“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg

Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil on Monday, and now Jacob Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.

Reversing JFK’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage, Weisberg inducts eight powerful Americans who didn’t stand up to Trump into his hall of shame. It’s quite a list. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Wall Street’s Stephen Schwarzman, big law’s Brad Karp, Senator Mitch McConnell, Dartmouth College president Sian Beilock, Chief Justice John Roberts, media influencer Megyn Kelly, and — perhaps most controversially — former President George W. Bush.

Rather than MAGA flunkeys, Weisberg wanted figures who had stood up to Trump in the first term and then folded in the second. People with, as he puts it, interior drama. Bezos gave up a $10 billion Pentagon contract rather than soften the Post, then he threw in the moral towel by going to Mar-a-Lago and paying Melania $40 million to make an Amazon documentary. What changed? According to Weisberg, Bezos was fearful that his space startup, Blue Origin, would lose out to SpaceX on government contracts. No, not exactly Eichmann. But nonetheless sad if true. Especially since Bezos has the billions to do whatever he wants.

His eight and their ilk aren’t monsters, Weisberg suggests. It’s just that their fear, ambition and self-preservation are contagious, and such pathetic behaviour is herd-like. That’s their soap operatic interior drama. The banality of cowardice. More grist for Susan Neiman’s thesis about the nature of evil in the Trump epoch.

Five Takeaways

•       Not Kennedy’s Book. The title is a departure point, not a homage — and Weisberg is quick to note the irony beneath it. JFK’s Profiles in Courage was written at the height of the McCarthy era by a senator who was conspicuously uncourageous about McCarthy, ducking even the censure vote, and no better on civil rights; Weisberg’s reading is that Kennedy wrote the book to give himself courage by studying senators who had sacrificed their careers for principle. (It won the only Pulitzer ever awarded to a president, with the help of a ghostwriter.) What he kept was the structure: eight representative figures, each standing in for a part of the problem. What he added was the inversion, and a working definition — not physical cowardice but moral cowardice, the rarer failure. His epigraph is Twain: why is physical courage so common, and moral courage so rare?

•       Cowardice Is Contagious. The book’s explanatory heart, and the reason it isn’t a gallery of villains. Fear, greed and ambition motivate most people most of the time, Weisberg argues, and political behaviour is herd-like: people copy their peer groups. Courage is contagious — and so is cowardice. His cleanest illustration is the tech elite, who acted almost as one after January 6 to throw Trump off every platform and swear off donations to Republicans who voted against certification, and who now, again almost as one, think the opposite. Their defence is competitive necessity: standing up would hand an advantage to rivals. Andrew’s challenge — the wildebeest crossing the river, where the first ones in are the brave ones, so shouldn’t Andreessen get credit for jumping early? — got a firm no: a departure from your peer group that is entirely self-interested isn’t courage. Since the second election, Weisberg says, we have been living through a wave of cowardice. Andrew’s name for it: the banality of cowardice.

•       Bezos and the Rocket. The book’s most carefully argued chapter, and the one that explains the method. First-term Bezos meets Kennedy’s definition of courage exactly: Trump pulled a $10 billion Pentagon contract because he didn’t like the Washington Post’s coverage, and Bezos didn’t flinch. Second-term Bezos went to Mar-a-Lago and paid Melania $40 million for a documentary. What changed isn’t character but priority. Weisberg traces the through line back to a high-school graduation speech about orbiting colonies: the thing closest to Bezos’s heart is getting humans into space, a vision he calls more benign than Musk’s — terrariums around Earth rather than cities on Mars — and one he may have built Amazon to fund. Between the terms, SpaceX pulled far ahead of Blue Origin, in a business almost wholly dependent on NASA and Pentagon contracts. To Andrew’s Zhou Enlai objection — if the space vision pays off, won’t history forgive the collaboration? — Weisberg’s answer: nobody would respect him for sacrificing his children to his vision either. Some things you compromise; the social contract isn’t one of them. Andrew’s verdict: not exactly Eichmann, but sad if true — especially since Bezos has the billions to do whatever he wants.

•       McConnell Went Home. The counterfactual at the centre of the book. After January 6, with the Senate about to vote on conviction, Mitch McConnell had decided Trump should be removed and barred from ever holding office again — he told people so — and Weisberg argues he could have delivered the ten additional Republican votes needed. Then he called a recess, went home to Kentucky, discovered Trump still commanded majority support inside the party, and changed his mind. Cowardice, Weisberg says, and fear — not of being beaten up but of losing his place in the world, which was the Republican Senate he had built into a machine. Bullying recurs across these lives: McConnell was bullied as a child, and so was Megyn Kelly, whose own memoir turns on a vow never to become a bully and always to stand up to them — which she did, magnificently, when Trump and Bannon set the dogs on her in 2015, before becoming, in Weisberg’s account, more MAGA than MAGA and a considerable bully herself.

•       The Case for Shame. Weisberg is careful about the charge he’s making — he gives space to each subject’s reasoning, on the grounds that none of us can be confident we’d choose better — but he is not neutral about the remedy. Shame, he argues, plays a constructive social function: a community asserting its values against someone who has deviated from them, with a salutary effect on everyone watching. Hence the inclusion of the sins of omission alongside the commissions: George W. Bush, who loathes Trump privately, watched PEPFAR dismantled and said nothing; Sian Beilock, whose Dartmouth took the Justice Department’s free pass and declined to back Harvard — at the one college whose 1819 Supreme Court case established academic independence in the first place. And who would make a Profiles in Courage? Local people, he says: the Minneapolis neighbours who drove ICE out by peaceful protest, the lawyers who resigned rather than sign the deals, the people on his own small-town corner with honk-for-democracy signs. On RFK Jr., a candid pass — the theory of the case runs out. On 2028: not a return to normal, but something owed to the country, an apo...

“You should fight against tyranny in any form it takes. You’re not betraying the founding by standing up to tyranny — you’re following in their footsteps.” — Dennis Rasmussen

After Lincoln, he was the best known man in nineteenth century America. And the most photographed too, some 160 portraits of the ex-slave’s unmistakable face still surviving. So there was nothing hidden about Frederick Douglass. And yet the more we know about this most remarkable American, the more enigmatic he becomes.

At first, he was America’s fiercest critic. In the early 1840s he accused the founders of being “little better than a band of pirates” and described the Constitution as a “wicked compact.” By 1851, however, he radically revised his view of that same Constitution, eulogizing it as “a glorious liberty document” that outlawed slavery outright. So why did Douglass change his mind so radically? Is it really possible that he was simultaneously America’s fiercest critic and its greatest fan? That’s the riddle at the heart of Dennis Rasmussen’s new book Frederick Douglass’s American Founding.

Rasmussen reminds us that Douglass got his political education from William Lloyd Garrison, the unbending New Englander who burned a copy of the Constitution and ground its ashes under his intolerant heel. Then Douglass — having moved to Rochester, started his own newspaper, and fallen in with Gerrit Smith’s political abolitionists — spent two years changing his mind about the Constitution. His logic was startlingly modern. Scalia before Antonin Scalia. Studying the historic document like a biblical scholar, Douglass argued that it never mentions slavery nor race. So the rights it confers, he argued, belong to all Americans. This exegesis made him more militant than Lincoln, because he argued that such a careful reading of the Constitution demanded immediate emancipation.

Was Douglass bought or paid off by Gerrit Smith? Naturally the bitter Garrisonians said he was. But Dennis Rasmussen disputes this, arguing that the timing doesn’t work. What Douglass earned instead, Rasmussen argues, was the right to call himself and his fellow abolitionists the founders’ true heirs, more American than even Lincoln and the Republicans. So no mystery, then. The most familiar face in America confessing, in public, that he had been wrong for a decade. If only we had such political enigmas today.

Five Takeaways

•       Band of Pirates. Where Douglass started. Escaping slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore at twenty, he entered the abolitionist movement under William Lloyd Garrison — editor of The Liberator, organizer of the largest antislavery society, and the man who called the Constitution “an agreement with death and a covenant with hell,” once burning a copy at a rally and grinding its ashes under his heel. Through the 1840s Douglass held the Garrisonian line: the founders were hypocrites who complained about a three-penny tax while kidnapping and enslaving a huge share of the population; the Constitution was not merely flawed but evil, with its three-fifths clause, fugitive slave clause and slave trade clause. And these were not respectable opinions. Rasmussen’s reminder: even in the North, abolitionists were the tiniest and most despised minority in American politics — Garrison was tarred, feathered and dragged around Boston by a rope.

•       The Two Years That Changed Him. The conversion ran from roughly 1849 to 1851, and it had a geography. Douglass left the East Coast for Rochester and started a newspaper against Garrison’s wishes, landing in the heartland of the political abolitionists — the Liberty Party, the Radical Abolition Party — who believed slavery should be fought through the ballot rather than outside it. (The Garrisonians held the opposite: to vote at all was to uphold an evil system.) Having to defend his position in print, week after week, exposed him to arguments he hadn’t met. The Garrisonians cried corruption: Gerrit Smith, one of the richest men in America, funded the paper and held the antislavery-Constitution view, so Douglass had been bought. Rasmussen finds the charge both unfair and untrue — the money came after the change of mind was mostly complete — and hears in it the same condescension the Garrisonians showed when they wanted Douglass to narrate his enslavement and leave the philosophical heavy lifting to whiter figures.

•       Read the Words on the Page. How do you get from “wicked compact” to “glorious liberty document”? Douglass’s answer was a method, and it is startlingly modern. Forget the intentions of the framers; read the text. The Constitution nowhere mentions slaves or slavery. It nowhere mentions white or black, or any euphemism for racial difference. Its preamble promises to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty. Therefore its provisions apply equally to everyone born here — and the supposedly proslavery clauses can be construed, chapter and verse, to have nothing to do with slavery at all. Rasmussen is honest about the history: as an account of what the framers meant, no, it doesn’t hold — he has written a whole book on the Philadelphia convention, where proslavery framers were plainly present. But as a reading of the words themselves, “it’s far more interesting than you might think,” and Douglass’s case is stronger than anyone expects.

•       More Radical, Not Less. The hour’s central correction, and the reason this isn’t a story about a radical mellowing with age. Douglass’s new position went beyond Lincoln’s. The respectable antislavery view of the 1850s was “freedom national” — keep slavery out of the territories, leave it alone in the South. Douglass was among a tiny handful arguing that the Constitution already forbade slavery everywhere and demanded immediate emancipation. And after the conversion he became more militant, not less: more willing to countenance violence against slaveholders and slave catchers, and more emphatic in denouncing a country now openly betraying its own founding law. He also claimed the founders’ mantle for the abolitionists rather than for Lincoln and the Republicans: the founders fought tyranny in their time; we fight it in ours; we are their true heirs. The parallel with the colonists was structural, not moral — he said repeatedly that the tyranny endured by the enslaved was a million times worse than a tax on tea.

•       Wrapped in the American Flag. The legacy, and the reason the book lands in 2026. Douglass’s reading made Black Americans constitutionally American by definition: the document recognizes only citizens and aliens, and “I was born here — so I am a citizen, wrapped in the American flag just as much as anyone else.” That argument runs straight through to King’s promissory note in “I Have a Dream,” and underneath the twentieth century’s long argument about whether to claim America or leave it. There are complications Rasmussen doesn’t hide: the Garrisonians and John C. Calhoun agreed the Constitution was proslavery, a strange meeting of minds; his greatest speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, was delivered mostly to white audiences, as most of his subscribers were white; he split with Elizabeth Cady Stanton over whether the Fifteenth Amendment should wait for women; and in later life — a stalwart Republican, entangled with the Freedman’s Bank — he was, as Rasmussen puts it, all too human. And his le...

“Add up all of their wealth — it’s more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined.” — Eric Zwick

Yesterday, the democratic socialist Susan Neiman blamed free market economics for all the evils of our age. But the market gives and the market takes. And in America it has minted three million millionaires whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. This human backbone of American capitalism is described in Eric Zwick’s and Owen Zidar’s The Everywhere Millionaire, a book about who is really rich in America and how they got there.

Forget Musk and Bezos, Zwick says. The real money is a hot dog man from suburban Chicago with a superyacht called Top Dog. Three million Americans own private businesses worth $5 million or more — dentists, beer distributors, HVAC contractors, Wendy’s franchisees — averaging $25 million each. Their combined wealth, Zwick says, is more than ten times the Forbes 400. And they are everywhere in America, from Walker County, Alabama to the Lake of the Ozarks.

Are these millionaires evil? They are certainly obsessed, relentless, bad at hobbies and mostly Republican. But evil? Only perhaps to ideologues resentful of other people’s success. In The Everywhere Millionaire, Zwick and Zidar show — in spite of growing inequality and shrinking opportunity — that the American Dream is still alive. Democrats might take note. Especially if they want to win back power in an America still dependent on Main Street for its prosperity.

Five Takeaways

•       Three Million of Them. The book’s central fact, and it reorders the American wealth debate: the everywhere millionaires are private business owners with a net worth of at least $5 million, averaging around $25 million, and Zwick and Zidar count roughly three million of them. Add their wealth together and it comes to more than ten times the Forbes 400 combined — not ten times Musk, ten times all four hundred. The market gives and the market takes, as Andrew put it — and here it has minted a class whose collective wealth radically outstrips Silicon Valley’s billionaires. They are also, unlike the coastal fortunes, geographically everywhere: the map lights up rather than clustering in four cities, with the highest average in Walker County, Alabama, and pockets around the Lake of the Ozarks, Aspen and less famous mountain towns. Why haven’t we heard of them? They don’t sell clicks. They run unglamorous businesses — a beer distributor, a dentist with a regional network, an HVAC contractor with trucks around town — and they aren’t buying media companies to be noticed.

•       Top Dog. The characters are the book’s pleasure. Dick Portillo started a hot dog stand in suburban Chicago fifty years ago with $1,100, the son of immigrants raised in a housing project; he sold the business decades later and now owns, as Andrew put it, a different kind of housing project in Naples, Florida — the authors found him via yacht registration data, because his superyacht is called Top Dog. Was he moral? Ask Mike Ditka, whose competing Ditka Dogs Portillo set about crushing. “Probably not super moral,” Zwick conceded — which is rather the point: these are not heroes or villains, just people obsessed with growing a business. Larry Miller went from auto parts distributor to dealer to owner of the Utah Jazz (and is pictured giving Karl Malone advice on the pick-and-roll). Junior Bridgeman left the Milwaukee Bucks for the deeply unglamorous business of Wendy’s franchises and made hundreds of millions. Tracy Britt Cool left Berkshire Hathaway to build her own.

•       The Accident of 1986. Zwick thinks of the tax code as a house that depreciates and needs repairs. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 — Reagan in the White House, Bill Bradley in the Senate, both of whom had actually paid the old 70% rates as a movie star and a basketball player — was a repair job: kill the loopholes, drop personal rates below 30%. The unintended consequence was enormous. For the first time it made sense to organize a business so that its profits were taxed at the personal rate, and the pass-through revolution followed: S-corporations and partnerships surging, the more profit you made the more you kept. Every subsequent reform sweetened the deal — the Bush cuts, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, made permanent in 2025’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Success or failure? Zwick finds elements of both, but won’t call it an unmitigated success: this class’s tax benefits are a real part of today’s fiscal problem. One unambiguous gain — pass-throughs linked owners to businesses in the data, which is precisely how this book became possible.

•       Bad at Hobbies. What are they actually like? The typical everywhere millionaire is a white man in his late fifties or early sixties, married, with a college degree — though roughly a third of star entrepreneurs in the data are women, across eight million founders over twenty years. From fifty to seventy-five detailed interviews, the unifying theme isn’t brains: test scores turn out to be a weak predictor. It’s ordeal — sleeping on the work table in the back of the shop, years of not knowing whether it would work, a relentlessness that beats IQ. They credit luck too, and macro trends they caught early. And the tax code? “Not the first thing or even the fourth thing” driving them; raise their taxes a little and they wouldn’t notice, though they do decamp to Nevada or Florida when they retire. They’re obsessed with the business at the expense of hobbies and, sometimes, family — which makes divorce, in Zwick’s dry formulation, a naturally occurring wealth tax. Not a guarantee of happiness. Also: if your parents are in the top 1%, you are six times likelier to found a star business than someone from the ninetieth percentile.

•       The Power They Don’t Advertise. The half of the book that complicates the good news. Survey data from PPP loan recipients shows this class skews Republican and cares about regulation and taxes rather than the social issues that dominate the feed — but Zwick was struck by how many Democrats there are among them, which explains why certain policies stay off the table even when Democrats hold power. Because they are dispersed, there are everywhere millionaires in every congressional district; they don’t run for office, they fund the people who do, and their influence shows up most sharply in local and state policy — including, sometimes, restricting entry and raising prices in exactly the markets where affordability bites. Trump, for the record, is not one of them: his wealth came through media and then political power, and he was born into the top 0.1%. Zwick’s advice for Democrats chasing this class, on the day after Jentleson’s big-tent argument: stop knee-jerk vilifying people who build businesses, and pay attention to problems as they are rather than as they appear in the Twitter feed. His advice for everyone else: walk down Main Street and ask who owns what. “Is a tax on 50 billionaires gonna move the needle at all? Not really.” Andrew’s verdict: evil only perhaps to ideologues resentful of other people’s success — and proof that, despite growing inequality and shrinking opportunity, the American Dream is still alive.

About the Guest

“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil, an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics.

So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident.

Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher.

So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men.

Five Takeaways

•       Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have,” and Neiman refuses to reduce it to a sentence — as, she notes, Kant refused before her. It is not a theological concept (the Bible itself shows moral concepts precede theological ones); it is the point at which the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be becomes so large “that we don’t know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up.” Children spot the gap first, though they call it unfair: the bully in the sandbox is the first lesson in a world that contains injustice. Her real argument is strategic. We have become afraid of moral concepts because we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for them — and the cost of that squeamishness is that the word passes to the polemical and the demonizing. Andrew pressed her twice on the dodge; her answer, eventually, was sharp: she is not unwilling to use the word, she is simply more interested in analyzing it than defining it — which is why she has called both the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response evil, two entirely different kinds, and why any single definition covering both would let one of them off.

•       The Falsified Adam Smith. The book’s core, and its surprise: a moral philosopher writing about economics. The major source of evil in our time, Neiman argues, is the ideology derived from a bad and simplistic reading of Adam Smith — that we are driven by self-interest and nothing else matters — a reading she calls not a simplification but a falsification, touted by Milton Friedman and still pumped out daily by the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Reinforcing it: evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, explaining that altruism is a puzzle and that we know how hunter-gatherers thought two hundred thousand years ago (we know almost nothing). Is capitalism evil, Andrew asked — the question she never quite answers in print. “Oh, I do, actually,” she said, and reached for Einstein, a committed socialist who said so all his life. Her favorite Thatcher line isn’t “there is no alternative” but the quieter one: economics is the method, the object is to change the soul. That, she says, is exactly what has happened — and when someone tells you at dinner that human nature is just that way, they are making a philosophical claim without knowing it.

•       Not a Book About Trump. Andrew put it to her that Call It Evil is barely about Trump, and got a flat correction when he pushed further: “I really think you’re twisting my arguments.” No, she does not say we are all evil. The point of the book is not to count his sins — for that, read Haberman and Swan, “a sickening” but excellent reminder of flooding the zone — but to ask how even half the country accepted him a second time, knowing everything. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the ideology: unabashed, unashamed self-advantage in the most powerful job on earth, “a way of giving permission” for everyone else to behave the same way. Against that: the woman helping a stranger with a baby carriage on the subway stairs, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, who died protecting a neighbor’s rights. We know not everyone is evil because we all have such moments. And the 9/11 quotation Andrew found most revealing of all — Trump noting that his building was now the tallest in New York.

•       Socialism Needs More Kant. The alternative tradition, and the hour’s intellectual heart. Neiman is a Kantian — the human condition as the struggle between the world as it is and as it ought to be, with an innate sense of justice we are born capable of but not guaranteed. Against Kant she sets Hume (custom, habit, emotion: fine for ordinary life, useless when a society is built on slavery or colonialism and someone wants to challenge it) and, behind him, the Nietzscheans. Her hero is Eduard Bernstein, the German social democrat who said socialism needs more Kant, an early champion of women’s and gay rights, in London during Wilde’s trial, who voted against the First World War. What Bernstein saw in Marx is what she rejects: that ideas are superstructure, “the foam on the beer,” while economics is the drink underneath. Her contemporary proof is Zohran Mamdani, whose win everyone credited to affordability — halal sandwiches, daycare — but who always framed it as justice: it is unjust that the teachers, nurses, taxi drivers and sanitation workers who keep New York running cannot afford to live in it. And Rawls, her teacher, was moving toward a Kantian democratic socialism before the strokes.

•       How Ordinary People Behave. On Gaza she is unequivocal — yes, genocide, following Omer Bartov’s careful reversal and the Israeli human rights organizations, though she notes the gap between genocide and crime against humanity is not gigantic. What drives the global outrage, in her reading, is not antisemitism (millions of Jews are outraged too) but the use of the twentieth century’s one moral consensus — that the Holocaust was evil — to justify another crime: “the use of one evil to justify another is something that’s morally obscene.” Truman’s bomb: evil, and not only for the dead but as the opening salvo of a Cold War we are still paying for. On Arendt: the banality thesis is right — we are endangered less by sadists than by the thoughtle...

Something unprecedented happened yesterday. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei — rivals who rarely agree on anything — all called for an AI slowdown. It came after more and more doomsday warnings from experts which seem to have finally woken Congress up to AI’s potentially existential threat. Axios even claimed that Speaker Mike Johnson is considering canceling the House recess to force members back to the Capitol to discuss the crisis. This seems to have been the week that the AI zeitgeist has finally shifted. Seven days that have changed the AI world.

For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, it’s time to shut up or shut down. While he remains a sceptic about the autonomy of AI agents, he recognizes its potential danger. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off,” he says. “You either control it or you don’t.” In terms of AI policy, he argues, you can’t be half-pregnant. Either leave it alone or flip the off switch. Anything else fudges the issue and allows slippery characters like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to pursue their own agenda.

I don’t disagree. The real world, however, is forever half-pregnant. Investment in AI and the upcoming Anthropic IPO are the driving force of the economy. So AI’s existential threat isn’t just to “humanity.” It’s also to American prosperity, a politically existential threat (thus Trump’s opposition to any regulation). So, yes, this was the week that the AI zeitgeist shifted. The die is, indeed, cast. But it’s only the beginning rather than the end of this remarkable story. Pass the popcorn. Predicting the future might be a fool’s game, but it’s certainly going to get real interesting.

Five Takeaways

•       Calling BS on the Slowdown. The week’s convergence was genuinely new — a Dario Amodei essay warning that humans could lose control, Altman and Musk jumping aboard, all three major papers leading with it, Congress “waking up,” and an Axios scoop that Speaker Mike Johnson is being urged to cancel the House recess. Keith’s diagnosis is withering: it illustrates “the weakness of AI leadership,” swayed by a six-week employee who resigned, wrote an essay, and went on TV. His deeper claim: there is no such thing as AI as an independent actor, so the entire scare is misconstrued — “AI is not dangerous, period.” What the slowdown talk really represents, he argues, is the economic self-interest of incumbents in containing open-source AI — rules that prevent others from playing. Is anything new, Andrew pressed? “The heat is ramped up a notch. That’s about it.”

•       No Speedometer. The episode’s logical core. If you believe recursive self-improvement can’t be controlled by humans, and that the agents it produces will be malicious, then slowing down is incoherent — “the only logical thing is not to slow it down, but to shut it down”: no Anthropic, no IPO, a ban. “The minute there is recursive self-learning, there’s no speedometer. It’s either on or off.” Scott Bessent’s speech — the week’s most prescient, in Keith’s view — made the practical version: recursion can’t be stopped, and 3,500 mostly open-source models already sit in the Hugging Face store. Stephen Witt’s NYT taxonomy (shut it down, air-crash investigations, monitoring, the kill switch — with his closing COVID-epidemiologist analogy) gets respect but fails Keith’s test: none of it solves the problem if the problem is real. In AI policy, as Andrew’s intro has it, you can’t be half-pregnant: either leave it alone or flip the off switch — anything else fudges the issue. His counter-gameplay: for AI to threaten humanity it needs biological or nuclear weapons, and that chain of events is “fantastical.” Andrew’s retort — so was hijacking planes into the World Trade Center. Keith: “9/11 is one airplane.”

•       The IPO Game. Why would the leaders sound alarms about their own products? Keith’s fork: they’re naive (buying space by taking heat out of the conversation — which won’t work, since demands to stop will only grow) or manipulative. The tell arrived mid-week: Altman told Fortune that OpenAI won’t IPO this year, given the safety discussion — which Keith reads as calling Dario’s bluff. Will Anthropic pull its $2 trillion listing? “I don’t think he is. I think he’s playing a game… a high-stakes game.” Andrew’s materialist reading: with the American economy increasingly dependent on the AI sector and its impending IPOs, nothing gets shut down short of an AI 9/11 or COVID event — the story is now about the whole future of the American economy. Keith’s post-midterm forecast: the White House does nothing, and unless Democrats take both houses, “nothing changes” — markets settle, IPOs happen, AI continues. And his path to peace: most innovations become acceptable only after they deliver the bacon; people must feel AI’s benefits to discount its fears. Andrew’s verdict: the AI zeitgeist has shifted and the die is, indeed, cast — but this is the beginning rather than the end of the story. Pass the popcorn.

•       Open Source Wins — China Included. Against Noah Smith’s America-is-winning scorecard, Keith reframes the race entirely: the real contest is open versus closed source — with the Chinese, ironically, in the open camp and the Americans building walled gardens. History’s lesson: “open source leaks like water into every crevice” — the cloud is almost 100% Linux. The week’s stranger revelation: reports that Kimi was routing every query to Claude — “there was actually no Kimi” — plus the training-dependency chain that keeps Chinese models about a year behind. The money agrees with American dominance either way: the FT’s moonshot-capitalism piece has US deep-tech VC at $246 billion (80% of it California) against China’s $105 billion and the UK’s 26 — with the power law concentrating it all into a handful of companies, and Andreessen Horowitz reporting that post-SpaceX-IPO venture returns now dwarf private equity. As for regulation: California’s new chatbot and teen-social-media laws are, per Keith, light and barely policed.

•       The Rest of the Week. Starbucks’ billion-dollar bet on the coffeehouse as antidote to lonely digital lives — Keith’s analyst verdict: Barnes & Noble tried the sofas, and “the biggest problem is the coffee isn’t very good.” How writers actually use AI, via Every’s interviews: Kevin Roose structured The AGI Chronicles himself, then let AI do what he calls three to four years of work in one — exactly, Keith notes, the process behind his own The Human Dividend. The Edmans crossover, from Monday’s interview of the week: do smart people make dumb investments? Keith’s Wall Street history says the best investors are “working class street smart kids” who smell deals — inventors are not gamblers — though Musk is the exception, and as for Dario: “I think Dario would be good at anything,” Andrew offered. “He’s pretty good at politics.” Apple’s iPhone Duo foldable arrives with, per Ben Thompson, still no AI strategy — while Facebook ships Muse, a full agent with a virtual machine that would need 27 million physical computers at Meta scale. And farewell to Bill Draper — among the first venture capitalists, first into Skype before his son Tim, a seeker of contrarian difference “a bit like AI now.”

About the Co-Host

Keith Teare is the publisher of the That Was The...

“One believes in democracy and the rule of law, and right now, the other doesn’t.” — Adam Jentleson

Yesterday, William Hitchcock explained FDR’s ability to build and maintain supermajorities. Today, Adam Jentleson — Harry Reid’s former deputy chief of staff and chief of staff to John Fetterman — talks about how the Democrats can build lasting power in the 21st century. The strategy is laid out in Supermajority, Jentleson’s follow-up to the acclaimed Kill Switch.

Is the Democratic Party too woke? “We are still too rigid” is Jentleson’s euphemistic take on the dramatic class flip in American politics. JFK won two-thirds of working-class voters in 1960, Jentleson reminds us, while Kamala Harris lost two-thirds in 2024. His prescription is FDR-style heterodoxy. Dems need to hold to their core commitments (healthcare, the safety net, progressive taxation, civil rights) while broadening their base in red states. His examples of tent wideners include a Kansan megachurch pastor, a pro-drilling Alaskan candidate, and an Iowan hopeful whose flat “no” on trans sports silenced a right-wing radio host. The model for winning back the working class, Jentleson argues, is Bernie Sanders circa 2016, an economic populist, but to Hillary Clinton’s right on immigration and guns.

The much maligned John Fetterman, Jentleson’s old boss, is the cautionary tale. It’s what happens, Jentleson warns, when the fighting “becomes the entire point” and a politician comes unmoored from principle. Jon Ossoff, Jentleson suggests, seems the anti-Fetterman in writing his own speeches and appearing authentic rather than opportunistic. Ossoff certainly isn’t FDR, but he might be the best chance the Dems have of defeating an increasingly authoritarian Republican party in 2028.

Five Takeaways

•       The FDR Lessons Nobody Tells. Picking up where yesterday’s Hitchcock episode left off: FDR built the New Deal supermajority not by bowling opponents over with progressive rhetoric but through a deeply heterodox coalition — including factions today’s Democrats would expel — and sold it in conservative wrappers: Social Security pitched as fiscally responsible and earned, not given (he railed against the dole in cabinet meetings). The uncomfortable ledger: FDR actively worked against every civil rights bill of his era to keep self-declared white supremacists in the tent — which means, Jentleson argues, that today’s trade-offs (a Kansas candidate with questions about trans sports, a border-security Democrat) “pale in comparison” to the compromises that built the twentieth century’s Democratic dominance. The Kansas case in point: megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton, running in a state Trump won by twenty points, holds the line on healthcare, the safety net, and progressive taxes — and the alternative to his heterodoxy is a MAGA senator.

•       Too Rigid, Not Too Woke. Asked the New Yorker’s question — is the party still too woke? — Jentleson answers with his own euphemistic diagnosis: “we are still too rigid.” The evidence is the class flip: JFK won about two-thirds of working-class voters; Harris lost about two-thirds, while the college-educated — once the party of Romney, Rockefeller, and Eisenhower — became the Democratic base. And the sociology cuts deep: education correlates with ideological rigidity, while working-class voters hold heterodox mixes — the focus-group regular who wants the 2008 CEOs jailed and undocumented immigrants deported in the same breath. Hence the echo-chamber problem (Andrew’s San Francisco testimony included): the decline of unions, parties, and Elks halls narrowed the aperture to funders and interest groups, and the Harris circle heard only itself. The fix costs nothing: choose diverse advisers, model good-faith disagreement — a preview of next week’s Susan Neiman conversation — and collect what Jentleson calls the electoral windfall waiting for whichever party does it first.

•       It’s Working Right Now. To Andrew’s two-state-solution objection — lovely in theory, impossible in practice — Jentleson answers from the November polls: Mary Peltola leading in Alaska (Trump +double digits) as a pro-drilling Democrat; James Talarico leading in Texas as a fossil-fuels-as-bridge Democrat; and Rob Sand in Iowa, whose flat “no” on a right-wing radio show — the host admitted he’d prepared follow-ups for the expected wriggle — took the wedge off the table and freed his anti-corruption message. As recently as 2009, he reminds us, Democrats held Senate seats in Arkansas, both Dakotas, Louisiana, and Montana. The forgotten exemplar: Bernie Sanders 2016 — economically populist but a 2007 immigration-bill no vote, “open borders is a Koch brothers proposal,” Lou Dobbs appearances, and gun rights to Hillary’s right — the heterodox mix that produced his crossover appeal, against Clinton’s across-the-board orthodoxy. Jentleson’s 2028 read: the primary won’t resolve for the left, and Ossoff, Cooper, and Peltola are the model — though he tips his hat to the DSA’s weeknight commitment to Robert’s Rules.

•       The Fetterman Cautionary Tale. The hour’s most personal stretch: Jentleson was John Fetterman’s chief of staff, and his verdict on his old boss — who cameoed at Trump’s convention this week — is that Fetterman shows what happens when the heterodox strategy is “taken too far”: the fighting “has become the entire point of his career,” unmoored from the principles that make divergence meaningful. On the Wall Street Journal’s reporting — the children’s hospital he refused to meet, the York police funerals he skipped — Jentleson wasn’t a source (“if you’re going to say something, you should say it on the record and put your name on it”) but confirms it “resonated with my experience.” His primary emotion: “sadness and regret… he’s letting a tremendous number of people down, including the people of Pennsylvania, who are basically down a senator.” The lesson for the book’s own thesis: heterodoxy is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it needs to stay rooted in why you entered politics at all — or it leads “to some dark places.”

•       The Vision Thing. Why supermajority and not Madisonian faction? Because, Jentleson argues, this era has something genuinely new: “the first time in American history where we have one political party that is entirely aligned with a sympathy towards authoritarianism” — not flashes like McCarthy or Father Coughlin (yesterday’s villain, returning), but a party whose convention this week featured Trump leading “a pledge to cheat in elections,” with no internal pushback. (FDR’s court-packing, by contrast, was the exception proving the rule: the system brushed him back in 1938.) Hence the pull quote — and yet democracy-talk alone doesn’t win: “Biden tried to run on soul of the nation… and it didn’t work.” The closing agreement, via Andrew’s wrapper argument: the New Deal and the Great Society were named visions; Clinton and Obama never articulated one. Jentleson’s candidate: finish FDR’s cradle-to-grave social insurance — wage insurance against AI’s disruptions, everything earned rather than handed out, aimed at bank accounts and the pump rather than the soul of the nation. And his 2028 intrigue, on the record: Jon Ossoff — the anti-Fetterman — who writes his own speeches, wins Georgia repeatedly, and conditioned aid to Israel early enou...

“We’ve taken our democratic functioning for granted, and we’ve forgotten what it looks like to actually have to fight for it.” — William Hitchcock

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, and there’s a lot of sombre talk about the forever wars triggered by the attack. But sometimes, fighting evil might be necessary. So argues William Hitchcock, whose A Shadow Over the World is a major new history of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the rise of fascism, and the making of American involvement in World War II.

We got the thirties wrong, Hitchcock says. The conventional view is that an interventionist FDR was hamstrung by an isolationist American public. Thus the US’s tardy entry into the war. The truth, Hitchcock argues, is the opposite. Judging from the period’s magazines, radio, films, and plays, he finds that most Americans hated fascism and wanted to act, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe until after Munich. Having become an interventionist, FDR managed the propaganda war with such trademark sophistication that “isolationist” and “appeasement” became the nastiest insults in Washington DC. So insulting, in fact, that American policy makers still deploy them today, with every adversary a new Hitler, every negotiation a new Munich.

Because the isolationists ended up as history’s villains, Hitchcock says, we’ve back-projected a narrative in which the 1930s public had its head in the sand and FDR was the lone farsighted interventionist. So the real thirties — featuring a vibrant public conversation about America’s role in the world, with the public actually more anti-fascist than the president — has gotten buried under FDR’s own accomplished myth-making.

And then there’s the F word. Are we back in fascist times? Is the 2020s a repeat of the 1930s? The UVA professor lives in Charlottesville, so it’s a particularly timely question for him. Hitchcock sees fascist behavior, he confesses, but not a fascist country. In the face of authoritarianism, he notes, America remains a vibrant democracy. Maybe that’s what the 2020s, with its public resistance to authoritarianism, has in common with the 1930s. History doesn’t repeat itself, as the line attributed to Mr America himself, Mark Twain, has it — but it rhymes.

Five Takeaways

•       We Got the Thirties Wrong. The book’s revisionist core, against libraries of Roosevelt biography: the standard story — an interventionist FDR hamstrung by an isolationist public — is backwards. From fresh research in the periodicals, radio speeches, films, and plays of 1930s political culture, Hitchcock finds an American public that hated fascism and wanted to do something, while Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with Europe or Asia from 1933 all the way to Munich in September 1938. His gift, once converted, was finding ways to act short of war — and then vilifying the isolationists so thoroughly that appeasement became the great sin — insults American policy makers still deploy today, with every adversary a new Hitler and every negotiation a new Munich. The thirties Americans were more sophisticated than the caricature: they struggled to fight fascism while avoiding war. The decade, Hitchcock insists, was not a cautionary tale of heads in the sand but “a time much like our own,” when Americans argued about the right role for their country in the world.

•       Coughlin, Not Lindbergh. The corrective to Philip Roth: The Plot Against America is a wonderful novel that overstates its villain. Lindbergh came late — speaking out only in 1940, joining America First in spring 1941, by which time “the table was set” and Roosevelt had won the war of ideas; polling showed two-thirds of Americans against Lindbergh’s views. The German American Bund, swastikas in Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, was small. Far more dangerous was Father Coughlin, the radio priest with millions of listeners undermining Roosevelt at every turn. The deeper discomfort: fascism was popular in America later than we like to admit — elites welcomed Mussolini in 1922, dictatorship carried no stigma, and Studebaker sold a sedan called the Dictator until 1937. (“Roth missed the trick,” Andrew noted. It should have been a Ford.) As for the New-Deal-as-fascism charge, leveled then and since: Roosevelt’s own answer — he was saving capitalism by making it fairer — holds, because fascism is not an economic program but war on enemies at home and abroad.

•       The Sheriff and the Same Tree. The South’s paradoxes, which deserve a book of their own. In Congress, southern Democrats — including Carter Glass of Virginia, among the most racist senators of a racist era — were ardent interventionists, not least because rearmament dollars flowed to southern military bases. Meanwhile African Americans were the first to recognize fascism, because they already lived under it: “he’s right here in our courthouse… He’s the sheriff. He’s the mayor” — Jim Crow and fascism, branches of the same tree, as the Black press argued years before Pearl Harbor. Hence A. Philip Randolph’s high-stakes poker in 1941: threatening a million-man march he might not have mustered, he extracted the executive order barring segregation in federally funded defense plants — the first federal lever of the modern civil rights era. The enduring puzzle Hitchcock presses on his disbelieving students: America fought and won the great war for democracy with a segregated army. And civil rights remains, in his verdict, one of the biggest stains on FDR’s reputation — Eleanor’s Black Cabinet notwithstanding.

•       The Making of a World Power. The trail of tears first: Abyssinia invaded, and America wouldn’t even embargo oil; Spain’s elected government denied weapons while the fascists poured in guns; the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Munich — nothing. The switch, Hitchcock argues, came at Munich: Roosevelt grasped that American military weakness was itself the problem — nothing could deter Hitler’s testing — and by early 1939 the Neutrality Act was being unwound, billions were flowing into a new Navy (even isolationists loved a picket fence around the hemisphere), and 1940 brought peacetime conscription. The supporting cast makes the chapter: Martha Gellhorn’s letters from Spain — “a dress rehearsal of the coming conflict” — reaching FDR through Eleanor; the loathed Chamberlain (“there’s one thing Roosevelt couldn’t stand — condescending Europeans”); the Stalin gamble that made him look a fool at the pact and a prophet at Lend-Lease; and Dorothy Thompson, the Republican journalist expelled by the Gestapo, whose Herald Tribune columns FDR’s speechwriters lifted by the page. And then Hollywood’s convergence: Casablanca — written after its playwright visited Vichy France to rescue his wife’s Jewish family — with Rick as Roosevelt, hesitating in a cafe called White House until he joins the fight, in theaters just as GIs landed in North Africa.

•       Not at Midnight Yet. The 2026 lessons, delivered from Charlottesville — Exhibit A, where 2017’s riot was “the kind of thing you could have seen in Weimar Germany.” First: normalization is the danger — the salami tactics of fascists mean “if they can get away with a little slice, they’ll keep slicing,” and the thirties’ sin was depicting Mussolini as harmless. Second: the demonizing instinct should be resisted — pressed on Susan Neiman’s forthcoming Ca...

“I’m a military correspondent, but I would be totally happy if there was world peace and I had to change jobs.” — Yonah Jeremy Bob

Oil hit $100 a barrel (again) today. Donald Trump confessed, with uncharacteristic honesty, that the Iran war won’t end until after the November elections. And while Israel’s war with Iran ended back in April, America’s hasn’t, with the US and Iran shooting at each other most of the time since February. So, with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow, is this about to become America’s new forever war?

Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent at The Jerusalem Post and co-author of In the War Room, the inside story of Israel’s fight against the Iranian “axis.” The Baltimore-born and Jerusalem-based journalist confesses that he watches this conflict with “two brains.” For Israelis of both left and right, it’s a war of survival. His US brain, however, has the more down-to-earth reading of a conflict that offers no existential threat.

So is this the new forever war? America after 9/11 “was at war for about a decade,” Bob responds. A nation in post-traumatic shock. A quarter of a century later, most Americans think of today’s Iran war in terms of domestic gas prices. Thus Trump’s presentation of the conflict in the context of an election calendar is not a forever war. Like all things Trumpian, it’s just another transactional campaign. As for the senior military correspondent himself, he’d be totally happy, Bob confesses, if world peace put him out of a job.

Five Takeaways

•       The Split Screen. Bob — Baltimore-born, Jerusalem-based — says he watches this war with two brains, and they see different wars. The American brain sees a US-Iran conflict that hasn’t stopped: strikes, sabotage, and bombing traded almost nonstop since February 28. The Israeli brain sees a war that ended on April 7 — one 24-hour exception aside — leaving Israel calmer about Iran than Washington is. What actually agitates Israelis this week is diplomatic: Britain and a dozen mostly European countries (plus Canada) sanctioning the West Bank — not Israel proper, but a stain and a loss all the same. On Witkoff and Kushner, whom Ed Luce’s FT column accused of “blind amateurism,” Bob’s ledger is mixed: genuine credit for ending the Israel-Hamas war in October 2025 and bringing home all 250 hostages — the war’s forgotten center of gravity for most Israelis — against failure to close any Iran nuclear deal and near-nothing on Ukraine.

•       The Transactional Ally. Bob’s three-level model of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship: lower-official criticism gets ignored; a direct Trump request gets “yes, but”; and a genuine Trump threat gets obeyed — every time. The astonishing exhibit: Israeli aircraft already en route to bomb Iran, recalled mid-flight after Trump tweeted “those aircraft better come back.” Bob can list three or four such episodes; Netanyahu backed off in all of them, because American support is more essential now than ever — which is the second story: Israel’s worst diplomatic isolation in decades, with bipartisan American support frayed and Europe largely gone. The counterweights: India, whose closeness to Israel — military, intelligence, and AI agreements — has never been higher, and the UAE, now closer to Israel than Egypt or Jordan. The original Abraham Accords held through the war; the grand prize didn’t — MBS was publicly “weeks away” from normalization in September 2023, and stopping that clock, Bob believes, is very possibly why Sinwar invaded when he did.

•       The Book Bibi Doesn’t Like. In the War Room’s revisionist core: the early-war Netanyahu was the hesitant man in the room — it took roughly three weeks for the rest of the war cabinet to convince him to invade Gaza at all, consistent with a career of avoiding big ground operations — until, with victories in northern Gaza and Khan Younis behind him, he flipped in spring 2024 into the war room’s most aggressive member, pressing on to Hezbollah and Iran as his own defense chiefs turned toward ending it. Netanyahu, Bob reports dryly, dislikes exactly those chapters: “we’re in touch… we got an earful” — from both political directions, which the authors take as evidence they nailed it. On October 7 itself: warnings — including one relayed from the UAE — were ignored by everyone, Netanyahu, the IDF’s Halevi, and the Shin Bet’s Bar alike, all captive to the concept that Hamas was deterred; Bob’s author’s note says all of them should have resigned, as their 1973 predecessors did. The conspiracy theory that Bibi wanted the invasion gets “an unequivocal no.”

•       Between Genocide and Mistakes. Andrew put Al Jazeera’s headline to him directly, and Bob — Boston University Law before journalism — answered as a lawyer: on genocide, “unequivocally no,” for want of intent (Bret Stephens’s point: a state that wanted genocide had the bombs to commit it in weeks, and wouldn’t have spent the war moving civilians out of the way). Then he did the arithmetic against his own side’s comfort: of roughly 70,000 dead, about 25,000 were Hamas and 3,000–5,000 were killed by Hamas itself — leaving 35,000 to 45,000 Palestinian civilians. “I think that’s too much.” The army has 150 criminal probes and some 3,000 disciplinary ones open; the World Central Kitchen strike — armed figures misread as Hamas boarding the trucks — stands as his anatomy of a terrible mistake that may yet be prosecuted as gross negligence. The insiders he talks to are genuinely sad about the civilian toll, and on the settlers he goes on record for the brass: top IDF and Shin Bet officials say the police under Itamar Ben-Gvir simply won’t crack down on Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank. “I point the mean finger at” Ben-Gvir — their words, he says, sounded out to the world.

•       The Nuclear Scorecard — and the Clock. His Jerusalem Post exclusive, summarized: what triggered June 2025 wasn’t just enriched uranium (Iran had ten weapons’ worth for years) but progress on the “weapons group” — the metallurgy and hemispheres needed to put a warhead on a missile. Today that weapons work is destroyed or inoperable, the vast majority of Iran’s 20,000 centrifuges are gone, and the 60-percent uranium sits under bombed rubble, watched by intelligence services Bob judges too deeply embedded for Iran to move it unseen. Rebuild in one to three years? Theoretically — if Israel and America fall asleep. The strategic errors he’d correct: selling regime change (the IRGC and Basij command hundreds of thousands of hardcore supporters; the messaging failure is now “an element of the current elections”) — and the split verdict stands: Israel’s war succeeded on its existential terms; America’s depends on Hormuz and the program’s end. On 9/11’s eve, his forever-war answer: America itself “was at war for about a decade” after the towers fell, but this one has a clock — Americans feel gas prices, not danger. And the sign-off: a military correspondent who’d be totally happy if world peace cost him the job.

About the Guest

Yonah Jeremy Bob is the senior military correspondent and analyst at The Jerusalem Post, with unparalleled access to top...

“The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated.” — Skye Perryman

Three years ago, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward Skye Perryman came on the show to wonder what our kids will one day ask us about what we did to confront authoritarianism in America. Now she returns with an answer in the form of her New York Times bestselling Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times about how Americans can reclaim their power, fight for freedom, and reimagine democracy.

Her diagnosis is pretty dark. Reminding us that America joined the list of backsliding democracies in 2021, Perryman warns that this descent into authoritarianism is rapidly accelerating. But her central argument inverts the gloom. Hopelessness is a feature, she reminds us, not a bug of our extraordinary times. So, rather than voter suppression or gerrymandering, the number one tool that autocratic actors have is making us feel alone and isolated.

Thus her call to agency. She prescribes seven actions including what she calls “information sobriety.” We don’t all have to do everything, she says, but everyone needs to do something. She ends where we began three years ago — with the kids. Skye Perryman dedicates the new book to her son as a way, I suspect, of telling him what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed.

Five Takeaways

•       A Generational Threat. Three years of Democracy Forward’s work, summarized from the courtroom: challenging executive overreach by the Trump-Vance administration, fighting book bans, and managing the fallout of Dobbs. America, Perryman notes, has never been immune to anti-democratic movements — they’ve been here since the founding — but this moment is “unprecedented in many ways”: the question is no longer just whether the country can move toward a democracy that works for everyone, but whether it can hold hard-earned gains like equal rights and voting rights at all. The receipts: the United States was added to the global list of backsliding democracies in 2021 — she and Andrew discussed it then — has stayed on it every year since, and the slide is accelerating, driven in part by a Supreme Court that more often reverses rights than protects them: the fruit, she argues, of a multi-decade far-right project against the civil rights movement’s gains. Even thirteen presidential libraries — Republican ones included — have sounded the alarm.

•       Neither Adjunct Nor Partisan. Andrew’s needle — blurbs from Hillary Clinton, JB Pritzker, the late Gloria Steinem, and Stacey Abrams: is Democracy Forward an adjunct of the Democratic Party? — drew her counter-blurb: Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, endorsed the book too. The standard, she insists, is conduct, not letters after names: “we will oppose anyone” who strips constitutional rights, threatens journalists, or sends masked ICE agents into communities — and the administration’s agenda harms Republican voters in red towns like her native Waco as surely as anyone. As for the that’s-just-democracy argument — Trump won, deal with it — she calls it “quite an un-American argument” twice over: nonvoters outnumbered the supporters of either candidate in 2024, and America is not a plebiscite but a democratic republic with a constitution. It doesn’t matter how large the majority: “he can’t jail journalists for what they report. He can’t kill Americans in the middle of the street.”

•       Is It Evil? Andrew previewed later this week’s guest — the philosopher Susan Neiman, whose new book calls the Trump-MAGA movement evil — and put the word to Perryman directly. Her answer, from a onetime philosophy major: judged by deeds — stripping families apart, terrorizing communities with masked agents, calling whole groups of people garbage — “if you wanna use the word evil… I’m with you there.” But she draws a practiced line between labeling acts and movements, which she will, and labeling every individual, which she won’t: most Americans of good faith across difference deserve bridges, while much of the president’s movement has operated in bad faith that forfeits them. The same discipline shapes her answer to Andrew’s question about national reconciliation, via the title of Omar El Akkad’s Gaza book (One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This): no backsliding democracy anywhere, she notes, has managed a U-turn “without some measure of truth and accountability.” That reckoning is tomorrow’s work; today’s is holding the administration accountable in the present tense.

•       Hopelessness Is a Feature, Not a Bug. The book’s central reframe, previewed in her Rolling Stone essay: the despair so many Americans feel is not a byproduct of the assault on democracy — it is the strategy. “The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated” — deprived of hope and agency alike. Hence action one of seven: stop spiraling and pick up a shovel. Doomscrolling, she argues, is the trap perfected — it feels like civic attention while it exhausts you into paralysis; “they want you doomscrolling.” The exit is communal: show up — even alone — to a No Kings march, discover the crowd feels as you do, and let community produce the conditions for courage, and courage for hope. We can’t control what the administration does each morning; we can control how we respond. The goal is a conversion: from spectators of democratic decline to agents of change, in small and repeatable ways.

•       Everyone Needs to Do Something. The practical core. Action two, information sobriety: audit your media diet, learn the difference between news and commentary and between independent and merely accurate journalism, get curious across the spectrum, and keep a healthy intake of the genuinely independent — the AP, ProPublica, NPR — whoever owns the rest. (Andrew’s Murdoch question got the even-handed version: know what’s influencing whatever you read, Breitbart or the Times.) The book meets readers where they are — the exhausted, the seasoned, the unplugged — because its creed is proportion, not purity: “we don’t all have to do everything, but everyone needs to do something.” And it ends at the beginning: dedicated to her son, with a kids’ corner and a chapter called Begin at Your Front Door — democracy lives there, not in Washington, and the young, whose future-visioning she finds more inspiring than their elders’ present fights, deserve to be heard on AI, climate, and the country they’ll inherit. Andrew’s verdict: an optimistic book in what many people insist are our dark times — a way, he suspects, of telling her son what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed.

About the Guest

Skye Perryman is president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a TIME 100 honoree, and a nationally recognized attorney; under her leadership, De...

“A sailor doesn’t control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously.” — Mikko Ketovuori

Our mood, as always, is miserable. Iran, the price of oil, the AfD, the long-term cancers from 9/11 dominate the headlines. But today’s guest thinks we’ve got the mood wrong. The writer Mikko Ketovuori — who wrote the intro to the Finnish edition of my own The Internet Is Not the Answer — has a new book out, Waves of Change, which is a study of the zeitgeist. Social mood drives events, Ketovuori argues, not the other way around. So the news measures nothing but the mood itself.

Are our times actually bad? “No,” Ketovuori insists. Things — from the arts to our abundance of food — are actually pretty good. Today’s perceived misery is, in fact, just the undertow. Surfing the waves of history — from the Dutch tulip mania of the 17th century to the 19th century philosophers buried in Highgate cemetery to the swinging Sixties — Ketovuori is actually bullish on our current futures. So buy the future. It will cheer everyone up.

Five Takeaways

•       Social Mood Drives Events. The inversion at socionomics’ core: we assume events shape our feelings, but the collectively shared, largely unconscious social mood comes first, framing how we interpret everything — the news is “a sociometer,” reflecting the mood rather than the world (in the bright-mooded 1980s, Ketovuori notes, the news simply read better). The field — sociology plus economics — was founded by Robert Prechter, the 1970s Wall Street guru behind Elliott Wave International, with whom Ketovuori has worked for twenty years; the book distills four decades of that tradition, “not totally my idea,” he says with Finnish honesty. And are our times actually bad? No: “actually, we are doing pretty well. You can have access to all the arts, all the books… We have plenty of food. What else do we need?” The misery is the mood — and if you surround yourself with miserable people and search the Internet for miserable news, you will reliably feel miserable.

•       The Beatles and the Dow. Prechter founded the theory on a startling correlation between the Beatles’ rise and the Dow Jones average — and Ketovuori ran the replication: Nokia’s share price against the pop music Finland listened to around 2006–2009, published in Cambridge’s Popular Music journal. Music, he argues, reflects social mood almost predictively. The chicken-and-egg question resolves cleanly in socionomics: the sixties made the Beatles, not the reverse — had Lennon and McCartney been born ten years earlier, “the time decides whether you succeed or not.” Which reframes where the next optimism will come from: unknowable in advance, because “optimism comes first, and then we see the fruits” — only afterward do we anoint the artists, writers, and politicians who captured the essence of the era.

•       Marx & Spencer, Staring. The book’s set piece — written standing in Highgate Cemetery, a stroll from Andrew’s old school: Karl Marx’s tourist-thronged tomb faces the largely forgotten grave of Herbert Spencer, the Social Darwinist — “the father of capitalism and the father of socialism are staring at each other,” and Ketovuori imagines their conversation after the tourists leave and night falls. Andrew completes the triangle with Highgate’s third resident, Alexander Litvinenko — the Putin-poisoned defector whose polonium killing, Ketovuori marvels via Luke Harding’s reporting, cost something like £50 million “just to wipe out one man. So somebody hated him very much.” The cemetery lesson is the book’s: some things don’t change, they return cyclically — Wagner and mad Ludwig included. Cemeteries, both agree, are creative places.

•       The Finnish Corrective. Finland supplies the book’s ballast. The history: the Winter War against Stalin (Hitler’s ally, by the Ribbentrop pact), independence kept “just by fighting back,” then the deck reshuffled by Barbarossa — and, little remembered, Finland driving the Germans from Lapland after 1944. The present: Finnish far right and far left importing American arguments verbatim — “that’s crazy, because we are not Americans” — opinions taken from media rather than lived. And the myth-busting: days before recording, new PISA results showed Finland’s fabled education system “has really gone down.” The thirty-year teacher educator’s advice to admiring Americans: “look to Estonia.” Even education, he notes from a chapter on lecturing at Columbia Teachers College, moves in cycles of idealization and correction.

•       A Sailor Doesn’t Control the Sea. The agency question, answered in the episode’s pull quote: we steer our own lives, but the social mood — the sea itself — no one controls. The evidence tour: Disney thrives in optimistic times while 1975’s dark mood produced Taxi Driver and “the movie about the shark” (past guest territory twice over — Scorsese biographer Mark Binelli visits soon); Prechter’s firm, Ketovuori claims, predicted the date of the Crimea war from wave analysis of the Moscow stock exchange; and yesterday’s Edmans episode gets its socionomic sequel in his tulip-mania essay. To Andrew’s closing paradox — American stock-market exuberance and cultural apocalypticism simultaneously, per this week’s Kirsch episode on UFOs — Ketovuori answers “neither” is real, noting the last great UFO panic also preceded a world war. His distinction: technology amplifies mood but doesn’t originate it — the Internet books were euphoric before 2008 and dark after, as Andrew’s own shelf attests. We, the people, decide how to use it. Andrew’s sign-off takes the bullish view: buy the future — it will cheer everyone up.

About the Guest

Mikko Ketovuori is a University Lecturer in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Turku, Finland. His research spans socionomics and herd theory, education policy, and the role of the arts in society; he has lectured across Asia, Europe, and North America, and is the author of Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society. He also wrote the introduction to the Finnish edition of Andrew’s The Internet Is Not the Answer. Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood (Iff Books, October 2026) collects thirteen essays on the tides of collective feeling. He lives in Turku, the old capital of Finland.

References:

•       Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood by Mikko Ketovuori (Iff Books, October 2026). The publisher’s tagline: history doesn’t repeat itself — social mood does.

•       Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society by Mikko Ketovuori, and Robert Prechter’s The Socionomic Theory of Finance — the theoretical foundations.

•       The Madness of Markets by Alex Edmans — yesterday’s episode, and the rationalist’s account of the same manias.

•       We Want to Believe by Adam Kirsch — this week’s UFO episode; Ketov...

“We might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for.” — Adam Kirsch

First he took on the transhumanists. Then the settler-colonialism fanatics. Now Adam Kirsch aims his critical pen at the ultimate crazies — the flying saucer crowd. In We Want to Believe, Kirsch explains how aliens went mainstream and why this once-crackpot conspiracy theory has become a mainstream political and cultural fact.

The beauty (if that’s the right word) of the subject, Kirsch argues, is that because UFOs don’t really exist, the flying saucer rumor mill encapsulates the paranoia of our populist age. Ever since the 2017 New York Times exposé of the Pentagon’s secret UFO program, it’s an industry that has fed off both the crisis of traditional authority and the suspicion that the people in power know more than they’re letting on. Elites, in other words, know nothing and everything. Simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Underneath this silliness, Kirsch notes, is something more substantial. Perhaps religion itself. Where people once saw miracles or demons, they now see little green-headed creatures packed into flying saucers. In other words, they provide a vocabulary for experiences that we can’t explain, as well as a community with which we can share that mystery.

So what happens when the aliens finally show up? As I suggested, maybe these transcendental creatures arrived. We’ve built them ourselves in the form of artificial intelligence. Kirsch agreed, seeing AI as a kind of nonhuman mind that doesn’t experience the world as we do. Such a Copernican moment is “very imaginable,” the sceptic concedes. Disclosure Day. Starring Adam Kirsch.

Five Takeaways

•       A Pure Thought Experiment. The trilogy’s logic, completed: three short books on popular ideas, this one distinguished by the fact that its subject doesn’t exist — which is precisely its value. UFOs, Kirsch argues, let us think “in a very sort of almost consequence-free way” about who decides what’s real, whose authority we trust, and why people need to believe — the defining questions of a populist moment in which vaccines, public health, and yesterday’s common sense are all contested. The hinge was 2017: the New York Times’s “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’” exposé revealed the Pentagon’s AATIP program, and the paper of record saying the government knows more than it admits took UFOs from niche conspiracy to mainstream issue. Kirsch himself started paying attention — smoke that might lead to fire. “Unfortunately, in the years since then, no fire has been discovered.” What he learned instead: how easy it is to be misled, and what scientific evidence actually is.

•       ’Oumuamua’s Wager. The book’s treatment of past guest Avi Loeb is a study in the seduction of credentials: an astrophysicist of unimpeachable standing willing to entertain what colleagues won’t — that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been a broken light sail from an alien probe — “kindles the imagination,” Kirsch’s included. But the metal globs from the Pacific floor and the fresh candidates each year breed suspicion, and the standard remains Carl Sagan’s: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Loeb’s reply reworks Pascal — ‘Oumuamua’s wager: believe, because the benefits of an open mind outweigh the cost of being wrong. Kirsch’s honesty cuts through: “I would love to believe in UFOs.” Nothing would be more exciting. Which sharpens the genuine scientific conundrum — the space age promised a galaxy teeming with signals and delivered silence: “Why is Earth so important if it should be so unimportant? Where are all the other Earths?”

•       The Archetype of Conspiracy. The disclosure paradigm is eighty years old, and it trained us all: the people in power know more than they’re letting on, there are secret tapes and files, and the people deserve the truth — a template rehearsed on Roswell long before COVID or the Epstein files. Andrew’s gloss: elites, in other words, know nothing and everything — simultaneously. Maybe, even, they’re the aliens themselves (see: Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The official history runs from Truman’s alarm at the early-fifties Washington flap (if the Soviets can reach our skies, we must know) through the commissions of Ruppelt, J. Allen Hynek, and Edward Condon — whose report closed the file for half a century — to the 2017 AATIP revelation that reopened it, complete with congressional hearings and annual Pentagon reporting requirements. Today’s ledger: military pilots keep reporting lights that move impossibly; 95 percent get explained; the unexplained 5 percent “doesn’t mean that they’re UFOs — it just means there isn’t enough information.” Even the vocabulary tells the story: “UFO,” coined in the fifties to sound neutral, absorbed the flying saucer and had to be replaced by “UAP.” Spielberg’s Disclosure Day — fan service for believers, by Kirsch’s account, and disappointing by Andrew’s — monetizes the same secret-truth appeal that made Close Encounters.

•       A Religious Impulse. Why do people believe? The scholar D. W. Pasulka’s “book encounters” supply Kirsch’s answer: someone has an experience they can’t understand, reads the UFO literature, and says this is what happened to me — where a medieval villager would have named a miracle, a demon, or a god. Belief provides a vocabulary for the inexplicable and a community to interpret it with; Jacques Vallée, Silicon Valley’s resident UFO intellectual, adds the perennialist claim that people have always seen strange things in the sky and that they mark “reality beyond our rational mind.” Science fiction serves the same hunger — Kirsch’s own California childhood ran on The Next Generation and Asimov — a sandbox for questions religion once answered: what are humans for, why is mind so out of place in the universe? And the aliens we imagine are always mirrors: Wells’s Darwinian indifference (we are their microbes), the Cold War’s destroyers and moral guides, and now Musk’s Mars — an insurance policy for mind itself against our own extinction. The catch that keeps UFOs at the intersection of science and belief: real aliens must obey physics, interstellar distances forbid the journey, so belief becomes “a big X” — faith that there’s physics we haven’t found. Even Sagan’s Contact, Kirsch notes, resorts to a wormhole. Magic, scientifically dressed.

•       The Aliens We Invented. The conversation’s destination, via Andrew’s suggestion that the aliens have arrived and we built them: “we might have invented the aliens that we’ve been looking for” — nonhuman minds, freed from biology, that don’t experience the world as we do and may transcend or outlive us. What felt like science fiction when The Revolt Against Humanity appeared in 2023 now reads as near-future planning — and the AI lens even revises the search heuristic: perhaps advanced technology isn’t skyscrapers in space but something chip-small, too compact to see. Pressed on whether a Copernican moment could leave skeptics — him and Andrew both — with egg on their faces, Kirsch concedes it’s “very imaginable,” with the caveat that the loudest AGI claims come from those selling it. The poet’s summation: the world not being made to our measure has been...