Tag: Spotlight

Among the many advantages of my generation, becoming adults in the 1960s and ’70s, was what and how we were taught. Advertising propaganda was new in the 1950s and, instead of using it to manage us, we were then taught how to manage it. Government and industry soon learned...
Leary Helped Destroy the 1960s New Left by Turning the Youth onto Drugs During the mid-1960s, as political activism against the Vietnam War and other social ills skyrocketed, Dr. Timothy Leary, a former University of California at Berkeley and Harvard professor, traveled the U.S. urging young people to “turn...
The late Mario Savio was a leading light of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1964 speech is now legend: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You...
Imagine being forced to prove how old you are—and having it verified by a third party—before unlocking your phone or signing up for a social media site. That’s the goal of legislation introduced or passed in some U.S. states, the UK and Australia...
1. Modern Imperialism and the Structural Logic of War In the history of United States foreign policy, wars have rarely been the product of an immediate and unavoidable threat; rather, they have often been the outcome of a complex process of narrative construction, economic interests, and geopolitical calculations. The recent...
In 1997, Ambassador Robert Houdek was the senior U.S. official in eastern Congo. His job was to assist in the repatriation of Hutu refugees who fled Rwanda after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control following Rwanda’s 1990-1994 civil war. A former senior U.S. official characterized Houdek as “our man...
On November 22, 1963, the same day as the JFK assassination, Mehdi Ben Barka, an anti-colonial politician and head of the left-wing Union of Popular Forces (UNFP) of Morocco, was sentenced to death in absentia for conspiracy to overthrow King Hassan II. The sentence was carried out two years later...
Bradley Birkenfeld, who exposed one of the largest tax scams in U.S. history, should also be pardoned On February 20, 2025, Donald Trump created the new position of the “Pardon Czar” to recommend “executive clemency” candidates, naming Alice Marie Johnson to that role. Johnson had been sentenced to life imprisonment without...
This is the second part of a two-part series, the first of which focused on Japan’s occupation of China prior to and during World War II, the human experimentation that occurred at Unit 731 (Japan’s bioweapons research facility in occupied Manchuria), and the after-effects of the Empire of the...
Congress is set to vote soon on reauthorization of the Section 702 warrantless surveillance program, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA...