Reliable sources of news and information.

Local news

• Kansas Reflector
• KMAN
• Manhattan Mercury

Independent Media

• The Guardian (UK)
• Mother Jones
• The New Republic
• ProPublica
• Teen Vogue’s News and Politics coverage
• Wired

Newsletters

• The Contrarian, edited by former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin.
• Dispatches from a Collapsing State. A former Associate Professor of English, Jared Yates Sexton is now a journalist, and is the author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People (2020), among other titles.
• Letters from an American. A historian, Heather Cox Richardson writes a daily newsletter, often placing the present in historical context.
• Lucid. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is also an historian; her expertise is fascism, authoritarianism, and propaganda. The newsletter typically publishes about twice a week.
• Meditations in an Emergency. Rebecca Solnit is an historian, activist, and the author of Hope in the Dark
• Popular Information. Judd Legum is founder and editor of ThinkProgress, and was the Research Director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
• The Power. An investigative journalist, Carole Cadwalladr was nominated for a Pulitzer for her work in breaking the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story.
• Robert Reich’s Substack. Reich is the author, educator and former Secretary of Labor.
• Sherrilyn’s Newsletter. Sherrilyn Ifill is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
• Thinking About. A leading scholar of Eastern Europe and expert on authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder is the author of the indispensable books On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) and On Freedom (2024).
• WTF Just Happened Today? Published once daily, and offering “a sane, once-a-day newsletter helping normal people make sense of the news.”

Trackers

• American Oversight: “Exposing the Work of Elon Musk and DOGE.”
• American Sunlight Project: “Increasing the Cost of Lies That Undermine Democracy.”
• Here’s Every Local Police Agency Enforcing for ICE (courtesy of The Markup)
• Gov Track US: Tracks activities of US Congress.
• The Impact Project: Mapping how and where the federal cuts are hitting. As the site says, it provides “objective, transparent, and open-source data to help explain how federal policies, funding, and workforce changes affect our communities”
• Project 2025 Tracker: Monitoring Project 2025.
• Tracking Anticipated Deaths from USAID Funding Cuts: from Brooke Nichols (BU School of Public Health), “tracking tools that capture estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total freeze in US foreign aid funding and programming”
• Tracker Newsletter: ICE in Focus (from Wired)
• Trump Censorship: An initiative of the American Sunlight Project, tracking Trump’s “aggressive campaign against” against freedom of speech, and how he is “systematically attacking the First Amendment and weaponizing the federal government’s power to intimidate critics and control public discourse.”
• Unbreaking: “How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.”
• Education
  • AAUP’s Political Attacks on Higher Education
  • Education Law Center’s Trump 2.0 Federal Revenue Tool: “How much federal education aid could your state lose?”
  • NEA’s Education bills in congress

General Resources

• American Autocracy Threat Tracker. “A Comprehensive Catalog Based on Donald Trump and His Associates’ Plans, Promises, and Propositions.”
• The Authoritarian Playbook 2025, a 2024 report by United to Protect Democracy
• The Committee for the First Amendment, a revival of the McCarthy-era initiative from the entertainment industry: “Our industry—and artists around the world—have a long history of refusing to be silenced, even in the darkest times. We face a powerful assault today, but we still have our voices, each other, and the freedom to express ourselves. Let’s speak out before it’s too late.”
• Freedom Trainers: “Collective Noncooperation Training for these times.”
• League of Women Voters and League of Women Voters of Kansas. “Empowering voters. Defending democracy.”
• Protect Democracy. “The 250-year American experiment in self-government is threatened by a global rise in authoritarianism. Together, we can preserve democracy for future generations.”
• Stop Project 2025 Comic. Comics artists explain “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” aka Project 2025
• How to Stop Autocrats: Guidance from History
  • David Corn, “Can a Democracy Reverse a Slide Toward Authoritarianism?” Mother Jones, 13 Nov. 2024.
  • David Robson, “The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world.” BBC, 13 May 2019
  • Erica Chenoweth, “The success of nonviolent civil resistance,” TEDx Talk, 4 Nov. 2013.
  • The American Pamphleteer, by “Lady Libertie,” offers lots of practical advice, drawing from historical examples.
  • The V-Dem Institute’s Case for Democracy report (Mar. 2023). We highly recommend the work of the V-Dem Institute, a data-driven project designed to understand “why some countries become and remain democratic and others do not.”
• Practical Advice
  • Carole Cadwalladr, “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like,” TED Talk, 9 Apr. 2025.
  • Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer, “So You Want to Be a Dissident,” New Yorker, 12 Apr. 2025. This is behind a paywall, but Ami Fields-Meyer’s Substack version is free.
  • Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt, “How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” New York Times, 8 May 2025.
  • The V-Dem Institute’s Defending Democracy Against Illiberal Challengers: A Resource Guide (May 2020). This is very useful.
  • Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Non-Violent Action (on The Commons: Social Change Library)
  • Impeach Trump Again. Lays out a clear case for impeachment, offers resources.