The.Ink

Yesterday, we published Anand’s essay on the deeper dynamics beneath the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting.Later, he went on MSNBC to talk about it. Katy Tur, the host, and he discussed the importance of deploring violence and, at the same time, being curious about what is enabling it. They talked about the state of healthcare for millions in America, and the common political emotion that seems to unite Americans of every stripe nowadays.We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still.“A sense of defenselessness”: a transcriptKATY: I think that when you have a lot of people cheering violence in the way that they have, you can deplore the cheering of the violence, but you have to ask yourself, why in the world do they feel good or okay with cheering it on? And it's because there is so much burning anger over the system in this country, broadly speaking, but also very much about healthcare because it's something that everybody deals with — not every day maybe, but for some people every day — but at some point in their lives, they get denied a claim or they get a bill that they can't understand and they're put into a financially dire situation for healthcare that they need. And so it's something that cuts across the political spectrum.You're talking about how there is a way to condemn the violence and also address the problem. And by addressing the problem, addressing the anger, you're actually gonna stop more violence from happening.ANAND: Absolutely. When you look at an act like this — lest anybody caricature our conversation — it is very clear that assassination is not how you get change. It's not how you get the world you want. It doesn't work. It's immoral, but it also doesn't work. End of story.But if that's the end of the analysis, we have a problem. And when you have, as you say, and I'm glad you played those social media videos, 'cause it shows, you know, not just what people on cable are saying, but what people in the country with their phones are saying.KATY: It's a conversation that everybody's having. I walk down the street, I hear people talking about it. It's not just what you're seeing on social media. Oftentimes social media conversations are niche. This one is broad.ANAND: This is the defining challenge in the lives of millions of people, maybe tens of millions of people. And if not the defining one, then a secondary one in almost everybody else's, right? Your health. Whether you can have a child or not and not have a $50,000 bill by accident. Whether something breaks or not, you can get it fixed. I know so many people — who actually have decent insurance, have some financial cushion if something goes wrong — and still things happen to them where they get a mysterious $100,000 bill for a shoulder surgery. This is a friend of mine, told me this after this happened the other day. A mysterious $100,000 bill — with insurance.KATY: I had a $90,000 bill for an emergency appendectomy that insurance refused to cover.ANAND: So let's be honest, since we're having an honest conversation. The reality in this country is if you kill people with a gun, it is very obvious to everybody what's going on and you're rightly deplored. And we should deplore that.If it is a more systemic kind of killing, as your social media person was saying, if people are being killed through PDF files and through claim denial letters, and through a deliberate practice of saying no to a certain form of care that you know you're gonna end up granting, but if you say no, 80 percent of people will lose steam and not appeal successfully and you'll only have to give it to 20 percent of those people and you factor that into your balance sheet.And if that is not an incidental thing that happens or bad apples, that's actually how you make money because the health insurance industry is an industry that doesn't really exist in many other countries 'cause they just take care of each other as part of their society. You cannot expect to live in a society in which that rage goes nowhere, just fizzles out and dissipates. And we have to deplore violence and then be curious about where it's coming from.KATY: The gentleman that I led into this with, Congressman Ro Khanna, said he understands this is part of the reason or a big reason why Donald Trump got elected because so many Americans are fed up with a system that is no longer working for them that they chose the party and the person that promised to change things. Instead of the party that was seen as the defender of the status quo. And there's been a lot of analysis about this. Chris Murphy's talked about it. Bernie Sanders has talked about it. Lots of people have come out and said this is the Democrats' fundamental problem.Do you see this as something that is actually going to get addressed by the Republicans? I mean, they've promised a lot of big change. Is what you're seeing from who Donald Trump has so far surrounded himself with, are these folks that are gonna help people out with a predatory insurance system?ANAND: Unless RFK Jr.'s raw milk deliveries are gonna cure all these conditions, no, I don't think so. No help is gonna come from these Republicans. But you're right that the reason many people turn to them is the desperation.And I think, you know, when you and I or anybody else here has a conversation, it's usually one issue at a time. We're talking about healthcare now, we're talking about the border. I think there's a more generalized political emotion in this country.A lot of what I write about is the political emotions underlying these issues. If you go beneath the trans rights fight, what's happening with your kids in school, or beneath the border fight, or beneath what was January 6th about? A very common political emotion on the left and right is a sense of defenselessness.I would argue it is the common culture right now that unites 80 to 90 percent of Americans. A feeling that no one's coming to help you, no one's hearing you, the people trying to tell you how things are, maybe people like you and me, there's a feeling that we don't get you. We don't reflect reality. There's a feeling that people with money don't care. People who run companies don't care. Your employer doesn't care. And it is not neatly mapped onto therefore you're the left or you're the right. It is not neatly mapped onto issues. It is a generalized pessimism about being heard and being helped. And that is the most dangerous thing for a society because then people wrongly, but predictably will start going it alone.KATY: And it's been festering now for a while. I wrote in my 2016 book about Donald Trump's first win, that part of what fueled it is this feeling of helplessness, defenselessness, lack of agency, that it felt like you were screaming at the top of your lungs in a room full of people wearing headphones. And that is still the predominant feeling. It might not be the one that everyone vocalizes, but it's the one that people feel in this country. They don't feel like they have control. Social media is taking advantage of them. CEOs are taking advantage of them. The New York Times opinion page called it the new Gilded Age that we're living through. And it does certainly feel like that.To read Anand’s essay that sparked this conversation, visit the link below:Your support makes The Ink possible, so if you haven’t joined already, we’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Was it something I said?The other day, I went on “Morning Joe” and was talking about the right wing’s media ecosystem. The right has built a conversion funnel that takes people from minor irritation and social confusion and pulls them all the way to full-blown radicalization.What would it look like to build an infrastructure on the political left that could similarly — but, hear me out, with truth and honesty and values of humanity and openness and equality — raise consciousness from relatively low levels of political engagement up through deep commitment?Specifically, I said we need media to meet men where many of them are, which is in a state of anxiety and between-eras confusion, and move them not toward fascism, which the right is doing, but toward feminism.Well.This triggered people. For much of the ensuing weekend, my suggestion that we need more men to be feminists roiled the right. Megyn Kelly did a segment about it. Right-wing sites felt the need to respond to it. And I began to get some very weird emails.I will spare you the profanity and the attacks. Buried in the bile was something significant and revealing.When a lot of men listened to me say that we need more men to be feminists, what they heard, apparently, was that I was saying we need more men to be FEMINIZED.It wasn’t an audio issue. It wasn’t a microphone thing. In some deeper realm, where hearing meets philosophical presuppositions and innermost anxieties, a significant number of men heard the suggestion that more of them become feminists and thought that I was proposing to castrate them, put them on hormone therapy, and change their gender.It’s preposterous, on one level. But one of my aspirations right now, in the wake of the election, is to try to be curious about what is preposterous.And so I chatted about it all in the video above with my friend Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, a great journalist and podcast maker and former BBC whiz.As we chatted, the conversation broadened, getting into so many of the ways in which our visions of progress crash on the shoals of how hard it is to move individual people.Watch and tell us what you think, as ever.We hope The Ink will be essential to the thinking and reimagining and reckoning and doing that all lie ahead. We want to thank you for being a part of what we are and what we do, and we promise you that this community is going to find every way possible to be there for you in the times that lie ahead and be there for this country and for what it can be still. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. And special thanks to Marlon Weems, Janine de Novais, Hon. José Gustavo Rivera, Janan Broadbent, Kerry Speer, and Miles Fidelman for chiming in. Join me for my next live video in the app! Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Hello, friends! I was so moved by your comments and thoughts this week that I wanted to jump on here and respond. I tried to cover it all: the meaning of Trump’s appointments, the battle between hope and despair, the need for a new media, the silence of the Dems, messaging and truth, the state of our spirits, and, finally, a pep talk on remembering that we are a society that will not be easily subjugated.Thank you for everything you do for this community. Together our voices matter.If you like what we’re doing here and haven’t yet signed on as a supporting subscriber, join us today. We have big plans to cover the Trump era with rigor and seriousness and heart. Help us realize them. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

During Kamala Harris’s interview last night with NBC’s Hallie Jackson, the vice president gave a muscular defense of her positions and also addressed something that’s been a challenge for her campaign — the willingness of American men to embrace the fascist option offered by Donald Trump. She vowed to combat that offering with an emphasis on her commitment to capitalism, to economic possibility, with an accent on jobs and a vision of the American Dream.This morning, Anand appeared on “Morning Joe” to talk about the task that remains for Harris and Tim Walz: making their case to the majority of the male electorate willing to trust their futures — and the futures of their families — to the MAGA movement, and why addressing the emotional underpinnings of that feeling is so critical in the outcome of this election.A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.Transcript: I think it's important to understand in a larger context why she's doing some of those things that you saw in that interview.I think part of it is, you know, inoculation against the socialism charge, but I think there's something deeper going on that they are trying to take on, which is men, American men right now.A majority of American men are supporting American fascism, right? And, I think there is, beneath the labels of socialism and capitalism and everything else, there is a deep problem in many American men's sense of themselves, a fear of the future, a sense that they don't quite know who they will be and how they will provide for their families and their communities in the future that's coming.I think a lot of these fears have been manufactured by places like Fox News, but some of those fears are real and based on real changes in our society: housing prices, food prices, things like that.And so what you're seeing the vice president do is answer some of that by saying, “You'll be able to create wealth. You'll be able to start a business.”All of that is great. I think what it doesn't quite do, and that she still has — and Tim Walz has — the opportunity to do in the next two weeks, is speak to millions of American men at that deeper guttural level. Because again, going back to the last conversation, it doesn't so much matter that Donald Trump is selling fascism. What really matters is that roughly half of Americans, including a clear majority of American men, are buying it.The buy side is much more scary than the sell side right now. And we all focus on deploring the sale of it. But the real problem is the buying of it. People should be rejecting this and most men… the average American man is saying “yes” to fascism right now. Why?And so I think she needs to understand, as I'm sure her team does, that in this era of rapid change, the future feels to a lot of men — a lot of people in general — like a pair of jeans that doesn't quite fit.And you have to speak to people not just in terms of economic policy. if that's the case. You have to say, “Hey, I see you and I recognize you. I understand the future feels bewildering. I understand you sometimes feel like you don't know what to say or you don't know quite how you're going to take care of your family, but real men don't outsource the protection of their family to dictators. Real men don't turn to fascists to solve their problems. They create things, they build things, they do things.”I think men need to be invited into an aspirational picture, an aspirational story of progress that has a place for them, too.Watch the full conversation below:Your support makes The Ink possible. We’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.Video courtesy “Morning Joe”/MSNBC Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

Every so often, a video of mine so triggers the right that I start getting called names and accused of being a lesbian, which is an honor, really, but that’s another story.This isn’t the insult you think it is. I would be absolutely honored to be a lesbian.What follows is some of the discussion I had on “Morning Joe” this morning that touches on something critical: How the threat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance represent is not just about the economy, or the erosion of norms, or even the curtailment of specific freedoms by some abstraction of fascism.It’s about the erasure of the institutions you’ve depended on all of your life, that make your future malleable, your plans possible, and let you live as you’ve dreamed. In their place, they promise nothing but the chaos of a failed state.I think if you think about some of the great presidents we've had in this country, obviously they were interested in winning and losing, but it wasn't necessarily the sum total of their being or understanding of the world.They were interested in policy. They were interested in the country. They had a certain feeling for history.I think Donald Trump is someone so small, so limited in a way that winning and losing is really the only thing he understands. There's this kind of thing that his father supposedly said to him.There's two kinds of people in the world, you know, killers and losers, killer being a good thing in this moral landscape.And so you can imagine the 2020 loss was a trauma for Donald Trump, because it's the only kind of meaning he has, is to have ratings higher than the other person.And his ratings were lower, the ultimate rating in this country, which is votes.And then J.D. Vance, I actually met J.D. Vance the first time here. We were both on the same day — this is 2016. I thought he was charming, kind, interesting, with a different worldview. We spoke, messaged a little bit after that, and he became what I think the founders a couple hundred years ago used to call men of ambition.Ambition didn't used to be a good word the way it is now. It used to mean people who have such a design on power, that there's nothing they won't say, do, become to have power. This is a person who is now willing to throw out constitutional democracy.He studied at Yale Law School, where I believe they actually have courses on the Constitution. He's willing to throw out everything he took time to study, to be that kind of man of dark ambition.And I think what's really important now is for people across this country who may not be diehard for Kamala Harris or diehard for Donald Trump, but who love the country, who have been blessed by the many gifts of this country to say this country is what it is.It has given you whatever it's given you because of institutions, institutions you take for granted, prospects of a peaceful transfer of power that you take for granted so you can go live your life. You can go start that restaurant. You can go do that job. You can go drive your kid to that college.You can do all those things in a way that you cannot in Somalia because the institutions are just working in the background. You don't even have to think about them very often. You have to vote every so often and then they work.And what is at stake now is you possibly not being able to do all those things you've done all your life, not be able to chase your dreams, not be able to make your plans, because what works in the background is not going to be working in the background in a Trump administration politics, government persecution would become your life. This would become the the full drama of our country.That's what happens in these countries that go in that illiberal, unconstitutional direction, and what they are proposing is not just you know an abstraction of fascism it is a kind of political project where politics would eat our dreams, eat your plans, and I don't think most Americans want that.Watch the full conversation below:Your support makes The Ink possible. We’d be honored if you’d become a paid subscriber. When you do, you’ll get access each week to our regular posts and our interviews with the most thoughtful people out there — and you’ll be able to join the conversation in our comments section.Video courtesy “Morning Joe”/MSNBC Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkThe Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking is a sweeping, multigenerational, and multilingual family epic (it runs nearly three-and-a-half hours, and the mostly South Asian cast delivers the story in English, Tamil, and Sinhalese), but it is also the story of how democracy and pluralism came apart in Shakthidharan’s native Sri Lanka, where his grandfather served as a cabinet minister before the civil war that wracked the country from 1983 until 2009.Anand caught up with Shakthidharan this week after seeing the play performed, and the two talked about how he came to write the story, what he learned while researching his family’s history and deep connection with the history of Sri Lankan democracy, and what the play has to tell us about the current American political condition and how quickly a society can find itself turning the corner from neighbors to enemies.I'm very excited to be talking with great playwright S. Shakthidharan, who has this incredible new play, which I saw in New York, called Counting and Cracking. Thank you so much for talking with The Ink.Good to see you, man.On the night that I saw the play, which just blew me away, blew my wife away, that although it was a play about democracy and pluralism in Sri Lanka, it felt like one of the most important interventions in the cultural dialogue around the American 2024 election that I had in a while.It may not have been the intention, I'm sure it was, but it landed that way for a lot of us in the room who were talking about it afterwards. And I wanted to start with the title, Counting and Cracking, because the play is about the straining and breaking of democracy and pluralism in Sri Lanka and the turning of all against all, or group against group. And there's this notion that you quote, of democracy as counting sometimes and cracking sometimes. What is counting and what is cracking in the context of the play?Yeah, so the play is called Counting and Cracking, and it comes from a quote from my great-grandfather, actually, who was a politician in Sri Lanka. And he wrote in a letter, "Democracy is the counting of heads within certain limits and the cracking of heads beyond those limits." And for him in Sri Lanka, what that meant was that he spent the early part of his political career as a lonely Tamil in an otherwise Sinhalese political cabinet in the government of Sri Lanka.And he was a champion for equality. And you know he really fought for that for many years. But by the end of his political career, he had given up on government as a place which would adequately support minorities and by then was starting to violently persecute them.And he dealt with this by retreating or advancing, depending on your political point of view, into a version of his more tribal self, his more village identity, growing up in Jaffna, in his village of Urumpirai, where they resisted intruders into their village way of life, whether it be the British or the nationalistic government.He has a memory of his mother breaking pots over the heads of the British who tried to come in and tell them how to live their lives. And he kind of finished his life brokenhearted by the civil war that was breaking out in Sri Lanka and talking about sometimes needing to crack heads in self-defense to protect one's community and one's way of life and having given up on the possibility of counting in Sri Lanka, even though he'd spent most of his political life fighting for that.So counting — democracy as this notion of, you know, kings used to decide things. Now we decide things by counting who wants what —YepVersus cracking.And what we're talking about here is self-defense. Just to be clear.

Anand was on Morning Joe today, responding to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s continuing racist lies about Haitian immigrants in his native state of Ohio, and talking about what is real: that immigrants are among America’s greatest gifts.Watch the video above, read Anand’s essay below, and read some text excerpts from his comments on Morning Joe, below the fold.A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.“There are concert lines around the world for people trying to get in on this dream”On Trump’s recent comments on blocking immigration from “infested” countries:What I hear is a wannabe Nazi — without the organizational skills. I hear someone who is literally reclaiming language from the 1930s and 1940s in Germany — “vermin,” “infestation.”This is the language of someone who is not just trying to win an election, although they are trying to do that. This is the language of someone who is trying to build a pretext for what he might do if in office.He's talked about deporting millions and millions of people on a scale that would require 24/7 train cars and buses — and camps, to use another mid-20th century word.But also, I think — and the example of the Haitian community in Springfield illustrates this — someone who is using a modern media environment to spread information, put out lies, that will then possibly inspire other people, private actors, to do things in their own name, with deniability for Donald Trump. Activating his stand-up-and-stand-back-and-stand-by paramilitary friends to go do all manner of things to vulnerable people.Because once you're telling millions and millions of people that there's vermin around, there's infestation, they're taking over the country, there's a replacement scheme/scam happening, violence will happen.On Trump and Vance’s dehumanization of Haitian immigrants in Ohio based on lies about what they ate:It was a trifecta for me. I am a native Ohioan. I am a son of immigrants. And I'm a passionate eater and cook. And so this sudden national story about this dehumanization of immigrants based on what they eat [brought up] a couple of things.First of all, in a lot of countries in the world with unstable political systems and high levels of violence, lies about what other people eat are actually crucial to how political violence happens. In India, where my family comes from, if you look at most episodes of lynchings or riots, it is Hindus and Muslims and rumors about, I smelled pork, I smelled beef, you're inappropriately smuggling something you shouldn't have been eating.A lot of countries in the world have taboos around food — and violence. So what was happening in Ohio is a playbook that is very familiar. If you've covered politics in developing countries, it is a classic dehumanization thing to say these people are the other. As Kendrick Lamar would say, “They not like us.” They eat differently from us.On what immigrants do eat:But it got me thinking: What do immigrants eat? Because immigrants don't eat what Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are lying about.One thing immigrants eat in this country is flavors that everybody else eventually eats and capitalizes on. And then you have gochujang in fancy little New American restaurants, and you have fish sauce in a vinaigrette several years later.But immigrants are people who bring that flavor to us — and what is multiracial democracy but flavor?Immigrants swallow their pride, often, to come to this country — come to places like Springfield, Ohio, often do jobs that they wouldn't have had to do back home. They are computer programmers back home, they work in a gas station in Springfield because they know that, to rise in America, you must first fall sometimes. So they eat their own pride. They often eat very little in the hope that their children will eat like kings.They eat the cheapest food they can get at Costco because they can taste what their grandchildren, unborn grandchildren, will eat one day. When I was growing up in Ohio, in my immigrant family, we ate pasta some days because my mom actually really enjoyed the freedom that America gave her as an Indian woman to not spend all the time in the kitchen, like Indian women like her would've spent back home. And sometimes we ate Indian food because she wanted us to have something of where she came from and to sustain the past forward. So these people are trying to get folks killed with lies about what immigrants eat. But I wanted to share with folks in my experience what immigrants do eat.On 7 a.m. lines worldwide and protecting not just the border but also the dreamWe're in the 7 a.m. hour, and I have an image seared in my memory. I have the privilege in my job of reporting from around the world. There is a 7 a.m. image that I have seen in many, many countries around the world, which a lot of Americans watching this may not have seen.Which is that at 7 a.m., in capitals around the world, when life is not very active in particular cities, there is a long line always outside the American embassy or the American consulate.When life is at a standstill at 7 a.m. in New Delhi, India, there is a line outside that embassy.We are sitting around this table, sitting at home, maybe in a funk about America. We may be despairing about America. We may think our democracy's unraveling, and this is happening and that's happening, and everything's going to the dogs. But even when we are in our deepest funk, that line — I have never seen that line go down.That line is like a concert line in capital after capital after capital. So instead of just having this conversation about how we protect the border, let's step back. Let's channel what Ronald Reagan said in his farewell address, where we remember that we are a country made of the world, and it is actually the secret of our greatness.And the fact that, even at our lowest lows, there are concert lines around the world for people trying to get in on this dream — it should make us buck up, but it should also make us remember not to shut this country to the energy and new blood that has always made it what it is.A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.Video courtesy MSNBC/Morning Joe Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

There’s a memorable scene in Kamala Harris’ memoir, The Truths We Hold, in which she recounts taking a tough phone call in a political dispute (in this case, from Jamie Dimon). And what does she do, unconsciously, as she picks up the phone?She takes off her earrings.And that’s the kind of gearing up for battle we’re seeing from the vice president and the almost unbelievably reinvigorated Democratic campaign.Today Anand went on Morning Joe to talk about Kamala Harris’ transformative first week of campaigning, and why she’s a phenomenon — a player in the culture, striking the right emotional chords, and giving the Democrats the real engagement with emotion that’s been missing for too long. She’s making people feel things.In the clip above, Anand and Rev. Al Sharpton talk here about how Harris has found the right alignment of person, moment, message, and what’s happening within people’s hearts, how she’s brought joy to the important work of fighting these great threats to democracy, and why it’s so significant that this has been Trump’s first bad week in years — maybe the first time he’s not been the center of attention since the coming-down-the-escalator bit.A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist. Get full access to The.Ink at the.ink/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit the.inkWhat is gender, anyway?When Judith Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990, the philosopher and feminist scholar inaugurated a new way of looking at gender. Butler’s ideas — about gender as something socially constructed, as performative — went on to influence a generation of scholars who have built on their work or challenged it to construct an entirely new way of thinking about gender as identity. The most important thing about gender, Butler tells us, is that its meaning changes all the time.Judith Butler talked to us about their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, which explores how forces on the right have identified and weaponized a supposed “gender ideology” for use as a tool to frighten and mobilize those already struggling with societal upheaval and the precarity of life in a late capitalist world. We also talked about the history of gender’s many meanings, from a category of feminist analysis to an evolving concept of identity, about what we can learn from the way young people have been able to build on basic lessons about ethical behavior to embrace a more fluid set of ideas around gender, the role and responsibility of political theorists, and Butler’s own legacy as a scholar, activist, and collaborator.It’s a deep conversation with a major scholar that you won’t want to miss (and we’ve got full audio along with it).A request for those who haven’t yet joined us: The interviews and essays that we share here take research and editing and much more. We work hard, and we are eager to bring on more writers, more voices. But we need your help to keep this going. Join us today to support the kind of independent media you want to exist.So thank you so much for making the time. I wanted to start by asking about how your new book, Who's Afraid of Gender, was inspired by this incident in 2017 in Brazil. Can you just tell us a story of that moment and how it puts you on the road to trying to answer this question? Who is afraid of gender, and the progress and new thinking and new understandings of gender in this moment?Well, I mean, I have to say that I certainly was studying the anti-gender ideology movement before 2017, and I had good colleagues in different parts of the world who had alerted me to what was going on. I had participated in events in Belgium and certainly been in conversations with colleagues in the U.K. and in Chile on this issue. But I had not personally confronted the people who had enormous passions about this topic until I got to Brazil in the fall of 2017.And I was actually not giving a paper, which was odd. I was curating an event on the “Ends of Democracy,” question mark, where we were thinking about whether democracy was heading toward its end and also what its ends or aims might be. So other people were talking. I gave a brief introduction at most. And I was told that there was a demonstration outside the venue and that I needed security.And in fact, when I arrived at the airport, there was security waiting for me because there had been a fair amount of chatter online instigated by a group called Citizen Go. That group is a right-wing anti-gender ideology group. They call it gender ideology. That's their name, not really mine.And they had amassed a petition that was apparently being populated by bots that Judith Butler should not come to Brazil and that Judith Butler should leave Brazil and should not be allowed to speak in Brazil.So this was right before the Bolsonaro regime took hold. But the passions against gender were also very pro-Bolsonaro. And Bolsonaro also made known his own opposition to gender, characterizing it, again, as an ideology. So I was burnt in effigy in the midst of this protest against me. There was a counter-protest at the same time, and that counter-protest did swell. So luckily, the number of those people actually was larger than the people who were against me.I continued through the next few days with a lot of security. But when I went to the airport with my partner, Wendy Brown, we decided, "We're fine. We're just going to the airport," but we then confronted another group with posters who were screaming, and they were screaming about pedophilia. And I was like, "Why? What does pedophilia have to do with anything? Where is this coming from?" So many of the things that were set against me and the ways in which I was portrayed struck me as very strange.I was, for instance, a demon or even a contemporary incarnation of the devil. But I was also apparently in favor of incest or pedophilia. Or I was involved in conscripting young people to become gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans, any number of things. All of these allegations struck me as preposterous, but I saw that these convictions were very deeply held, and the people who held them were willing to resort to violence.Luckily, I did escape the metal trolley that was coming toward me by virtue of a kind young man who interposed his own body between the trolley and me. Otherwise, I would have had some injuries.I can't believe you ended up in a real-life version of the trolley problem.Yes, a real-life version of the trolley problem.