Keen On America

“Democracy didn’t fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall
 
Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it.
 
Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest’s child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob.
 
So where’s the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it’s been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That’s who we are. Sometimes, at least.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday’s Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.
•       Democracy Didn’t Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest’s victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.
•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.
•       No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall’s favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You’re cheating.” “I know. I am.”)
•       Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration’s shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton’s moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What’s needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution.
 
About the Guest
 
Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City.
 
References:
 
•       A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan’s stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.
•       Curtis White’s On Resistance — Monday’s Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian’s reply.
•       Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall’s “outsourced outrage.”
•       The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.
•       Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.
•      &nbs...

“Jared Kushner is one of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — and he has no skill set to speak of that I can see.” — Casey Michel
 
Four years ago, the muckraking journalist Casey Michel came on this show to discuss how the United States has built the greatest money-laundering scheme in history. That pre-Trump 2.0 America, he says, looks quaint. His new book, United States of Oligarchy: How America’s Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the U.S., and Destroy Democracy, describes an American casino where the Trump family has become the dealer with a perennially stacked deck.
 
The word “oligarchy” comes with 2,500 years of baggage. Aristotle, not averse to aristocracy, nonetheless warned of the rule of the few. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy” as a way of describing the baronial rule of the late 19th century American capitalists. And, of course, it took a Roosevelt — the sickly scion of upper-crust New York — to dilute his own oligarchic caste with anti-trust law and inheritance & progressive income taxes.
 
Exhibit A in this American oligarchy is Jared Kushner, who has leveraged his father-in-law’s rotten casino to ally with dictators and destroy democracy both in America and around the world. Michel says Kushner has “no skill set to speak of” — apart, of course, from an insatiable greed for wealth and power. The banality of the deal.
 
So what to do? Michel is waiting for a 21st century Teddy Roosevelt — he names Talarico and Ossoff — who will tax and perhaps even prosecute Kushner and his fellow oligarchs. But I fear he is waiting for Godot. Teddy isn’t coming back. Nor is FDR. Don’t expect the banality of the current highly lucrative deal to end anytime soon.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Child’s Play. The anonymous shell companies and mystery donations of American Kleptocracy — dire enough in 2022 — now read as quaint. The scale has exploded (crypto, prediction markets, AI as accelerant), and so has the shamelessness: a Qatari luxury airliner gifted to a sitting president, and a $1.8 billion slush fund that will compensate January 6 rioters while granting Trump’s family, inner circle, and “associates” carte blanche from tax audits, past and future. America has had corrupt administrations — Grant, Harding, Nixon — but nothing, Michel argues, on this magnitude. Trump himself is symptom rather than cause: the culmination of trends decades in the making. “Shameless does not begin to describe it. I have to laugh — otherwise, I’m sure I’d just be crying.”
•       From Aristotle to the Trillionaire. Aristotle popularized oligarchy: rule of the few — who must also be the wealthiest. Teddy Roosevelt preferred “plutocracy,” and the Founders fought over “aristocracy”; Michel meets the 2020s where they are. The through line he found in the research: America’s anti-oligarchic champions come from inside the elite — above all TR, the sickly, bloodlet, electroshocked child of upper-crust New York who grew into the singular force against concentrated wealth: inheritance tax, progressive income tax, and a bully pulpit used without apology. Today’s benchmark: Gilded Age fortunes — Rockefeller’s $30 billion in modern terms — are pocket change beside centibillionaires and America’s first, briefly minted trillionaire.
•       Exhibit A: Jared Kushner. One of the most powerful American diplomats of the twenty-first century — Israel and Gaza, Russia and Ukraine, the Gulf — with, in Michel’s judgment, no skill set to speak of: a string of failures from 666 Fifth Avenue to the New York Observer, redeemed by the single best thing he ever did, marrying Ivanka Trump. MBS bragged Kushner was “in his pocket”; James Comer told an intermediary to tell him to fuck off — making Kushner, Michel suggests, a genuinely bipartisan target for future investigations. Andrew pushed back — the network of autocrats is real, the Harvard degree is real — and the conversation settled on Arendt: not evil, but indifferent to good and evil. What Kushner cares about: Ivanka and her father, his bottom line, and carrying water for Benjamin Netanyahu.
•       The Incentive Machine. Michel’s deeper argument indicts structures, not sinners: virtually none of this is illegal, which is precisely the problem. Corporate secrecy, campaign finance, and offshore taxation build an architecture in which allying with dictators is the rational move — if your competitor will meet MBS or Xi, you must too. Hence the corporate class’s standing ovation for Xi Jinping in San Francisco; Google’s Project Dragonfly censorship engine; Musk’s Tesla leverage in Beijing (and DOGE actions conspicuously in Chinese interest); the NBA’s progressive branding beside its Rwandan and Emirati partnerships; and Ireland, the thriving democracy at the bottom of the tax-haven barrel. Michel is happy to call the CCP one of history’s most monstrous regimes — and to note that no ideology, only rank financial interest, lays American CEOs at its feet.
•       Waiting for Teddy. Does oligarchy actually weaken America? Michel points to the Iran war’s aftermath — collapsed interceptor stocks, an intact Tehran regime, Gulf monarchs getting their dirty business done at American expense — plus Greenland threats, wobbling alliances, and the nuclear proliferation he expects among abandoned allies. Andrew pressed the counter-case three times: Wall Street at record highs, half of America holding retirement accounts. Michel’s answer: inequality beyond anything in the national experience — and a political moment, left and right, hungry for anti-oligarchic leadership. The GOP just moved to kill the shell-company database; the remedy is a twenty-first-century TR — a Talarico, an Ossoff — willing to be denounced as a communist agitator. “If Teddy Roosevelt can be, I suppose anyone can.”
 
About the Guest
 
Casey Michel is an author, investigative journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of American Kleptocracy — named by The Economist one of the best books for understanding financial crime — and Foreign Agents, and his writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, and illicit wealth appears in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on illicit financial networks and national security, holds a master’s from Columbia’s Harriman Institute, and is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work. United States of Oligarchy (St. Martin’s Press, August 4, 2026) is his third book.
 
References:
 
•       United States of Oligarchy by Casey Michel (St. Martin’s Press, Augu...

“We were still trying to change the world from the inside… and the empire struck back.” — Claire Stapleton on the Google Walkout
 
Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed on how to fight back against big tech which included a reading list from previous guests on the show like Karen Hao, Yanis Varoufakis and Astra Taylor. Not included was Claire Stapleton’s Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Partly, I assume, because this anti-Google jeremiad only came out yesterday.
 
An idealistic English major straight out of college, Stapleton joined Google in 2007, when few questioned Silicon Valley’s utopian language. Her first job was in Google’s ministry of truth, an internal communications department designed, as she now admits, to get everybody high on the mission. And that mission was to train Googlers into becoming obedient corporate cogs by neither blaming the system nor questioning authority.
 
While not exactly Winston Smith, she nonetheless rose in the bureaucracy. Rachel Whetstone (Steve Hilton’s wife) promoted Stapleton to the CEO’s communications team where, as the archivist of the sayings of the company’s two big brothers (Larry & Sergey), she became known as the “Bard” of Google. As an obedient corporate cog, she was both the message and the messenger. Until she wasn’t.
 
Like Orwell’s Smith, Google’s Claire Stapleton eventually turned her ministry of truth language on the ministry itself. In response to the $90 million exit package of a senior Google exec accused of sexual misconduct, she co-organized the Google Walkout of 20,000 employees. Two months later, her role was hollowed out. Then she lost her job. Not quite Room 101. No rats. But not a lot of fun.
 
So is Google evil? Stapleton doesn’t know. But the former Bard of Google acknowledges that Larry & Sergey’s promises of making the world a better place are no longer credible. Today, idealistic young college grads want to fight back against Silicon Valley. Today, nobody outside the internal communications department of Google, OpenAI or Anthropic believes that technology is making the world a better place. Like Claire Stapleton, we all now want to escape from big tech.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Getting High on the Mission. Google in 2007 wasn’t selling a job; it was selling a worldview — and Stapleton’s department, internal communications, existed to pump the mission, the values, and the founders’ folksy TGIF theater into a workforce growing by tens of thousands. The perks were the philosophy made visible: laundry, haircuts, dentists, masseurs — “letting Google be your housewife.” The indoctrination had a curriculum, too: Fred Kofman’s “radical accountability” training taught new hires to be players, not victims — which sounds empowering until you notice, as Stapleton did in a G-chat to her brother, that it means never blaming the system: “today I learned that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault.”
•       The Bard of Google. Rachel Whetstone — ex-London, politically shrewd, now married to California’s Republican gubernatorial nominee — drafted Stapleton onto Larry Page’s communications when Page retook the CEO job, making her the archivist of the founder’s vision (until, in a twist she still can’t quite believe, he literally lost his voice). From there: Creative Lab, “the alchemist lab of Google’s branding,” wrapped in change-the-world gobbledygook; then YouTube’s curation team, a job so dispensable that nobody on earth would notice if it stopped — David Graeber’s bullshit jobs made flesh, complete with colleagues vanishing to the gym for hours. Her bad bosses, she notes, were workaday and familiar — which is precisely the point. Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules explains why Google tried to constrain managers’ power: given too much, they abuse it, pettily.
•       Normie, Not Whistleblower. Unlike Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People — a whistleblower’s damning portrait of Zuckerberg and Sandberg — Don’t Be Evil is a coming-of-age story from the rank and file: earnest, unjaded, “normie.” What’s genuinely new in it is the workers’-eye view of the tech-labor moment: a company that hired idealists on the promise of changing the world, then watched the worker-management relationship transform with whiplash speed once those idealists asked what corporate accountability actually looks like. “We were still trying to change the world from the inside, from a different direction, as we lumbered our way through labor organizing 101… and the empire struck back.”
•       The Walkout and the Bill. The rupture came in 2018: the Me Too summer, an engineer’s memo against diversity itself, and the Times’ revelation of Andy Rubin’s $90 million exit after credible harassment findings. The moms listserv lit up; at TGIF, management read talking points “designed to absorb dissent, project empathy, and move right along” — radicalizing the woman who used to write them. The Walkout drew 20,000 employees. The bill arrived two months later: her role hollowed out, transfers blocked across the organizer group, Meredith Whittaker’s role dismantled, the rubber room. The group went public — the nuclear option — and Google offered severance. Stapleton, pregnant, asked for a year. An HR veteran’s verdict, years later: “They sure got you out cheap.” And the villains of her story, she notes, were mostly women — her own management chain — while Susan Wojcicki offered the older generation’s lament: you have no idea how hard it was for me.
•       Don’t Outsource Your Moral Compass. Is Google better than the rest? There’s no noxious star — Sundar Pichai harmonizes rather than dominates — but the company owns the infrastructure of the digital world, and “is it more evil? less evil? I don’t know.” The deeper shift is industry-wide: Larry Page’s “treat workers well and they’ll contribute tenfold” has become “your job could easily go to AI, so be grateful.” Her advice to the young and idealistic: keep some skepticism; hold your own values in your own mind; let work be part of your life without letting it take over; build solidarity instead of “letting the overlords do their overlord thing.” The good news, she suspects, is that the spell is breaking anyway: audiences now boo the AI ads in movie theaters.
 
About the Guest
 
Claire Stapleton is a writer, communications consultant, and tech labor activist. She spent twelve years at Google in communications, marketing, and executive ghostwriting roles — becoming known as “the Bard of Google” — before co-organizing the 2018 Google Walkout, in which 20,000 employees protested the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment; The New York Times called it a watershed moment in tech. She writes an existential advice column for tech workers on Substack, and her account of her Google years, “The Voice of Google,” appeared in The New Yorker. Her first book is

“Uncertainty is what tells you that science is reliable. It’s the people who are absolutely certain that you have to watch out for.” — Stuart Firestein
 
The physician-scientist Tony Fauci is having a rough week. His newly revealed diary has even disappointed traditional allies at The Atlantic and The New Yorker who see the hitherto liberal saint of the pandemic as both too intimate with power and too certain of his scientific assumptions.
 
Fauci’s fellow American scientist, Stuart Firestein, is having a better week. The Columbia neurobiologist has a new book out today, It Could Be Otherwise, which is a manifesto against scientific certainty. It’s the certain ones you have to watch out for, Firestein warns about those scientists intoxicated with the certainty of their own doctrines.
 
Science, Firestein argues, requires a blend of hubris and humility. So the great Isaac Newton needed real chutzpah to claim to understand the mind of the creator with only a few equations. The expert is, by definition, riddled by doubt. They should be the most uncertain person in the room. Thus for Firestein, Charles Darwin is a greater scientist than Albert Einstein because Darwin’s theory of life is premised on randomness.
 
So will contemporary science appear quaintly medieval in 500 years? Will 26th century man think of Darwin and Einstein like we moderns patronize Aristotle? Probably, Firestein suggests. In his Columbia course on ignorance, he tells his students that getting an A requires getting an F. We should all be so ignorant.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Watch Out for the Certain Ones. Firestein won’t defend Fauci’s certainties, but he explains them: science requires a blend of hubris and humility — without some hubris, nobody would attempt a discipline that is mostly failure, mostly time spent in the dark. What corrupts the blend is a culture that demands the opposite of humility: exams with one right answer instead of ranked possibilities, journalists who need a confident quote, a public that has made science the theology of the twenty-first century. The result is Firestein’s paradox of expertise: the real expert is the most uncertain person in the room, because expertise means seeing the holes, the missing data, the failures. Certainty grows with distance from knowledge.
•       True Enough. Truth gets a small t only. Borrowing from the Harvard philosopher Catherine Elgin, Firestein describes science as moving from one provisional truth to the next — “true enough,” always improving, never final. His favorite proof is John Maddox, Nature’s longest-serving editor, asked how many of the journal’s published papers would prove wrong: “Oh, that’s easy. All of them.” Not wrong-wrong — unsettled science is not unsound science; it is reliable and it will get better. In science, revision is a victory, which is why Firestein sincerely hopes that in five hundred years our best knowledge will look as quaint as medieval astronomy — which, he notes, was accurate enough for people who weren’t launching satellites.
•       Two Kinds of Uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty is what we don’t know yet; ontological uncertainty is the irreducible complexity of the universe itself — so complicated it might as well be random. Every answer in the lab raises ten better questions, which is how the more we know, the less we know. And yet we thrive amid the not-knowing: lasers, GPS, and randomized drug trials are all built on uncertainty. Ninety percent of hypertension diagnoses are idiopathic — no known cause — while nine different families of medicine treat it successfully. Even the brain, his own subject, isn’t unknowable — we know plenty at every level — but the vertical knowledge, from ion channels to consciousness, may never reduce to a single formula. Multiple explanations, Firestein says, are not a defeat.
•       Berlin, Darwin, and the Fox. The book’s presiding philosopher is Isaiah Berlin, the great value pluralist: many good answers to any real question, even incommensurable ones — which is emphatically not relativism (the poststructuralists get no comfort here; we still must choose, critically and responsibly). Berlin’s hedgehog and fox turn out to describe scientists too, and Firestein wants room for both. His scientific hero, though, is Darwin, whom he ranks above Einstein: the first person to show that tremendous organization and complexity can arise from essentially random events. Sixty-five million years ago, seven minutes of orbital difference and the asteroid misses. Randomness and uncertainty, properly understood, produce diversity and complexity — not chaos.
•       When AI Learns to Be Uncertain. AI appears exactly once in the book, a restraint Firestein is proud of: “we hate the bomb, but we love anesthesia,” and it’s the use, not the thing, that will decide. Socrates was famously against writing — it did ruin our memories, and libraries were worth it; calculators did ruin long division, and who cares. In the classroom, the smell scientist admits you can no longer smell Claude in an essay — hence his ignorance course’s 999-word assignment, harder than the 5,000 words Columbia students write in their sleep. But his sharpest cut is at AI itself: the machines will be valuable to the extent that they are uncertain. When AI learns to weigh possibilities rather than issue single solutions, it will be intelligent — it will be human. A deterministic tick-tock universe is no place for discovery, imagination, or freedom. It could be otherwise.
 
About the Guest
 
Stuart Firestein is a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, where his laboratory studies the sense of smell, and a member of the Santa Fe Institute. A Guggenheim fellow and elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is the author of Ignorance: How It Drives Science and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, both translated into more than a dozen languages; he remains an Honorary Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where Failure was written. His new book is It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty (Basic Books, August 4, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       It Could Be Otherwise: Science in the Age of Uncertainty by Stuart Firestein (Basic Books, August 4, 2026). Kirkus: “A solid and even stirring defense of science.”
•       Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein — the 2012 book, born of his Columbia course, that made not-knowing respectable.
•       The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin — the essay, and the value pluralism, that give the book its philosophical spine.
•       True Enough by Catherine Elgin — the Harvard ph...

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White’s motto for resistance
 
How to say no to fascism? Curtis White, the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance, the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos.
 
But don’t expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That’s not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we’re supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It’s an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia’s subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn’t simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed.
 
So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Psychic Treason. White’s resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.
•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn’t start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.
•       The Three False Resistances. The book’s first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White’s exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.
•       Dropping Out, Together. White’s alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester’s Open Letter — for which he’s now plotting a group Substack. The obstacle is the money jail: everyone’s struggle for money limits what it is possible to do. The goal isn’t overturning the status quo. “What we need right now is companions.”
•       Misbehave, Make Something Beautiful, Try to Win. White’s motto since The Middle Mind — the making beautiful needn’t be art; the trying to win is where misbehavior gets socialized. His lineage runs Thoreau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and above all John Berger: Marxist, art critic, poet, writer of lively living books. His Marxism, such as it is, is the humanist 1844 Manuscripts — alienation, not expropriation — via Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. And the book itself is the argument: playful and fierce, a performance that moves like a novel, reinvigorating worthy old ideas rather than hunting new ones. At 75, it’s his last nonfiction — written in a spirit of play, to be left in one.
 
About the Guest
 
Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose books include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed. Called by Elle “the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment,” he is co-founder, with Ronald Sukenick, of FC2, the publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors, and taught English for many years at Illinois State University. His new and, he says, final work of nonfiction is On Resistance: A Manifesto (Melville House, August 11, 2026). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington.
 
References:
 
•       On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (Melville House, August 11, 2026). Jeffrey St. Clair: “a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape.”
•       Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia — the source of “psychic treason” and the argument that the arts subvert by nature.
•       The Middle Mind by Curtis White — where the motto was coined: misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.
•       Jon Taplin in Rolling Stone — the recent essay asking whether the counterculture can rise again, and a recent Keen On conversation in the same key.
•       One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse — the Western Marxist tradition, via the 1844 Manuscripts, that taught White to worry about alienation rather than expropriation.
•       FC2 — the author-run press of innovative fiction White co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, now past its fiftieth year.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
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