The.Ink

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkWe’ve spent this week talking a lot about Elon Musk’s ongoing coup — and, as more information emerges about his attempt to use his team of junior programmers to reshape America in the image of Grok AI — something we found even Grok AI doesn’t recommend, by the way — we’re going to keep delving into the details.I covered all of that and more in a live co…

What an astonishing, terrifying day. Again.Last week’s coup by an elected leader, seeking to usurp the spending power of Congress, has been eclipsed by something utterly unprecedented: a private businessman, in Elon Musk, unilaterally weaseling his way into the payment system of the most powerful country in human history as well as shutting down USAID.Meanwhile, we have a Democratic opposition that, in general, seems to be focused — with some exceptions — on improving its penmanship for strongly worded letters rather than, well, fighting back. And a press that doesn’t know how to name things.I talked live with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of fascism and authoritarian leaders and movements, and we tried to bring some light to everything that’s going on.This is a really powerful conversation full of analysis that I think you won’t find elsewhere. I started this newsletter on a whim in 2020, but now, more and more, I believe that it’s going to be independent spaces like this that allow us to tell the truths that need telling and apply the pressure that needs to be applied, even if we are small.But, also, we are not small; we are many. Thank you for being a part of this, and if you value independent media in this time, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.Share this video with people you know. These Lives are open to all who come, and the recordings are perks of subscribing, which helps us do the work of telling these truths. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

I normally try to be calm (well, sort of). But these are extraordinary times, and we need an extraordinary opposition, and we are quickly learning that we don’t have one.And so the above is a rant.(Apologies in advance if this is too much for you. Hold out for my next sober essay.)But it’s time to stop coddling the Democrats, even in our own minds. If you are not part of the future of an extraordinary pro-democracy opposition, make way. Time to start that restaurant or sheep farm or book-writing project you’ve always talked about.And I also talk here about the media’s role. Words have meaning. Call a purge a purge, not a buyout. Call a coup a coup, not a spending pause that is sparking confusion. And whatever you do, absolutely do not do this:Thank you for supporting independent media and giving me the freedom to speak clearly and plainly and, yes, today, rantingly. I am more convinced than ever that The Ink has a big role to play in what’s coming, and I invite you to be part of it. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

What is it like to live in fear of a knock on the door rather than in hope of a better future?It’s not something most of us would want to think of as the American way of life, but it’s the reality Donald Trump wants to impose on millions of immigrants — themselves victims of a broken system — who have become integral parts of the communities across the United States.It’s a “solution” that offers nothing of substance, not for those looking to build on the American dream, not even for those who voted for Trump out of a deep-rooted sense of defenselessness that they felt only a strongman could address. It can only intensify the chaos and collapse that drove that emotion in the first place — a distraction that lets Trump and his cronies rob us all the more easily.Anand talked on “Morning Joe” about the impact of the first week of Trump’s expanded ICE raids in cities across America, and what it might mean to live in the country those raids usher in.The.Ink is brought to you by readers like you. Sign up today and support independent media by becoming a paid subscriber.MIKA BRZEZINSKI: A federal agency stepped up immigration enforcement operations in cities across the country again yesterday. That included Dallas, Denver, Seattle, and Honolulu. In Chicago, approximately 10 separate teams of federal agents fanned out across the city to conduct operations there.NBC News rode along with one of the teams in Chicago and was granted rare access to the ICE processing facility where detainees are being taken to be photographed, fingerprinted and held until there are deportation flights.At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants rounded up by authorities on Sunday was much higher than first reported. NBC News has learned immigration authorities made close to 1,200 arrests on Sunday, up from the 956 reported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on social media. And nearly half of those detained do not have criminal records. That's according to a senior Trump administration official.President Trump and administration officials have repeatedly said they would prioritize the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes. Anand, your thoughts on this?ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: I think there's always this gap between what they say they're going to do and what they do. And that is because what Donald Trump is interested in is using genuine public concerns that are out there and weaponizing them to then do, you know, much more sweeping things for which there is no mandate.So in this example, I was on with you last week when we were talking about polling that shows there is support in the country for deporting undocumented people with criminal records. There is support for that. So Donald Trump will talk about that and then kind of run on that.And then, as you're seeing in the reporting just now, what they actually do behind the scenes, they trust will not really get out. And it's part of a different agenda they have, which is really to make America white again, which is part of their attack on everything from birthright citizenship to any number of programs, aid freezing, various forms of aid that real people depend on. They have an agenda to make it harder for regular people to live in this country and for immigrants to have to live in worry about whether they have their papers.We are going to become a kind of check-your-papers society in the blink of an eye. And there's no mandate for that, but that is what folks like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and others around the president actually want. They want to change the very fabric of this country, something for which there is not that same mandate.JONATHAN LEMIRE: So, Anand, we know there's a showman part of this. We know that this is partially a spectacle for political points. How do we know it? Well, the latest evidence is newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem right now is live tweeting. She's live tweeting an immigration raid in New York City, right here in New York City, right now. She's posted a few times. this morning, landing in New York, and now they're carrying out this raid.She is saying the person that this latest clip shows is someone who does have a criminal record. But there's also been reporting that Donald Trump is unhappy, actually, that these numbers aren't higher in the first week of his term.And that raises that tension point. If this does go, and more and more, we've already seen it happen some, but more and more people who do not have criminal records are indeed rounded up. Do you think that's the flashpoint for some sort of real pushback, public outcry, the sort of protest movement, at least to this point, we haven't seen in this second Trump term?ANAND: Here's what I think the real tipping point is and will be. The thing that I would say Donald Trump deserves most praise for is that he intuited in 2016 and then again in ‘24, that there was an emotion out there among many, many people of feeling undefended, of feeling unseen and unheard by the system, of feeling defenseless against chaos and entropy.And that political emotion was underserved, was underrecognized by those of us in the media, was underserved by the Democratic Party, was underserved by his own different flavor of Republicans. And he was able to see that. People wanted to be advocated for.Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them, but he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that. When you start having Gestapo raids in America, and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create, then we are moving very, very far from the president worrying about what regular people need.He is distracting people with this flurry of activity. But none of this, none of these images you're seeing are gonna make your life better. None of these things — contrary to popular belief — have anything to do with the still high price of eggs. None of these things will make it easier to start a business. None of these things will make it easier for people to get the education they need, change their lives, leave their kids better off. This is all a distraction shock and awe as you said earlier so that Donald Trump can do one thing — and you saw at the inauguration, telegraphed to you — enrich his billionaire cronies enrich his oligarch friends.That is what he is actually doing when he's not busy releasing his crypto coins, and all of this is sort of bread and circuses for people to stare at while he's robbing you from the back.To receive new posts, access our archives, comment on our posts, and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber today. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkToday Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the historian of fascism and authoritarianism, and I had another great conversation. We covered many subjects — from how to understand Trump’s imperialist shouts, to why he wants a puppet at the helm of the most powerful military on earth, to why Democrats struggle to command attention in the way he does, to what the proper place for joy is in the struggle against autocracy.Watching these videos is among the many benefits of being a paid subscriber to The Ink. Join us today — and help support the kind of independent media you enjoy.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkYou probably know Chris Hayes as the anchor of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, the news program he’s hosted for the last decade. The journalist, documentarian, and author has just published a new book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, which investigates how a defining quality of being human became the new oil and gas.Hayes joined Anand to talk about all things attention: why we’re as attached to our phones as Gollum was to the One Ring, how the algorithms hijack the part of the brain meant to protect us from lions, and how we can begin to break free of the corporate interests — so contrary to our own — that compete for our emotions, every last second of our time, and every bit of our attention.Below are some text excerpts of their conversation. Full the full conversation, in video and transcript form, click above, or, if you haven’t yet joined us, become a supporting subscriber of The Ink today.The.Ink is brought to you by readers like you. Support independent media by becoming a paid subscriber today.There's a scene early on that I want you to start with. We have daughters. You have three kids. I have two, but we have daughters roughly the same age. And there's a really touching, heartbreaking scene with your daughter when you're reading with her one morning, and you realize how broken both you and the world are. Can you just tell us that scene and story?Yeah. It's just sitting next to her on the couch before school, and she wants me to read her book, and she's cuddled up to me, and her breath is on my cheek, and it's like the greatest feeling in the universe. And as I'm reading to her, I can feel an almost physical tug towards the phone sitting there in my pocket. I say it's pulsing there like Gollum's ring. And I don't look at it. The ability to reject it is important. It means I still have control over myself.But why do I feel it in this moment that is the apex of joy? A moment that 30 years from now, I'll look back on and be like, "Oh, they went by too fast." And I think that feeling of interruption or that feeling of being pulled towards being outside ourselves in a moment of focus is so endemic to the times.I start with the metaphor of Odysseus on the mast, avoiding the sirens. And ultimately, that epic is about his desire to get home, to get back to the woman he loves, and to get back to his family. And the journey is all the things trying to interrupt him and stop him from doing that. And what we want is to get home. What we want is to be with our family. What we want is to read to our children.It feels like this world we've constructed for ourselves is interrupting and derailing that.The reason I think it's such a powerful story is the moment with your daughter, our entire bodies and beings have been primed for thousands and thousands of years to respond to that moment, to savor that moment, to offer protection. That is the deepest training we have.The deepest.How is it that this thing — which is like 15 years old — we have not had enough time to evolve to it, but it is clearly tapping into some deep things in us? What is it about this thing that can even get in the conversation with the deepest instincts in your body? Like, how can that even be a competition?Because it's also working on the deepest part of us. For a few reasons. One is we have this faculty for attention that we have evolved to save us from danger, right? So let's say you're with your child on the savanna, 100,000 years ago before humans have settled down into an agrarian society, and you're focused on them, and then there's a rustling in the bushes of something dangerous. It's that rustle, and your attention going to it before your conscious will. That's the source of all this because we have this faculty for involuntary attention.If you loved your daughter too much in that moment, you would die.Exactly. That's exactly right. So we have evolved. And it's an incredible faculty. I mean, it really is amazing. Like You could be locked in, locked into something. And if someone breaks a glass or someone fires a gun — and I've been in reporting situations where I'm locked in and someone fires a gun — your entire physiology moves towards the source of that.That's as deep and as central to us as that moment of that feeling of care and love.And in its origin, not toxic. In its origin, important.Not toxic, yeah. And in its origin, not at all toxic. And in fact, attention is an incredible thing we have. Dogs have it too, but we have an amazing version of it, which is at any given moment, we're faced with infinite stimulus. I mean, it’s the only way to navigate the world,If you're out and looking at a forest, if you equally paid attention to each leaf, you wouldn't be able to make sense of anything. It's the ability to focus, to withdraw attention from some things and put it on others, and then to have this compulsory sensation if things go sideways. And this fight between the kind of part of us that wants to direct our will to what we want to focus on — my daughter — and then the part that is always scanning in the background for some interruption, some danger, something we need to know about in the moment that is pre-conscious.It's the war between those two things that we have that our current version of attention capitalism is exploiting, is sort of en masse and on-scale attempting to monetize.What is it specifically about these new technologies that you focus on in the book that makes them able to trick your lion detector into action?They're engineered to interrupt us and compel our attention, right? The best example of this — and I have notifications turned off — is the haptic feedback on your phone. That's happening as a physical sensation that bypasses your will. If you feel something buzz in your pocket, before you get to decide whether you want to notice or not, you're noticing it, right?So they have engineered a bunch of ways to bypass conscious attention. And then — and this is really important, and one of the things I really try to wrestle with in the book — this is something that can be trained over time, can shrink or expand over time based on what we do with our minds, which is to say, the more accustomed we get to interruption, the more habituated we are towards finding diversion, the less comfortable we become sitting in the moment with her own thoughts or sitting there reading to your daughter or sitting doing anything.And the more that you come to crave the interruption, the more that you come to crave the diversion. And that's also working on a deep part of us philosophically and spiritually.One of the things you and I have talked about on this topic for a long time, even as you were working on this — and I wrote about this a little bit in my last book — was about this kind of asymmetry in American politics around attention and how the anti-democratic, increasingly fascistic modern right — particularly Trump, but not only — has really understood some of these dynamics of attention. And the left, the Democratic Party, pro-democracy movement, however you define it, it really does not.You talked about this with Ezra Klein the other day, about how one way to think about it is understanding that it's the amplitude, the volume of total attention, the absolute value of attention, not the quality of attention.When I talk about this people will say, “Well, no, it is inherently easier if you're malevolent, if you don't care about lying. It's not an even playing field. Of course it's easier for the Republicans, given their commitments.”However, I don't necessarily agree with this. And I often find myself pushing back and saying, I don't know. I feel like you could generate as much attention around the scandal of healthcare bills as they're generating around the border.You could generate as much attention about economic precarity as they're generating about crime in cities. So help me sort that out because I often feel like it's an excuse to just not be good at politics and not an inherent thing. But there's a lot of people who feel like it's just not the same game.So that is a really well-formulated framework. I basically am going to split the baby here and say I sort of think there's something to each part.On the first part, I do think that in the aggregate, an attentional system that selects for that compelled attention, the predators in the bushes in the aggregate, is going to have a reactionary effect in the same way that competitive evening news does, right? If it bleeds, it leads, local crime stories — they're doing that because that threat sensation is the thing that they're using to compel your attention. And I think in the aggregate, it calls forth from us the fight-or-flight part of us. And I think that's probably our most reactionary part.So I really do think there's something to that. I do think it's easier to get attention on an invasion at the border than healthcare bills. I do. I think there's something deep in the wiring about that.Can you talk about the effort to update Marx and his notion of alienation, both in the wage labor story of the 19th century and the attention story of today?Yeah. So I'll start with Marx's basic story about wage labor, which is, look, human toil, human effort, us doing stuff, that long predates labor as a category. It long predates a system of wages where you're paid for that work. And his point is that the transformation of capitalism takes this thing that's inside us, the product of our effort and will, and commodifies it, puts it on a market exchange, and extracts it from us. And it going from something internal to us to something external to us produces alienation. The source of alienation is the feeling of a thing that should be internal to us being outside of us, of us being estranged from it.I think something's happening along the same lines with attention. This thing is internal to us. We want to control where it goes, which is really the substance of our lives. The sum totality of our consciousness is where I put my thoughts at a given moment. And now a system exists of very sophisticated corporations and multi-billion dollar companies, some of the largest and most powerful in the world, whose CEOs are arrayed with the President of the United States at his inauguration, where their business model is to take that attention from us and sell it. And the thing that was internal to us is now being extracted at a market price.But why is an invasion at the border different from a wildfire and climate change?The wildfire, actually, I do think is an example where it is easy to get attention in the same way because it has the same threat. So that, I think, is an example that lines up in the same place as the border. And we've seen that. I mean, it's not like there hasn't been a lot of coverage of the wildfire. Now, what you do with that and whether you connect to climate change is the question, which I think connects to the second thing, which is I also agree with you that Democrats have been conflict-averse and conflict draws attention, and have also not understood how important it is to get attention, even if you run the downside risk.And the one person who gets it is someone who figures prominently in your last book, who you profile, is AOC, who is the best at this of Democrats. Whatever you think about her, whether you agree or disagree with her politics, as an attention age politician, she is by far the most gifted.It's easier to troll than to get attention for positive ends. The reason trolling exists is because if you're okay with getting negative attention, it is easier to get negative attention than positive attention. If you want to just start screaming at people on a subway, you can make them all look at you. But if you want to persuade everyone =in the subway to listen to what you have to say or to give $5 to a charity, it's harder. It just is.What AOC has figured out is how to do both. And I think even where she fails or if she's polarizing, she is operating in the world of this reality in a way that very few Democratic politicians are.I often think about political emotions underneath political events. And I think a very broad political emotion right now across the spectrum is the sense of being kind of defenseless, undefended, not spoken for or advocated for by people with more power than you.It's not that people want to watch you for three hours. But I think there's a way in which that answers that sense of undefendedness. You're just walking with people.All this is Politics 101. But you know FDR.'s Fireside Chats, the reason those are so iconic is because of the way they synced up with a new medium, which was the radio. And it's a sort of example of the frontier of using the radio for politics. But it’s also because he was just doing a ton of public communicating, all the time.And look at Trump. I mean, Trump's done more talking than most Democratic politicians do, not just Biden. I mean, Barack Obama talked a lot, but they were staged events, and Trump's just like constantly yammering. And a lot of what he says is just like vile nonsense. But again, you're hearing from him.The above are excerpts from our conversation with Chris Hayes. To watch the full video, to get access to a complete transcript of this discussion, and to read and comment on this and all of our posts, sign up as a paid subscriber. We’d love it if you’d join us today.Chris Hayes’s latest book is The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkThe day after the election, Anand joined Ezra Levin, the co-founder of Indivisible, for a conversation with KALW Public Media’s “Your Call” on the way forward for people looking to challenge — or even just to carry on in — the Trump II era.Anand and Ezra talked with host Ethan Elkind (and fielded questions from KALW listeners), covering everything from how to identify practical goals and focus political energy to achieve them over the next four years, to how to manage the information overload of Trumpism, to analyzing what’s wrong with the Democratic Party and what needs to change to build an opposition that reflects the power of the people. Click on the player above to listen to the conversation, or scroll down to read excerpts in the transcript below.The Ink is brought to you by readers like you. Support independent media by becoming a paid subscriber today.Let me start with a question for you both just to get a temperature check. It's been now about 24 hours since the presidency changed hands. And I wanted to find out how you both are doing and what sort of jumped out to you now about this moment 24 hours in.Ezra, I'll start with you for that one.Ezra Levin: Well, a lot of what we've seen over the last 24 hours is what we predicted Trump would do. He is moving forward with a deeply unpopular agenda that he did his best to distance himself from throughout all of last year.He swore up and down that he had nothing to do with Project 2025, and that he was going to go in a different direction, and lo and behold, that wasn't the case.Immediately upon taking office, he takes some of the most egregious actions that were thought up in that terrifying plan, and he's putting them into the world now. He is using the power of the presidency to pursue that agenda.I think the real question for all of us now is, how does America respond? How do people respond? But he is doing exactly what we thought he would do.Yeah. And Anand, what about you? What jumps out at you now 24 hours in, and how are you feeling about what's happening?Anand Giridharadas: Well, yesterday was the inauguration, and I woke up today, and it was 10 degrees in New York, 22 below freezing, so thanks, Trump.It does feel like a chill has come to this country. And I know a lot of people who didn't watch yesterday, and I can understand that the brain is an important organ to maintain the health and wellness of. But I did watch, even got, you know, my nine-year-old son to watch, even though he wanted to keep going to play. And I said it was important to watch this, to understand the context of what's going to unfold.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat has the answers so many of us have been desperate for, ever since fascism leapt out of the history pages and became a modern-day American menace.Today we checked in on each other during this tumultuous week, and tried to unpack the logic of Trump’s early moves and postures. Things aren’t always what they seem.He is a facile and simple man, but the moves he is making — from surrounding himself with oligarchs and nominating empty suits and issuing crypto coins — are complicated, and they have a history. What, for example, is the interesting parallel between a nominee like Pete Hegseth and some of Donald Trump’s choices in wives? Ruth joined me to help process all of it.I also asked her how we — you — might live well through this period: how to get right the balance between plugging in and unplugging, reacting and creating, focusing on national outrages and building local vitality. She had so much wisdom there, too.These videos are among the many perks of being a paid subscriber to The Ink. If you haven’t yet, join us today and help support independent media that makes you think. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

It’s not every day that a former president of the United States reads your book. Or is bothered enough by it to rebut it. So imagine my surprise when I got a Google alert this past weekend alerting me that Bill Clinton had discussed me in his new Citizen: My Life After the White House.In a four-page section in the middle of the book, Clinton lifts up my book “Winners Take All” as a counterpoint to his views about philanthropic and other private-sector solutions to public problems. To his credit, the former president accurately and deftly summarizes my argument that, as he puts it, “inequality keeps increasing because the principal architects of the global ‘winners take all’ economy do try to do some good, but never propose anything that will make a significant difference because doing so would reduce their wealth and power.” He even allows, “There's something to it.”Then he rebuts the argument from his point of view. It’s thoughtful, borne of his experiences in public and civic life, and, ultimately, lands in a different place than I do.But I want to know what you make of our debate about whether we’d be better off with or without billionaires and their schemes and visions to “change the world.”So check out my deconstruction of this stretch of the Clinton book, which I did along with our friend Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. And please let us know what you think.Running a newsletter takes resources. It took three people to bring you this post alone. We need the support of paying subscribers to keep going. Support the kind of independent media you wish to see. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

I went live this morning to talk about the billionaire war on Christmas and the potential government shutdown.These lives chats are really enjoyable for me — and, I think, for those who join them. We’re trying to create a kind of call-in show vibe.If you want to join us next time, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe