Keen On America

“If a society cannot find a way to deal with something that is actively melting it from within, then that is a terminal symptom.” — Finn Brunton
 
A couple of days ago, Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm, 1789 Capital, led a billion-dollar funding round in Polymarket. As today’s guest, the fintech expert Finn Brunton, notes in an insightful Harper’s essay this month, prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi are transforming America into an always-on gambling den. No wonder, then, that the Trumps are such gleeful participants in what Brunton calls “the casinoification of modern life.” From the father’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to the son’s Taj on everyone’s phone. “Trade on Anything” as Kalshi promises (or threatens) us.
 
In “The Chaos Machine,” Brunton introduces us to two visionaries of prediction marketplaces. On the one hand, there’s the idealistic Robin Hanson, who dreamed of prediction markets as machines for truth with experts betting real money and generating trustworthy odds about the future. And then there’s Tim May, a self-described crypto-anarchist, the “bad guy,” according to Brunton, who invented the idea of BlackNet as an anonymous marketplace designed to destroy institutional trust from within. Brunton warns that today’s prediction marketplaces have bet on May, rather than Hanson. They are insider-trading machines where the smart money is always on the other side of the table.
 
It’s no wonder that Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm is called 1789 Capital. By investing in prediction marketplaces, they are accelerating an anarchic French rather than institutionally trustworthy American-style revolution. These BlackNet operations are both the cause and effect of today’s destruction of trust. Polymarket is the polycrisis. It is cashing in on chaos.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       From Papal Bets to Polymarket. Prediction markets are centuries old — people have wagered on wars, weather, elections, and popes — but the modern idea belongs to the economist Robin Hanson, the hedgehog (per Isaiah Berlin) with one big idea: turn expert opinion into a market. Since experts are famously bad at prediction (Philip Tetlock’s research), make them bet: specify the outcome precisely, let the odds be anonymous, and people must wager what they really believe rather than what fits in or stands out. Hanson’s markets were meant for specialists — internal corporate markets synthesizing insider knowledge into actionable odds — not Surowiecki’s cow-weighing crowds. However disputed, Brunton insists, it was “a fundamentally positive idea”: a machine for honest consensus about the future.
•       The Casinoification of Modern Life. Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan credits Hanson outright — then flips him. The modern slogan: “monetize any difference in opinion.” The sportsbook has been absorbed and joined by elections, crude prices, and missile strikes — anything anyone will bet on. The tragedy, per Brunton: an idea about synthesizing expertise became “the spread of gambling into every aspect of contemporary living.” And the experts who do bet are now effectively insider traders — a possibility Hanson, contrarian to the last, actually welcomes, but which has made the platforms “rip-off machines in which people who know what’s going to happen… exploit suckers.” The data is unambiguous: a handful of whales win; everyone else loses. The platforms’ defense — we just give people what they want — is, Brunton notes, the classic play of buying time against regulation, perfected by YouTube a generation ago. Meanwhile New York’s subway ads sell the flattering fantasy that you’re not gambling; you’re deploying your sophisticated read of the news. No wonder the Trumps are gleeful participants — from the father’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, as Andrew puts it, to the son’s Taj on everyone’s phone.
•       Tim May’s BlackNet. The essay’s second character is the late Tim May: cypherpunk pioneer, gleeful provocateur, “idealist of the dark web” in Andrew’s phrase — and, Brunton says flatly, “a bad guy” whose politics were racist and violent. May’s gift was seeing the worst use of every technology, and his masterwork was BlackNet: an anonymous marketplace for secrets — exams, health records, trade secrets, classified plans — whose deeper purpose was to destroy institutional trust from within. Create a world where no one inside any institution knows whom to trust (a Leninist move, Andrew observed), and the institutions dissolve. Brunton’s thesis in one line: prediction markets present themselves as the fulfillment of Hanson’s vision, but they are really the fulfillment of May’s. The evidence is already tabloid fact: the operator of Trump’s teleprompter betting on the words of future speeches; a US soldier arrested in April for wagering on operations he knew were coming.
•       Polymarket & the Polycrisis. These platforms are worse than casinos: at least the Nevada State Gaming Commission checks that the roulette wheel isn’t rigged, while prediction markets are “so thoroughly crooked and corrupt in their current setup” that Brunton — who still cherishes Hanson’s original promise — doesn’t know where regulation would begin. Andrew’s coinage-pairing landed: Polymarket and Adam Tooze’s polycrisis are siblings — nested, interlinked crises producing unmanageable volatility, with betting as a way of “interacting with a future that otherwise feels completely out of your control.” Hence Brunton’s students on Polymarket: not just addictive app design but “a weirdly rational decision” for a generation with no faith in pensions, home ownership, or the long-term dollar. Lambos or food stamps. The house rule stands: the smart money is always on the other side of the table — and the winners-take-all arithmetic mirrors the broader digital economy.
•       Betting on Hanson Over May. Prediction markets, Brunton argues, are the heirs of crypto twice over: the next stop for fevered capital, and — like the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, which horrifies even the Cato Institute — a mechanism for relatively untraceable corruption, a natural extension of the family casino business. Andrew’s twist on the firm’s name: 1789 Capital is accelerating an anarchic French rather than institutionally trustworthy American-style revolution. His warning is the episode’s pull quote: platforms designed to dissolve institutional trust, monetize interference with journalism, and sow paranoia are a solvent, and a society that cannot deal with what is melting it from within shows “a terminal symptom.” But he ends with a fix, and it is refreshingly concrete: KYC. Impose the know-your-customer identity rules we demand of banks, and “you immediately eliminate 95% of the bad actors” — official insider bets become visible, and the markets might even get smarter. A partisan of anonymous speech, Brunton draws the line at anonymous betting on information. Andrew’s closer: he’s still betting on Hanson over May — Kant over Hobbes. And his verdict: Polymarket is the polycrisis. It is cashing in on chaos.
 
About the Guest
 
Finn Brunton is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and of Cinema and Digital Media at the University of C...

“On my headstone, it would say: I was always right. I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” — Paulina Borsook
 
A quarter of a century ago, the tech journalist Paulina Borsook published Cyberselfish, one of the earliest critiques of Silicon Valley’s libertarian culture. While the heretical book got widely reviewed, it not only didn’t sell but cursed her writing career, Borsook claiming she couldn’t get published again on any subject. Used copies of Cyberselfish could be had for a few dollars and she became just another forgotten tech dissenter.
 
Then, last year, Borsook was magically resurrected. The New York Times (re)discovered her as “the writer who dared criticize Silicon Valley” and the price of secondhand copies of Cyberselfish jumped to over a thousand dollars. The world caught up with her tech scepticism. Like an AI startup, Borsook is now hot. So hot, in fact, that the original Cyberselfish is now being republished not only in the US and UK, but also in France. So hot, that we now have a new word: “Borsookian,” to describe Silicon Valley libertarianism.
 
The funny thing is that nothing much has changed over the last quarter century since Borsook’s original book came out. Not tech’s libertarian hostility to government. Not the Silicon Valley boys-only club. And certainly not Paulina Borsook, who retains what the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital utopian John Perry Barlow half-lovingly called her “dyspeptic” manner. “On my headstone, it would say: I was always right,” Paulina Borsook confides with dyspeptic glee. “I never lied, and no one paid any attention to me.” How delicious to be so fully resurrected. What fun for the heretic to help transform the original orthodoxy into the new heresy.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Back from the Dead. The resurrection required no publicist: used copies of Cyberselfish drifted from $4 toward $1,000; graduate students begged her for copies she couldn’t supply; a stranger she’s never met posted on LinkedIn that she’d gotten everything right and been forgotten — and it went viral. That led to Gil Duran, whose furious Bluesky post (after a Wired mea-culpa writer interviewed him about her for forty-five minutes and cited neither of them) alerted The New York Times, whose November feature — “The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley” — brought her agent’s immortal email: “we always knew you were right.” Tin House is reissuing the book on September 15 with a Duran foreword and her new afterword, changing not a word. Younger readers, she’s told, like that it doesn’t read like a TED Talk. Her headstone joke covers the whole arc: always right, never lied, no one paid attention.
•       Why Are They So Mad? The book’s core observation remains undefeated: “no sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than people in Silicon Valley. So why are they acting like this, and why are they so mad?” “Libertarian” was simply her shorthand for a subculture violently anti-government, totally anti-regulation, and drunk on Ayn Rand — or, in the book’s reframe, the mind-set of adolescents craving total rampaging autonomy while someone else does the laundry. She wrote it from inside: a Wired freelancer under Louis Rossetto (who handed new writers The New Journalism), perpetually paired point-counterpoint against John Perry Barlow, whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace made her snort and whose “dyspeptic” label she wears as a compliment. Kevin Kelly, she insists, is not Sam Altman — they almost never agreed, but she doesn’t demonize — “except that they have a belief in everything that tech wants to do is fine.” The book, she says now, is a Guide for the Perplexed: the metaphors and framing to decode everything the current crop is spewing.
•       That Damn Book. She calls it TDB — That Damn Book — because it wrecked her. A strong media arc and worldwide reviews, then no sales and a career that “came to a crashing halt”: for twenty-five years she could not get published again, on tech or anything else; a finalist for four fellowships, winner of none; no one — blacklist theorists, gender theorists — could ever explain it. “I have PTSD from twenty-five years of never being able to be published again.” The lost years: seven of nasty elder care, an eviction that put everything she owned in storage, six years as an Airbnb superhost in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and the art project My Life as a Ghost — about the traumatic brain injury she’s carried since a friend accidentally shot her with a Colt 45 at fourteen. She resists the redemptive reading that the TBI explains her outsider eye (“I’m a package deal”), and values tech precisely as the utility — word processing, BBSs for the housebound — that made a writing life possible. Using is not worshiping.
•       AI Is the Inevitable Result of Cyberselfishness. “Was anybody asking for this? Not really.” AI, on her reading, is the financial play the culture was always building toward — there’s little real innovation left, “except for surveillance capitalism” and, in her Shakespearean phrase, the current crop “borrowing the robes of the tech culture of another era.” Her oldest fascination has become the newest: since ELIZA in the sixties, people have preferred confessing to machines over talking to humans — AI boyfriends included — and “it gets so much stuff wrong that people wanna rely on this” bewilders her still. Andrew’s question about Anthropic’s calls for regulation drew the hour’s driest line: “isn’t that just sort of the lipstick on a pig issue? I’ll believe it when I see it” — nobody, she notes, will do anything that touches the stock price. Her counter-example is the late Peter Neumann, the computer scientist who gave $4 million to the San Francisco Symphony’s chorus: “we will not see his like again.”
•       The Blue of Tahoe. Asked what freedom means, she calls the word too abused to define — a card-carrying ACLU member since high school who believes just as firmly in regulation, and whose answer to Sergey Brin’s California-as-Soviet-Union hissy fit is the episode’s keeper: “what do you think keeps the water of Tahoe so very blue except for government regulation and environmental scientists? Who do you think regulates the use of the term organic?” The regulation-freedom dynamic, she argues, is healthy — it’s the worship that isn’t. Her San Francisco test: The Crucible, the beloved East Bay institution that taught Burning Man its metalwork, gets nothing from the boom, while art nonprofits die weekly and the winners insist they owe nothing because they pay taxes — “which they try very much not to do.” Burning Man itself she reads via Brave New World: the violent passion surrogate, a scheduled space for disorder before returning to lives spent “creating nonsense and ruining a lot of things that we hold dear.” A California writer to the end — and, per Glengarry Glen Ross, always be closing.
 
About the Guest
 
Paulina Borsook has worked in and around Northern California tech culture since the early 1980s. Formerly on the masthead of Wired, she has written for Mother Jones, Salon, and countless tech and non-tech publications, and is a contributing editor at InFormation (“every day computers are making people easier to use”), the revived tech-skeptic magazine of past guest Davi...

“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath
 
A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
 
So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted.
 
Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries — the First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Rohingya, and Gaza — chosen not to rank horrors but to expose “the repetitive patterns and the processes that underlie genocide.” Walrath’s definition is Raphael Lemkin’s original, processual one, before politics narrowed the convention: the purpose is always a land grab, the apparatus always dehumanization, and precise academic definitions are often deployed “to keep some stories and histories out.” The book began as an interactive art installation with nine genocides and a tenth chapter on “the borders of genocide” — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine — until the violence in Gaza persuaded her to make the case outright, while insisting the aim is not to demonize her Jewish friends, Judaism, or Israel, but to show the system. Her hope: that a globally framed comic might open dialogue between Jews and Palestinians “trapped in enmity right now.”
•       Lemkin’s Last Train. The man who coined the word is the book’s tragic through-line. As a Polish law student, Lemkin followed the Berlin trial of a young Armenian who had shot one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — and found it ludicrous that the assassin faced justice for one murder while his victim had answered for none of his millions. His family farm had been seized in the First World War; his brother Samuel died in the forest. He escaped Warsaw on a train that was bombed, ran by night to reach his family, and failed to persuade them to leave (“they do this to us all the time”). Via Sweden, Russia, Japan, and Duke, he spent the war in Washington trying to make Americans see. His convention passed — then waited years for the US, UK, and China to ratify — and he died in 1959 penniless and friendless, UN officials fleeing him in the corridors. Walrath’s speculation: his great regret, looking down, may be refusing to support We Charge Genocide, the 1951 petition by Black Americans — “we can’t talk about something America has done” in the Cold War. Had America owned and repaired that crime then, “we’d be in a very different world.”
•       Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew’s pushback — if politicians can be “verging on genocidal,” does every Karen yelling at her kids get accused of it? — drew the hour’s most honest concession: “that’s the absolute spot-on critique of the approach I’ve taken.” Her defense is preventive: half a genocide is “too quantitative”; better to name things “on their way to massacre” and stop them, or repair them, than to litigate the label afterward. Genocide, she argues, predates modernity and Arendt’s industrial reading — it arrives with the first hierarchical, extracting, wealth-inheriting “so-called civilizations,” Sparta and Thucydides included. Slavery qualifies because the operational word is systemic: the transatlantic trade ran on thinking of humans as lesser. But she draws one line firmly: asked about factory farms as future genocides, “I would hate to see genocide get used over there. It is something that humans do to one another” — and, she insists, don’t have to: the literature on aversion to killing shows soldiers must be socialized into it. We’re hardwired for love and taught to hate.
•       Stanton’s Stages in MAGA America. Is there something genocidal in MAGA’s language about undocumented immigrants? “Absolutely.” Walrath applies the ten stages of genocide — the classroom heuristic Gregory Stanton first presented to the State Department in 1996 — and finds the United States “doing a heck of a lot of them”: polarization; dehumanization (people called vermin, “not worthy of life”); discrimination in the restriction of voting rights. “We’re on very, very shaky ground.” Homelessness, in the same frame, is the product of structures that disenfranchise some and privilege others — “we’ve got enough to go around; we just revere wealth.” Her model for how ordinary people let it happen is Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River: the fearful, the wounded, the disenfranchised, vulnerable to takeover — with parallels in MAGA voters spurned by the neoliberal machine and unable to see who is pulling the levers. Hence her claim for the book: it is resistance, but resistance that builds a coalition across horrors rather than policing which horror counts.
•       Springtime for Hitler. She didn’t read Maus until 2009 — “that’s when I found my medium and just went wild” — and pays it explicit homage in the book. Comics, she argues, let readers “come into” a history and think for themselves, and laughter is respite: an angry messenger gets no listeners. Her earlier Aliceheimer’s let people laugh about her mother’s dementia (not at it, she corrected sharply); telling audiences she’s working on her genocide jokes makes them relax enough to hear the rest. Andrew’s challenge — “do you really want to make it safe?” — produced the useful distinction: safe to enter, not whitewashed; hand-lettered so readers can bring the content in, every truth intact. The closing exchange landed on The Producers and Springtime for Hitler as a brilliant portrayal of the legacies of catastrophe. Her last word: knowledge must cross boundaries, “and the boundaries are all human made, so let’s unmake them.” Andrew’s: most will disagree with her list — and it may be a classic.
 
About the Guest
 
Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and on NPR. The Book of Genocide...

“We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not.” — John West
 
Back in 2006, at the height of Web 2.0 optimism, Time made YOU person of the year. The user-generated technology of the internet, Time implied, would make all of us into digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years later, the script has been totally flipped. Now we know that the internet is all-too-human. And so are we. This reminder of our mortality is the heart (if that’s the right word) of the new book by John West, the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal computational journalist.
 
West’s The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is a kind of digital memento mori. His argument is metaphysical rather than political. Offline, he writes, our lives are marked by constraint. But we mistake the internet’s destruction of physical distance for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods,” he reminds us, “and we are not.” A Christian and a digital deconvert (not an uncommon combination in the technocrati), West wants us to import our mortality online. If we recognize that the internet will decay and finally die, he suggests, we will make it human. (Re)Make it, as us.
 
I’ve been making a version of this argument since The Cult of the Amateur in 2007. Only West’s version — by contrasting Bach, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver with the infinite scroll — is more poetic and musical. Politer too. Noli timere, as the poet Seamus Heaney texted before he died. Be not afraid. Of life, of death. But beware of YOU. Be afraid. Timere. Very afraid.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       We Are Not Gods. The book’s thesis: offline life is marked by constraint — you cannot talk to people farther than you can shout, or hug your child while she’s at school — while online we act at a distance and mistake that “foot-loosening technology” for limitlessness. “We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we are as gods, and we are not” — the AI singularity being the theological version of the same delusion, and “a recipe for disaster, both interpersonally, but also within ourselves.” The fix is not logging off but bringing our mortality online: “this is where we live,” and the Internet’s magic only stays magical when tempered by limits — “in order for it to be magical, we need the flip side, which is that it can’t always be magic.” Andrew’s frame: in 2006, Time made YOU person of the year, promising digital gods of memory and forgetting. Twenty years on, the internet is all-too-human — and so are we.
•       The Deconvert’s Meditation. “No one is more strident than the convert or the deconvert.” West’s digital utopianism began in a middle-school computer lab, where an unhappy kid discovered he could find friends and communities online — and it died by monkey’s paw: the same mechanism that found him anime fans now routes lonely kids into pro-anorexia TikTok rabbit holes (his own Journal colleagues’ reporting) and neo-Nazi forums. “That supercharging is something that I wished for.” He concedes the lineage Andrew has worked since The Cult of the Amateur (2007) and The Internet Is Not the Answer (2015) — and goes further: “I actually think largely, Plato and Postman were right.” Culture must metabolize its technological ruptures. Or, per the Freudian slip Andrew gifted back to him for the next book: its raptures. Andrew’s verdict on the lineage: the same argument, more poetic and musical. Politer too.
•       A Few Thousand Weeks. On the Luddite summer, West channels past guest Brian Merchant: hatred of technology is usually hatred of lost control. The backlash against AI data centers is about being “completely removed from democratic control over that technology,” and the marketing — a magic box that will take your job — has backfired predictably. His arithmetic of dignity: we get only a few thousand weeks on this earth, and “our dignity demands that we have some say over what we do with our lives.” He cites Freddie deBoer’s Copernican principle — everyone believes they live at history’s hinge — then breaks it honestly: “but I also think this time, it might be right,” the elder millennial awestruck at the rupture he came of age inside.
•       Religious, Not Spiritual. West inverts the modern chestnut: “everyone says they’re spiritual and not religious these days. I actually think it’s important to be religious, and spiritual can take it or leave it” — religion being “a powerful technology” for binding people into the civic fabric. His Christianity runs to liberation theology: not storing up treasure for the glorious day, but making this world more just now. Hence Bach cantatas, Ecclesiastes, and Mary Oliver as the book’s unnamed philosophies — and hence his verdict on the billionaires who struggle with finitude: it doesn’t shock him that men who earn millions while sleeping believe themselves gods, since “every dollar is like a little Iago whispering poison into the ears of the Silicon Valley elite.” The advantage belongs to us mere normals, unburdened by the whispering.
•       Noli Timere. The Latin on West’s X page — be not afraid — was Seamus Heaney’s last text message, sent by SMS before the surgery he didn’t survive, then carried by the Internet to thousands who found hope in it. That, West argues, is the network at its best: “it is about how you spend your time on the Internet, not what you can do on the Internet.” On memory, his formula is to remember “not more and not less, but rather differently” — choosing what we remember (the Odyssey’s oral re-membering, retold body to body) rather than having it forced on us (the red solo cup photos, the traumas that refuse processing). The great mismatch of the web: “the things that we think should be permanent are often the things that are the most impermanent online, and the things that I really wish would fade away are the ones that refuse to.” Andrew’s send-off inverts Heaney: be not afraid — of life, of death. But beware of YOU, the ultimate human conceit. Timere. Very afraid.
 
About the Guest
 
John West is a writer and technologist. He reports the news with code at The Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe called his first book, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery, “lyrical and crystalline.” He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College, and lives outside Kingston, New York, with his partner, children, and unruly cat. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You (Here Below, September 10, 2026) is his digital memento mori.
 
References:
 
•       The Internet Will Die, and So Will You: On Learning to Live in Our Digital Age by John West (Here Below, September 10, 2026).
•       Lessons and Carols: A Meditati...

“It’s a dying gasp of white supremacy — and I say dying with a caveat, because that part depends on us.” — Sonali Kolhatkar
 
Yesterday, Wendy Lesser suggested that Americans can learn much from the anti-fascist history of Berlin in the 1930s. Today, Rising Up With Sonali host Sonali Kolhatkar is even more explicit. Yes, she argues in her new book, Breaking ICE, the 2020s are eerily similar to the 1930s, especially in what she calls “state terror” and “MAGA fascism.”
 
In 2023, Sonali Kolhatkar came on this show to talk about Rising Up, a book about the power of narrative. Three years later, her new book describes what she sees as the dying gasp of white supremacy. But to fully die, she argues, the community needs to rise up. So, like the perennial fascist threat, the ability to tell stories is a perpetual feature of politics. Thus Breaking ICE, Kolhatkar’s story of stories about community defense against MAGA fascism.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Narrative Is Everything. The crackdown, Kolhatkar argues, was built on stories: immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” — Hitlerian language, used repeatedly — recast a population of workers and families as criminals, justifying the funding, the raids, and the denial of due process. The counternarrative is her book’s project: the activists who retold the story of ICE agents as Gestapo-like masked thugs, and did it so successfully that public opinion has swung back. Trump, she argues, overplayed his hand — every day brings another story of a Trump voter whose spouse is deported at a routine check-in, protesting “this is not what we voted for.” The sequel to Rising Up thus practices what that book preached: narrative as the primary weapon of politics — a weapon, she notes via Springsteen and the protest singers, that artists have always wielded and the right has lately understood better than the left.
•       A Dying Gasp — With a Caveat. Asked flatly whether this is a repeat of the 1930s, Kolhatkar answers yes — and adds that the echo is deliberate, down to “homeland,” a favorite term of the Nazis that George W. Bush domesticated. But the deeper lineage is homegrown: her interviewees Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D. G. Kelley trace American fascism through Native dispossession and mass enslavement — authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist. ICE, on this reading, is simply race-based policing restored. Hence her verdict: “a dying gasp of white supremacy,” with the caveat that the dying depends on us. No magic bullets, no finish line: “democracy is an ongoing exercise. There is no resting when it comes to freedom.” Fittingly, the episode lands the day after Wendy Lesser’s Berlin hour — Kolhatkar making explicit what the cautionary mirror implied.
•       The Mamdani Lesson. The hour’s sharpest political analysis: flip the script on electoral politics. Politicians want elections as popularity contests — “this is who I am, who’s behind me?” — when voters should be saying “this is what we want, who will back our demands?” The not-Trump ad is the losing move: it was Hillary Clinton’s approach, Kamala Harris’s approach, and now Xavier Becerra’s in California. The winning move is Zohran Mamdani’s: voters could instantly name what he was for — free buses, city-run grocery stores, rent control, universal childcare, fixed potholes. Her model is the civil rights movement, which didn’t wait for a savior politician but marched and forced hands. And her defense against the radicalism charge: what the American left demands — healthcare for all — is centrist in Europe. If public schools are education for all, why not Medicare for All? And to Andrew’s pushback — doesn’t Abolish ICE alienate the persuadable middle? — her answer is the polling: majorities already oppose the raids, because Trump overreached.
•       What State Terror Looks Like. The subtitle’s claim, cashed out: downtown Los Angeles under curfew, freeways shut, armed National Guardsmen at the federal buildings — and the refrain she heard nationwide: who will save us from these masked thugs? The realization that the police belong to the same structure taught the lesson in her credo: only the people can save the people. The terror is bureaucratic as much as theatrical — green-card applicants seized at airports en route to see friends, families ripped apart, and 20,000 immigrant children stripped of legal representation in defiance of a law George W. Bush signed (“who we thought at the time was the fascist authoritarian and is now, you know, like a Democrat”). Against it, the book’s nineteen voices — from Maine to Georgia to LA — deploy whistles, bullhorns, patrols, documentation, and, in a civil-rights echo, holding hands and singing to bring the temperature down. With Viet Thanh Nguyen, Kendi, Kelley, and a foreword by Roberto Lovato supplying the long view.
•       Detention Centers & Data Centers. The conversation’s bridge to this show’s long Luddite summer: Kolhatkar sees the fight against immigrant detention centers and the fight against AI data centers as one struggle, since both, she argues, distract from and serve the same billionaire fleecing — “if we are busy blaming the day laborer at the street corner for stealing our job, we’re not gonna look at what Elon Musk has done.” Even MAGA voters, she notes, don’t want to live next to either. On movements that wither, her revision: Black Lives Matter didn’t fizzle, it was muzzled — Musk bought Black Twitter, its biggest bullhorn — and its abolitionist platform reads as current as ever: take the first four letters away from police, and you’re left with ICE. Her ask of journalism itself: solutions journalism — start with how people are fighting back, not one more story of how they’re being crushed.
 
About the Guest
 
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist and the founder, host, and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, the long-running television and radio show airing on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. A senior editor at YES! Magazine and writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, she is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and serves on the board of the Justice Action Center. Her books include Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, Talking About Abolition, and Bleeding Afghanistan (as co-author). Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism (Seven Stories Press) gathers nineteen of her conversations from the front lines, with a foreword by Roberto Lovato.
 
References:
 
•       Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2026).
•       Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice — the book behind her first Keen On appearance, three years ago.
•       Among the book’s nineteen voices: Viet Thanh Nguyen, past Keen On guest Ibram X. Kendi, Robin D. G....