At yesterday afternoon’s meeting of the Book Club, we talked a lot about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, but a lot more about what the book has suggested, sparked, and implied for the nearly 2,000 readers on the call. We talked through many of the responses to and thoughts on the questions we posted earlier in the week, and while if you misse…
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Today the Supreme Court of the United States will hear arguments in a case involving the Trump administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. On that occasion, I wanted to repost this very personal reflection on the larger idea behind a constitutional clause.
I am by birth and by right an American. I do not wish to change this fact, and I will not surrender to those who would change it for me.
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, a place I invariably think back to on those rare occasions when someone says, “Go back to your country.”
Cleveland? You want me to go back to Cleveland?
And, yes, I was born as the thing now being argued over nationwide: a birthright citizen. Which is to say, my parents were not yet American citizens when they had me.
Had they given up everything they knew to come here? Yes. Had they strained family bank accounts back in India for so much as a plane ticket? Yes. Had they committed every morsel of their energy and perseverance and ingenuity to making a life here? Yes, yes, and yes. Had my father, quoting the folk singer Tom Paxton, written to my mother of their departure from India’s comfortable certainties that the two of them were now venturing “Outward bound upon a ship that sails no ocean / Outward bound, it has no crew but me and you / All alone when just a minute ago the shore was filled with people / With people that we knew”? Yes. And he still quotes it to her.
But they were not yet American citizens. Nevertheless, they dared to cast the biggest vote of confidence a human being can cast in another country: creating a child who will belong first to it, and not to the country of their own certainties. To have a child is to begin to lose control from the moment of physical separation. They never go back in; eventually, they acquire minds of their own. But the loss of control is greater, the faith deeper, when you are one thing, and you engender a child who is another.
My father used to introduce my sister and me as “the original Cleveland Indians.” The joke killed before the team’s name change.
But really we were just Americans. Americans with masala, maybe, but Americans. Baseball and Hot Wheels and hot dogs and a big Oldsmobile and a yard and, more than anything else, a sense that history didn’t have to be some big drag, that here, eyes to the horizon, standing atop the old, not under it, you become, become, become.
President Trump wants to end birthright citizenship. Because he is inelegant, his way of going about it would inevitably imperil much of the legal infrastructure that pulled America out of slavery, brought down segregation, and laid the foundation for women’s rights and equality and the freedoms of many other populations.
Legal writers more knowledgeable than I have explained why Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is both perilous and, legally speaking, hogwash. I want to make a different point, borne of my experiences in America and outside of it. Birthright citizenship is not only a profound legal foundation of the United States. It is a cultural idea that does as much to make America feel like America as any other thing.
My family learned this lesson the difficile way.
A dozen years after my father first touched down in America as a graduate student, a decade after my mother joined him, they decided to take their now-family of four on an adventure. We were moving to France!
Now, France is a very captivating country. Don’t get me wrong. But even though I was merely seven years old when we moved there, I remember watching my parents daily confront a reality that they would have had no way of understanding from the other side of the Atlantic: in France, there is something called Frenchness, and the only way to access it or participate in it fully is to have the luck of already being French.
This poses a challenge to outsiders. If the only way to become French is to have already been French, then how do you become French? The short answer is you don’t. You can live there; there are ways to finagle citizenship. But at the heart of French law and culture is the idea that Frenchness is a specific culture, French people have a specific blood, and the barriers to entry are high. You can be there. But you can never be of there. You can enjoy the place. But the place will never truly belong to you.
That is changing slightly even in France, as I have seen on recent trips. But those who would open up the definition of Frenchness are, and always will be, playing defense.
Many countries around the world function in this same way, with a cultural and legal idea of citizenship rooted in blood and soil and lineage. Basically, in one form or another, to be a citizen requires your parents or even grandparents to have been citizens. What this means at a philosophical level is that a citizen is something you are because they were, not something you become as you, because you were born here.
I always think of something my friend Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, said (and I paraphrase). His family came from China to the U.S. They became American, like so many before. And, Liu notes, having been rooted in China’s soil for thousands of years and uprooted into America’s for only a few decades, Eric could never “become Chinese” by moving back. One severed link: the chain ends.
This is why, for all of the dangerous things President Trump has proposed in his first days, the assault on birthright citizenship strikes me as so fundamental. Because it’s an attack not just on a policy question of how and when passports are given out. It’s an attack on the idea that anyone can be part of this, that this is a nation of becoming.
So fundamental is this culture of becoming that even Trump cannot escape it. He can slap 10 percent tariffs on foreign goods, but nothing will change the fact that 67 percent of his own wives were imports. And I want to say for the record that I will never use the fact that Melania Trump was not born in the United States against her. I believe she is every bit as American as I am.
I used to live in the Boston area. One day, several friends and I went down to the river and laid out contiguous picnic blankets and waited hours for the Fourth of July fireworks. The bank grew more crowded by the hour. There were minor arguments about space and the obstruction of views. Most of it was totally peaceful. But at some point, our group, a large and diverse crew, came into the focus of a man who did not like how many blankets we had laid out.
“Go back to your country!” the man barked at me. I remember being taken aback. Cleveland? “Why did you even come to this country?” the man persisted. His tone suggested he wasn’t thinking of Cleveland.
As the situation escalated, another man came forward. He was white, in a sleeveless shirt, with a bald head, full of tattoos, and with a generous belly. He looked like he might be a Hell’s Angel or some type of biker dude. Given the argument we were in about whether we belonged, he didn’t necessarily look like he would fall on our side.
But he turned to the man barking at us and said five words I will never forget — five words so simple and profound that Trump will live and die without grasping them: The man said, “These are my people, too.”
It was a big idea; it is a big idea. But to him, it was also no big deal. He didn’t want to make a big fuss about it. It was just what he knew to be true. Whether or not he had ever spent much time ruminating about “birthright citizenship,” he had internalized the culture of it. These are my people. Anyone can become my people. We become.
And where that story leaves me is this: I don’t think of Trump as being in a contest with me over my citizenship, or in a contest with legal scholars and the courts over the proper reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fundamentally, I think of Trump as being in a contest with that biker dude. With the deep and abiding culture he spoke for. With the lifeblood of a nation of becoming. I believe the biker dude will prevail.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
I just had a very…animated discussion with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. I began by asking if he believed Donald Trump will be committing an impeachable offense if he accepts the Qatari 747 and takes it home in a doggy bag.
A longtime crusader against the distorting force of dark money in American politics, Whitehouse has had a front-row seat at the critical arguments of the Trump era. We talked about the open corruption of the Trump regime, whether the Democratic Party has failed to meet the moment, and whether the old guard should bow out for the new.
The conversation became animated when I challenged the senator on whether Democrats are willing to actually change as a party in order to meet this crisis. Why do so many Democratic voters feel so totally undefended? Are they all wrong? Who are some leaders the senator looks to? Are there any fighters he sees on the horizon?
Watch and tell us what you think below.
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In the later part of the video, we also had a great meeting of The Ink Book Club, not just about our book this month, Abundance, but about democracy itself, and how clubs like this — that can draw 2,000 people to talk about the real issues, not just the firehose of news — role model democracy. Reading really is the opposite of fascism!
Tomorrow, Thursday, May 15, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio returns; then at 1:15 p.m., we will be joined by Amanda Litman of Run for Something. We hope you’ll join us for both conversations!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.
We just talked with Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation and once (and future?) presidential candidate, (and 8,400 of you). We got into EVERYTHING.
I asked him what’s going on with air travel, why Democrats are more unpopular than Trump, whether he now favors a bolder policy approach than the one he campaigned on in 2020, whether he can imagine himself in a political partnership with AOC, if there is anything he admires about Trump, whether voters are right to feel ghosted by Democrats, how he is deciding about running for president, whether he thinks being gay is still a hindrance to his chances, and what he hopes to be able to tell his grandkids about what he did at this moment in history.
He spoke in the end about the future that could be if Americans meet this right — seriously address the challenges of the crisis of democracy, of rising inequality, and the transformation of labor and society by artificial intelligence, and more.
“We don’t run the risk of living in a time that doesn’t matter,” Buttigeig told us. “We want to look back from the perspective of ‘Here’s how we made it right’ rather than ‘that’s when it all went wrong forever.’”
Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 14, at 12:15 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. And after that, at 1:00 p.m., we’ll have the second meeting of The Ink Book Club, where we’ll be diving deeper into Abundance. Then on Thursday, May 15, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll welcome the return of messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio; then following that at 1:15 p.m., we will be joined by Amanda Litman of Run for Something. You won’t want to miss any of these!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Donald Trump is waging war on the American republic. Why don’t more people care?
Today I had a conversation I won’t easily forget that sought answers to this question.
Are we living through the familiar, well-worn descent into authoritarianism? Or are we witnessing a new phenomenon, specific to modern life, in which people have enough of a subjective feeling of freedom in their personal lives that they are willing to carve out political freedoms they tell themselves they don’t need? Years ago, I found this attitude reporting in China. I asked my guests if it was now happening here.
What is freedom, really? Does a world of broad consumer choices and job options and infinite scrolling somehow cause people not to recognize they’re in a slow-motion emergency? And what does this mean for how defenders of democracy should make their case? I talked about all of this and more with the scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat of Lucid and journalist Andrew Marantz, who has a great piece in The New Yorker about the parallels between Hungary and what the U.S. is headed towards.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, May 13, at noon Eastern, we’ll speak with former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. On Wednesday, May 14, at 12:15 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. And then on Thursday, May 15, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll welcome the return of messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. You won’t want to miss any of these!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.
That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.
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This post was originally published on The.Ink.
This week, I got to speak at the legendary editor Tina Brown’s annual conclave (the other one) of journalists.
At the Royal Institute of British Architects, we discussed and debated the future of media, of the freedom of expression, of accountability and democracy. It was sobering and inspiring.
I got to meet and spend a few minutes chatting with Yulia Navalnaya, the fearless widow of the slain Russian dissident leader Alexei Navalny. What a force.
I spoke on the opening panel. I represented The Ink, alongside leaders at slightly bigger publications: Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times; Alessandra Galloni, editor in chief of Reuters; and Brian Stelter, chief media analyst at CNN.
We had a spirited conversation about whether the media is standing up to Trump, why not if not, whether independent media (a.k.a. Substacks and podcasts) are filling a void, why I refuse to own an amusement park, and how the press needs to evolve.
Enjoy, and tell me your thoughts: Where do you think the future of truth-telling — and accountability itself — will come from?
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Hello from back home in New York. I am here to report that having your plane struck by lightning is totally fine. It happened on my flight back from London — flash, pop, fuselage shimmy. If this is going to happen to you, may it be on a British Airways flight, where the captain very promptly made an announcement about how everything was completely fine. He seemed to be fighting the urge to say “Keep calm and carry on.” The flight attendant informed me that lightning strikes are really no big deal. She said it’s the bird strikes you have to watch out for, luv. She keeps her eyes peeled. But for her it’s mostly a smell thing. She told me it smells like roast chicken. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you this except to say that I am grateful for the gift of life!
And for you all on this Saturday morning. Welcome to the weekend. As we do for our supporting subscribers each weekend, we’ve gathered the most interesting, challenging, entertaining, and thought-provoking writing we’ve come across this week for you below. Among the links you’ll find in today’s edition of Weekend Reads:
A love story that broke the categories
How Iceland was built on herring
Why cooking opens a window to the past
Is artificial intelligence the latest in very human stupidity?
The law that lets billionaires upend nations
What is freedom, anyway?
And more…
You won’t want to miss any of it. Thank you so much to our supporting subscribers for making this newsletter possible. If you haven’t yet joined our community, why not become part of this, and help us build the future of independent media today?
I had so much early career success you might have thought I’d conquered what I saw as the biggest danger in my developing life. I’d conquered other phobias, but fear of exposure still had a tyrannical hold on me, so much so that it stunted any chance of my having a fulfilling personal life. Instead, I had discovered I could separate myself from anything painful or terrifying by just locking it away, putting it into a distant box, and having to deal with it hopefully never. Compartmentalizing these unwanted feelings became so successful that it has both ruled and riled my life ever since. I developed the ability to say the right thing in order to make a situation better, whether or not it was anchored to any moral belief. I had no core at all, other than to please those who needed pleasing. I’d learned to seduce people, especially those much older than I was, and I could accomplish it on demand in any setting. I could subordinate myself effortlessly. I could keep secrets. [New York Magazine]
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Hello from London, where I am this week for the legendary editor Tina Brown’s annual conclave (the other one) of journalists.
We spent all of yesterday at the Royal Institute of British Architects discussing and debating the future of media, of the freedom of expression, of accountability and democracy. It was sobering and inspiring.
Last night, I got to meet and spend a few minutes chatting with Yulia Navalnaya, the fearless widow of the slain Russian dissident leader Alexei Navalny. What a force.
I spoke on the opening panel. I represented The Ink, alongside leaders at slightly bigger publications: Joe Kahn, executive editor of The New York Times; Alessandra Galloni, editor in chief of Reuters; and Brian Stelter, chief media analyst at CNN.
We had a spirited conversation about whether the media is standing up to Trump, why not if not, whether independent media (a.k.a. Substacks and podcasts) are filling a void, why I refuse to own an amusement park, and how the press needs to evolve.
Enjoy, and tell me your thoughts: Where do you think the future of truth-telling — and accountability itself — will come from?
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
This was a great conversation, and one we think everyone needs to hear, so we’re keeping it open to all in the spirit of public service — no paywall.
If you appreciate the work that goes into The Ink and haven’t already done so, we hope you’ll become a supporting subscriber.
That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.
Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?
It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.
What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.
I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.
The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.
Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.
What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.
El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.
That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.
Confront the bully. But woo the posse.
Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.
Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.
Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.
Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.
Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”
What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”
So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.
In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.
Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.
This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.
Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.
He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.
It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!
What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.
“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.
“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”
His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”
Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.
Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.
But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.
But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”
What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.
The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.
And how do you win the peace?
There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.
What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.
Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.
You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.
“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”
So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.
And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?
Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.
A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.
“You can’t beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he’s always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You’re like, Well, I don’t know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”
El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.
Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.
His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)
But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.
America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.
Watch my full conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed here:
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
We just got off another truly inspiring Live conversation, this time with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for Senate in Michigan, and with our own Leigh Haber, who’s heading up the brand-new Ink Book Club. And both conversations focused on how to stand up to Trump — not just by fighting against his regime, but by building community, and engaging in the kind of radically empathetic acts that let us build the America that could and should be.
For Dr. El-Sayed, that’s first and foremost about defeating Trump politically, winning the fight. But it’s more importantly about winning the peace by offering a real vision for the future.
And ultimately, that’s about approaching Trump voters — the people we’re going to be sharing the country we build with, the people who allied themselves with a bully out of a deep, deep insecurity — with the empathy it takes to bring them over. As he told us:
So often we are so frustrated by where we are as a society, about all the pain that we’ve seen at the hands of Donald Trump, that we want to go to those folks who support him and be like, “Don’t you see how stupid this decision was?” And we want to prove them wrong.
And I think if we’re serious about the future, we’ve got to get them to being right. And that’s a very different process.
That’s not about me being right and you being wrong. That’s about you being right because I created a space within which you felt safe enough to have a sense where you could look at facts and reality and say, “You know what? I made a mistake.” Where we’re not going to jump on them and be like, “Yeah, you did.” No, no. Hey, we’re all trying to move forward here. We get that sometimes when scary, powerful people come along, that they turn other people against the truth. So let’s get folks to be right.
And that ties directly into something that came up in our conversation about the Book Club, because, as Leigh pointed out, reading is an act of profound empathy that counters the deep insecurity at the heart of Trumpism. If we look at Donald Trump, who’s said not to be able to read anything longer than a page, we see a person totally dependent on the opinions of others but without any capacity to judge those opinions or trust any of them. He’s lost, insecure — a bully who’s the weakest of all.
Reading is what lets us get out of our own heads and what lets us communicate with others, form opinions, and make judgments — the opposite of Trumpism is reading.
You won’t want to miss this one, and we hope you’ll share it far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you, one and all.
This was a great conversation, and one which we think everyone needs to hear, so we’re keeping it open to all in the spirit of public service.
We’re trying to be good citizens by keeping as many of these conversations as we can open to all. A lot of other newsletters don’t do that. But we want to know if people will support our work even when we do make it available at no cost.
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Join us again on Monday, May 5, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be back with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. We hope to see you all there!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
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I just talked to my friend the artist Ryan Piers Williams and 1,000 of you all to mark the publication of his new brand new Substack, Wildly.
We talked about the many overlapping crises in the world and the common thing Ryan believes underlies so many of them. We talked about harnessing creativity in ourselves to participate in making a new world. We talked about surviving wild times by keeping one eye open to the madness and keeping one eye closed, the better to pay attention to our imaginative life.
And, ahhhh!, I let Ryan ask me some questions and then sketch an inner creature that he sees living in me — live-action art! Stay for the reveal of me and my fork.
Sign up to join Ryan’s newsletter, Wildly, today.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Join us as we go Live this morning at 9:00 a.m. Eastern to talk to artist Ryan Piers Williams about his new Substack newsletter, Wildly, out today!
My dear friend the artist Ryan Piers Williams is launching a newsletter today, Wildly, exploring what it means to process all that’s going on in this moment through creativity. We’re going to talk to him about his practice this morning, and maybe even convince him to draw a wild creature version of me in real time. (One that he made of me and my wife some time ago is the only piece of art hanging in our bedroom.) We hope you’ll join in; we’re also planning to have him back in a few weeks to draw with us. And don’t forget to subscribe to Wildly — just enter your email address in the box below. Thanks!
By Ryan Piers Williams
Gun to head.
Knife to neck.
Mouth zipped.
World on fire.
One eye open.
One eye shut.
To say it feels heavy to be alive right now is an understatement. The urge to turn inward, to tune out the world, and just hug the ones you love is totally understandable. Who has the stomach to witness all that’s happening? Rising global nationalism. Attacks on human rights. Unstable financial markets. Climate change. Genocide. War. The atrocities are as endless as the fingers pointing blame.
Wildly is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
For me, at the core, it all centers around one idea.
We are collectively experiencing what it means to live under the tight grip of a destructive masculine running amok. It has hijacked the narrative of who we are and allowed very few lives to be enriched at the great expense of everyone and everything else. In the story it tells, some lives are more valuable than others, and the natural world is merely ours for the taking.
It’s a story that has been around for centuries. To many of us, it feels awful, and we’re no longer willing to accept it.
As I’ve braced myself for the daily barrage of news and noise coming from our dominant culture, I’ve become increasingly interested in how to step outside of it. I’m curious about how we stop living in reaction to this old narrative and how we start living in the creation of a new way – one that has yet to be seen.
We need to imagine a new story. A story about ourselves that serves the well-being of all human life while also centering the health of the natural world. A story that reshapes the systems that govern us, the beliefs that define us, and the behaviors that are deemed normal.
When I was a child, I lived in my imagination – I created whole worlds that came alive within me and transformed the environment around me. The difference between the real and imagined was so blurred at times it was hard to tell which I was living in. In this in-between space, anything was possible. Today, as I stumble through the dense jungle of our world, I’m reminded of the wild imagination of my younger self and wonder if maybe an in-between space where anything is possible is just what we need today.
So where do we begin?
We begin with one eye open to the reality around us and one eye open to our imagination. With the belief that we can create a new story through ideas, art, and community.
We begin by thinking critically about the relationship between masculine and feminine energies in the world and in us. By bucking norms and embracing new ways of being.
I created this Substack as a place for us to get inspired and envision new possibilities in the midst of these wild times. I’ll explore what I’ve learned through art and writing and share with you what others have discovered as well.
In wild times, we must live wildly. Wildly curious. Wildly creative. Wildly alive.
Welcome to Wildly.
Where to Begin? by RPW
40” x 60”, Oil on Canvas
2025
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
What a long, strange 100 days it’s been. To make sense of what’s happened since the dawn of the Trump regime, all those days-that-seem-like-years ago, we just talked with 1,400 Ink readers and Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University and a great expert on the political history of the United States.
Americans have been obsessed with the notion of a president’s first 100 days since F.D.R. moved to stop the Great Depression with a series of fast, unyielding changes that set the model for what presidential power was capable of. Zelizer told us about how the slow erosion of our institutions over the last century has resulted in Trump’s rise, why the United States has remained so vulnerable to demagoguery, how illiberalism is as American as apple pie, and how the power of the people — the only thing that ever works against authoritarianism — can dig us out of this.
Want to know more? Prof. Zelizer now has a newsletter, The Long View, which you can find here on Substack.
Share this far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you, one and all.
As always, “The Ink Live!” is open to all who join. Later, we will post the full videos for our supporting subscribers to rewatch and share.
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We’re launching a book club about democracy for readers of The Ink. Join us as we read our first book together: Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and sign up for a chance to win a copy. Details at the link below.
This Friday, May 2, at 12:15 Eastern, we’ll be talking to Leigh Haber about The Ink Book Club and all that we’ve got planned for readers. Then immediately afterward, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. You won’t want to miss it!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Democracy is under great threat right now, but it’s not over! And please don’t say it is.
I had a great time talking about that and much else in today’s “Ask me anything” session. Thanks for all the great questions.
We talked about many things — refusing self-fulfilling fatalism, refusing fear, who the pro-democracy leaders to watch are, and how the Democratic Party isn’t really a party — it’s a fundraising machine, and we need to build a real party, one that’s where people are, that invites them in, that is present in their lives. We need to revive the machine, but without the corruption.
As always, “The Ink Live!” is open to all who join. Later, we will post the full videos for our supporting subscribers to rewatch and share.
Above, a short preview is open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, subscribe. That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve.
Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
We’re back Monday, April 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with the scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then on Wednesday, April 30, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have the economic researcher and journalist Nathan Tankus. And on Friday, May 2, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with the Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. You won’t want to miss any of it!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
We just finished up an inspiring live show with Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, and 1,700 of you. She talked to us about a general strike — what it is, what it can do, how realistically it can happen.
This was a rich conversation about labor, organizing, protest, American history, the importance of emotion in the fight, the Democratic Party, and much more. Enjoy.
And some real talk. We’re trying to be good citizens by keeping these open to all. A lot of other newsletters don’t do that. But we want to know if people will support our work even when we do keep things open.
If you appreciate this labor, and haven’t already, become a supporting subscriber.
That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.
Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Share this far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you one and all.
We’re back Monday, April 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with the scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then on Wednesday, April 30, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll have the economic researcher and journalist Nathan Tankus. And on Friday, May 2, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with the Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed. You won’t want to miss any of it!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
We just got off a live show with Robert Reich — the professor, writer, lawyer, former Secretary of Labor, and intellectual hero of the pro-democracy cause — and almost 7,000 of you. Wow. We talked about the challenges of our time. Donald Trump, Reich argued, isn’t the cause of our national woes, but the culmination of an age of greed and bullying. And Bob also gave a very clear prescription for how we fight back.
The way out is fighting the denial of those who refuse to see what’s going on, and inspiring courage among those who could step up but have been too afraid.
Reich, as always, remains hopeful (and he pointed to the huge turnouts for the Fighting Oligarchy rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reason for hope). And the conversation was as inspiring as it was sobering.
Among the many things we talked about:
People are in denial, too many of them still believe that we are comfortably in a democracy, that we still have the rule of law.
The impact of the Wall Street crisis of 2008 and the willingness of Bush and Obama to bail out banks, but not workers or homeowners, destroyed faith in the system — and led directly to the Occupy movement on the left and the Tea Party on the right, and from there to Bernie Sanders but also, alas, to Donald Trump.
If there is a silver lining, it’s that we may emerge from this age of bullies with a stronger consensus on democracy and justice than we’ve had in many years.
The days of protest need to become more regular, expected, and national (maybe weekly?) — on up to a general strike, and the press must be made to notice.
We don’t yet have the leaders we need in this moment, but they are emerging.
To keep hope alive, you have to be able to look at the comedy around you.
We also talked about the new book Reich has on the way, titled (with his characteristic humor) Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, which looks at the country through the lens of his own experience of bullying. Get it on your summer reading list now!
We’re keeping this video open to all. But if you want to help us build the next media, and haven’t already, become a supporter here.
That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.
Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Share this far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you one and all.
We’re back tomorrow, Thursday, April 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, with labor leader Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO. You won’t want to miss it!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
If Donald Trump somehow did mean to create a golden age, it’s pretty clear that his plan isn’t working. Rather than fixing any of the many things that were wrong with the U.S. or the global economy, the chaos of Trump’s shifting tariff policy has broken even the things that were going right. Inflation and interest rates are up, the dollar is sinking. And that’s even putting aside the rest of the damage the Trump regime is doing to domestic institutions.
To understand whether there was any method beyond Trump’s chaos, why massive tariffs aren’t working (and can’t), and what could actually be done to address the discontents of globalization, we talked to the economist Dani Rodrik, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he walked us through how we got into this mess — and how we might get out.
The era of hyperglobalization that started in the 1990s — and flipped trade policies on their head by putting democracy to work for globalization — has ended.
The rise of populist authoritarianism is a backlash to the very real problems of hyperglobalization and loss of local agency — with the blame shifted onto out-group Others.
Trump’s plans can’t work because he’s only looking at adjusting trade policy — tariffs — and is repeating the mistakes of the architects of free trade in the 1990s by ignoring domestic problems.
The economic collapse we are living through is not an effect of policy, but of Trump’s lack of policy — he’s just a chaos machine.
The key to better policy is a coherent domestic strategy for upgrading productivity — trade should be in a supporting role, not a leading one — that’s what China did in the 1990s, and it lifted millions out of poverty.
To win in the future, progressives need to put domestic policy first: not just offer a vision and a pathway for making service jobs satisfying and enabling a middle-class existence, but to organize around that fundamental challenge.
Share this far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you one and all.
As always, “The Ink Live!” is open to all who join. Later, we will post the full videos for our supporting subscribers to rewatch and share.
Above, a short preview is open to all. If you want to watch the whole thing, subscribe. That’s how we keep the lights on, pay our writers and editors a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve.
Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
We’re back tomorrow, Wednesday, April 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be speaking with the writer, lawyer, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Then on Thursday, April 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by labor leader Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO. You won’t want to miss any of these!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
This past week, as part of his evisceration of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. turned his attention to a lifelong goal — establishing the imagined link between vaccines and autism that took hold after the publication of the since-debunked work of Andrew Wakefield. Kennedy has announced a task force, suggested a national registry to track people on the autism spectrum, and hired a crank to conduct “research” to “solve” the supposed problem of neurodivergence. People with autism and their advocates are aghast and see the move as a threat to their identities and even their existence
Last month, we had a riveting conversation with one of the world’s leading scholars of and advocates for people with autism, Simon Baron-Cohen. We talked about the debate around how people on the spectrum shaped Silicon Valley in general, and the role that autism might play in influencing the highly influential actors — like Elon Musk — who are now shaping all of our lives. The conversation was fascinating, because Baron-Cohen made clear the dual challenge: autism remains for most regular citizens a difficult fact to navigate in a world not yet hospitable to neurodifference. At the same time, a small number of highly capable and powerful actors on the spectrum are bringing their systematizing nature to bear on the world, and there may be, he argued, a need for more balance around them and more empathy in the development of tools like social media algorithms and AI.
With so many half-truths out there, it’s a conversation that’s worth revisiting right now.
We’re back Live again this week, with three special guests. Join us this afternoon, Tuesday, April 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll talk to the economist Dani Rodrik. And tomorrow, Wednesday, April 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with the writer, lawyer, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Then on Thursday, April 24, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be joined by labor leader Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO. You won’t want to miss any of these!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
I just talked with my friend Michael Cohen, and it’s worth listening if you didn’t make it live. We talked about courage and fear, what Pope Francis’s life should teach the rest of us about actually using your power, what is driving Trump now, his weakness in the face of deputies he can’t control, and what it will take to stop the madness.
We’re keeping this open to all. But if you want to help us build the next media, and haven’t already, become a supporter here.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
When we talked to former Donald Trump lawyer and confidant Michael Cohen last week, he spoke to us in a way few people can about how he’s dealing — very personally — with life under this regime. You’ll want to see the entire conversation, but what really struck us was his ability to look back on his own experience of misplaced loyalty (he went to prison on campaign finance charges stemming from the Stormy Daniels payoff scandal) to find lessons for us all about living bravely through this moment.
We know some of you prefer reading to watching, so we’re publishing text excerpts of the conversation below. If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the video above.
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How do you, given what you’re holding… you’ve held what you’ve dealt with what you’ve gone through to fight this administration what you’re holding now in terms of all the knowledge and of what’s happening and the same way everybody else in this stream and everybody on the stream has not gone to prison the way you have but are experiencing the blizzard of of insanity the way you are. How do you attempt to keep healthy, keep your mind, you know, working?
Like, what do you, at a very practical level, because I think a lot of people are dealing with this just when they open up the news on their phone. What are you trying to do to stay sane, given all of this?
The busier that I keep myself, the less I have time to think. The more time that I have to think, the worse the PTSD gets. Sleeping is a disaster because that’s when your mind works overtime. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in probably seven years.
Remember, as of yesterday, yesterday was the seven-year anniversary of the raid on my home, the hotel room I was staying at, and my law office by the FBI that sparked this entire chaos.
My journey is not a journey that is anti-Trump. I don’t care if the last name was Trump, if it was Jones, if it was Smith, if it was Cohen. It makes no difference to me what the last name of the president is. My concern is for what he is doing. So I tried to take my past affection and my loyalty to him. And I have pushed that way off to the side. I don’t think of this as a Trump policy. I think of it as a President Trump policy.
And it may be hard for people to understand, but you know, I was incredibly close with him, 15 years basically sitting shoulder to shoulder with him, protecting him from basically everything,
providing him with advice and guidance that would only benefit him, not harm him. And sometimes, as I’m watching and I can’t discern the difference between yesterday and then today.
And I’m wondering, where is the Michael Cohen in this inner circle? Where is the Michael Cohen in this administration? To say to him, before he announces this willy-nilly, self-inflicted tariff policy stupidity, “Mr. President, you can’t do this. Let me just give you my prediction on how this is going to end up. You, of course, you’re gonna do whatever you want, but let me give you my prediction.”
I did that in 2017 after Steve Miller, the immigration ban, which was really a Muslim ban. And I was in the office shortly thereafter, like a day or so, and he asked me what I thought because they were intending on doing a second round of it. And I said, “Mr. President, can I speak freely?”
He goes, yeah.
I said, “You’re fucking crazy.” Just like that, in his office.
Are you fucking kidding me? You know I have hundreds of friends who are Muslim, right? Some of whom are my best friends since 1984.
So I said, “You’re basically telling them they have to leave the country. How is it possible that you think it’s OK to ban an entire religion from the country if it has to do with just Somalia? OK, I understand that. But you can’t make it this broad.” And he took my advice to heart. And that’s why you didn’t see a 2.0.
There is no Michael Cohen there. And sometimes based upon my loyalty that I had in my relationship that I had to him going back to like 2005, I sometimes I almost feel like I want to pick up the phone, call him and say, “What the fuck are you doing? Why? Knock it off. Do something that will give you a legacy that future generations with the last name Trump will be proud of. Not wrecking the global economy. Who gives a shit if Xi Jinping comes on his fucking knees begging to you, begging you for forgiveness? How does that benefit Trump? Your legacy, how does that benefit the American people? How does it benefit future generations?”
It does not. And that’s the problem. This entire group of enablers — they’re only worried about themselves. This is all.
Do you think you could break through to him in some way because of that history of loyalty in spite of everything that’s happened? If you made that call, do you think it would go anywhere?
Today?
Today?
No, I don’t think he would even take the call. I don’t think he would even take the call.
If the two of us were sitting in a room, just us, and we both were able to lower the fences that we have built around us to protect ourselves from each other. Yeah, I’m certain he would have listened. It wouldn’t have taken a Bill Ackman or a Jamie Dimon to get him to reverse what he was doing here.
Because somebody breathed into his ear this notion that these tariffs are going to be great for him. It’s gonna be a major win. And ultimately, America will be better off for it. It’s gonna bring back manufacturing.
No, it’s not.
We’re never going back to being a manufacturing country. Too expensive in this country to manufacture. Other countries do it better and much cheaper.
And so these are the struggles that I live with. I live with anger. I live with sadness. I live with confusion. I live with yesterday being in solitary confinement with no food, no ability to shower, no change of clothing for 51 days, or my 13 months in Otisville, the unconstitutional remand, when they first took me, because I refused to sign a counterfeit document. Imagine how far Bill Barr’s administration, his Department of Justice, went in order to unconstitutionally remand me.
They gave me a document that doesn’t exist, that they wrote specifically for me. And when the very first paragraph is a massive First Amendment constitutional violation because I refuse to sign that document, I was handcuffed, shackled, stripped out, put into a paper jumpsuit, put into a freezer for three hours to the point I thought my teeth were gonna fall out of my jaw because I was so cold and my jaw was rattling so hard, I thought my teeth were gonna break. I’ve never felt cold like that before.
And then to be transported back to Otisville to be put back into solitary until, thank God, a million times for Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein and my attorney, Danya Perry, who filed that habeas corpus, and the judge determined it was retaliatory and a violation of my First Amendment, constitutional rights. A federal court judge had to enjoin the United States government, the DOJ, the Attorney General, from continuing to violate my constitutional rights?
How does something like this even happen? So for me, this is what unfortunately is on the loop that exists in my brain all the time.
It’s what I wrote in my whole book. Revenge talks about this. And that’s why I think it’s important for me to continue to speak up so that it never happens to anyone else ever again.
That’s almost the journey that unfortunately my life has taken me into. And I’m willing to accept it.
Well, I know everybody watching this joins me in feeling immensely grateful for your truth-telling voice now and sorry for what you have to go through every day, not just in the limelight, but just in your own life and the quiet of your own life to do that.
We are seeing in real time the opposite, generally in this society, a society with no bravery, no courage, people capitulating left and right. So it almost is like an alien phenomenon when you see someone who’s willing to tell the truth, willing to stand up.
As you can see from all the hearts there, a lot of people are very grateful. So thank you. Always appreciate talking to you, and always appreciate your voice, and take care of yourself.
Watch the entire show, with philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo joining Anand and Michael Cohen, at the link below.
And you’ll also want to see the powerful town hall Cohen hosted last night with Jim Acosta. It’s not to be missed.
We’re on the road this week, so we’ll be taking a break from our regularly scheduled Live conversations. We’ll be back next week with some very special guests. On Tuesday, April 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll talk with the economist Dani Rodrik. And on Wednesday, April 23, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with the writer, lawyer, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. You won’t want to miss either one, so mark your calendars now!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live, and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
We just had a deep, wide-ranging, and even inspiring conversation with more than 2,000 Ink readers and two guests from very different worlds: the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo and Michael Cohen, the former Donald Trump lawyer turned anti-Trump activist. Both conversations started with how to make sense of all the tariff chaos — and how Trump was finally “disciplined by reality.” But that was just the beginning.
Beyond the tariffs, both Taiwo and Cohen, in their different ways, ended up talking about how essential it is going to be to get millions of everyday Americans to understand how they’re under threat, how their rights are being taken away, and why they need to defend them — and to get them into the fight against the regime.
As Cohen told us, that means everyone pulling together to face Trump with no fear. And as Taiwo put it, progressives need to reach out and embrace everybody to do it. The reason Black Lives Matter provoked the far right so much is that it was truly frightened by the prospect of normies — the brunch crowd — demanding justice.
And stay to the end for an incredibly moving and personal reflection from Cohen about the personal toll of fighting Trump — and the reasons to do so nonetheless.
Some of the other things we covered:
Look at the “pause” on tariffs as a triumph of organizing against Trump — but it was big capital doing the organizing. What can the resistance learn from that?
The attack on the universities is a lesson: staying safe by being quiet or withdrawing is not the way to win. You can’t count on individual bravery, but you can count on collective courage.
Progress is reversible! The gains of civil rights were substantial, and we can’t lose sight of what’s being taken away, but we never should have thought that they didn’t require defense.
Trump has no fear of anything and only thinks transactionally — that means he does care what the 77 million voters who backed him think. And that’s an opportunity to convince them, in the simplest terms.
Want to know more? Michael Cohen will be joining Jim Acosta for a town hall in New York City next week. And be sure to check out Olufemi O. Taiwo’s book Elite Capture, which goes deep into many of the issues we talked about today.
Watch the video and share it widely — you really won’t want to miss this one.
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We just finished a conversation with journalist Joy-Ann Reid and 3,400 Ink readers — and we talked about this past weekend’s “Hands Off!” protests, the Trump-Musk regime’s reign of destruction, the problems of American exceptionalism, and the crisis of media. And Joy dropped some of the hardest truths facing America right now:
Black Americans are done being the country’s “moral mules.” They’ve preached, they’ve taught, they’ve led by example. Many are sitting the Resistance out.
This so-called Resistance should focus not only on thwarting Trump but also on rebuilding trust with Black Americans.
There is no progressive media to counter what the right has. Joy breaks down how corporate media works on the inside.
Newsletters like these have the potential to be the new talk radio: intimate, real — like Twitter but without the Nazis.
Conservatives are too sure they’re right. And liberals are too sure they’re wrong.
We need a real opposition. Dems have failed to defend their own gains, failed to protect the social contract they wrote, failed to defend the 20th century they built.
We ended by talking about joy (my name also means joy, as it turns out!) and courage.
“Life is so precious and so short,” Reid told us. “What is the point of a public platform if you’re not going to use it? I’m going to Navalny this shit until America is what it promised my mom it would be.”
Who wants a regular airing of our show “Joy and Joy on Joy”?
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Share this far and wide. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep growing. Thank you one and all.
Join us again on Thursday, April 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re speaking with the philosopher and author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. We hope to see you there!
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Millions of people, in 1,400 cities and towns in red and blue districts across the United States, turned out this past weekend for the “Hands Off!” protests.
We just asked Astra Taylor and Liz Plank — both of them brilliant authors, activists, and organizers — what comes next?
Taylor and Plank (and the 2,100 viewers who joined us live) had plenty of ideas of where pro-democracy organizers need to put their energy going forward to build a movement with the power to change things. Among the things we talked about:
Does the market crash, which has upended the notion of men as protectors and providers, provide an opportunity to organize, especially among young men?
The protests, huge as they were, skewed older. Can the left learn from student movements of the past to reach out to younger people isolated by phones, and the pandemic, and real fears about crackdowns?
The regime’s actions are so alienating that the online right is on the back foot, struggling to message. Can the left finally learn from the guerrilla organizing that made Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro household names and start winning the online messaging battle?
The tariffs, the cuts to education, the attacks on the universities are all about creating insecurity — and an opportunity to talk people out of fear, into community, and into strategy.
We don’t just want to restore the broken system we had before — we need to come together and fight for something bigger and better than what we had before.
In the public interest, we’re leaving this open to all. But please support this work and subscribe if you can. When you do, it allows us to keep at it, pay our staff a living wage, and keep reaching a wider audience. We really appreciate it!
Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Join us today, Tuesday, April 8, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern, when we’ll talk to the author, documentarian, and political commentator Joy-Ann Reid. And on Thursday, April 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’re speaking with the philosopher and author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. We hope to see you all there!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Critics on the left and the right called out Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech this week for being “performative.” But what’s that all about?
Performance matters. Nobody wants to listen to a politician rattle off a list of statistical explanations. When you speak to people about something important, you need to make them feel a certain way, not just think a certain way. Otherwise, they are not going to act.
That goes for Booker holding the Senate floor for 25 hours (and making C-SPAN must-see TV), and that also goes for you, trying to convince your friends and neighbors to get together to go out to a protest if they’ve never been before. And that’s what we talked to political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio about this afternoon, along with what to make of the victory in the Wisconsin supreme court election, how to talk about the tariffs (and how to avoid the trap of explaining too much), why the Democrats missed the mark on the budget, and how to plan for the Hands Off! protests this coming weekend. As with anything Shenker-Osorio has to say, you won’t want to miss it.
We’re leaving this open to all. But please support this work and subscribe if you can. When you do, it allows us to keep at it and keep reaching a wider audience. We really appreciate it!
Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Stand up for media that bows to no tyrant or billionaire. Join us today. Or give a gift or group subscription.
Join us again next week for two great live discussions. On Tuesday, April 8, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with the author, documentarian, and political commentator Joy-Ann Reid, and on Thursday, April 10, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, the philosopher and author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò will join us. We hope to see you for both!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
Welcome back to democracy.
Welcome, those of you who were not scared off by the authoritarian bluster but who don’t like your 401(k) and portfolio diving.
Welcome to all who wanted to shake things up, smash the system, and now realize that it’s your family getting smashed. We welcome you. We must. Democracy is a schadenfreude-free zone. Come on in.
Welcome to the veterans who thought Donald Trump would be strong on defense and now are seeing your benefits endangered. You earned those benefits. No one deserves this pain. We welcome you to the cause of defending democracy in this hour of peril.
Welcome to those who thought other countries needed to be more grateful for the privilege of trading with the United States but now will not be able to afford basic necessities of life. Sometimes these economic things grow clearer up close. Theory is hard. We welcome you with open arms.
Welcome to the people who wanted the tax cuts, in the hope that they might trickle down, down, down, all the way down to you, but who now face the largest tax increase in memory. Your pain is our pain — literally. This will hurt everyone. Welcome in.
Welcome to the people who thought change and what some call progress was going too far, who felt unfamiliar in their own country at times, who feared the turning of the tables, who didn’t like all the gender stuff. Welcome if you now realize that all of those fears, some based in reality but many not, were weaponized against you. Welcome back home to democracy, because the only way through those fears and those concerns is each other. Democracy is the choice to choose the future together.
Welcome to the people who thought America would come roaring back and now face the real prospect of the end of American leadership in the world — who do not like capitulating to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, who don’t like the idea of HIV/Aids making a comeback because American generosity ends. Welcome, and let’s get right to work.
Welcome to those who let hatred into their hearts, and now confront the prospect of real suffering as a penalty for it. Only you can take responsibility for what you let yourself become, but the tent of democracy will always be big enough for you. Come on in; the pluralism’s fine. On your way in, thank those who held the torch while you took your hiatus from the idea of democracy.
Welcome to the CEOs who projected swagger but were, deep down, so afraid of this president, so afraid that you lost your voice, forgot that fuck-you money is supposed to give you courage. But welcome in, because we know you hate uncertainty more than anything, and this is the most chaotic, unstable, gyrating policy atmosphere in years.
Welcome, one and all. The pro-democracy movement needs you. More importantly, perhaps, you need it. And you needed it here when you went away for a time. We had your back. We had America’s back. We were marching for you, too. Welcome home.
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Is Donald Trump the de facto mayor of New York?
I put that question to the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, today. Lander, who is running for mayor himself, argues that Trump now has extraordinary leverage over the city, having forged a shady deal with Mayor Eric Adams to free him of criminal charges for corruption in exchange for fealty.
I talked to Lander about the state of the city he aspires to lead, and he had some fascinating and provocative things to say. Adams, in his telling, is corrupt. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor now running for mayor, is “a corrupt abuser who is only in it for himself.” The democratic socialist firebrand Zohran Mamdani is surging because people are fed up.
Progressives, Lander told me, have a condescension problem on issues of crime and disorder, mental illness and homelessness. Voters have been telling leaders they don’t feel secure, Lander said, and too often progressives have fact-checked their comments instead of addressing them with real policy.
I asked Lander if, in the more dire scenarios of Trumpism, a city like New York would be forced into the role almost of city-state, insisting on the protection of its people in active contravention of federal activities.
And I heard about Lander’s plan to build housing…in part by getting rid of golf courses.
A great conversation, which we’re leaving open to all. But support this work and subscribe if you can. When you do, it allows us to keep at it and keep reaching wider.
Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.
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Join us again tomorrow, Thursday, April 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, when we’ll be talking with messaging guru and political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio. We hope to see you all there!
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to The Ink to access full videos of past conversations and to join the chat during our live events.
This post was originally published on The.Ink.
