Change the Conversation

Capitol assault: the real reason Trump and the crowd almost killed US democracy

Stephen ReicherBishop Wardlaw Professor in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St Andrews Alex HaslamProfessor of Psychology and ARC Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland Evangelos NtontisLecturer in Psychology, The Open University Klara JurstakovaPhD Candidate, Canterbury Christ Church University It was the moment that could have brought US democracy to its knees. One year ago, around noon on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump gave the concluding speech to a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington DC. Within an hour, protesters attacked and then breached barricades around the Capitol Building, seat of the US Congress. By 1.30pm, they had invaded the building itself. And by the time they left, five people had died. To what extent were the two events related? Did Trump’s words incite his followers to assault the Capitol? Or did the rioters act independently and of their own accord? These were the questions on which Trump’s second impeachment trial turned. More specifically, the debate centred on whether Trump’s words contained clear instructions that guided what happened next, with special attention given to a specific sentence in the speech: If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. For the prosecution, this was the smoking gun. For the defence, the word “fight” was a mere metaphor, akin to “fighting for one’s principles”. To quote from the opening statement of Trump’s lawyer, Michael van der Veen: This is ordinary political rhetoric that is virtually indistinguishable from the language that has been used across the political spectrum for hundreds of years. In the end, interpretation split clearly along party lines. In the Senate, 48 Democrats voted for impeachment, none against, while 43 Republicans voted against impeachment and seven for. The total in favour failed to reach the two-thirds threshold, so Trump was acquitted as not guilty. But whatever one […]

Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

by Batya Ungar-Sargon, Newsweek magazine Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the Right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately, the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because the majority of our mainstream news is no longer just liberal; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including “antiracism,” intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be? It all has to do with who our news media is written by―and who it is written for. In Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon reveals how American journalism underwent a status revolution over the twentieth century―from a blue-collar trade to an elite profession. As a result, journalists shifted their focus away from the working class and toward the concerns of their affluent, highly educated peers. With the rise of the Internet and the implosion of local news, America’s elite news media became nationalised and its journalists affluent and ideological. And where once business concerns provided a countervailing force to push back against journalists’ worst tendencies, the pressures of the digital media landscape now align corporate incentives with newsroom crusades. The truth is, the moral panic around race, encouraged by today’s elite newsrooms, does little more than consolidate the power of liberal elites and protect their economic interests. And in abandoning the working class by creating a culture war around identity, our national media is undermining American democracy. Bad News explains how this happened, why it happened, and the dangers posed by this development if it continues unchecked.

Manifesto

The powerful, urgent manifesto on never giving up from Booker prize-winning trailblazer, Bernardine Evaristo. Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker win – the first by a Black woman – was a revolutionary moment both for British culture and for her. After three decades as a trailblazing writer, teacher and activist, she moved from the margins to centre stage, taking her place in the spotlight at last. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history. Manifesto is Bernardine Evaristo’s intimate and inspirational, no-holds-barred account of how she did it, refusing to let any barriers stand in her way. She charts her creative rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to the imaginative exploration of ‘untold’ stories. And drawing deeply on her own experiences, she offers a vital contribution to current conversations around social issues such as race, class, feminism, sexuality and aging. This is a unique book about staying true to yourself and to your vision. It’s about how to be unstoppable – in your craft, your work, your life. It is Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto for never giving up.

The Book of Hope:A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet

Jane Goodall & Doug Abrams A legendary conservationist. A lifetime spent fighting for nature. An indispensable message of hope. The world-renowned naturalist and conservationist Jane Goodall has spent more than a half-century warning of our impact on our planet. From her famous encounters with chimpanzees in the forests of Gombe as a young woman to her tireless campaigning for the environment in her late eighties, Jane has become the godmother to a new generation of climate activists. In The Book of Hope, Jane draws on the wisdom of a lifetime dedicated to nature to teach us how to find strength in the face of the climate crisis, and explains why she still has hope for the natural world and for humanity. In extraordinary conversations with her co-author Doug Abrams that weave together stories from her travels and activism, she offers readers a new understanding of the crisis we face and a compelling path forward for us all to create hope in our own lives and in the world. The world needs a manifesto of hope now more than ever. This profound book from a legendary figure in the fight against climate change shows that even in the face of great adversity, we can find hope in human nature, and in nature itself.

Why scaling investment is crucial for sustainable development

Ahmet Burak Dağlıoğlu, President, Investment Office of the Presidency of Turkey. Climate change has been on the international agenda for a long time, but recent developments have upped the urgency of taking immediate action for both humanitarian and developmental reasons. World leaders gathered in Glasgow to discuss climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26, following the G20 summit in Rome in late October, which also prioritised sustainability. Keeping climate change at bay through mitigation and adaptation is imperative to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were set by the United Nations in 2015 and made social, economic and environmental sustainability central to economic development. Achieving the SDGs will, in turn, require an integrated approach and close cooperation among all stakeholders. Mobilizing financial resources will play an especially important role in reaching the SDGs and addressing the adverse effects of climate change. In this regard, foreign direct investment (FDI) has been a significant source of external finance for many countries, especially developing economies, to help achieve sustainable economic development. Commitment to SDGs can mobilise foreign direct investment Today, all economies vie for greater FDI inflows as it not only brings capital but also generates employment, transfers technology, and helps move up the value chain. Moreover, FDI can be instrumental in a country’s economic transformation towards a greener economy, as multinational corporations (MNCs) have both the financial wherewithal and technical capacity to help transform local operations to greener global best practices. MNCs have been increasingly incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles into their investment strategies, not only to achieve ESG investor score targets but also to save costs and mitigate risks, helping achieve both more sustainable and more profitable operations. The international community is putting more efforts into scaling such investments through establishing effective mechanisms to support cooperation on investment […]

How to stop supply chain issues disrupting the economic recovery

Covid-19 revealed that modern supply chains are a house of cards, collapsing the moment they come under any kind of sustained pressure. Many businesses that were caught flat-footed by global lockdowns have found the speed of the recovery just as treacherous to navigate. Clogged ports and widespread shortages have led to record order backlogs across major supply chain hubs. The crunch on container capacity could last until Q4 2022, according to maritime research firm Drewry. Shortages of key components, including semiconductors, could take even longer to resolve. Is the answer to carry on pushing orders through in the hope that these problems resolve themselves? Two years into the pandemic, there are strong signs global businesses are starting to realise that supply chains actually need root-and-branch reform. Bursting at the seams Recent data from Tradeshift suggests buyers are beginning to question the wisdom of putting fresh orders into a system that is coming apart at the seams. Global order volumes fell by 24 points in Q3 2021 (see figure 1), the biggest quarterly drop since the first lockdowns in early 2020 and 15 points below the pre-pandemic forecast range. Rising invoice volumes provide an indication of how supply chains are reacting to demand signals. Invoice numbers moved five points closer to the expected range in Q3 2021, but the upward trajectory is flatter than anticipated given the significant spike in order volumes during the previous quarter. The data suggests it may be some time before order volumes start to align with invoice flows. The longer this gap persists, the more likely it is that the downward trajectory in Q3 signals the beginning of a more prolonged slowdown. The International Monetary Fund recently cut its forecast for US growth by 1 percentage point to 6%, citing supply chain disruption and weakening consumption. Tradeshift’s data indicates that activity across US supply […]

Global Shapers Community driving change

As it marks its 10 years anniversary, the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community continues to drive change and disrupt the status quo in cities and communities across the world. The community is a network of more than 14,000 young people driving dialogue, action and change in more than 450 hubs across 150 countries and territories around the world. Their projects range from providing disaster relief to combating poverty to fighting climate change to building inclusive communities. This is an incredibly diverse community, but they all have one thing in common: they want to create real, meaningful change. For many people around the world, 2021 has been a reminder of the fragility of our global system. For others, this year has been a time of hope as countries race to vaccinate their population with the aim of going back to normal. But for many members of our community, “normal” is the problem. Young people today believe that they can and will change the world for the better. The Global Shapers Community was created with the mission to empower young people through enabling them to self-organise and amplifying their voices. Global Shapers have sense of shared responsibility, an urgency to make the world a better place and an attitude of cooperation irrespective of differences. The ambition is to support a global community of young changemakers taking action to improve the state of the world, one local community at a time. To achieve this goal, the Global Shapers Community seeks to create meaningful impacts on individual Shapers, who in turn create change within their communities through city-based Global Shaper hubs and the projects these hubs develop, launch and implement. Through the work of Shapers, hubs and their projects, citizens become engaged in their communities, become proud of their communities, and develop a greater sense […]

The Premonition

For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in. Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short.

The long read:Why cybersecurity needs a more diverse and inclusive workforce

As cyberattacks increase in scale and severity, so too does the global demand for cybersecurity professionals – in all aspects of the field and across all sectors. The supply seemingly cannot keep up, resulting in an acute talent shortage. But in this talent shortage, there is an even bigger and more troubling gap: the lack of diversity in cybersecurity. Improving the work environment for underrepresented groups The latest statistics on demographics in cybersecurity are troubling: according to the Aspen Digital Tech Policy hub’s latest report, underrepresented groups such as Black (9%), Hispanic (4%) and Asian (8%) professionals make up an increasingly low percentage of the industry. For example, women make up 51% of the population, but only comprise only 24% of the cybersecurity workforce. On the flip side, there are almost 500,000 open jobs in cybersecurity in the United States alone, signalling a systemic, yet not-insurmountable divide. If we work together through individual and collective action to improve the current environment for underrepresented groups, there could be lasting positive impacts across the field of cybersecurity. Cybersecurity professionals work long hours. In many circumstances, they exhaust themselves to safeguard infrastructure, IT systems and institutions. Almost everyone in cybersecurity is stretched thin. Organisations and nations alike need more qualified people to work in cybersecurity. Professionals must truly understand the threats while producing more robust solutions. To do so, the industry must fix parts of recruitment, retention and leadership development. Choosing candidates with the right core traits Focusing on the barriers to inclusion and success in the industry, instead of just overt discrimination, can help reduce the talent shortage. Cybersecurity leaders play an important role in this. They should focus on diversity and inclusion when selecting candidates. Instead of merely recruiting new diverse candidates into the workforce, they must also provide those professionals already in it […]

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