The principle is simple. Just like politicians are not supposed to pick their voters, government officials don’t get to pick the reporters who cover them.

If they did, the First Amendment would be meaningless. and we would no longer live in anything resembling a constitutional republic. That is why President Trump’s September 18 announcement that he is banning reporters from CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House is so dangerous.

Keep ReadingShow less
A person interacts with an AI chatbot on a smartphone. The screen displays a conversation interface with the text "Hi, may I help you?" suggesting the use of an AI assistant app. A laptop is visible in the background, emphasizing a tech-savvy environment.

A 2026 study found AI beat elite debaters, until it was slowed to human speed. Why persuasion throughput matters and how to make chatbot tempo transparent.

Chong Kee Siong/Getty Images

Political Chatbots Should Not Be Allowed To Set the Pace

A political chatbot can answer before a citizen has finished reading its previous message. It can add statistics, historical examples, causal claims, and links at a rate no human campaign volunteer could match. That does not necessarily make its case wiser. It changes the contest by allowing one speaker to control the tempo.

A June 2026 preprint offers unusually direct evidence of this problem. Across four preregistered experiments involving 18,978 conversations from 6,923 people, frontier AI systems were more persuasive than laypeople, tournament winners, professional canvassers and elite competitive debaters. The human experts were not casual opponents: the study included world and continental champions, paid preparation, live practice and substantial performance incentives.

Keep ReadingShow less
© Copyright 2026