Everything was forever, until it was no more.

— Alexei Yurchak, Soviet anthropologist, on the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

I took the title of this post from a paper Professor Kim Scheppele wrote on the rapid demise of Victor Orbán entitled, “Things That Are Solid Can Melt Into Air: Lessons from the 2026 Hungarian Election.” Professor Scheppele walked us thr…

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Please join at the following Zoom link at 2:00 p.m. EDT:

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ON COMPLICITY AND COURAGE

If you are new to my Substack, I am doing research for my book, Uncompromised: Activating Your Moral Compass in an Age of Complicity, and using this platform to showcase some of the authors and research I am learning from to understand what makes people complicit in bad behavior, and learning from the people who take a stand against it.

To this end, I’ll be writing free posts on these topics each month, in addition to my weekly Round Ups, on the topics of complicity and courage. Each month I’ll have one person — like a psychologist, professor, leadership expert — explain the science and theory behind complicity and courage. And then I will also bring in a real-time moral rebel who can talk about what led them to take a stand — despite the personal and professional risks they faced (and often still face). Studies show that people are better able to resist pressure and stand up for their beliefs when they can reflect on their own values and see models of moral courage in action, so I hope you will tune in and take some knowledge and inspiration from my guests! (You can find past guests, as well as posts on the topic, under the Complicity & Courage tab on the homepage.)

Zoom links for guest speakers are sent three hours before the event, and the discussions will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live. You can always access past guest speakers here and book club authors here.

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TOMORROW!

• On Complicity (and Courage): Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (Monday, May 18, 2 -3 p.m.). Project 2025 mirrored the tactics used by Orban in Hungary (his team literally helped them write it)…and things didn’t turn out so well. Professor Scheppele is THE person to help break down Hungary’s secret sauce in its last election, and how we here can replicate it.

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Coming Up:

• On Courage: , former DHS official and candidate in this year’s congressional race in Virginia (Thursday, June 11, 1-2 p.m.). Olivia served in Trump’s first term as part of Vice President Mike Pence’s team, and left when she believed what she was witnessing in DHS was morally reprehensible. I know you have all seen and heard Olivia speaking out since then, and I am so excited to host her at The Freedom Academy to talk about her journey!

• Happy Hour with Special Guest Tom Nichols (Friday, June 12, 5-6 p.m.). I’ve always been a fan of Tom — including his contrarian takes on Indian food and the use of the word “fascism.” We’ll discuss great power competition, how bad he thinks things are right now, and anything else you want to discuss, so please join us! This will not be recorded.

• NEW! On Courage, Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney at the Justice Department, (Wednesday, July 8, 3-4 p.m.) I don’t think Liz’s former position even exists anymore since she was fired in March 2025 after she refused to make a recommendation to reinstate Mel Gibson’s gun rights after they were rescinded because of a domestic violence conviction in 2011. When she was asked to testify to Congress, the Trump administration sent U.S. Marshals to her home in an effort to silence her. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.) We have come a long way since that point but I hope you will feel inspired by her story of standing up for truth at a time when things were very scary and uncertain.

• On Complicity, Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (Monday, July 27, 1-2 p.m.) This tome has been an incredible source and resource for me in my research. It is an incredibly comprehensive look at historical and contemporary stories of whistleblowing across corporate America, government, and academia. We’ll talk about some of the common threads among the people who speak out in complicit systems.

I am confirming more speakers through the summer so watch this space! Also:

• ICYMI: I have taken down the paywall on my talk with Dr. Stein on “Ministers of Defense (Mechanisms)” last week so you can watch it, and read his longer piece, here — I hope you will check it out!

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The Freedom Academy Book Club

In the past I have typically done a book selection every quarter, but I am going to get more ambitious for 2026 and try to do one each month — too many interesting books and cool authors! Check out the selections below:

• MAY (Thursday, May 28, 5-6 p.m. EDT): Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by . I know that as we approach SCOTUS decision season we will need an expert guide to help us make sense of rulings that have come down and what to expect on the ones still pending! I am so excited to talk with University of Michigan Law Professor Leah Litman about how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails and what (if anything) we can do about it.

• JUNE (Date/Time TBA): The Voter File by . David has been a guest several times on my Substack but this time we will be talking about his prescient novel! The Voter File came out in 2020 and is a story about how elections can be manipulated if someone can get their hands on…you got it, the voter file. Well, guess what? The Trump administration is trying to get their hands on…states’ voter files. Life imitates art, I guess (David’s first novel, published in 2016, was about Russian election interference.) This will be a terrifying beach read with real world implications!

• JULY (Date/Time TBA): One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pritzker. Is it OK to call the warehouses being built across the U.S. as “concentration camps”? Andrea Pritzker knows the answer (and it’s yes). There has, sadly, never been a more important time to learn the history of how this form of human internment and political repression was developed and how it has evolved. (I picked July so at least the weather is nice when we’re reading it — better than in winter when it gets dark at 4 p.m. and you’re already depressed.)

  

• AUGUST (Date/Time TBA): The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. This book has been on my nightstand forever…to be honest, though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it last year, when Elon Musk was still taking a wrecking ball to our government. But now I’m ready: find out the origin story of the tech villains you love to hate, and who now have an outsized influence on our collective future.

• NEW! SEPTEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück: How an Intrepid Band of Frenchwomen Resisted the Nazis in Hitler’s All-Female Concentration Camp by Lynne Olson. Ravensbrück was the only all-female German concentration camp, and comprised largely of political prisoners from the French resistance. At a time when women’s contributions and agency are being erased in many ways here in the U.S., this story s an important reminder of the role of extraordinary women in history and their impact on the world. I am thrilled that Lynne will be able to join to talk about this story of courage and resistance under horrific circumstances.

• OCTOBER (Date/Time TBA): The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I’ve been so excited to read Tim’s book since it came out last fall. His last book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (a must-read), chronicled the history and evolution of the agency from its inception during World War II through 9/11. This book picks it up from there to the present day. This will be a great discussion on the past and the future of our foreign intelligence capability.

  

• NOVEMBER (Date/Time TBA): This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. I was soooo excited to learn that this book was finally out! For those of you who have been subcribers to The Freedom Academy for a while, you know that Professor Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century was our first book club selection! (You can watch that talk here.) I’m soooo excited to have her back to discuss her latest project, which a journey through the amazing history and diversity of OUR country. With better planning I would have gotten this on the calendar closer to July 4, but honestly the midterm elections is as good a time as any to be reminded of the American values we love, and why they are still alive and well in the hearts of its people.

  

• DECEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Lost Orchid: A Tale of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston. I realize that this title is not necessarily in the vein as the others, but I feel like by December we’re going to be ready for a change of pace for the holidays — and what better distraction is there than a little Victorian plunder and obsession? Seriously, though, this book has been on my to-read list since my brilliant colleague, professor of British literature, and master storyteller published this last year (I’m also partial to orchids, it being the only plant I have successfully managed to tend in my home). This will be a fun discussion to close out the year!

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My TV appearances this week:

I joined Nicole Wallace earlier this week to discuss (who else?) Kash Patel:

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It’s Complicated is Cruisin’!

Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information.

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I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.

For those who had trouble memorizing it, The Princeton Triangle Club (of which I was a member — catch a glimpse of me here) made a catchy tune about it:

The Honor Code is enforced by an Honor Committee comprised of eighteen students. To ensure their commitment to the code, students also accept responsibility for reporting violations of the Honor Code they witnessed or knew to the Committee.

Well folks, video killed the radio star and AI killed the Honor Code. At least it appears that way at first blush.

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Last week, the Princeton faculty voted to return to proctored examinations for the first time in 133 years. Citing AI and “small, personal devices” that “have changed the external appearance of misconduct during an examination,” the policy signals an era where ethical norms can’t keep up — or adapt to — technological advances. Social media also appears to play a role: the policy also notes that students are reluctant to report violations, or use their names when doing so, because of fears of “doxxing or shaming among their peer groups.” The following paragraph from The Daily Princetonian was a gut punch:

In The Daily Princetonian’s 2025 Senior Survey of over 500 seniors, 29.9 percent of respondents reported that they had cheated on an assignment or exam during their time at Princeton. 44.6 percent of senior respondents reported knowledge of Honor Code violations that they chose not to report. Only 0.4 percent of seniors responded saying that they had reported a peer for an Honor Code violation.

This is usually the part where someone out there reading this is blaming this on yet another problem of overprivileged kids at elite schools. There is a lot to say on that front when it comes to Princeton and other Ivies, but this is not an issue confined to the elite — this has become ubiquitous in higher education, with a study showing that 89% of higher education leaders estimate that at least 50% of students rely on AI for assignments.

At a recent discussion I attended at Yale, a presenter offered reasons students gave him for why they rely on AI, even if they understood that it was cheating. You’d think that the main reason would be that they’re trying to get a good grade. But efficiency, not grades, seems to be the primary motivation. The students just don’t see the point in spending a lot of time, say, generating their own ideas for a paper or working through multiple iterations of them, especially when they have a number of competing demands on their time and attention. The other excuse given is that students feel like they will be expected to use AI in their jobs, so they feel like they are just training themselves to do what employers will expect of them.

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I’ll leave it to my fellow educators reading this post to debate whether these are valid justifications (I don’t think they are). I’m more concerned with how starkly moral considerations are divorced from students’ calculus on whether to cheat — the excuses are entirely self-interested, and there’s little consideration for the larger, collective good. If almost 30% of students are cheating, and 40% of students are aware of this cheating and doing nothing about it, then that represents a significant breakdown in social trust, creating a ripe environment for corruption and misconduct to flourish.

Let me explain. Those of you who participated in (or are currently taking) my Substack course on disinformation and democracy may remember my post on social trust — which is about the norms of trust and reciprocity that arise among networks of people. When there are high levels of social trust — which means that people believe they are connected by shared values and a responsibility to their larger community — you need fewer policing mechanisms. You can rely on people to honor their obligations to each other, which means you can operate on norms rather than strict rules. The game of golf is a good microcosm of this in action: It’s a sport that largely relies on honesty, good sportsmanship, and self-policing to work. As I wrote in my class lesson:

It’s worth pausing here and reflecting on some of these things. Why do people pay taxes? Give blood? Volunteer? Donate to charity? Why do we do things that involve a sacrifice on our part, and for which we may not receive any direct benefit?…

Your impulse to return the wallet you found in Wal-Mart to Customer Service? That’s generalized trust: You’ve got your (faceless) fellow citizens’ back, because you feel that they’ve got yours and would do the same. And when people believe that others are playing by the rules, they are inclined to do their part for the greater good, like pay taxes. Conversely, if you believed everyone else was somehow getting away with breaking the rules, you’d be a sucker for complying. (Sound familiar?)

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A technology that makes it easier to cheat wouldn’t be able to easily subvert the norms of a community where there is already high social trust. To go back to golf: Golf is a game where it is quite easy to cheat, if you really want to. (And, clearly, some people who shall remain nameless, do exactly that.) And yet, as far as I’m aware, the norms of golf haven’t (yet) broken down. But in a community where everyone is out for themselves, AI is simply another tool to get an edge on the competition — the temptation is too great, and there just isn’t a countervailing pressure or sense of obligation to higher principles or loyalty to fellow students, to overcome it. In this regard, AI is not so much the cause of the breakdown of the Honor Code as it is an accelerant of a culture shift that was already underway.1

I think that Princeton’s response to the problem is the right one for the short term: As I have written before, when “warm trust” — social norms — breaks down, you have to replace it with “cool trust” — more rules, more oversight, more enforcement. Basically, you need to add more refs to the game. It’s sad, because the net effect is to make everything more rigid and less efficient for everyone.

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But the larger breakdown of norms of honesty and trustworthiness — the pillars on which social trust is based — requires a longer-term fix, and it not only needs to be rebuilt at Princeton, but in our society at large. The erosion of honor as an internal moral constraint isn’t just a Princeton problem, it’s an America problem. We are already seeing how the “game the system” is playing out on platforms like Polymarket and, of course, in our own government, where the GOP has rushed to redraw voting maps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais decision (which itself appears self-interested), with little regard for the fundamental tenets of fairness and equality. It’s every man out for himself, everywhere.

It’s tempting to blame AI for the demise of honesty and integrity. But as I’ve noted before, AI — and how we use it — is a reflection of who we are already. It just amplifies and accelerates it. Character is what you do when you think no one is looking — and increasingly, we seem to believe that if no one is looking, honor no longer matters.

On the March 9, 1954 broadcast of his landmark TV show “See It Now,“ Edward R. Murrow told the nation, speaking of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”^[1]

The ‘we’ Murrow was referring to is everyone – all of us. And the issue he was calling out was why we would let ourselves become complicit in terrorism. Then as now, many decisions are shaped by our psychologies, mixtures of individual and collective motivations, aims, and personal histories. How we perceive and process our experiences of the world. What we’re drawn to or step away from. A reality that’s familiar and we prefer, or can normalize and accept, versus one that we object to and refuse.

Many of us are unaware of those unconscious emotional forces and how they shape decision-making and behavior. There’s usually no pressing need to think about it. Most of the time, we make good enough decisions and generally make our way alright, hopefully keeping own goals and cataclysmic choices to a minimum. But not always. We take risks we shouldn’t and overestimate our abilities. We turn right when we intend to go left, tie our shoelaces together at the worst moment, and serially repeat the same mistakes. People often dismiss these as blunders or a momentary lapse. Sure, sometimes. But considered more deeply, they’re an unintended behavioral communication of something inside us we hadn’t recognized or acknowledged – and sometimes, an indicator or symptom of psychological distress or disorder. They also give rise to any number of unintended consequences.

Some of those consequences may not be immediately obvious but can turn out to be life-changing or world-altering – including turning a blind eye to whom we put or allow into positions of power.

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Institutions and societies are complex. How they function is less the influence of a single individual and more the consequence of multiple intertwining factors, the result of nesting decisions and processes involving many people. But people – citizens of a nation and workers inside organizational ecosystems – naturally adapt to the needs and expectations of the central figure. Culture is not just the tone from the top but how everyone responds to it.

So it’s intuitively sensible that organizations and nation-states alike would be better off with someone psychologically balanced, mature, and emotionally and socially intelligent at the helm. After all, it’s a recipe for disaster when the leader is beset by unresolved conflicts or hobbled by a psychological disorder, whose emotional instabilities drive impulsive, erratic behavior, and behaves like a mad king.

But when that’s who you have, certain things happen. One is that he won’t be the only one you have to deal with. Autocratic capture, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has explained, is a process in which the ascent of a disturbed and destructive leader forces the state’s administrative and governance ecosystem to undergo a transfusion. Important institutions staffed by competent, experienced, career professionals are replaced by supplicants who know their actual job is to satisfy the whims of the self-serving Poohbah. In addition, as Timothy Snyder makes plain in his 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, many people will simply obey in advance, becoming volunteer loyalists without a fuss or whimper. Unfortunately, there’s never a shortage of them.

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What’s to be done when we find ourselves stuck in a mess of our own making? One job is to clearly assess what’s happening. No sugar-coating or over-simplifying. Another is to unearth the root causes of how and why it happened. That can be painstaking. As Peter G. Neumann, a computer-science researcher, observed, “complex systems break in complex ways.” Many factors will have contributed; there’s no single failure point and no single solution.

There is, however, a common element: our psychological tendencies, as I’ve already mentioned, to unconsciously accept or move toward emotionally familiar people and situations (often even despite disagreeing with their decisions and behavior). Many elements inside us drive that system. I want to spotlight one: defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are features of our minds that buffer us against anxiety, guilt, or other various painful or disturbing emotions. Freud introduced “defenses” as a term and concept in his 1894 paper, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense.” In the decades since, research and clinical data have led to delineating distinct types and categories of defenses. The primary ones are listed and defined here:

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• Denial – The repudiation of ideas and facts to avoid awareness of a distressing or painful reality. It plays a normal role in childhood and at any age a degree of transient denial is an expectable reaction to trauma, loss, or upset. It typically involves a fantasy that erases unwelcome facts and replaces them with a more pleasing counter-narrative.

• Negation – More than denial. A belief and declaration that something does not exist or is a statement of a reversal – ‘this is not that’ or ‘I’m not hurting you’ or ‘you’re wrong not me’ – that embeds an unacknowledged admission or reveals a wish. It is a false manufactured substitution that seeks to neutralize the impact of something in reality.

• Disavowal – A means of eradicating (in fantasy) the existence of one thing (in reality) so it can be replaced (in fantasy) with something else preferred. In perversion it could become a fetish object. Or in psychosis, a remodeling of reality whereby anything can be anything you need it to be (for you).

• Repression – The banishment of unacceptable mental content (a wish, an idea) from consciousness. Its function is to ward off the anxiety that would be consciously felt if the forbidden mental content reached consciousness. It is an unconscious system and so cannot be controlled at will. The “return of the repressed” is an unconscious eruption or disclosure that is evidenced in symptoms, slips or mistakes, dreams, behaviors.

• Suppression – The conscious, deliberate, and voluntary act of pushing uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or impulses out of awareness. A functional strategy that can, from a positive perspective, facilitate temporary but effective self-management of anxiety, stress, distraction, etc. But maladaptive and inhibiting when used continuously as an avoidance strategy.

• Dissociation – The disconnection of thoughts, memories, or feelings (akin to compartmentalization) from disturbing causes as a protective shield against overwhelming trauma or unbearable stress. A system on a spectrum. At low levels it’s a sort of zoning-out or momentary daydreaming. But in more severe cases, a structural separation partitions off awareness or aspects of the self in the world leading to depersonalization (feeling detached from oneself), derealization (feeling the world is unreal), and memory gaps or amnesia.

• Splitting – A mental model that helps explain several defense mechanisms. It describes how an individual can ‘split’ off different categories of consciousness such that the person can behave as though they have not noticed or don’t believe something that has been factually verified and is thus otherwise actually known. It can also refer to splitting other people (or groups) into distinct categories – good or bad – at will so that certain people (or groups) can be maintained while others attacked and discarded without any feeling of contradiction (or cognitive dissonance).

• Magical Thinking – A belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, typical of early childhood when cognitive capabilities and reality testing are still underdeveloped, in which there’s a powerful belief that one’s internal mental state directly dictates reality. It can also provide a false sense of control in unpredictable situations. It is a highly maladaptive and potentially dangerous coping mechanism often indicative of deeper psychological disturbances.

• Displacement – Shifts the focus or emphasis connected to a feeling or interest designated as unacceptable to something or someone else associated as being more tolerable.

• Reaction Formation – Flips a painful idea or feeling to its opposite, for example mentally transforming hatefulness or sadistic urges into behavior that conveys extreme solicitousness and concern.

• Undoing – Thoughts and, often, behaviors that in fantasy attempt to remove (not merely cover over) offensive or prohibited acts, usually through a process of ritual atonement or self-punishment.

• Isolation – Separates a painful idea or event from the feelings associated with it to alter or diminish its emotional impact. That unlinking removes the discomfort of responsibility (such as guilt) and creates both an affective (emotional) and cognitive (intellectual) disconnect between cause and effect so that awareness of the consequence of an act can be recategorized as completely separate from the actual cause.

• Projection – A mental operation by which feelings and desires that somebody needs to reject or refuse to recognize are treated as if they exist in or emanate from something or somebody else. Related to disavowal except that unacceptable feelings and wishes remain but are not one’s own and belong (in fantasy) to another.

  • Projection is one basis for racism (disavowed attributes are attached to a hated group), paranoia (self-criticism is experienced as a reproach or attack from others), and phobias (some internal danger is felt to derive from an external source which can be avoided to produce a sense of safety).

  • Joseph Goebbels understood how to weaponize this at scale for the Nazis (and adopted by every fascist since): “Propaganda,” he declared, “must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.”

• Projective Identification – A complex relational defense involving one person (the projector) unconsciously projecting unwanted emotions or objectionable attitudes onto (or into) another person (the recipient), then inducing the recipient – through pressure or manipulation – into accepting and unconsciously adopting and experiencing the projected feelings – to identify with them – causing the recipient to then behave as if those emotions are genuinely his or hers rather than belonging to the projector. Not to be confused with ‘Projection’ even though it contains that term. Projection attributes a feeling to another person while projective identification involves forcing the other person to feel and act on it.

  • Projective Identification is the underpinning mechanism at play in Gaslighting – a form of psychological abuse where the perpetrator manipulates the victim into doubting their own memory, perception, or sanity through lies, distortion, trivialization, and withholding information.

  • It is also involved in DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – a pattern of behaviors commonly used by perpetrators in abusive relationships to escape culpability by manipulating partners into submission. This is the torturous crazy-making I’m-rubber-your-glue tactic favored by so many on the far right.

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Defenses are one of the ways we selectively distort reality in our minds as an unconscious means of avoiding acknowledgement of unpleasant or painful facts, thoughts, or realities. They protect us from feeling, thinking, remembering, or even knowing things about ourselves and others, and to try to control people and situations to help us feel safe, powerful, or important.

That’s not all bad. In fact, defenses are essential, normal psychological dispositions shared by everyone. Most defense mechanisms constructively facilitate efficient thought and action and provide temporary comfort or relief. We all need and use them in our lives, like the reflex to close our eyelids in bright light or the way antibodies help ward against our bodies being overrun by infection.

But human psychology isn’t always straightforward. Defense mechanisms function along a spectrum and, especially in conjunction with personality disorders or other psychopathologies, can generate dysfunction and transition from shield to sword.

That can occur because these mental devices involve the denial of a universe of normal and situationally appropriate emotions and responses and so are fundamentally maladaptive, especially when embedded as a monolithic default. They inhibit or obstruct the recognition and addressing of important realities, however difficult they may be to experience. Frequently, the insistence that only one class of emotions and behavior is acceptable suggests a dread of the others (this is obvious in xenophobia where in-groups and out-groups are classified as good and bad, respectively). This gives rise to a restricted, hobbled repertoire for responding to the diversity of natural, unavoidable experiences and life events.

This type of fundamentalist credo goes something like this: “There are things in the world and people in it that upset me. The only solution is to destroy that world and reshape as I need it to be and punish or banish those other people.” The potential viability of that as an action plan, not a passing fantasy to be nursed for a moment and then dismissed, is a delusion, a feature of omnipotent narcissistic grandiosity – a disorder involving magical thinking but often expanding into more severe pathologies.

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In other words, ideology is informed by psychology. This perspective helps us see into some of the psychopathologies that typically bind together authoritarians, despots, and mafiosi with zealots, abusers, and extremists, as well as their lieutenants, sycophants, and enablers.

Freud wrote in 1905 that “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” By which he meant that our symptoms – anxiety, depression, substance abuse, addiction, behavioral outbursts and collapses, chronic discontent or emotional deadness (anhedonia), serial entanglements in combative situations, love, involvement, or support for somebody cruel and debasing – are telling a story we don’t want told, that we can’t bear to confront…but that cannot be kept under wraps.

The shared ambitions of certain world leaders and their minions and supporters to control, crush, oppress, desecrate, demean, punish, shame, and excise aren’t tools they learned from a manifesto. They’re expressions – an unleashing – of impulses rooted in their own personal lacerating experiences. Many people – not only those in positions of significant power and influence but also those enthralled by and compliant to them – present what to trained experts are typically indicative of profound early trauma and psychological (or other) abuses. Of course, individual situations and experiences are ultimately unique. But if you look closely, and understand what certain indicators commonly suggest, you can see through the disguise – the outer jacket of a defense structure – to the helplessness, psychological impotence, and foundational damage under it. For example, constant taunts, threats, and belligerence serve to project the appearance of ferocity, but are a distraction, a fraud, to dupe us into believing there is strength, not terror and ineffectualness. Or, someone who shames and debases must be morbidly petrified of humiliation, living in a maelstrom of fear and outrage. Trained mental health professionals understand that certain responses – modes of presenting psychologically and behaviorally -- are indicative of certain defenses which in turn nearly always suggest certain causal dysfunctions.

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To be in relationships with such people means being subjected to their intense unrelenting demand to control and delimit. Censorship, bans, expulsions, curtailing or reversing rights and freedoms are more than acts in service of an extremist ultraconservative ideological agenda, but policy-based iterations of emotional imperatives. They are a means of preemptively and comprehensively protecting – defense by annihilation – against negative emotions and anything or anyone that might cause them.

Everyone is affected. Not just by ruinous policies, executive orders, and judicial rulings. But environmentally, relationally, emotionally. Flooding the zone, wrecking vital and beloved institutions and values at muzzle velocity, and putting groups of people into states of distress isn’t just a socio-political tactic. It’s psychological warfare. It’s also a form of malevolent creativity used – and countenanced and/or applauded – by people who are comfortable with (syntonic is the technical term), indifferent to, or delight in others’ pain and who can live and breathe in chaotic, disordered states. These are people for whom destabilization and fear are familiar. Even if that seems and feels normal and livable (defense mechanisms can be very effective), it can only entail suffering.

To elevate an autocrat – an individual who by definition is a textbook case of severe grandiose pathological (or malignant) narcissism usually co-existent with psychopathy (antisocial personality disorder) – means that the populace, or large portions of it, must feel narcissistically injured. They are longing for recognition, validation, of their deprivation and pain, and also for real relief and redress. They’re eager to surrender to a figure who tells them he, and he alone, understands and will take care of everything. All will be not just ok but great. It’s the answer to a prayer. It’s also straight out of the authoritarian playbook – the prayer he’s ready to answer. And then betray.

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This circles back to Murrow’s injunction to consider what we have allowed. How we’re all complicit. For those currents to merge – a desperate populace responsive to a snake-oil salesman – means there’s been widescale chronic suffering: multigenerational trauma stemming from structural prejudice and social inequities, deprivations of every kind, abuses and violations of all sorts, among many other factors -- which has been ignored, denied, minimized, and left unaddressed.

Emile Zola spoke to this in his 1898 testimony in the Dreyfus Affair: “If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

Hopefully, more of us are willing and able to understand how real that is. Returning to the question of what we can do, my call to action is for all of us to look more deeply at ourselves, to become more self-aware as well as more psychologically literate. To see that what we all try to avoid, to protect ourselves against, can sometimes become the very thing we participate in creating. To know that love and care are ultimately vastly more powerful and sustainable than hatred, and that part of that care involves being courageous: in speaking truth to power, speaking up when others want silence, protecting children and others who are vulnerable and dependent, and confronting something – even within ourselves – we think we can’t bear.

And, finally, we must hold in mind what the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny instructed at the end of his life to all who oppose oppression and injustice: “You’re not allowed to give up.”

End Note & Disclaimer:

Section 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)’s Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry, adopted in 1973 and known informally as the Goldwater Rule, prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without a personal examination and without consent.

It is important to note that I have not met with or interviewed any individuals implicitly suggested in this article. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental and is intended solely as a generic illustration of how the mental devices discussed present behaviorally and to explain the effects they can have on decisions, situations, and other people. Nothing written here should be misconstrued as any form of clinical assessment or speculative diagnosis.

Resources:

Ben-Ghiat, R. (April 21, 2025). Is America an Autocracy Now?

Clark, C. (April 24, 2026). No Need to Break the Goldwater Rule. Here’s What Docs Propose Instead — There’s a difference between diagnosis from afar, and raising clinically informed concerns. MedPage Today

Diamond, D., Kernberg, O. F., et al (2023). Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference Focused Psychotherapy. Guilford Press

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, pp. 41-61

Freud, S. (1905 [1901]). Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, pp. 1–122

Nicholl D, Greenhalgh T. (22 April 2026). Should doctors speak of their concerns about the mental health of a president?BMJ 2026; 393

O’Toole, F. (May 14, 2026). The Right Amount of Crazy. The New York Review of Books.

Rangappa, A. (April 27, 2026). An FBI Director on the Rocks. https://asharangappa.substack.com/p/an-fbi-director-on-the-rocks

Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. NY: Crown

Stein, A. (November 8, 2018). Donald Trump’s Leadership Clinic: How to Disguise Impotence as Power. Forbes.

Stein, A. (Jan 27, 2021). How To Become A Malevolent Leader: A Field Guide for Aspiring Fraudsters and Tyrants. Forbes

Stein, A. (2023). Innovations and Strategic Applications in the Psychology of Fraud. 2023 ICC FraudNet Global Report — Fraud and Asset Recovery in an Unstable World

Stein, A. (August 2025). Educating Psychodynamically Minded Leaders. Psyche on Campus. University of Pennsylvania.

Zola, E. 13 January 1898. J’Accuse...!. L’Aurore Paris.

^[1] A recent cultural response is the 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck,” directed by George Clooney and the 2025 Broadway stage production directed by David Cromer. On a personal note, Shirley Wershba, who with her husband Joseph Wershba, worked with Edward Murrow on See It Now is a close family relation. Now approaching 103 years of age, Shirley remains a vital and ferocious advocate for journalistic integrity and freedom of the press. She was portrayed by Patricia Clarkson the film version and by Ilana Glazer on stage.

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I’ve invited Dr. Stein to publish a deep dive on the topic to accompany the video when I post it tomorrow — this will be accessible to all paid subscribers. You won’t want to miss this!

Please join at the following Zoom link at 1:00 p.m. EST:

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ON COMPLICITY AND COURAGE

If you are new to my Substack, I am doing research for my book, Uncompromised: Activating Your Moral Compass in an Age of Complicity, and using this platform to showcase some of the authors and research I am learning from to understand what makes people complicit in bad behavior, and learning from the people who take a stand against it.

To this end, I’ll be writing free posts on these topics each month, in addition to my weekly Round Ups, on the topics of complicity and courage. Each month I’ll have one person — like a psychologist, professor, leadership expert — explain the science and theory behind complicity and courage. And then I will also bring in a real-time moral rebel who can talk about what led them to take a stand — despite the personal and professional risks they faced (and often still face). Studies show that people are better able to resist pressure and stand up for their beliefs when they can reflect on their own values and see models of moral courage in action, so I hope you will tune in and take some knowledge and inspiration from my guests! (You can find past guests, as well as posts on the topic, under the Complicity & Courage tab on the homepage.)

Zoom links for guest speakers are sent three hours before the event, and the discussions will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live. You can always access past guest speakers here and book club authors here.

Subscribe now

THIS WEEK!

• Ministers of Defense (Mechanisms), Monday, May 11, 1-2 p.m. EDT: Dr. Alexander Stein is back! We will be building on his talk in March on how Trump uses abusive psychodynamics to keep people in his orbit (and the country) under his control to discuss how various defense mechanisms are manifesting in this administration. Dr. Stein has been an indispensable resource for me into my research into complicity, and I hope you will join for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion!

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Coming Up:

• On Complicity (and Courage): Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (Monday, May 18, 2 -3 p.m.). Project 2025 mirrored the tactics used by Orban in Hungary (his team literally helped them write it)…and things didn’t turn out so well. Professor Scheppele is THE person to help break down Hungary’s secret sauce in its last election, and how we here can replicate it.

• NEW! On Courage: , former DHS official and candidate in this year’s congressional race in Virginia (Thursday, June 11, 1-2 p.m.). Olivia served in Trump’s first term as part of Vice President Mike Pence’s team, and left when she believed what she was witnessing in DHS was morally reprehensible. I know you have all seen and heard Olivia speaking out since then, and I am so excited to host her at The Freedom Academy to talk about her journey!

• NEW! On Complicity, Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (Monday, July 27, 1-2 p.m.) This tome has been an incredible source and resource for me in my research. It is an incredibly comprehensive look at historical and contemporary stories of whistleblowing across corporate America, government, and academia. We’ll talk about some of the common threads among the people who speak out in complicit systems.

I am confirming more speakers through the summer so watch this space!

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The Freedom Academy Book Club

In the past I have typically done a book selection every quarter, but I am going to get more ambitious for 2026 and try to do one each month — too many interesting books and cool authors! Check out the selections below:

• MAY (Thursday, May 28, 5-6 p.m. EDT): Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by . I know that as we approach SCOTUS decision season we will need an expert guide to help us make sense of rulings that have come down and what to expect on the ones still pending! I am so excited to talk with University of Michigan Law Professor Leah Litman about how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails and what (if anything) we can do about it.

• JUNE (Date/Time TBA): The Voter File by . David has been a guest several times on my Substack but this time we will be talking about his prescient novel! The Voter File came out in 2020 and is a story about how elections can be manipulated if someone can get their hands on…you got it, the voter file. Well, guess what? The Trump administration is trying to get their hands on…states’ voter files. Life imitates art, I guess (David’s first novel, published in 2016, was about Russian election interference.) This will be a terrifying beach read with real world implications!

• JULY (Date/Time TBA): One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pritzker. Is it OK to call the warehouses being built across the U.S. as “concentration camps”? Andrea Pritzker knows the answer (and it’s yes). There has, sadly, never been a more important time to learn the history of how this form of human internment and political repression was developed and how it has evolved. (I picked July so at least the weather is nice when we’re reading it — better than in winter when it gets dark at 4 p.m. and you’re already depressed.)

  

• AUGUST (Date/Time TBA): The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. This book has been on my nightstand forever…to be honest, though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it last year, when Elon Musk was still taking a wrecking ball to our government. But now I’m ready: find out the origin story of the tech villains you love to hate, and who now have an outsized influence on our collective future.

• SEPTEMBER: The publication date for Mimi’s book has been pushed back, so stay tuned as I am lining up another book for this month!

• OCTOBER (Date/Time TBA): The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I’ve been so excited to read Tim’s book since it came out last fall. His last book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (a must-read), chronicled the history and evolution of the agency from its inception during World War II through 9/11. This book picks it up from there to the present day. This will be a great discussion on the past and the future of our foreign intelligence capability.

  

• NOVEMBER (Date/Time TBA): This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. I was soooo excited to learn that this book was finally out! For those of you who have been subcribers to The Freedom Academy for a while, you know that Professor Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century was our first book club selection! (You can watch that talk here.) I’m soooo excited to have her back to discuss her latest project, which a journey through the amazing history and diversity of OUR country. With better planning I would have gotten this on the calendar closer to July 4, but honestly the midterm elections is as good a time as any to be reminded of the American values we love, and why they are still alive and well in the hearts of its people.

  

• DECEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Lost Orchid: A Tale of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston. I realize that this title is not necessarily in the vein as the others, but I feel like by December we’re going to be ready for a change of pace for the holidays — and what better distraction is there than a little Victorian plunder and obsession? Seriously, though, this book has been on my to-read list since my brilliant colleague, professor of British literature, and master storyteller published this last year (I’m also partial to orchids, it being the only plant I have successfully managed to tend in my home). This will be a fun discussion to close out the year!

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This Week’s It’s Complicated Podcast:

This week, Renato and I discuss Schroedinger’s ceasefire (i.e., Trump and Hegseth’s claim that we are no longer at war even though we are still at war) and the latest court shenanigans with mifepristone:

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It’s Complicated is Cruisin’!

Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information.

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This recent reporting reminded me of Nixon’s preoccupation with “plugging the leaks” of classified information coming out of his administration. I’ve been in the weeds of Watergate for my research into complicity (how could I not?) and have been particularly interested in John Dean’s role in the cover up and later decision to testify against Nixon. Watergate was slightly before my time (I was born in 1974) so I read Dean’s memoir, Blind Ambition, to understand the details from his perspective and….hoooooo boy. It’s not nearly as insane as the Trump White House, but it is pretty batsh*t crazy. (I won’t go into details here, but the memoir is a riveting read and worth your time.)

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Most of you will remember the “Plumbers Unit,” Nixon’s mini, personal secret police group operating out of the White House whose focus it was to prevent more leaks stemming from the Pentagon Papers that might implicate his administration, and which engaged in illegal activities like the Watergate break-in on June 17, 1972. But the trail leading from the Watergate break-in to the White House began with a connection between the Watergate burglars and an earlier break-in to the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Daniel Ellsberg, of course, was the person responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in June 1971 (which led to the landmark Supreme Court case). When I interviewed Dean he noted that most people refer to Watergate as just a “bungled burglary,” but that the Ellsberg break in, and Nixon’s obsession with the Pentagon Papers, was the linchpin of the whole scandal.

Ellsberg is another figure I have been researching, because his own transformation from insider to whistleblower is incredibly fascinating. Yesterday, I spent the afternoon going through the archival collection of Ellsberg’s papers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Among them was the huge volume of personal correspondence that Ellsberg received after he leaked the Pentagon Papers. I was struck by how similarly people felt in that political moment to how people feel now, particularly in terms of feeling like the government was just out of control and that they were powerless to do anything — and why Ellsberg’s courage was an inspiration and sorely needed ray of hope for getting the country back on track. Here are some of the letters people wrote (don’t you miss the days of handwritten letters?):

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It was also similar to our current moment in that people were clearly polarized on the issue, as you can see from the angry (and often anti-semitic) letters below. I have to say that hate mail hasn’t changed much since the 70s.

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One letter in particular struck me in its honesty and reflectiveness (transcription below):

To the Ellsbergs —

Almost 3 yrs ago a young UCLA PhD candidate chose prison instead of army service. His name is Joseph Maiglish. His act put me in awe and fear. Awe, that he and others had that kind of courage, and fear that it was only that kind of courage multiplied many times over the world that would stop the war, that I therefore could not in good conscience escape my responsibility in that direction.

I have rationalized for these years doing a bit of peace work here and there; but taking no stand that would say, ‘I will no longer be an accomplice at any level.’

Your recent act has brought me to a new stage of apprehension. It’s no longer the ‘youth’ in their idealism that are taking a stand of unequaled courage. Here is a man my age, and not too different in socio-economic, religious or political background. I was, and am, flabbergasted.

About a yr ago I mustered up the courage to resist the telephone tax. And that scared me. What would be the cost to my freedom for such an act? It is hard to convince myself that the real cost to my freedom comes in overlooking such opportunities for civil disobedience. I don’t want to realize it. I guess I prefer the creeping repressiveness to quick and immediate loss of bodily freedom.

I’m beginning to have less fear of ‘the authorities’ when I realize that I am, in my complicity, an unpunished war criminal. I don’t know yet what [illegible] that realization will have in terms of action. But more and more I wonder that I can go on gardening while V.N. gardens are mined; that I can take to the shelter of my apartment while their houses are burned; that I can enjoy the luxury of lovemaking while all their loved ones are dead or in excruciating pain.

Why do I write? Because Another Mother for Peace said you need our backing. Can those who have taken your step really need the backing of we who go on living as usual?

Jean Glasser

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Of course, Kash Patel making people take polygraphs to stop leaks about his alleged drinking feels way more dumb than a president burglarizing political enemies to stop leaks about a massive, decades-long deception campaign about a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. But even so, the fact that the “plumbers” are back in different form should make us ask how we will make it out of this mess this time around without more people on the inside willing to step up and speak out.

Leaders who are most obsessed with punishing truth-tellers are the ones with the most to hide. And that is precisely why truth-telling — even when it is imperfect, risky, and inconvenient — remains one of the most powerful acts of courage in a democracy. Ellsberg understood that. I hope there are still people inside our institutions who do too.

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I hope you’ll join today as I talk with Harry about how he faced the challenges that day, what he’s lost since then, and what he’s gained. There will be lessons about bravery and courage for all of us to learn from.

Please join at the following Zoom link at11:00 a.m. EDT:

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ON COMPLICITY AND COURAGE

If you are new to my Substack, I am doing research for my book, Uncompromised: Activating Your Moral Compass in an Age of Complicity, and using this platform to showcase some of the authors and research I am learning from to understand what makes people complicit in bad behavior, and learning from the people who take a stand against it.

To this end, I’ll be writing free posts on these topics each month, in addition to my weekly Round Ups, on the topics of complicity and courage. Each month I’ll have one person — like a psychologist, professor, leadership expert — explain the science and theory behind complicity and courage. And then I will also bring in a real-time moral rebel who can talk about what led them to take a stand — despite the personal and professional risks they faced (and often still face). Studies show that people are better able to resist pressure and stand up for their beliefs when they can reflect on their own values and see models of moral courage in action, so I hope you will tune in and take some knowledge and inspiration from my guests! (You can find past guests, as well as posts on the topic, under the Complicity & Courage tab on the homepage.)

Zoom links for guest speakers are sent three hours before the event, and the discussions will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live. You can always access past guest speakers here and book club authors here.

Subscribe now

THIS WEEK!

• On Courage: Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn (Thursday, May 7, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. ). I think all of us are incredibly grateful for Harry’s service, along with the rest of the Capitol Hill police, on January 6. I have had a chance to hear him speak and to get to know him personally since then, and am so thrilled that he will be coming on this Substack to talk to us!

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Coming Up:

• NEW! Ministers of Defense (Mechanisms), Monday, May 11, 1-2 p.m. EDT: Dr. Alexander Stein is back! We will be building on his talk in March on how Trump uses abusive psychodynamics to keep people in his orbit (and the country) under his control to discuss how various defense mechanisms are manifesting in this administration. Dr. Stein has been an indispensable resource for me into my research into complicity, and I hope you will join for what is sure to be a fascinating discussion!

• On Complicity (and Courage): Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (Monday, May 18, 2 -3 p.m.). Project 2025 mirrored the tactics used by Orban in Hungary (his team literally helped them write it)…and things didn’t turn out so well. Professor Scheppele is THE person to help break down Hungary’s secret sauce in its last election, and how we here can replicate it.

I am confirming more speakers through the summer so watch this space!

Subscribe now

The Freedom Academy Book Club

In the past I have typically done a book selection every quarter, but I am going to get more ambitious for 2026 and try to do one each month — too many interesting books and cool authors! Check out the selections below:

• MAY (Thursday, May 28, 5-6 p.m. EDT): Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by . I know that as we approach SCOTUS decision season we will need an expert guide to help us make sense of rulings that have come down and what to expect on the ones still pending! I am so excited to talk with University of Michigan Law Professor Leah Litman about how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails and what (if anything) we can do about it.

• JUNE (Date/Time TBA): The Voter File by . David has been a guest several times on my Substack but this time we will be talking about his prescient novel! The Voter File came out in 2020 and is a story about how elections can be manipulated if someone can get their hands on…you got it, the voter file. Well, guess what? The Trump administration is trying to get their hands on…states’ voter files. Life imitates art, I guess (David’s first novel, published in 2016, was about Russian election interference.) This will be a terrifying beach read with real world implications!

• JULY (Date/Time TBA): One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pritzker. Is it OK to call the warehouses being built across the U.S. as “concentration camps”? Andrea Pritzker knows the answer (and it’s yes). There has, sadly, never been a more important time to learn the history of how this form of human internment and political repression was developed and how it has evolved. (I picked July so at least the weather is nice when we’re reading it — better than in winter when it gets dark at 4 p.m. and you’re already depressed.)

  

• AUGUST (Date/Time TBA): The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. This book has been on my nightstand forever…to be honest, though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it last year, when Elon Musk was still taking a wrecking ball to our government. But now I’m ready: find out the origin story of the tech villains you love to hate, and who now have an outsized influence on our collective future.

• SEPTEMBER: The publication date for Mimi’s book has been pushed back, so stay tuned as I am lining up another book for this month!

• OCTOBER (Date/Time TBA): The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I’ve been so excited to read Tim’s book since it came out last fall. His last book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (a must-read), chronicled the history and evolution of the agency from its inception during World War II through 9/11. This book picks it up from there to the present day. This will be a great discussion on the past and the future of our foreign intelligence capability.

  

• NOVEMBER (Date/Time TBA): This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. I was soooo excited to learn that this book was finally out! For those of you who have been subcribers to The Freedom Academy for a while, you know that Professor Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century was our first book club selection! (You can watch that talk here.) I’m soooo excited to have her back to discuss her latest project, which a journey through the amazing history and diversity of OUR country. With better planning I would have gotten this on the calendar closer to July 4, but honestly the midterm elections is as good a time as any to be reminded of the American values we love, and why they are still alive and well in the hearts of its people.

  

• DECEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Lost Orchid: A Tale of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston. I realize that this title is not necessarily in the vein as the others, but I feel like by December we’re going to be ready for a change of pace for the holidays — and what better distraction is there than a little Victorian plunder and obsession? Seriously, though, this book has been on my to-read list since my brilliant colleague, professor of British literature, and master storyteller published this last year (I’m also partial to orchids, it being the only plant I have successfully managed to tend in my home). This will be a fun discussion to close out the year!

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My Clips This Week:

I joined Ana Cabrera on MSNOW earlier this week to discuss the indictment against James Comey.

This Week’s It’s Complicated Podcast:

Renato and I discuss the latest insanity from the Justice Department, as exhibited by the indictment against James Comey for posting a photo of seashells on his Instagram account. We also discuss the aftermath of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner assassination attempt, including Trump’s unhinged court filings:

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It’s Complicated is Cruisin’!

Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information.

Leave a comment

I have a lot of ideas swirling around in my head from my research to share but this weekend I am hunkering down to grade papers and exams — I hope to see you next week!

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A quick note on a referen…

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If you are not able to join this afternoon, the talk will be recorded and posted for paid subscribers tomorrow. Please join at the following link at 1 p.m.:

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There are times in the Trump era where you sort of know something, intuitively, but then when an actual report comes out putting in black and white, it’s especially jarring because it’s even worse than you thought. That’s how I felt reading Sarah Fitzpatrick’s report in The Atlantic of panic within the FBI resulting from Director Kash Patel’s alleged drinking habits. Drawing from interviews with over two dozen people – not only current and former FBI agents, but staff at other intelligence agencies, members of Congress, and “hospitality industry workers” (!), among others – Fitzpatrick paints a picture of an agency literally passed out at the wheel. It did not take long for Patel to fire back against Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic with a defamation lawsuit, an attempt to protect his job as much as his reputation. The lawsuit is unlikely to prevail, but that won’t change the bigger concern: The claims in the article, if true, pose an alarming national security threat to the United States.

I won’t rehash Fitzpatrick’s article in too much detail (it is definitely worth the read if you haven’t already done so), but it suggests a level of incompetence and negligence that is astounding, even for this administration. For instance, the article claims that early in his tenure meetings would have to be pushed to later in the day because of Patel’s “alcohol-fueled nights” and that he is “known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication” at some very specific establishments in D.C. The detail that became most viral was the report that Patel’s security detail had to request “breaching equipment” (in my mind I have a battering ram, but there are other ways to breach a door) because the director was allegedly nonresponsive behind locked doors. Needless to say, the article notes alarm of people across the government, considering that the FBI is understaffed as it responds to numerous domestic and international threats, not to mention a war. (The attrition of agents, of course, is due to the firings and resignations that have happened in the wake of Patel becoming the director.)

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The lawsuit against The Atlantic, in which Patel is claiming $250 million in damages, faces an uphill battle. Because Patel is a public figure, he must show 1) that the statements in the article are false, and 2) that the magazine acted with “actual malice,” which is defined as acting with a “reckless disregard for the truth.” You might remember that Fox News, which repeatedly aired false claims about Dominion Voting Systems in the aftermath of the 2020 election despite knowing they were false, met this high bar. But Fitzpatrick’s article is a far (far) cry from Fox News. Not only does she rely on a large number of sources, she also used standard journalistic practice to reach out to Patel himself for comment, and published his denial. (“Print it, all false, I’ll see you in court—bring your checkbook.”) As for falsity, Fitzpatrick says that she’s been “inundated” with even more corroboration since Patel filed his lawsuit, and The Intercept just published Patel’s own letters to the Florida state bar addressing episodes of excessive drinking from college and law school. And, of course, we’ve all seen the footage of Patel chugging brewskies with the U.S. hockey team. Discovery could be really fun, though the suit will probably get tossed before then.

The suit against The Atlantic isn’t Patel’s first defamation rodeo. Last June, he sued former FBI agent and MSNOW contributor Frank Figliuzzi for stating on air that Patel had “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building.” Patel claimed that Figliuzzi had “fabricated a specific lie” about him, but the judge in that case disagreed. Just last week, Judge George Hanks of the U.S. district court for the Southern District of Texas dismissed the lawsuit, stating that Figliuzzi’s comments were “rhetorical hyperbole” and that his “statement, when taken in context, cannot have been perceived by a person of ordinary intelligence as stating actual facts about Patel.” (I.e., that no reasonable person would actually believe that Patel literally spent more time at nightclubs than at the office. I mean true, but then again….)

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Whatever happens in the courts is really secondary, though, to the larger problem. Those of you who have been reading my work for a while know that I often invoke the mnemonic used by the FBI when it conducts background checks: CARLA F. BAD. To recap, this stands for: Character; Associates; Reputation; Loyalty; Ability; Finances; Bias; Alcohol/Addictions; and Drugs. The FBI’s Adjudicative Desk Reference, which agents use to assess what kinds of behaviors might make someone unsuitable for a position of public trust, has this to say about alcohol abuse (which it distinguishes from the equally problematic alcohol dependence): “Alcohol abuse may be part of a pattern of impulsive, immature, sensation-seeking, hostile, or antisocial behavior that raises serious concern about a subject’s reliability, trustworthiness, or judgment.” Hmmm. It also states that alcohol (ab)use is a serious security concern when it creates “work problems such as absences, reduced productivity, unreliability, carelessness, or unsafe habits.” Hmmm.

The desk reference also notes a correlation between alcohol abuse and national security vulnerabilities. It observes that that alcohol abuse is disproportionately represented among convicted spies than among the general population: Out of 24 American spies convicted of espionage (including Aldrich Ames, which it includes as a case study), twenty had been drinkers, eleven were heavy drinkers, and nine increased their drinking once they began their espionage activities. Obviously, just because someone abuses alcohol doesn’t mean they will become a spy. However, because excessive drinking reflects “irresponsibility and a lack of control” and also may cause excess and poor judgment in other areas adversaries may look to exploit — like finances (i.e. debt) — it is precisely the kind of behavior that can, standing alone, be the basis for denying access to sensitive information or a position of public trust.

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These concerns are, of course, exponentially greater when we are talking about the Director of the FBI, who has access to the most sensitive information across the entire intelligence community, especially during a time of war. But perhaps that won’t be a concern for too much longer. President Trump is not a drinker – his older brother, Fred, died at a young age after struggling with alcoholism. Fitzpatrick writes that Trump was already displeased with Patel’s beer-chugging spectacle at the Olympics, and called to tell him so – which might be why Patel reportedly thinks he is on thin ice. One of the incidents detailed in The Atlantic article is when Patel was temporarily locked out of a government system – according to Fitzpatrick, he had a “freak out,” believing he had lost access because he had been fired, suggesting that he knows he is on thin ice. Patel’s effort to fight back so vehemently against the claims made by The Atlantic may not only be an effort to save his reputation, but also his job.

Leave a comment

ON COMPLICITY AND COURAGE

If you are new to my Substack, I am doing research for my book, Uncompromised: Activating Your Moral Compass in an Age of Complicity, and using this platform to showcase some of the authors and research I am learning from to understand what makes people complicit in bad behavior, and learning from the people who take a stand against it.

To this end, I’ll be writing free posts on these topics each month, in addition to my weekly Round Ups, on the topics of complicity and courage. Each month I’ll have one person — like a psychologist, professor, leadership expert — explain the science and theory behind complicity and courage. And then I will also bring in a real-time moral rebel who can talk about what led them to take a stand — despite the personal and professional risks they faced (and often still face). Studies show that people are better able to resist pressure and stand up for their beliefs when they can reflect on their own values and see models of moral courage in action, so I hope you will tune in and take some knowledge and inspiration from my guests! (You can find past guests, as well as posts on the topic, under the Complicity & Courage tab on the homepage.)

Zoom links for guest speakers are sent three hours before the event, and the discussions will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live. You can always access past guest speakers here and book club authors here.

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THIS WEEK!

• THIS WEEK! Thursday, April 30, 1-2 p.m. EDT: Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping Democracy by , author of Substack. Many of you noted the optimism in my post from yesterday — I think I was largely influenced by the hope in Joyce’s book, which I have been reading in preparation for this talk. I have been waiting for this talk for a long time, and I hope you will join us!

  

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Coming Up:

• On Courage: Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn (Thursday, May 7, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. ). I think all of us are incredibly grateful for Harry’s service, along with the rest of the Capitol Hill police, on January 6. I have had a chance to hear him speak and to get to know him personally since then, and am so thrilled that he will be coming on this Substack to talk to us!

• On Complicity: Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (Monday, May 18, 2 -3 p.m.). Project 2025 mirrored the tactics used by Orban in Hungary (his team literally helped them write it)…and things didn’t turn out so well. Professor Scheppele is THE person to help break down Hungary’s secret sauce in its last election, and how we here can replicate it.

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The Freedom Academy Book Club

In the past I have typically done a book selection every quarter, but I am going to get more ambitious for 2026 and try to do one each month — too many interesting books and cool authors! Check out the selections below:

• MAY (Thursday, May 28, 5-6 p.m. EDT): Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by . I know that as we approach SCOTUS decision season we will need an expert guide to help us make sense of rulings that have come down and what to expect on the ones still pending! I am so excited to talk with University of Michigan Law Professor Leah Litman about how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails and what (if anything) we can do about it.

• JUNE (Date/Time TBA): The Voter File by . David has been a guest several times on my Substack but this time we will be talking about his prescient novel! The Voter File came out in 2020 and is a story about how elections can be manipulated if someone can get their hands on…you got it, the voter file. Well, guess what? The Trump administration is trying to get their hands on…states’ voter files. Life imitates art, I guess (David’s first novel, published in 2016, was about Russian election interference.) This will be a terrifying beach read with real world implications!

• JULY (Date/Time TBA): One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pritzker. Is it OK to call the warehouses being built across the U.S. as “concentration camps”? Andrea Pritzker knows the answer (and it’s yes). There has, sadly, never been a more important time to learn the history of how this form of human internment and political repression was developed and how it has evolved. (I picked July so at least the weather is nice when we’re reading it — better than in winter when it gets dark at 4 p.m. and you’re already depressed.)

  

• AUGUST (Date/Time TBA): The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. This book has been on my nightstand forever…to be honest, though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it last year, when Elon Musk was still taking a wrecking ball to our government. But now I’m ready: find out the origin story of the tech villains you love to hate, and who now have an outsized influence on our collective future.

• SEPTEMBER (Date/Time TBA): Justice Under Siege by Mimi Rocah. Mimi is a former federal prosecutor who is writing, in real-time, about the hostile takeover and purge of the Justice Department. We’ll get to talk to her when her book is hot off the presses, just in time to get us fired up for the midterms! (No book cover yet, but you’ll be the first to see it when it’s out!)

• OCTOBER (Date/Time TBA): The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I’ve been so excited to read Tim’s book since it came out last fall. His last book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (a must-read), chronicled the history and evolution of the agency from its inception during World War II through 9/11. This book picks it up from there to the present day. This will be a great discussion on the past and the future of our foreign intelligence capability.

  

• NOVEMBER (Date/Time TBA): This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. I was soooo excited to learn that this book was finally out! For those of you who have been subcribers to The Freedom Academy for a while, you know that Professor Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century was our first book club selection! (You can watch that talk here.) I’m soooo excited to have her back to discuss her latest project, which a journey through the amazing history and diversity of OUR country. With better planning I would have gotten this on the calendar closer to July 4, but honestly the midterm elections is as good a time as any to be reminded of the American values we love, and why they are still alive and well in the hearts of its people.

  

• DECEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Lost Orchid: A Tale of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston. I realize that this title is not necessarily in the vein as the others, but I feel like by December we’re going to be ready for a change of pace for the holidays — and what better distraction is there than a little Victorian plunder and obsession? Seriously, though, this book has been on my to-read list since my brilliant colleague, professor of British literature, and master storyteller published this last year (I’m also partial to orchids, it being the only plant I have successfully managed to tend in my home). This will be a fun discussion to close out the year!

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My Clips This Week:

I joined MSNOW’s Ana Cabrera to discuss the SPLC indictment:

This Week’s It’s Complicated Podcast:

Renato and I discuss the Justice Department’s indictment against the SPLC, which tries to paint the storied civil rights organization that exposes right-wing hate groups as on that provides material support to terrorism. We also examine FBI Director’s defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and the chaos behind the Justice Department’s efforts to bring a case against former CIA Director John Brennan:

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It’s Complicated is Cruisin’!

Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information.

Leave a comment

One of the fun things about writing about complicity is that everyone, it seems, is interested in the topic. When I tell people about my book topic, they are invariably intrigued — which means that they often ping me with “have you seen this?” along with a link to articles, speeches, books, podcasts, etc. (Thanks to all of you who have done that! About 80% of the time it’s something that was not on my radar, and I love new sources and research and case studies, so keep ‘em coming.)

Recently, at a dinner at the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, I sat a few seats away from a woman whom I didn’t get to speak to, but who overheard me talking about the book. She literally tracked me down and suggested a podcast called In Bed With the Right — and particularly a sub-series on the podcast called “Project 1933.” The podcast hosts decided to do this series last year, soon after Trump was inaugurated. The idea was to understand how ordinary people experienced the rapid consolidation of power during Gleichshaltung — the “forced synchronization” of all institutions and civil society with Nazi ideology following Hitler’s ascension as chancellor on January 30, 1933 — month by month, for a year.

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It’s quite well done, and is a fascinating approach in that they draw a lot from contemporaneous sources, like people’s diaries, to understand how impacted individuals interpreted what they were seeing around them — remembering, of course, that in that moment, they, unlike us, were unaware of the very, very dark place where the trajectory would take them. And indeed, looking back on our own experience in 2025, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, it’s hard not to see the parallels: the administration’s attempts to bring universities, law firms, and the media to heel; the punishing of critics (like the firings for people who dared say anything about Charlie Kirk after his murder); and the unleashing of the ICE terror campaign. (Frankly, one has to wonder whether the architects behind Trump’s first 100 days had a specific model in mind.) I could imagine if you were listening to the pod last year as they were describing what was happening in Germany ninety-two years before, you’d be kind of freaked out.

A year later, though, it feels very different. Not that we are out of the woods regarding the danger to our democracy, or that there hasn’t been a LOT of damage done to it, but there is a sort of womp womp vibe to the whole effort by the Trump regime to establish authoritarian control. So listening to the pod now actually makes me reflect on important differences between America 2026 (and even later in 2025) and Germany 1933 which I think has made us more resilient. A few of them are as follows:

1. We’re Aware of the Stakes

In a lot of ways how ordinary people responded to 1933 seems to me more like how people responded to Trump in 2015. They just didn’t take him seriously. They were confused by how this fringy and clownish movement could gain power. And they assumed that once in power, institutions would hold. We did the same with Trump leading up to, and after, his election in 2016. And to our great fortune, between a combination of his own ignorance of the breadth of power he had and the presence of some relatively normal (“normal”) people around him, he was largely prevented from doing the worst (though by January 2021, he got there).

We know, of course, that Trump and his MAGA circle learned from that term, and also had four years to plan to do differently. But they also advertised it for all the world to see. Granted, we weren’t quite prepared for DOGE or immediately defying court orders or the blatant retaliatory EOs, and they caught us off-guard…temporarily. But the various culture wars, while riling up the MAGA base, also made clear that going in to 2025, we were in an existential fight for our democracy, and for either an exclusive or inclusive vision of America. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision also made it crystal clear that there were no real guardrails this time around. That foreknowledge matters — and it’s why we were already ready with a phalanx of lawyers, people ready to protest nationwide, and some media and commentators (like the Project 1933 podcast itself) offering clarity on what was happening.

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2. Our Democratic Values Are Baked In

One thing I hadn’t really appreciated until I listened to the pod was how briefly the German experience with democracy under the Weimar Republic was. The timespan from the end of the Kaiser Republic and the Nazis’ takeover was only fifteen years. And during that time, it seems like most people were not impressed with democracy — in episode 4, the hosts of the pod call pre-1933 Germany “a traumatized society” emerging from a world war with social fissures, a sense of national grievance, acute unemployment, and a number of other severe structural and systemic issues. Anti-democratic sentiment was more pervasive, increasing the general receptiveness to a strongman.

The MAGA movement is, without a doubt, antidemocratic, and it has been a surprisingly stubborn wart on our body politic for the past decade. But honestly I think this hard-core group is only (“only”) 25-30% of our population. Not something we can ignore, but a minority. This country has had its ups and downs and has yet to realize its full potential as a democracy, but I truly believe that the vast majority of people in the U.S., partisan affiliations aside, actually want one and care about democratic values. I think we see that in the waning support for Trump, the pushback against the ICE raids, and the election wins. As we approach America’s 250th birthday, I think more people will be reminded of what really makes this country great, and we aren’t giving them up anytime soon.

3. Our Institutions and Constitution Still Work

Bear with me, here. Yes, they have been crippled, and some of them, like the Justice Department, are on life support. But I think it’s important to remember that the institutional and constitutional levers of accountability still exist and work. To wit: We still have the capacity and infrastructure to, among other things: bring righteous prosecutions; conduct congressional oversight; bring articles of impeachment; fight back on redistricting efforts; and have judicial review of the administration’s actions. The problem is that many of the people in control of many of these levers — like Congress and SCOTUS — are abusing their power or refusing to utilize these mechanisms.

You might think this is a distinction without a difference: What good are institutions and levers of power if the people in control of them won’t act, or act antidemocratically? I don’t disagree that it’s a problem, and one that we will need to address both at the ballot box and in some kind of reconstruction period when this is all over. But it is a far cry from a formal elimination of checks and balances, complete elimination of oversight, and the handing of total and arbitrary power to one person. We still hold the power.

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4. We Have Instantaneous Communication

One of the very clear patterns I have observed among the central wrongdoers in any complicity system — whether it’s a corporate CEO, a sex predator, or a dictator — is that they operate through secrecy, compartmentalization of information, and the use of lies and propaganda to shape reality. This was clearly an advantage for the Nazis in 1933: People were atomized and just didn’t have any way of immediately knowing what was happening to their friends and neighbors or in other parts of their country. This opacity made it easier to whisk away political opponents and dissidents to prisons and initial concentration camps like Dachau. Modern communications technology can make this kind of government gaslighting easier — indeed, for those who have delved into my Substack course, information warfare is the cheap weapon of choice for authoritarians.

But two can play at this game. As Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology states, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Part of what this administration has been unable to counter is the immediate transparency into things like ICE abductions and shootings. New and independent media is covering things that Trump-captured networks won’t. And the administration has also been thwarted in its efforts to construct detention facilities around the country. My friend (one of my initial speakers for my Complicity and Courage series!) at just launched a new rapid response initiative called GTFO — ICE (Get the Facilities Out) which allows you to sign up and immediately be notified if ICE is attempting to open a prison camp in your backyard. We may be being watched, but we are watching right back.

5. It’s Really Hard to Get Rid of Political Opponents

We currently have front row seats to Trump’s revenge tour against his enemies. It’s been disconcerting to watch, but let’s face it, it’s not going so well. That’s because Trump can’t just round up or eliminate his opponents, as much as I’m sure he’d like to. He has to go through the criminal justice system, which actually puts up meaningful roadblocks, like due process and judicial oversight (see #3, above). Womp womp.

Though they may not realize it, this is good news for people like Vance and Rubio and any other GOP contender who aspires to the presidency in 2028. I just finished the fourth installment of the Project 1933 series which discusses the rise of the Nazi brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung, or SA). They note that only a year later, on the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had the leaders of the organization executed. (If you watch PBS’s The Dictator’s Playbook, you’ll know that eliminating threats to your power from the inner circle is a common authoritarian tactic, one employed by Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and others.) Now, technically, Trump could order Seal Team Six to assassinate anyone he likes, and there would be no legal accountability for it. But even as low as we’ve sunk, I don’t think he really has that level of power, and clearly he doesn’t, either (if he did, he would have used it by now). It’s hanging by a thread, but we are still a nation of laws. Mostly.

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I realize that “Hey, it’s not as bad as 1933 Germany!” is a low bar for hope. And to be clear, I’m not trying to sugarcoat the absolute s***show that is our democracy right now, nor am I suggesting that we need to be complacent. But compared to where we thought we were a year ago, our democracy is not in free fall.

What happens next isn’t inevitable, and where we go from here is up to us.

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Join us as we discuss the responsibility of journalists and media in this moment to speak the unvarnished truth.

Please join at the following Zoom link at 3:00 p.m. EDT:

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ON COMPLICITY AND COURAGE

If you are new to my Substack, I am doing research for my book, Uncompromised: Activating Your Moral Compass in an Age of Complicity, and using this platform to showcase some of the authors and research I am learning from to understand what makes people complicit in bad behavior, and learning from the people who take a stand against it.

To this end, I’ll be writing free posts on these topics each month, in addition to my weekly Round Ups, on the topics of complicity and courage. Each month I’ll have one person — like a psychologist, professor, leadership expert — explain the science and theory behind complicity and courage. And then I will also bring in a real-time moral rebel who can talk about what led them to take a stand — despite the personal and professional risks they faced (and often still face). Studies show that people are better able to resist pressure and stand up for their beliefs when they can reflect on their own values and see models of moral courage in action, so I hope you will tune in and take some knowledge and inspiration from my guests! (You can find past guests, as well as posts on the topic, under the Complicity & Courage tab on the homepage.)

Zoom links for guest speakers are sent three hours before the event, and the discussions will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live. You can always access past guest speakers here and book club authors here.

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THIS WEEK!

• On Courage: Moran, former Senior National Correspondent at ABC News and now author of the Substack, (Thursday, April 23, 2026, 3 p.m. EDT). I always loved being on ABC News when Terry was hosting because of his thoughtful analysis of the news of the day. But I am even more excited to have him on to talk about how the media is responding to the authoritarian threat and his own experience speaking the blunt truth (and paying a price for it).

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Coming Up:

• On Complicity: Professor Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs (May Time/Date TBA). I have learned SO MUCH from Professor Scheppele about the authoritarian playbook being replicated around the world. Tune in to learn the tactics used by Orban in Hungary and the far right in Brazil and how Project 2025 has mirrored these moves.

• On Courage: Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn (May Time/Date TBA). I think all of us are incredibly grateful for Harry’s service, along with the rest of the Capitol Hill police, on January 6. I have had a chance to hear him speak and to get to know him personally since then, and am so thrilled that he will be coming on this Substack to talk to us!

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The Freedom Academy Book Club

In the past I have typically done a book selection every quarter, but I am going to get more ambitious for 2026 and try to do one each month — too many interesting books and cool authors! Check out the selections below:

• NEXT WEEK! APRIL (Thursday, April 30, 1-2 p.m. EDT): Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping Democracy by , author of Substack. This book talk is waaaaaay overdue, but Joyce has been on the road since her bestseller came out so I am happy to grab her when I can! I know we will all need a civic pep talk and pick me up in April…plus we will have changed the clocks by then so things will already feel more hopeful. I truly can’t wait for this discussion!

• MAY (Thursday, May 28, 5-6 p.m. EDT): Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by . I know that as we approach SCOTUS decision season we will need an expert guide to help us make sense of rulings that have come down and what to expect on the ones still pending! I am so excited to talk with University of Michigan Law Professor Leah Litman about how the Supreme Court has gone off the rails and what (if anything) we can do about it.

• JUNE (Date/Time TBA): The Voter File by . David has been a guest several times on my Substack but this time we will be talking about his prescient novel! The Voter File came out in 2020 and is a story about how elections can be manipulated if someone can get their hands on…you got it, the voter file. Well, guess what? The Trump administration is trying to get their hands on…states’ voter files. Life imitates art, I guess (David’s first novel, published in 2016, was about Russian election interference.) This will be a terrifying beach read with real world implications!

• JULY (Date/Time TBA): One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pritzker. Is it OK to call the warehouses being built across the U.S. as “concentration camps”? Andrea Pritzker knows the answer (and it’s yes). There has, sadly, never been a more important time to learn the history of how this form of human internment and political repression was developed and how it has evolved. (I picked July so at least the weather is nice when we’re reading it — better than in winter when it gets dark at 4 p.m. and you’re already depressed.)

  

• AUGUST (Date/Time TBA): The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. This book has been on my nightstand forever…to be honest, though, I couldn’t bring myself to read it last year, when Elon Musk was still taking a wrecking ball to our government. But now I’m ready: find out the origin story of the tech villains you love to hate, and who now have an outsized influence on our collective future.

• SEPTEMBER (Date/Time TBA): Justice Under Siege by Mimi Rocah. Mimi is a former federal prosecutor who is writing, in real-time, about the hostile takeover and purge of the Justice Department. We’ll get to talk to her when her book is hot off the presses, just in time to get us fired up for the midterms! (No book cover yet, but you’ll be the first to see it when it’s out!)

• OCTOBER (Date/Time TBA): The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner. I’ve been so excited to read Tim’s book since it came out last fall. His last book on the CIA, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (a must-read), chronicled the history and evolution of the agency from its inception during World War II through 9/11. This book picks it up from there to the present day. This will be a great discussion on the past and the future of our foreign intelligence capability.

  

• NOVEMBER (Date/Time TBA): This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage. I was soooo excited to learn that this book was finally out! For those of you who have been subcribers to The Freedom Academy for a while, you know that Professor Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of an American Century was our first book club selection! (You can watch that talk here.) I’m soooo excited to have her back to discuss her latest project, which a journey through the amazing history and diversity of OUR country. With better planning I would have gotten this on the calendar closer to July 4, but honestly the midterm elections is as good a time as any to be reminded of the American values we love, and why they are still alive and well in the hearts of its people.

  

• DECEMBER (Date/Time TBA): The Lost Orchid: A Tale of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston. I realize that this title is not necessarily in the vein as the others, but I feel like by December we’re going to be ready for a change of pace for the holidays — and what better distraction is there than a little Victorian plunder and obsession? Seriously, though, this book has been on my to-read list since my brilliant colleague, professor of British literature, and master storyteller published this last year (I’m also partial to orchids, it being the only plant I have successfully managed to tend in my home). This will be a fun discussion to close out the year!

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Podcast appearances:

Renato and I didn’t record a podcast this past week because I was traveling, but you can check out my appearance on ’s , where we discuss the state of the FBI today (sadly, this was before the latest crazy reports about FBI Director Kash Patel). The full podcast is available here (and also on Spotify), but here is a short clip:

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It’s Complicated is Cruisin’!

Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information.

Leave a comment