Colleague, News, and Opinion Links for the Week of June 15, 2025

Newsletter #361 — June 16, 2025

Note: This newsletter was compiled over a week ago, before we left on a vacation. So it is not as up to date with current events as it might otherwise be. However, most (maybe all) of these readings are still very relevant, despite current events.

Reader Suggested Links

Highlighting links suggested by our readers. Please send us links to things that you find useful.

• US Politics
  How Qatar Bought America — An alarming article about influence peddling on a gargantuan scale -- the kind of thing that petrodollars make possible.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real — An explanation of a useful new word, "hypernormalization" -- – the notion that we can normalize and adapt to increasingly serious levels of hyper-polarization and sociopolitical dysfunction.

• Theories of Change
  ‘We Have Power Together’: Three Social Change Leaders On Solidarity And What We Can Learn From History As We Build A More Equitable Future — An enlightening interview with three people who are actually making collective action work.

• Non-Violence
  Protests, political violence and its alternatives with Erica Chenoweth: podcast and transcript — Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, discusses historical and contemporary strategies for protesting, democratic backsliding, global comparisons and more.

• Developing a Unifying Vision
  Lessons In Listening From A Political Exile — For those who might think that today's problems are unprecedented, an article describing how thinkers from an earlier generation struggled with similar crises.

• US Politics
  There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab — A proposed strategy for defeating the most egregious and indefensible aspects of President Trump's efforts to consolidate power.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  Tools for Meeting the Moment — From Over Zero, a set of tools for preventing violence, defusing tensions, and responding when violence does occur in ways that minimize harm and quickly restore norms of peace and civility.

Colleague Activities

Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.

• Constructive Communication
  Why Do They Think We're Extreme? — Drawing from More in Common's Perception Gap, Jonathan Stray talks about dynamics that increasingly make us fear "the other" and what we can do to try to resist these pressures.

• Bridge Building
  Why 500 Organizations Joined Forces to Bridge America's Deepest Divides. — David Beckemeyer talks with Karissa Raskin, the new CEO of Listen First.

• Constructive Communication
  The Last Of Us Warns That Us Vs. Them Thinking Is As Deadly As The Zombies — In season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us, humanity has survived a zombie apocalypse long enough to remember what it loves most: pointless, self-destructive wars against each other.

• Interstate War
  A New Normal in India-Pakistan Relations: in the Age of Cross-border Terrorism — A summary of the terror events of April 2025 in Kashmir, the Indian response and recommendations for both India and Pakistan to work towards normalising bilateral relationships with help from international actors.

• Runaway Escalation
  What if American polarization gets a lot worse? — What if our enemies are doing horrible, unforgivable things? What then?

• Non-Violence
  The Faithful Fight: Practicing noncooperation and civil disobedience — As part of movements for freedom, justice, and democracy, faith leaders and communities have turned to nonviolent action, writes Stephen Green and Maria Stephan.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Normsy.ai: Strengthening Online Civic Norms At Scale — A white paper explaining how Normy.ai works to transform online conversation threads with the greatest potential for civic harm toward more constructive dialogue.

• Saving Democracy
  How Do We Resist Trump — A podcast with directors of the Indivisible Project, State Democracy Defenders Action, and the Horizons Project.

• Peacebuilding
  Triangulating Peace: How Adversaries Build Sustainable Peace through Negotiated Settlements — This article pulls in twelve case examples to show how peace negotiations can be started, successfully concluded, and implemented.

• Artificial Intelligence
  Normsy.ai — A project of the Civic Health Project, Normsy.ai empowers everyday users to promote respectful discourse, institutional trust, and democratic norms—right in the heart of the online spaces where these values are most under threat.

• Networking
  Hubs, Humans & Half-Baked Potatoes — Better Together America: How Civic Hubs Are Weaving Democracy from the Ground Up. Duncan Autrey's report on the BTA workshop that we wrote about in Newsletter-352.

• Media Reform
  A Social Feed Without the Rage? Meet Sez Us — David Beckemeyer talks with Yevgeny Simkin, co-founder of Sez Us —a new kind of social media app that’s not built to stoke outrage. The platform’s algorithm is designed to surface thoughtful, meaningful content—not the most toxic or divisive takes.

• Hate Mongering
  3 Surprising Ways WYSIATI Causes Undue Hate — "What you see is all there is" is a fundamental cause of unnecessary, inappropriate, and destructive hate.

• De-Escalation Strategies
  Enemy Roulette — Amanda Ripley talks about how to exit "the blame game."

News and Opinion

From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better. (Formerly, Beyond Intractability in Context.)

• Israel / Hamas War
  Unholy Alliance — An in-depth review of an important new book exploring the implications of burgeoning coalition of radical leftists and Islamists that has emerged since October 7.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  'Oikophobia': Our Western Self-Hatred — An essay exploring an important new word, "Oikophobia" -- a concept that can help us understand one of today's most important (and least recognized) socio-cultural trends.

• Interstate War
  How Chinese drones could defeat America — In the wake of Ukraine's surprise attack on the Russian Air Force, worrisome speculation about how China could attack the United States in much the same way.

• Culture and Religion
  I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge. — An impassioned challenge to the way in which the "Make America Great Again" administration seems to be discounting the notion that there is an American idea worth defending and fighting for.

• Effective Problem-Solving
  The Politicization of Intelligence — From a champion of rigorous expert analysis of policy questions, an alarming essay about how that kind of expertise is being driven from national security decision-making.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  White Americans as a normal minority — A thought-provoking new way to think about race in America -- think about whites as just another racial group.

• Saving Democracy
  When Culture Breaks, Democracy Won’t Be Far Behind — Reflections on the critically important relationship between a society's cultural and social beliefs and the health of its democratic systems of governance

• US Politics
  Can the ‘Abundance Agenda’ Save the Democrats? — More critical reflections on the profound and controversial changes in Democratic policies that adoption of the Abundance Agenda would entail.

• US Politics
  Rod Dreher: The Woke Right Is Coming for Your Sons — From a conservative perspective, a critical look at the the disturbing way in which so many on the political right are trying to make sense of today's turbulent times.

• The Scale and Complexity Problem
  The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong — A reminder that everything we think we know is haunted by irreducible uncertainties -- uncertainties that may be resolved in surprising ways by rigorous science.

• Artificial Intelligence
  For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here —A report on the way in which AI is already dramatically altering labor markets -- especially for young knowledge workers.

• US Politics
  ‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’ — A compilation, with lots of links, to what political scientists think about the adverse impact that Donald Trump is having on the US Presidency.

• Saving Democracy
  Why Democracy Is in Retreat — From Walter Russell Mead, an attempt to distinguish genuine threats to democracy from the widespread use of anti-democratic rhetoric to undermine the legitimacy of political opponents.

• US Politics
  Trump Is Turning a Good Idea Into an Authoritarian Weapon — Praise for efforts to move government agencies out of Washington and into the communities that they serve, and harsh criticism for Trump's efforts to weaponize such moves as a strategy for attacking government employees.

• Race / Anti-Racism
  DEI’s Beleaguered True Believers, in Their Own Words — For a time in which DEI programs are under siege, a chance to hear what supporters of those programs have to say about the current situation.

• Theories of Change
  Check In on the Authoritarians in Your Life — An argument for limiting support for authoritarianism by better drawing alienated individuals into our society and civic culture.

• Social / Economic Complexity
  Continental Divide: America is way richer than Europe now. — For those interested in comparative democracy and social welfare, startling information about just how rapidly the economic fortunes of the United States and Europe have been diverging.

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About the MBI Newsletters

Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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