Keen On America

It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. According to the Pulitzer finalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, the majority of Americans no longer trust standard scientific proof. As he notes in his new book, The Ghost Labs, this faith in evidence based science has been replaced by the growth of bigfoot hunters, mediums, and alien enthusiasts. Hongoltz-Hetling traces this trend from his previous work on libertarian movements and alternative medicine, noting how the pandemic accelerated distrust in traditional institutions. He argues these paranormal beliefs, while seemingly harmless, fragment communities and undermine collective problem-solving. So how to fix this crisis in scientific trust? Hongoltz-Hetling’s suggestion of licensing psychics and incorporating these beliefs into clinical settings to prevent further institutional erosion might sound a little absurd. But perhaps it’s one concrete way of addressing social cohesion in our bizarre age of bigfoot hunters, mediums, and alien enthusiasts.

* Crisis of institutional trust: Americans are increasingly rejecting science, government, universities, and even churches, turning instead to individualistic paranormal beliefs as alternatives to evidence-based institutions.

* COVID as a catalyst: The pandemic accelerated existing distrust, with libertarian "medical freedom" messaging providing a bridge between fringe beliefs and mainstream Republican politics, leading to figures like RFK Jr. gaining power.

* Fragmented vs. collective belief: Unlike organized religion which builds community through shared doctrine, paranormal beliefs are highly individualistic and based on personal experience, ultimately driving people apart rather than together.

* Real-world consequences: This isn't just harmless entertainment—it leads to defunding of universities, people avoiding medical care, and the weakening of institutions that society depends on for collective problem-solving.

* Controversial solution: Hongoltz-Hetling reluctantly suggests licensing psychics and incorporating paranormal beliefs into clinical settings as a pragmatic strategy to prevent complete institutional collapse, though he acknowledges this feels like "capitulation to dark forces."

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting. He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Associated Press, and elsewhere.

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According to the legal scholar Marcus Alexander Gadson, violence is central to the constitutional history of the United States. As American, in fact, as apple pie. In his new book Sedition, Gadson argues that America's revolutionary foundations established a precedent for political violence. Examining six 19th-century constitutional crises including the Buckshot War, Brooks-Baxter War, and Bleeding Kansas, Gadson explores how disputed elections, fraud allegations, and violent responses shaped American democracy. Gadson expresses concern about current threats to constitutional order, particularly the January 6th Capitol attack and subsequent pardons, warning that inadequate consequences may encourage future attempts to overturn elections through violence.

Five Key Takeaways

* Revolutionary Origins Create Precedent: America's birth through violent revolution against Britain established a template that future groups would invoke to justify political violence and rebellion.

* Constitutional Crises Are Underappreciated: Gadson argues that violent constitutional crises have been more fundamental to American development than commonly recognized, with disputed elections frequently leading to armed conflict.

* 19th Century Pattern: Six major incidents show recurring themes of election disputes, fraud allegations, militia involvement, and federal intervention, demonstrating fragility of democratic institutions.

* January 6th Parallels: The Capitol attack fits historical patterns of insurrection, but the subsequent pardons set a dangerous precedent by failing to impose consequences.

* Current Constitutional Danger: Gadson warns we may be in a constitutional crisis, citing concerns about election integrity, court order compliance, and the normalization of political violence.

Who was America’s great power prophet during the Cold War? Perhaps not Henry Kissinger. In Zbig, Financial Times’ U.S. editor, Edward Luce, makes the case that the Polish-American strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski was at least equal to Kissinger in his prophetic grasp of America’s role in the Cold War world. Luce explores Brzezinski's role as Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, his combination of hard and soft power strategies against the Soviet Union, and his uncannily prescient predictions about Soviet collapse and the emergence of an "alliance of the aggrieved" against the United States.

five key takeaways

* Brzezinski was remarkably prescient - He accurately predicted Soviet collapse decades in advance, identifying the USSR's "Achilles heel" as its suppressed internal nations and calling it a "gerontocracy" destined to fail through "reverse natural selection."

* The dinner that saved Europe - Brzezinski's coordination with Pope John Paul II in 1980 helped prevent Soviet invasion of Poland by persuading Solidarity to moderate their rhetoric while warning Moscow that Poland would be "indigestible."

* Post-Cold War prophet of doom - Unlike triumphalist Americans in the 1990s, Brzezinski warned that U.S. hubris would create an "alliance of the aggrieved" (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) - a prediction that proved remarkably accurate.

* Meritocracy believer with aristocratic standards - Despite his Polish noble background, Brzezinski championed American meritocracy but maintained old-world intellectual rigor, famously giving only one A per class regardless of size.

* Study your adversaries - His key lesson for today: America must continue studying and understanding other nations' languages, cultures, and motivations rather than assuming everyone should simply follow the American model.

Edward Luce is the US national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. Luce's biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski Zbig, The life of Zbig Brzezinski: America's great power prophet, came out this month. He is the author of three highly acclaimed books, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (2017), Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (2012), and In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2007). He appears regularly on CNN, NPR, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and the BBC.

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Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people’s language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy’s excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism’s most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message.

5 key takeaways

* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.

* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.

* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.

* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.

* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.

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Full Transcript

Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."

But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.

So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?

John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.

Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.

Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?

John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.

And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.

But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you k...

Why are the Democrats losing the American working class? According to Joan Williams, it’s because they are failing to prioritize economic concerns of working-class Americans. In her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, Williams argues that Democrats lost the 2024 election because of their over-preoccupation with the interests of college educated Americans. Williams notes significant shifts among non-college voters of color toward Republicans and believes Democrats must develop what she calls "cultural competence" to connect with working-class voters. She emphasizes that economic struggle, and not just racism, drove Trump's victory. Williams advocates for a messaging that resonates with working-class values while maintaining progressive goals on issues like climate change. Democrats, she suggests, must return to their traditional language and prioritize economic stability for all Americans if they are to win back power in 2028.

Five Key Takeaways

* Democrats lost working-class voters across racial groups in 2024, with significant shifts among non-college voters of color (35-point shift among Latinos and 30-point shift among Black voters) and even larger shifts among younger voters of color.

* Williams argues that economic factors, not just racism, drove Trump's victory. She believes Democrats failed to prioritize inflation and economic issues that matter most to working-class Americans, focusing instead on issues that primarily resonate with college-educated elites.

* The "class-culture gap" between college-educated elites and working-class Americans requires Democrats to develop "cultural competence" - understanding and connecting with the values, communication styles, and priorities of non-college educated voters.

* Williams believes Democrats must center economic messaging on the principle that "anybody who works hard in America deserves a stable middle-class standard of living" while connecting progressive policies to working-class values.

* Unlike some critics, Williams doesn't believe Democrats must abandon identity politics or progressive causes, but rather must present these causes in ways that connect with working-class values while prioritizing economic issues.

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Described as having "something approaching rock star status” in her field by The New York Times Magazine, Joan C. Williams is an award-winning scholar of social inequality. She is the author of White Working Class, and has published on class dynamics in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic and more. She is Distinguished Professor of Law and Hastings Foundation Chair (emerita) at University of California College of the Law San Francisco.

In Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us, best selling writer Anna Malaika Tubbs reveals the secret history of American patriarchal values. Tubbs argues this patriarchy is the central narrative thread of American history. She emphasizes that patriarchy affects everyone differently according to their race, class, and gender - thereby creating a "gendered hierarchy" that excludes many from traditional gender roles. Tubbs maintains that this patriarchy persists. Indeed, she presents the Trump administration’s Project 2025 as a reactionary attempt to return to this central narrative of American history.

Five Key Takeaways

* American patriarchy was intentionally built into the nation's founding documents, with women deliberately excluded from the Constitution. This systemic design continues to influence modern American society and politics.

* Patriarchy affects different groups in varying ways—white women experience oppression differently than women of color, who historically weren't even afforded the "protections" of traditional gender roles. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for building effective coalitions.

* Agency is central to resistance against patriarchal systems. Throughout history, marginalized groups have consistently demonstrated alternative ways of living despite systemic constraints.

* Current political movements like Project 2025 represent a conscious return to traditional patriarchal values, particularly in their emphasis on women's reproductive roles.

* According to Tubbs, addressing patriarchy requires multi-level approaches: personal reflection, reimagining relationships, mindful parenting, and policy change. Understanding how patriarchy operates helps explain voting patterns and can inform strategies for social change.

Anna Malaika Tubbs is a New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University, Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear and engaging. Her articles have been published by TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, CNN, Motherly, the Huffington Post, For Harriet, The Guardian, Darling Magazine, and Blavity. Anna’s storytelling also takes form in her talks, including her TED Talk that has been viewed 2 million times, as well as the scripted and unscripted screen projects she has in development. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids.

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History, Marshall Poe wrote in December 2023, shows that Israel will never win a “war of occupation”. Eighteen months later, with Israel on the brink of a full scale occupation of Gaza, Poe’s argument is even more relevant. the Gaza war, the historian warns, is turning into Israel’s Vietnam - an unwinnable occupation that will only bring shame on the invaders. Trust Poe on the Vietnam analogy. His last book was about the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, so he’s all too familiar with the catastrophic consequences of imperial wars of counter-insurgency.

Five Takeaways

* Counterinsurgency operations typically evolve into prolonged occupations, as forces cannot easily identify and eliminate insurgents without alienating the local population.

* Military occupations historically fail when the entire civilian population becomes hostile to occupying forces, leading to ethical compromises and potential atrocities.

* The My Lai massacre in Vietnam exemplifies how poor intelligence and leadership can result in civilian casualties when soldiers cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

* Population relocation, a strategy being discussed for Gaza, has historically been catastrophic whenever attempted in the 20th century.

* The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has limited viable solutions, with Poe suggesting the two-state solution is no longer realistic and expressing skepticism that external powers like the US can resolve the situation.

Marshall Tillbrook Poe is an American historian, writer, editor, and founder of the New Books Network, an online collection of podcast interviews with a wide range of nonfiction authors. He has taught Russian, European, Eurasian, and world history at various universities including Harvard, Columbia, University of Iowa, and, currently, the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Poe is the author or editor of a number of books for children and adults.

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Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

So why did Harris lose in 2024? For one very big reason, according to the progressive essayist Bill Deresiewicz: “because she represented the exhausted Democratic establishment”. This rotting establishment, Deresiewicz believes, is symbolized by both the collective denial of Biden’s mental decline and by Harris’ pathetically rudderless Presidential campaign. But there’s a much more troubling problem with the Democratic party, he argues. It has become “the party of institutionalized liberalism, which is itself exhausted”. So how to reinvent American liberalism in the 2020’s? How to make the left once again, in Deresiewicz words, “the locus of openness, playfulness, productive contention, experiment, excess, risk, shock, camp, mirth, mischief, irony and curiosity"? That’s the question for all progressives in our MAGA/Woke age.

5 Key Takeaways

* Deresiewicz believes the Democratic establishment and aligned media engaged in a "tacit cover-up" of Biden's condition and other major issues like crime, border policies, and pandemic missteps rather than addressing them honestly.

* The liberal movement that began in the 1960s has become "exhausted" and the Democratic Party is now an uneasy alliance of establishment elites and working-class voters whose interests don't align well.

* Progressive institutions suffer from a repressive intolerance characterized by "an unearned sense of moral superiority" and a fear of vitality that leads to excessive rules, bureaucracy, and speech codes.

* While young conservatives are creating new movements with energy and creativity, the progressive establishment stifles innovation by purging anyone who "violates the code" or criticizes their side.

* Rebuilding the left requires creating conditions for new ideas by ending censoriousness, embracing true courage that risks something real, and potentially building new institutions rather than trying to reform existing ones.

Full Transcript

Andrew Keen: Hello, everyone. It's the old question on this show, Keen on America, how to make sense of this bewildering, frustrating, exciting country in the wake, particularly of the last election. A couple of years ago, we had the CNN journalist who I rather like and admire, Jake Tapper, on the show. Arguing in a piece of fiction that he thinks, to make sense of America, we need to return to the 1970s. He had a thriller out a couple of years ago called All the Demons Are Here. But I wonder if Tapper's changed his mind on this. His latest book, which is a sensation, which he co-wrote with Alex Thompson, is Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, its Cover-up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper, I think, tells the truth about Biden, as the New York Times notes. It's a damning portrait of an enfeebled Biden protected by his inner circle. I would extend that, rather than his inner circle protected by an elite, perhaps a coastal elite of Democrats, unable or unwilling to come to terms with the fact that Biden was way, way past his shelf life. My guest today, William Deresiewicz—always get his last name wrong—it must be...

William Deresiewicz: No, that was good. You got it.

Andrew Keen: Probably because I'm anti-semitic. He has a new piece out called "Post-Election" which addresses much of the rottenness of the American progressive establishment in 2025. Bill, congratulations on the piece.

William Deresiewicz: Thank you.

Andrew Keen: Have you had a chance to look at this Tapper book or have you read about Original Sin?

William Deresiewicz: Yeah, I read that piece. I read the piece that's on the screen and I've heard some people talking about it. And I mean, as you said, it's not just his inner circle. I don't want to blame Tapper. Tapper did the work. But one immediate reaction to the debate debacle was, where have the journalists been? For example, just to unfairly call one person out, but they're just so full of themselves, the New Yorker dripping with self-congratulations, especially in its centennial year, its boundless appetite for self-celebration—to quote something one of my students once said about Yale—they've got a guy named Evan Osnos, who's one of their regulars on their political...

Andrew Keen: Yeah, and he's been on the show, Evan, and in fact, I rather like his, I was going to say his husband, his father, Peter Osnos, who's a very heavy-hitting ex-publisher. But anyway, go on. And Evan's quite a nice guy, personally.

William Deresiewicz: I'm sure he's a nice guy, but the fact is he's not only a New Yorker journalist, but he wrote a book about Biden, which means that he's presumably theoretically well-sourced within Biden world. He didn't say anything. I mean, did he not know or did he know?

Andrew Keen: Yeah, I agree. I mean you just don't want to ask, right? You don't know. But you're a journalist, so you're supposed to know. You're supposed to ask. So I'm sure you're right on Osnos. I mean, he was on the show, but all journalists are progressives, or at least all the journalists at the Times and the New Yorker and the Atlantic. And there seemed to be, as Jake Tapper is suggesting in this new book, and he was part of the cover-up, there seemed to be a cover-up on the part of the entire professional American journalist establishment, high-end establishment, to ignore the fact that the guy running for president or the president himself clearly had no idea of what was going on around him. It's just astonishing, isn't it? I mean, hindsight's always easy, of course, 2020 in retrospect, but it was obvious at the time. I made it clear whenever I spoke about Biden, that here was a guy clearly way out of his depth, that he shouldn't have been president, maybe shouldn't have been president in the first place, but whatever you think about his ideas, he clearly was way beyond his shelf date, a year or two into the presidency.

William Deresiewicz: Yeah, but here's the thing, and it's one of the things I say in the post-election piece, but I'm certainly not the only person to say this. There was an at least tacit cover-up of Biden, of his condition, but the whole thing was a cover-up, meaning every major issue that the 2024 election was about—crime, at the border, woke excess, affordability. The whole strategy of not just the Democrats, but this media establishment that's aligned with them is to just pretend that it wasn't happening, to explain it away. And we can also throw in pandemic policy, right? Which people were still thinking about and all the missteps in pandemic policy. The strategy was effectively a cover-up. We're not gonna talk about it, or we're gonna gaslight you, or we're gonna make excuses. So is it a surprise that people don't trust these establishment institutions anymore? I mean, I don't trust them anymore and I want to trust them.

Andrew Keen: Were there journalists? I mean, there were a handful of journalists telling the truth about Biden. Progressives, people on the left rather than conservatives.

William Deresiewicz: Ezra Klein started to talk about it, I remember that. So yes, there were a handful, but it wasn't enough. And you know, I don't say this to take away from Ezra Klein what I just gave him with my right hand, take away with my left, but he was also the guy, as soon as the Kamala succession was effected, who was talking about how Kamala in recent months has been going from strength to streng...

“That he not busy being born is busy dying”, Dylan noted in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, his grim 1965 masterpiece about reinvention. Sixty years later, at a time when “everything is technology”, these words have particular resonance in Silicon Valley. As That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I discuss in our weekly roundup of tech news, every Big Tech firm - from OpenAI and Airbnb to YouTube and Netflix — is in the perpetual business of radical reinvention. It’s what Keith identifies as “the truth” of our technological age. Surviving this mayhem, then, requires not just perpetual birth, but also a lot of conscious dying.

5 takeaways

* Keith Teare argues that "truth" can only meaningfully apply to facts and past events, not to opinions or future possibilities. He suggests that what becomes "true" is created after the fact through human actions and choices.

* Our discussion explores how technological change is accelerating, with Paki McCormick's article "Everything is Technology" framing technology broadly as "the process of human ingenuity transforming conditions and creating change" rather than just gadgets.

* We discuss AI's impact on education, with Keith sharing an example of a professor who allegedly resigned in real-time after discovering students had created a website with AI-generated lecture summaries and essay responses, highlighting the disruption to traditional academic models.

* Our conversation covers how established companies like Airbnb and Netflix are evolving their business models, with Netflix adding an ad-supported tier alongside its subscription service and Airbnb expanding from accommodations to curated experiences.

* We discuss economic differences between regions, referencing Yascha Mounk's article on the "great divergence" between the US and Europe in terms of GDP per capita, noting that the US has roughly three times the GDP per capita of Europe (approximately $85,000 versus $30,000).

Is spying an un-American activity? Not according to Jeffrey Rogg, whose new book, The Spy and the State, tells the story of American intelligence from the Revolutionary War to the present day. Rogg explores America's ambivalent relationship with espionage, arguing that spying is often viewed as "un-American" and yet necessary. he discusses key figures in American intelligence history such as OSS founder “Wild” Bill Donovan as well as shameful episodes like the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. Rogg highlights how these agencies reflect American society's strengths and weaknesses, and warns against over-politicizing intelligence. Throughout history, he emphasizes, Americans have gotten the intelligence community they've "bargained for." Which is certainly one way of thinking about SignalGate and the current state of American intelligence.

5 take-aways

* Americans have historically viewed spying as a "necessary evil" that contradicts core American values of transparency and forthrightness, creating an inherent tension in the intelligence community.

* Intelligence agencies often reflect the broader society - during crises, they tend to surveil minority groups, showing how America's fears manifest in intelligence operations.

* Major intelligence failures (like the Bay of Pigs) and domestic surveillance represent dark chapters that have eroded public trust in intelligence institutions.

* Political polarization of intelligence agencies is dangerous - when appointed leaders and career officials are at odds, it creates a toxic environment for effective intelligence work.

* The intelligence community struggles to keep pace with technological advances, creating challenges for modern operations (as seen in the Signal Crisis and COVID work-from-home limitations).

*

Jeffrey P. Rogg is Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. He previously held academic positions at the Joint Special Operations University at US Special Operations Command, the Department of Intelligence and Security Studies at The Citadel, and the National Security Affairs Department at the US Naval War College. He has a BA from Swarthmore College, a JD from Villanova University, an MA in Security Studies from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and a PhD in history from The Ohio State University. He serves on the boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence and the Society for Intelligence History. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.