Late last month, someone paid a call to Congress. She wanted to talk about the Trump administration’s disregard for established national security protocols. The call was coming from inside the house -- inside the White House, that is.
Guest: Ned Price, Director of Policy and Communications at National Security Action.
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, and Anna Martin.
Harley-Davidson spent more than a century branding its motorcycles as the bikes for rebels and macho cowboys. They’re made in America, for Americans. But Harley’s core customers are aging and before long will die out. Younger generations aren't stepping up to take their place. If it wants to keep selling motorcycles, Harley-Davidson is going to have to look outside the U.S. for new buyers, and become a little less American in the process. But that isn't sitting well with its customer base. PLUS: One listener tells us about the Honda Civic that brought her and her husband together.
The president says it would be a "money making operation" to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, but that's simply not true. The costs would be enormous. Dan Ikenson and David Bier make the case.
The president says it would be a "money making operation" to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border, but that's simply not true. The costs would be enormous. Dan Ikenson and David Bier make the case.
In the interview, Nicholas Christakis is here to discuss his new book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, how he studied the progression of goodness throughout human history, the way healthy communities evolve, and why shipwrecks were so important to his research.
Before you leave home, don't forget about travel insurance. This often-overlooked coverage is a bargain for the big benefits you get. Find out the many protections you can choose, how it fills gaps in your medical coverage, the typical cost, and how to save money when shopping for a travel plan. Read the transcript at Check out all the Quick and Dirty Tips shows: www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts FOLLOW MONEY GIRL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MoneyGirlQDT Twitter: https://twitter.com/LauraAdams
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had to deal with plenty of liberal activists during his tenure. In an interview recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker shares what he learned--and how to deal with a biased media. We also cover these stories:•The House Judiciary Committee votes to subpoena the Muller report.•The NATO secretary general addresses Congress.•New Mexico has officially ditched Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
You and a body of like-minded people want to reform a wretched regime, or perhaps just break away from it and create an independent state. Are you more likely to achieve your goals by a campaign of bombings, assassinations and riots, or by mass protests which are avowedly peaceful?
Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has studied this question in depth, her latest book being Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know. (And people do listen: In 2014 she received the Karl Deutsch Award, given annually by the International Studies Association to the scholar under 40 who has made the most significant impact on the field of international politics or peace research.)
Starting in 2006, she and Maria Stephan, and later other colleagues, have collected and cataloged mass movements – those with at least a thousand participants and with repeated actions—since 1900, trying to see whether violence or nonviolence help bring reform.
“Turns out,” Chenoweth tells Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “that the nonviolent campaigns in the data had about a two-to-one advantage in success rate over the violent campaigns.” This isn’t to say that violent movements have never worked, or that nonviolent ones always work (they fail as often as they succeed); it is saying that nonviolence tends to work better.
One contributing factor seems to be that nonviolent campaigns are generally larger – 11 times larger, on average—than violent ones. “That allows them to activate many different elements of political power,” Chenoweth notes.
Success comes in various forms. In anti-dictatorial movements, the strongman’s departure within a year of the peak of the movement—and with the movement being an obvious factor—would be considered a success; same for kicking out an occupying power or seceding from a larger entity
Some notable nonviolent mass movements that succeeded were the Iranian Revolution (although a violent consolidation of power did follow the removal of the Shah) and the 2000 “Bulldozer Revolution” in Serbia which toppled Slobodan Milosevic.
“There are hundreds if not thousands of techniques of nonviolent action,” she explains. “It’s any form of unarmed conflict where people actively confront an opponent without threatening or directly harming them physically. So it can be a protest, a sit-in, but it can also be a strike, a withdrawal of economic cooperation (like a boycott), a withdrawal of social cooperation (like refusing to wear a certain prescribed attire).” This is a subset of civil resistance movements, what Chenoweth calls “maximalist” movements, while the bigger tent of civil resistance would include the reformist efforts or Martin Luther King, Jr. or the Suffragettes.
Chenoweth says she “errs on the conservative side” by classifying protests that involve destruction of property as violent, although she does study hybrid campaigns which are generally nonviolent but have “violent flanks,” as long as those fringe actions are not inherently adopted, or are specifically rejected, by the larger movement.
Chenoweth has worked diligently to spread her message outside of academia. In addition to her books and journal articles, she co-hosts the blog Political Violence @ a Glance, hosts the blog Rational Insurgent, and blogs occasionally at the Washington Post’sThe Monkey Cage. She directs, with Jeremy Pressman, the Crowd Counting Consortium, which has examined American political mobilization during the Trump years.
Her 2012 book with Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works, won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and the American Political Science Association’s 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Some of her other books include the edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, with Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; last year’s The Politics of Terror with Pauline Moore; and the 2013 SAGE book Political Violence.
Chenoweth is currently a research associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a fellow at the One Earth Future Foundation, and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Who is the greatest chess player in history? And what does the answer have to do with a story of a chess cheating school from Texas? In this week?s More or Less, the BBC?s numbers programme, David Edmonds finds out what a statistical analysis of chess moves can teach us about this ancient board game.
