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VIDEO: FDD's online harassment against critics of Trump’s State Department

The role Foundation for the Defense of Democracies served as a messaging hub for a controversial taxpayer-funded project, has never been revealed until now.

Analysis | Reporting | Middle East
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Earlier this month, Responsible Statecraft reported — based on recently obtained documents via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — that the hawkish DC think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies was at the center of an online harassment campaign funded by the State Department that targeted Americans, including journalists, and human rights advocates, because of their opposition to Donald Trump's Middle East policy. Quincy Institute Multimedia Producer Khody Akhavi breaks the story down:


(Image via shutterstock.com)
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Analysis | Reporting | Middle East
Trump Hegseth Rubio
Top image credit: President Donald Trump, joined by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, announces plans for a “Golden Fleet” of new U.S. Navy battleships, Monday, December 22, 2025, at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Trump's realist defense strategy with interventionist asterisks

Washington Politics

The Trump administration has released its National Defense Strategy, a document that in many ways marks a sharp break from the interventionist orthodoxies of the past 35 years, but possesses clear militaristic impulses in its own right.

Rhetorically quite compatible with realism and restraint, the report envisages a more focused U.S. grand strategy, shedding force posture dominance in all major theaters for a more concentrated role in the Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific. At the same time however, it retains a rather status quo Republican view of the Middle East, painting Iran as an intransigent aggressor and Israel as a model ally. Its muscular approach to the Western Hemisphere also may lend itself to the very interventionism that the report ostensibly opposes.

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Alternative vs. legacy media
Top photo credit: Gemini AI

Ding dong the legacy media and its slavish war reporting is dead

Media

In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.

It’s been a long road.

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Ted Cruz
Top photo credit: Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) (Shutterstock/lev radin)

Ted Cruz's anti-Tucker pose for 2028 is truly a Jurassic Park dud

Washington Politics

Ted Cruz is reportedly planning on running for president. But which version?

The Tea Party Republican senator who once called the Iraq war a mistake, tried to appeal to non-interventionist Ron Paul libertarians, questioned Barack Obama’s authority to strike Syria, warned against U.S. military adventurism, who was also once the favored alternative to Donald Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary only to eventually capitulate to MAGA even after Trump insulted his wife?

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