Keen On America

“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...