Author: Insights

The world has watched Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine with a mixture of alarm and déjà vu. Moscow has a history of looking enviously upon its neighbors. Just as the Czars of old harbored visions of an ever-expanding empire, and used their military might to seize, colonize, and absorb lands that were once sovereign, Putin has long sought a revival of those imperial dreams. The dictator’s brand of nationalism, wrapped in historical revisionism and lies, has painted Ukraine as an inseparable part of Russia’s spiritual, cultural, and political heritage. The propaganda has ignored the fact that Ukrainians...

In the early 2000s, if someone were to mention online gaming, the average American might have pictured teenagers sitting in living rooms, gripping plastic controllers, and shouting into their headsets. It was easy to dismiss such behavior as harmless, where young gamers practiced their trash talk in the privacy of their own homes. Few recognized that a nasty undercurrent of sexism, racism, and homophobia was developing in those spaces. Fewer still could have predicted that, decades later, some of the same voices would evolve into a powerful current of political hate, fueling an entire army of trolls committed to...

In the past several years, Donald Trump and many of his closest allies in the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement have launched a series of high-profile attacks on progressive causes, activists, and policies. While these efforts have shifted their rhetoric over time, from decrying “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) in 2020 to blasting critical race theory (CRT) in 2022, labeling liberal ideas as “woke” in 2024, and more recently challenging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in 2025, many critics say the underlying target has never changed. Despite the ever-evolving jargon, each of these buzzwords has functioned as a...

The federal government for the first time publicly addressed one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history, an overdue acknowledgment of a racial violence that targeted Black Americans in 1921. Just before Trump’s second inauguration in January, the Department of Justice released a 123-page report examining the deadly events surrounding the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The extensive investigation, carried out by career lawyers and investigators from the Emmett Till Cold Case Unit of the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, represented the first time in over a century that the Department of Justice had...

Shortly before 9 p.m. Eastern on January 29, an American Airlines jet carrying 64 passengers and crew collided with a U.S. Army helicopter carrying three military personnel in the airspace over Washington DC. Both aircraft crashed into the Potomac River, and authorities have said there were no survivors. Officials have not formally released the names of all the victims, pending notification of families. The tragedy has prompted national grief, as the incident marks the most serious air disaster involving a commercial jet in the United States since 2009. While many Americans continue to grieve, other voices in Washington are...