One of the things I love about Substack is the humbling amount of great writing that I find on here every day. This is a new, hopefully to be continued, project for me: I’ll choose a handful of pieces really worth reading and explain why.
This piece hit home for me right from the headline. Recently someone I know, someone like me who is, let’s face it, not terribly important in our online world, told me that they had stopped posting anti-Trump and anti-fascist statements because of their fear of being arrested. And that truly shocked me. My mother is a scholar of German history and did research in Germany. One of the families we got to know through her research were farmers who hid Jewish tradesmen under their barn. It’s clear that the Nazis were empowered in a variety of ways, but one of the most profound was the silence and complicity of the non-Jewish population. If our government comes after you for telling the truth, sure, I’ll hide you in our crawl space… though you might want to find less smelly accommodations. And nothing they say or do will stop me from exercising my Constitutional right to tell it like I see it.
“Courage is contagious” is becoming one of our mottos for this administration. Keep focusing on the truth. Keep speaking out. Keep going.
Articles about how our political process is broken generally just make me angry or sad. This one is inspiring because Armitage very precisely shows us that while we need to keep up the work of everyday democracy (don’t stop writing those postcards and calling your elected officials!), we also need to understand the levers of power.
So many lefties I know, when faced with corporate power, just offer the standard platitudes about how we need to change our system. Sure, there’s a lot that needs to change, but we’re in this capitalist system, like it or not. You can say you don’t take part in capitalism, but you are wrong. We all do, and so we’re all responsible for stepping up and fixing it.
The federal democratic system has been captured by interests that will never allow it to threaten their power again. We can spend the next decade proof-testing that proposition with doomed electoral efforts, or we can build something new while we still have the resources and space to do so.
This is possibly the smartest reaction to Kirk’s murder that I’ve read. I love that it’s personal, yet well argued and factual. Ganz really looks at our nation, the way that some of us look in the mirror: seeing what’s actually there, not what we hope is there or what people tell us is there. His conclusion isn’t terribly hopeful, but it is realistic and non-apocalyptic.
It’s long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do.
Paul Krugman is hands-down one of my favorite short-form writers because he does something that so few people can do: marries technical knowledge with storytelling prowess. Krugman seldom veers out of his lane as an economist, but he never presents economic numbers as if they are just dry facts. Facts about money always illuminate stories about people. In these two pieces, Krugman uses research by economist Claudia Goldin to tell a story about while male distress. It’s not the story you usually hear, so check it out.
There’s lots of great feminist writing on Substack—too much of it behind a paywall. I agree with Sarah Fay that it’s a bad idea for writers to paywall all of their work. Yes, we women have a history of not asking to be paid, but we also need to get our ideas out there. This piece by Soraya Chemaly looks at the phenomenon of young male white violence through a feminist lens. The mainstream media “conspicuously misses the core gender dynamics underpinning both this shooting and broader patterns of extremism.” As feminists say over and over: We don’t have a problem with violence in this country, we have a problem with young male violence. Solve that, and we’d be a relatively peaceful nation.
There is no way to understand Kirk’s shooting, the morass of online right-wing culture, or widening extremist violence today without contending with violent male supremacy.
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