WDET Newsmaker Dinner 2025: Barbara McQuade

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The WDET Newsmaker Dinner, sponsored by McKeen & Associates, is an exclusive thank-you gift premiering during the 2025 Spring Fundraiser!

You and your guest can join WDET News Director, Jerome Vaughn and legal scholar, analyst and the author of Attack From Within, Barbara McQuade for an evening that includes a stellar dinner at The Whitney and an off-the-record conversation on Monday, May 19 at 7PM. Plus, you will each receive a signed copy of Barbara’s new book Attack From Within.

In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:

• The authoritarian playbook: a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
• Disinformation tactics—like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence—and reasons why they work.
• An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
• Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.

With your sustaining gift of $150/month – or a one-time gift of $1800 – you’ll join a small group of WDET members, Jerome Vaughn and Barbara McQuade on Monday, May 19th at 7PM at The Whitney. Seating is limited, so make your gift now at wdet.org/give and select “$150/month – Newsmaker Dinner with Barbara McQuade” as your thank you gift.

The 2025 WDET Newsmaker Dinner is made possible in part by McKeen & Associates, Detroit-based civil justice attorneys.