Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Bestselling author and former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to share her exposé on the escalating threat of far-right politics—and a clear roadmap for saving our democracy.

McQuade has drawn on her decades of experience as a federal prosecutor to reveal how systems of organized crime and political opportunism exploit the levers of power—using corruption, cruelty, and chaos as tools to dominate institutions and eliminate accountability. She examined the tactics of today’s far-right MAGA system: information warfare, aggressive retribution, conformism enforced by fear, and pervasive dismantling of legal checks and balances necessary to defend the public interest and uphold justice.

She presented her views in her new book The Fix, in which she weaves together courtroom stories, real-time political analysis, and cautionary lessons from history and democratic backsliding abroad. She argues that the threats we face are not future possibilities—they’re already here. But she has more than just a warning; she has a call to action, outlining common-sense reforms and strategies that she says can reclaim the rule of law and recenter democracy with the power of the people.

June 23, 2026

1 week ago | [YT] | 6

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

When the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” this March, the dispute put a spotlight on civil liberties concerns in the AI-era. Anthropic had reportedly hit an impasse with the Trump administration over the company’s push for guardrails banning the use of its Claude model to conduct mass surveillance. Anthropic’s CEO had called such surveillance a “red line” it would not cross. But where exactly should those lines be drawn, and who should draw them?

Few people have spent more time thinking about those issues than Cindy Cohn, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Throughout her career, EFF’s executive director has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, chronicles her battles to protect our right to digital privacy.

Cohn weaves her own personal story with the history of the Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into “one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.”

Cohn will be joined by Adam Savage, former co-host of the Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters,” to talk about the issues raised in her book, EFF’s work, and the emerging battle over AI surveillance.

1 month ago | [YT] | 7

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Join Commonwealth Club World Affairs for an in-depth conversation with one of America’s most seasoned national security voices.

1 month ago | [YT] | 4

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Missed last month's Ai for Good: In Climate, Health & Investing program? Be sure to check it out on our channel and our Ai playlist!

When should artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence? And when should human intelligence lead? For climate action, for impacts on health, for investing and portfolios, where can AI tools multiply productivity—and what situations cause a quality assurance minefield?

Learn from innovators around the world (from Europe to Oceania to the Americas) when and how AI tools bring new value, expand audiences, and where human intelligence and empathy are still required, and how we all can benefit.

We will delve into how AI can improve the expansion and sustainability of food systems, which can also enhance climate justice and access to nutrition for low-income communities.

1 month ago | [YT] | 5

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Artificial intelligence can now match and sometimes surpass physicians in areas such as diagnosis to empathy. What does that mean for doctors, patients, and the future of our health care? Join us for a look at AI in medicine from the physician who has more than a dozen times ranked as one of the 50 most influential physician-executives in the United States by Modern Healthcare magazine, Robert Wachter, M.D.

Wachter will sift out the facts from the hype and make a compelling argument for AI’s power to transform health care. He says that the system is currently buckling under the weight of bureaucratic pressures, soaring costs, and clinician burnout; in that environment, AI doesn’t have to be perfect, just better.

Wachter conducted extensive research and more than 100 interviews with leaders in medicine, technology, policy and business; he presented the results in his new book A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future. In it, he also considers challenges such as AI hallucinations, biases and misinformation. Yet AI is already in hospitals and clinics drafting notes, answering patient questions, recommending treatments, interpreting images, and guiding surgeries.

Will this collaboration of humans and technology be successful in the long term? Will it become the savior of health care or just another source of harm and frustration?

4 months ago | [YT] | 8

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Join us on January 21, 2026, in San Francisco for a fact-based exploration of immigration and the future of the United States. Moderated by the Population Reference Bureau's Jennifer Sciubba, this conversation will cut through opinion and politics to reveal the real data shaping America’s demographics, economy, and competitiveness. Hear from leading experts Dr. Giovanni Peri, Daniel Costa, and Dr. Russell Hancock on what’s working—and what needs fixing—in U.S. immigration policy. Gain clear insights into how these forces will shape our businesses and communities for years to come.

This core learning event offers an intentionally apolitical and fact-based perspective on a politically, emotionally and culturally charged topic. Credible, fact-based information on immigration can be hard to discern from opinion and rhetoric. Amplifying the stakes for the United States, at a time of intense rivalry for leadership of large global industries of the future, the full scope and impact of federal policy actions is unknowable. Some are immediate, obvious and reported in mass media. Others will take years to be known, understood and reported. All businesses, communities and individuals will be affected.


Notes
Program support provided by YPO Gold NorCal.

5 months ago | [YT] | 9

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

We have entered the second quarter of this century, and the general public’s concern in regard to past, present and future relationships and alliances looms large on the horizon.

Established practices, agreements, and alliances seem to be under review. Are the accepted patterns of diplomatic, political and economic institutions wobbling and leaving the future uncertain?

Our panel will have an open conversation among the consuls general of the United Kingdom and Ireland; the deputy consul general of Italy; and the honorary consul general of the Czech Republic about what we can expect. Will the established relationships of the past 25 years among the European nations and the United States dramatically change?

The new year is a great time to review what we have all experienced and thought, with an eye on the present and the future. This should be a frank and open conversation.

5 months ago | [YT] | 5

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

Cutting billions in research grants. Detaining student activists. Threatening to cancel accreditation. President Trump’s attacks on colleges and universities have left them reeling. But rather than speak out, all but a few higher education leaders have remained silent, perhaps hoping to avoid being targeted. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth thinks that’s a mistake. “This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Mr. Roth told The New York Times in March. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.”

Roth says Trump’s “wrongheaded, lawless, authoritarian, fascistic” attacks on higher ed are not really about preventing anti-semitism or protecting national security, but about intimidation. The goal, he argues, is to force schools to conform with the administration’s ideology.

He joins us to talk about why he decided to speak out, and how education leaders—and the public—should fight back.

8 months ago | [YT] | 12

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

In August, after Texas acceded to President Donald Trump’s demand that it adopt a redistricting plan favoring Republicans, California Governor Gavin Newsom said he would fight back. He signed legislation creating Prop. 50, which asks voters to suspend California’s independent redistricting maps and allow the legislature to draw new districts. "Today, we gave every Californian the opportunity to stop Trump by saying yes to our people, to our state, and to American democracy," Newsom said at the time.

Supporters say the plan is a temporary but critical defense against partisan mapmaking in other states. They argue that California must step in to protect democracy nationwide and pledge that the state will restore its independent redistricting process after 2030.

Critics, who include former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, contend the proposal undermines the state’s voter-approved redistricting reforms, restoring the same partisan gerrymandering that California has banned.

“We know American democracy is on fire, but accelerating gerrymandering only adds fuel!,” a No-on-50 ballot argument states. “[Prop. 50] claims to protect democracy, yet diminishes our communities’ voices and is ineffective against any overreach of presidential power.”

With voting already underway, join us to learn more about Prop. 50 and what’s at stake for California and control of Congress.

8 months ago | [YT] | 7

Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California

For about a millennium and a half, between 250 BC and A.D. 1200, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilizations, creating an empire of ideas, to a world that was a willing and eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power. From religion such as Buddhism to mathematics that introduced the idea of zero, infinity, algebra, trigonometry to astronomy that proposed a spherical earth rotating on its own axis and trade, that Pliny the Elder complained drained the wealth of Rome into Indian pockets, Indian ideas infected the world.

In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple, draws on a lifetime of scholarship to give a name to the spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire, to the creation of the numerals we use today, Dalrymple shares the soaring history of how India transformed the culture and technology of the ancient world, and in doing so, the world today as we know it.

8 months ago | [YT] | 14