Author

Lila Mooney

Lila Mooney is a third-year undergraduate student pursuing a double-major in Philosophy and Political Science. An American-Canadian, she is interested in US politics, as well as in radicalism and radicalization, technology, democracy and democratic backsliding, authoritarian regimes, human rights issues, women's rights, and gender equality.

Cruel, Unusual, and Costly: The Death Penalty’s Got To Go

Lila Mooney May 16, 2021

The death penalty has withstood shifting international human rights norms and evolving public opinions at the domestic level and remains a fixture of the American judicial system. But whether moral or practical, the reasons to end capital…
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Plague & Prayer: In the Midst of Pandemic Life, Religion is a Mixed Blessing

Lila Mooney Mar 25, 2021

In the Western world, where religion no longer plays a central role in public life, not much attention is paid to the experience of religious communities. Yet, faith has proven to have a powerful role in shaping pandemic life for believers…
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Free Speech in the Internet Age: America Needs to Have a Conversation

Lila Mooney Feb 28, 2021

The free speech debate is important in more ways than one. As our modes of expression change, so must our thinking about what free speech does, or should, entail. At its heart, this conversation reveals a bigger problem: the absence of a…
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The Many Faces of Surveillance Technology: Why the Facial Recognition Conversation Needs to Happen

Lila Mooney Dec 20, 2020

To have ‘nothing to hide’ is not a sufficient justification to allow the infringement of our individual freedoms. Liberal democracies in particular will have to acknowledge the dangers of facial recognition technology if their governments…
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Standing By: The American ‘Militia’ Is Back, But It’s Not What it Used to Be

Lila Mooney Nov 17, 2020

Militias are re-establishing themselves as a feature of America’s political landscape. But there are vast differences between today’s ‘militias’ and those of America’s revolutionary past. In contemporary use, the word ‘militia’ connotes an…
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Trump’s Refusal To Respect Election Results Is a Symbolic Threat to Democracy

Lila Mooney Oct 19, 2020

If Trump loses the election in November, what follows may put America’s democratic safeguards to the test. Trump’s actions have a powerful symbolic impact that shouldn’t be ignored.
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Unmasking the Alt-Right: Real-World Implications of a Virtual Movement

Lila Mooney Dec 12, 2019

We have seen too often that radicalization in the virtual world can lead to real-world violence; we have seen terrible acts of mass violence that have been connected with members of the alt-right online, such as in Christchurch and El Paso.…
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Unmasking the Alt-Right: the Psychology Behind Online Radicalism

Lila Mooney Nov 18, 2019

In the face of a reality where an everyday tool is also the perfect weapon for hate-mongers to radicalize and recruit new members, how does extremism manifest online, who is most vulnerable to hateful indoctrination, and why is it so easy…
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A Look at the Electoral College: Can America do Better?

Lila Mooney Oct 10, 2019

It’s difficult to make a case for keeping the Electoral College in its current form. It’s an antiquated and outdated system that undermines the democracy it was designed to protect. America can do better.
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