Civil liberties advocacy group Defending Rights & Dissent today announced the appointment of veteran human rights attorney and former board co-president Shannon Al-Wakeel as its new Executive Director.  Al-Wakeel brings more than a decade of experience defending civil liberties and

Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons joined the Left Reckoning podcast Tuesday to discuss the Trump administration crackdown on dissent and its echoes of past McCarthyite repression. In conversation with hosts Matt Lech and David Griscom, Gibbons expounded

Twenty-five years ago, 3,000 people were brutally and senselessly murdered by criminal members of Al-Qaeda.  As the nation grieved, national security hawks within the Bush administration quickly set about exploiting the tragedy. Many of them, like Vice President Dick Cheney,

Recently released discovery documents show that the Department of Homeland Security used Clearview AI facial recognition technology to search for ‘Minnesota 15’ defendant Isaac Sant, and that the search results included photos of a 2018 Defending Rights & Dissent protest

Today the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced it has imposed sanctions on groups including UK-based direct action group Palestine Action, which organizes nonviolent protests in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Defending Rights &

Newly released documents reveal that four days after Customs & Border Patrol agents in Minnesota shot and killed Alex Pretti in January of 2026, the Department of Homeland Security opened an investigation – but not into the agents who shot

Today the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed NYC activist space the People’s Forum, nonprofit media outlet BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons has issued the following statement in

Today the U.S. State Department issued “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” a 100-page report which purportedly aims to expose “the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion” in the United States. Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip