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The world does not yet know exactly what happened in Alexei Navalnys final hours. We do know that he was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020, then after returning to Russia to continue his public opposition to Vladimir Putin and his regime, was immediately arrested and spent years isolated in abusive conditions in prison. His death last month in a remote Russian penal colony was almost certainly an assassination.

Navalny left a legacy of courageous advocacy against corruption and in favor of a free Russia. He also left behind a large number of fellow imprisoned activists whose lives are in grave danger.

There are lamentably too many political prisoners in Russias jails to name here. One who faces perhaps the greatest risk is our colleague, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a politician, journalist, and historian who has advised and advocated for the human rights organizations that we lead, the Free Russia Foundation and Human Rights First, respectively. The U.S. government imposed a handful of new sanctions in connection with Navalnys killing. We believe the United States also must urgently act to prevent the killing of another important voice for democracy in Russia: Vladimir.

Like Navalny and others, Vladimir has faced shocking persecution from the Russian government for his advocacy, including poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that investigators have linked to the Russian intelligence services and to Navalnys poisoning. Vladimir barely survived those attacks.

It is not hard to see why the Kremlin has targeted him. He forcefully condemned the Putin governments invasion of Ukraine, just as he opposed its repressive policies at home. Like Navalny, when he returned to Moscow in April 2022, he was quickly arrested. In a sham trial, he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison. No opponent of Putins war has been given a longer prison term.

Vladimir has managed to continue writing in prison. He urges opposition to Putin and his war in Ukraine, and he seeks to hold the Russian government to account for failing to investigate his poisonings. But under harsh conditions and without proper medical care for polyneuropathy, a nerve disease he has suffered since the poisonings, a quarter-century in the hands of his persecutors amounts to a death sentence for him even more clearly after Navalnys death.

U.S. diplomacy has secured the release of many Americans in recent years, including three from Russian custody since February 2022, and, as Vladimir himself often observed, during the Cold War the U.S. government played an important role in helping negotiate the release of Soviet dissidents. Negotiating for Vladimirs release would fit with both these traditions. In addition to being a modern dissident, Vladimir is a legal permanent resident of the United States. For more than 10 years, he has divided his time between Virginia where his wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, live and his native Russia. The Kara-Murza familys home-state senator, Tim Kaine, and representative, Jennifer Wexton, have called for the Biden administration to immediately engage with the Russian government in order to secure his release.

Hostage diplomacy can be unsavory, and Congress has created a legal and policy framework for when and how the U.S. government should pursue such negotiations for U.S. citizens or residents. Vladimirs case meets the criteria: most critically, the U.S. State and Treasury Departments have recognized that he is being arbitrarily detained for exercising his rights; the Russian judiciary that sentenced him is not independent; and U.S. engagement is almost certainly necessary to secure his release.

Given these facts, we and other organizations that have worked with Vladimir over the years have been urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to use his authority to find that Vladimir is indeed unlawfully or wrongfully detained. That conclusion is needed to refer Vladimirs case to the U.S. governments hostage-affairs envoy, Roger Carstens, and it would signal to the Russian government that the United States is invested in his fate.

Of course, when it comes to Russian-held political prisoners, the bigger picture includes U.S. citizens whom the Kremlin also has detained. Many of them, including the journalists Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, face patently trumped-up charges. Blinken recently designated Gershkovich as wrongfully detained by Russia, and advocates for Kurmasheva, including members of Congress, are seeking the same determination for her.

Energetically seeking Vladimirs release as well is the right thing to do and would reflect a serious American commitment to protecting political prisoners abroad. Last month, citing Navalnys killing, the organization Freedom House organized a letter that we joined asking President Joe Biden to include Vladimir as an additional focus of any negotiations with Russia on prisoner releases. Especially after Navalnys killing, the United States should provide moral leadership by helping protect voices opposing the human rights-abusing Putin regime and advocating for freedom in Russia.

The fate of democracy in places where it is under brutal attack depends on supporting those who are willing to fight for it. Even knowing that a fate like Navalnys might await them, Vladimir Kara-Murza and other activists have carried on that fight in Russia at great personal peril. They must survive, and the United States must do its part to help.

(Authors note: Vladimir Kara-Murza was vice president of Natalias Free Russia Foundation from 2019 to 2021, and is a senior advisor to Michaels Human Rights First.)

Alexei/Alexey Navalny, Biden administration, Department of State, detainee treatment, Diplomacy, hostages, Human Rights, journalism, political prisoners, Russia, Russia-Ukraine War, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Vladimir Putin

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A Simple US Step Can Help Protect Another Imprisoned Democracy Activist in Russia - Just Security

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Seven years ago, when author Tom Nichols was still a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, a student approached him on the first day of class and told him his course syllabus was poorly designed. Nichols, who has a PhD in political science and government, replied that perhaps the student should wait until after the course was over to critique it. Nichols kept the syllabus intact, but the young scholars unearned self-confidence stuck with himand in his telling, this wasnt an isolated incident. Another exchange on social media, in which a young person said, Tom, let me explain Russia to you, was the last straw for Nichols, who went on to write a book about a dangerous and growing disregard for expertise in American life.

You may have noticed this blinkered perspective in the Facebook posts of a conspiratorial relative who does his own research on vaccines, or heard it emanating from a Trump administration official talking about alternative facts. (The Simpsons was prescient, as it has so often been, when it had Homer assert the following in 1997: Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything thats even remotely true!) Nichols, now a staff writer at The Atlantic, titled his book on this malaise The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Now more than ever, he views the collapse of trust between citizens and experts as driving a death spiral of American democracy and, as he writes in the book, representing an immediate danger of decay either into rule by the mob or toward elitist technocracy. Both outcomes, he warns, are authoritarian in nature.

Nichols (who, for what its worth, is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion) recently spoke with GQ about the newly expanded second edition of The Death of Expertise and why the nations widespread contempt for experts has only gotten worse since the book was first published in 2017.

GQ: The book, to me, is you sounding an alarm about the root cause of a rot that has taken hold of American democracy. At its core is this widespread public dismissal and distrust of expertise, which is preventing voters from making informed decisions based on agreed-upon facts. Do I have that right?

Tom Nichols: Its even worse than that. Its not just hobbling the ability of citizens to make informed decisions, its breaking down the bonds of trust that democracies rest on. None of us are willing to listen to anybody else about anything. And thats not just an attack on knowledge, thats basically an attack on the division of labor, in a way.

As you write in the book, society functions by different specialists and professionals doing different tasks. And in order for the whole thing to work together, there has to be a mutual trustwhen you get on a plane, you trust that the pilot is trained and knows what hes doing. Youre not questioning whether hes some sort of false-flag actor.

And the pilot trusts that the people who designed the switches on the knobs are engineers who know what theyre doing, and that the people who control the air traffic system know what theyre doing. There are all different forms of expertise, and they require a lot of trust. When you think about the amount of trust we put in each other every dayand not just for superspecialized thingsI mean, you trust when you put your kids on a bus that the bus driver has a bus license, and that they actually know how to drive a bus, and do it better than someone who doesnt know how to drive a bus.

You identify a number of reasons for how we got to this place: the coddling of college students at universities that are driven by profits to treat them like clients; the surfeit of information on the internet; the fractured media landscape; the widespread, arrogant narcissism of Americans thats been exacerbated by social media; and even the mistakes made by experts themselves. Am I missing anything?

Yeah, but narcissism is the thread that binds them all together. The first time I ever wrote anything called The Death of Expertise was over 10 years ago. And back then I was still a professor. And I was mostly sort of bristling at people who would take my field of expertise and try to lecture it back to me. Normally, I get paid to talk, and you pay to listen. But as I wrote it, and as the years went on, I came to realize that there was a much more serious social malady underneath all of this. And it was narcissism.

Because in a republic, where you elect people to represent you to make independent decisions on their own, on a range of issues on which no one can be the single expert, we have to be able to have some kind of trust among ourselves. And we simply dont. And its not because the powerful have abused their station, and so many things have gone wrong, and there have been so many disastersyeah, those things happen, and they happen in every government throughout history. Whats different now is instead of demanding accountability, or electing better people or asking intelligent questions, the average citizen says, I could do that job better. I know how to run foreign policy. Ask me about how to end the war in Ukraine. And its just this incredibly narcissistic viewpoint that is abetted by all the things in the book that you just mentioned, about education, about the news media, about the internet.

How do we go about correcting the course were on, if the people who really need to understand the value of expertise are unwilling to listen at all?

That is, I think, one of the failings of the book, and one that Im not sure I really remedy in the new edition, which is when it got to the end, I sort of said, Well, this is all terrible, isnt it? [Laughs.] I probably should have said something more about what to do about it. In the ensuing yearsand this is in the new versionI dont think its that helpful to call on the average citizen to be more epistemically humble. They dont want to hear that. But I have told experts that they need to get out there and engage and to be forceful, and to plant some flags.

A lot of whats going on, when I mentioned narcissism, I think another thing thats happening is the epidemic of loneliness, where people do this because its basically attention-seeking. Like, Im gonna go on the internet and say, the earth is flat, and maybe I dont believe it myself, but at least people will talk to me for hours on end, and give me engagement.

And through that, some of them have also found a sort of tribe, the biggest one being the Republican Party.

Not just in the political realm, but everywhere. The internet allows people to create these add water and stir communities ex nihilo, just by going online and saying, Who out there agrees with me? Experts need to stand up and say loudly, I dont care what you believe, youre wrong. Im not your therapist! You know? Experts have to stop being therapists and enablers and simply say, There are some things that are true and some things that are false. There are things that only experts can do and other things that experts shouldnt do. But this kind of postmodern equivocation where, you know, we all have something of value to contribute has overtaken even the experts. And one of the messages of the book is that not everyone has something of equal value to contribute on everything.

Was there a point as you were working on this book where you started to think the 2006 movie Idiocracy was prescient?

Idiocracy is perhaps one of the most brilliant satires that never got the love it deserved. Yeah, I thought of that all the time. Especially with the interlocking of the news and consumerism and entertainment. But you know, the guy that really saw this coming was Neil Postman, when he wrote [the 1985 media polemic] Amusing Ourselves to Death. Because part of the way that you become that self-centered, and that narcissistic, is that you have a very high standard of living with a lot of leisure time and a huge amount of entertainment at your fingertips. Because then you think everythings easy.

Donald Trump seems to be the embodiment of so many of the dysfunctions you explore in the book, and now hes a coin flip away from being president again. I agree with what you write in the book about how it is nearly impossible to persuade someone who has refused to listen to any contradictory information. But is there anything you would say to a voter who is still undecided?

I guess the first question I would ask is, What are you undecided about? What is it that you dont know? What is the one more piece of information you think that you dont have that would clear all this up? Because in 2024, Im reluctant to believe in the undecided voter. Both of these men have been president for four years. Right? This is, again, that I must do my own research nonsense that paralyzes so many of us. Well, I know, theyve both been president for four years. And Donald Trumps been around and on TV for decades, and Joe Bidens been a senator since forever. But I still need one more piece of information. Its ridiculous! If youre an undecided voter who thinks that you dont know enough about either of these men by 2024, thats a problem in itself.

What would you say to people who are fearful of what Trump would do with a second term and want to stop that from happening? Do you have any advice as an expert about how they can direct their energy?

Well, I think one of the things that has broken down is the way people talk to each other about politics and elections. We dont sit around in the bar anymore, or if were in a bar, were probably in a bar with a lot of people who agree with us, because weve so siloed ourselves. And we dont want to have that argument. And so we retreat to our castles, and we dont engage with anyone. What Ive told people is there are things that are true, and there are things that are false. There are things that are good, and there are things that are evil. And Im not going to just nod my head and say, Yes, Uncle Ned. The vote was stolen by Venezuelan voting machines guided by Italian computers that work with Jewish space lasers. You have to put your foot down and be an example to the people around you. You cant just stroke your chin and say, Well, you know, thats one point of view.

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How 'Do Your Own Research' Might Have Doomed Democracy - GQ

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Once at Democracy's Center, Nonprofits Now Stand on the Outside  The Chronicle of Philanthropy

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Once at Democracy's Center, Nonprofits Now Stand on the Outside - The Chronicle of Philanthropy

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Letters to the editor: Democracy and freedom are on the ballot; a peaceful week without students; how we react to adversity  Boulder Daily Camera

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Letters to the editor: Democracy and freedom are on the ballot; a peaceful week without students; how we react to adversity - Boulder Daily Camera

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Voters are divided on whether they think the system of democracy in the United States is working, as 46 percent say it is working and 49 percent say it is not working, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of registered voters released today.

There are big differences along party lines.

Democrats 66 - 31 percent think the system of democracy in the U.S. is working, while Republicans 62 - 33 percent think it is not working. Independents are split, with 45 percent thinking it is working and 49 percent thinking it is not working.

When voters were asked whether they think democracy in the United States will end in their lifetimes, voters 68 - 21 percent think that it will not end in their lifetimes.

When asked who they think is better suited to preserve democracy in the United States, 48 percent of voters think President Joe Biden and 44 percent think former President Donald Trump.

In a head-to-head presidential election matchup, 48 percent of voters support President Joe Biden and 45 percent support former President Donald Trump. This is virtually unchanged from Quinnipiac University's February 21 poll.

When the matchup is expanded to include independent and Green Party candidates, Trump receives 39 percent support, Biden receives 38 percent support, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. receives 13 percent support, Green Party candidate Jill Stein receives 4 percent support, and independent candidate Cornel West receives 3 percent support.

There is no clear leader in either of these matchups because the leads are within the margin of error.

Voters were asked how it would impact their vote if Donald Trump were convicted in the criminal trial in New York City where he stands accused of falsifying business records, including a hush money payment to an adult film actress. If Trump were convicted, 29 percent say they would be less likely to vote for him, 55 percent say it would not make a difference, and 12 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him.

Ten percent of Trump voters say if he were convicted they would be less likely to vote for him, 62 percent say it would not make a difference to their vote, and 26 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him.

Voters give President Biden a negative 37 - 59 percent job approval rating, compared to a negative 40 - 57 percent job approval rating in Quinnipiac University's February 21 poll.

Given a list of 10 issues and asked which is the most urgent one facing the country today, immigration (26 percent) ranks first among voters followed by the economy (20 percent) and preserving democracy in the United States (18 percent). No other issue reached double digits. This marks the first time that immigration has ranked as the top issue in this election cycle.

Among Republicans, the top issue is immigration (52 percent) followed by the economy (27 percent), with no other issue reaching double digits.

Among Democrats, the top issue is preserving democracy in the United States (32 percent) followed by climate change (11 percent) and gun violence (11 percent).

Among independents, the top issues are the economy (23 percent), immigration (23 percent) and preserving democracy in the United States (19 percent).

Voters were asked about Haiti, which is in the midst of a violent takeover by gangs. A majority (55 percent) say if Haitians flee to seek safety and attempt to reach U.S. shores, the United States should provide safe haven for these refugees, while 36 percent say the United States should not.

Voters give the United States Supreme Court a negative 34 - 58 percent job approval rating, compared to a negative 36 - 56 percent job approval rating the High Court received in Quinnipiac University's July 2023 poll.

Seven out of 10 voters (70 percent) say it should be possible to charge a former president with a federal crime for alleged crimes committed while in office, while 24 percent say it should not be possible.

Democrats (94 - 4 percent) and independents (74 - 21 percent) say it should be possible to charge a former president with a federal crime for alleged crimes committed while in office. Republicans are divided, with 44 percent saying it should be possible and 47 percent saying it should not be possible.

Among Trump voters, 42 percent say it should be possible to charge a former president with a federal crime for alleged crimes committed while in office and 48 percent say it should not be possible.

A plurality of voters (47 percent) oppose a national ban of TikTok, while 41 percent support it.

Voters 18 to 34 years old, who are more inclined to use the social media app, (71 - 26 percent) oppose a national ban of TikTok.

However, a slight majority of voters (51 percent) support legislation recently approved by the U.S. House of Representatives meant to ban TikTok if the Chinese technology company that owns it does not sell it to a buyer from the United States or another U.S. ally, while 40 percent oppose this legislation.

Voters 18 to 34 years old (60 - 35 percent) oppose this legislation.

Roughly three-quarters of voters (74 percent) are either very concerned (45 percent) or somewhat concerned (29 percent) that there is potential for a foreign government to have easy access to users' information on TikTok, while 23 percent are either not so concerned (12 percent) or not concerned at all (11 percent).

Among voters 18 to 34 years old, a majority (53 percent) are either very concerned (20 percent) or somewhat concerned (33 percent) that there is potential for a foreign government to have easy access to users' information on TikTok, while 48 percent are either not so concerned (30 percent) or not concerned at all (18 percent).

Voters 52 - 43 percent support the United States sending more military aid to Ukraine for their efforts in the war with Russia.

Thirty-seven percent of voters think the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine, 29 percent think the U.S. is doing too little, and 28 percent think the U.S. is doing about the right amount to help Ukraine.

Voters 52 - 39 percent oppose the United States sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas.

When it comes to the relationship between the United States and Israel, 33 percent of voters think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, while 21 percent think the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, and 37 percent think the U.S. support of Israel is about right.

Forty-three percent of voters think the United States is doing too little to provide humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza, while 14 percent think the U.S. is doing too much, and 30 percent think the U.S. is doing about the right amount.

Roughly three-quarters of voters (76 percent) think that it is a bad thing for the world that Vladimir Putin will serve another term as Russia's president and will be in office for another six years, while 11 percent think it is a good thing for the world, and 13 percent did not offer an opinion.

Democrats (93 - 2 percent), independents (77 - 9 percent), and Republicans (63 - 22 percent) think it is a bad thing for the world.

1,407 self-identified registered voters nationwide were surveyed from March 21st - 25th with a margin of error of +/- 2.6 percentage points.

The Quinnipiac University Poll, directed by Doug Schwartz, Ph.D. since 1994, conducts independent, non-partisan national and state polls on politics and issues. Surveys adhere to industry best practices and are based on random samples of adults using random digit dialing with live interviewers calling landlines and cell phones.

Visit poll.qu.edu or http://www.facebook.com/quinnipiacpoll

Email poll@qu.edu or follow us on X (formerly known as Twitter) @QuinnipiacPoll.

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3/27/24 - Is Democracy In The U.S. Working? It's A Toss-Up, But Voters Don't See It Ending In Their Lifetimes ... - Quinnipiac University Poll

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