Experts in the News | Miller Center

Facebook’s Super Spreaders

Last Friday afternoon, just as President Joe Biden was boarding Marine One for a weekend at Camp David, a reporter yelled out a question: “On Covid misinformation, what is your message to platforms like Facebook?” Above the din of the helicopter, Biden responded with his quintessential frankness: “They’re killing people.” His comment didn’t come out of nowhere.

Aynne Kokas

The Selling of a Centennial, 2021 : What the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Reveals About the CCP

The Chinese Communist Party was founded in July 1921 as a small, revolutionary group that hoped to impose a foreign ideology—Marxism-Leninism—on a vast, weak, poor agrarian nation. In July 2021, the CCP hopes to use its 100th anniversary to convince China, and the world, that it is the only organization qualified to lead a powerful, wealthy, ambitious superpower. How Xi Jinping and his propaganda ministries tell the story of the past hundred years, and how that experience be understood, speaks volumes about the CCP’s goals and values as it looks to its future. Please join three of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese propaganda and media—all of whom have recently conducted research as Wilson Fellows—for a detailed analysis of how the CCP sees, and sells, its leadership of China after 100 years.

Aynne Kokas

White supremacy on trial

Four years after the deadly attack on the Charlottesville community, a landmark federal lawsuit against the white supremacists responsible is going to court. Integrity First for America—in partnership with a world-class legal team—is taking on the leaders of this violent movement. IFA’s Executive Director Amy Spitalnick, lead attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, and UVA Law Dean Risa Goluboff will discuss the suit, Sines v. Kessler, and the process of holding extremists accountable. UVA Batten School's Ian Solomon and the Karsh Center's Micah Schwartzman will also offer remarks.

Risa Goluboff

Biden's budget vacancy raises eyebrows

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, called it “highly unusual” for the OMB job to remain unfilled this far into the administration. She noted the Senate has been slower than past administrations in confirming Biden’s nominees, but in the case of OMB the president has yet to put forward another pick since withdrawing Tanden.

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

Limited Power for the World’s Most Powerful Man

"Everybody can be on the stage now. You get a mental picture of the president standing at the bully pulpit on the stage but nobody's in the audience. That's because everybody who was once in the audience is actually on the stage with their own mini-pulpit, and don't want to be persuaded," says Barbara Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia's Miller Center.

Barbara Perry

Latin America and the Caribbean

Cubans' unprecedented cry for change

Sunday’s protests in cities across Cuba were unprecedented in their scale and in the boldness of Cuban citizens to confront authorities and the repression that has plagued them for six decades. While reminiscent in some ways of the Aug. 5, 1994 “maleconazo” that brought a few thousand Cubans to Havana’s waterfront, and to the 1980 storming of the Peruvian embassy, the sweep and scope of this weekend’s protests appear to mark a new and distinct era of broad citizen defiance and disaffection with the island’s 62-year old communist regime.

The Hill