Keen On America

“They all did it. They’re all guilty.” — Amy Littlefield Who killed Roe? Amy Littlefield , the abortion access correspondent at The Nation and big time Agatha Christie fan, has written a true crime book about it. Literally. Killers of Roe treats the death of the constitutional right to abortion as a murder mystery in the Poirot or Miss Marple tradition, complete with suspects, motives, and a foren...

“It’s about blood. I cover a lot of bloodshed in the book, but I also talk about a different kind of blood: blood that ties, blood that binds families across time and distance.” — Jazmine Ulloa Kristi Noem is gone. Under her tenure, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — double the previous year’s toll. But Jazmine Ulloa , the New York Times’ national immigration reporter, doesn’t think much will...

“This is not the beginning of a new right-wing revanche fascist era; this is the end of something. But the problem is we can’t get to the new world because the new world is too filled with problems.” — Jonathan Taplin Trump fantasizes about himself as a king. But he’s actually just an interregnum, at least according to Jon Taplin — author of Move Fast and Break Things , Hollywood insider, and old...

“Fidel Castro told his aides, ‘We’re going to fill his arms with shit.’ That is an example of weaponised migration. What we’re experiencing now is on a thermonuclear scale.” — Peter Schweizer Is best selling writer Peter Schweizer a conspiracy theorist? He doesn’t think so. His new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon , argues that Mexico, Ch...

“I have always said that they are the same person. And the drama of this story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America, and the other in the White House.” — Michael Wolff A few days ago we had Jason Pack on the show suggesting that the Anglo-American media elite had a degree of complicity in the Epstein scandal. Michael Wolff disagrees. The media weren’t complicit, he says. They...

“The fatal error is ours. Legislators set out a regulatory regime that keeps regulation at bay. The only other industry with a similar protection is the gun industry.” — Olivier Sylvain There are certain words in book titles that provoke. “Reclaiming”, for example. My guest today is happy to defend the provocation. Fordham law professor and former FTC senior advisor Olivier Sylvain argues in his n...

“They’re both naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the absence of clarity to their own advantage. Neither one of them is an authoritative leader of opinion with the interests of everyone at heart.” — Keith Teare What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday, Keith Teare was arguing that Anthropic was wrong to push back against the US government’s use of AI in warfare. This week his editorial...

“All my life, I’ve absolutely opposed all terrorism by anyone under any circumstances. I define terrorism as the deliberate killing of noncombatants.” — Daniel Ellsberg, October 2001 Last week we had Tom Wells on the show talking about Henry Kissinger’s moral indifference to the loss of innocent lives in the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger, of course, was no fan of the Pentagon Papers— the leaked doc...

“I don’t think we’re sleepwalking, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible. In some ways, they’ve been too thoughtful. We’re paralysed, in fact, by our risk awareness.” — Christopher Clark It’s 1830 in East Prussia. The city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of people who’d never been there. But that glow, it goes witho...

“We should all be able to look at the numbers and agree that this is not sustainable and that whatever we’ve been doing is not working. Democrats have had their chance, and Republicans have had their chance, and it’s only gotten worse.” — Halle Tecco Warren Buffett called America’s healthcare costs “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” That tapeworm now devours nearly a fifth of the nation’...

“If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, I think it is more likely than not that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.” — Arne Westad This conversation was recorded before the invasion of Iran, which makes what you are about to hear even more chilling. In his new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,...

“When you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it—but you’re also doing something that’s completely devastating.” — Rhae Lynn Barnes Donald Trump’s recent retweet of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes was dismissed by his supporters as “just a joke”—another example, they claimed, of liberals lacking a sense of humor. But Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes argues that this k...

“If you disestablish Christianity, then Christian leaders need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want.” — Matthew Avery Sutton Over the years, Keen On has done many shows on the relationship between the United States and organized religion. Daniel Williams argued that smart people still believe in God. Jim Wallis warned that a false white...

“We keep telling you there’s an eviction crisis, so organize with us. Feel free to come into our meetings. Feel free to learn about the lives of people who have been here for a long time.” — Manissa Maharawal Yesterday we spoke with anthropologist Ida Susser about France’s Yellow Vests—provincial truck drivers, nurses, and teachers who drove hours to Paris, furious about decades of disinvestment i...

"He's blundered here. He's trying to set policy for the government on the use of AI through a sales contract." — Keith Teare on Dario Amodei There's only one story this week: Dario Amodei's refusal to let the Department of War use Anthropic's best technology for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Silicon Valley rallied behind him. The New York Times covered it. Sam Altman pub...

"You can't wear a yellow vest on a demonstration anymore because you get arrested as soon as the police see you." — Ida Susser In November 2018, something strange happened in France. People from the urban periphery—truck drivers, nurses, teachers, plumbers—drove seven or eight hours to Paris wearing yellow safety vests. They weren't students. They weren't union members. They weren't organized by a...

"He lied more than I thought he did—and I thought he lied a lot." — Tom Wells on Henry Kissinger In our Epstein age, everyone seems to have access to everyone else's dirtiest secrets. But half a century ago, in the Watergate era, it was harder to get one's hands on the secret files, phone calls and other private data. But historian Tom Wells has done exactly that with the private phone calls of He...

"They are fundamentally bound at the hip, because the Trump age is a conspiratorial age and a backlash against global wealth inequality... Epstein facilitated the rise of Trump." — Jason Pack Late last year, Disorder podcast host Jason Pack came on the show and predicted that Mark Carney would be the "orderer" of 2025 and Jeffrey Epstein would be 2026's "disorderer-in-chief". Pack was uncannily ri...

"The House hasn't reorganized committee jurisdictions since the early 70s—before the internet existed." — Maya Kornberg America is stuck stuck stuck stuck. Almost exactly a year ago, I interviewed the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum about Stuck , his influential critique of the housing crisis. Now we have another Stuck —this one by Maya Kornberg , a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Only...

"We didn't have to grow up with that." — Ross Greene, on school shootings One of the most persistent worries these days is that our kids aren't okay. With most of the blame, of course, now being placed on the ubiquity of social media. But psychologist Ross W. Greene , author of the bestselling Lost at School , has a new book out today called The Kids Who Aren't Okay which doesn't place all the bla...

"I wake up at 3 AM, check my phone to see what fresh hell has come out, and it's usually two words: 'Trump threatens.'" — Peter Bale We're reversing the lens today. Rather than examining America from the inside, we're peering at it from the outside in—from New Zealand, at the bottom of the world. Peter Bale is a longtime media executive who's had senior positions at CNN, Reuters, and News Corp. He...

"Great minds think alike? It's completely wrong. It's not that great minds think alike; it's that different minds are great." — David Oppenheimer It's diversity week. Yesterday, Brian Soucek argued in favor of what he calls the "opinionated university" to protect free speech. Today David Oppenheimer , law professor at UC Berkeley, on The Diversity Principle: The Story of a Transformative Idea . Op...

"They are changing venture capital from a 30% tax to 0% tax. If Robinhood succeeds, it makes Sequoia and Andreessen's business model untenable." — Keith Teare The Silicon Gods must have their blood. And they've finally come for the funders of disruption, the venture capitalists, who are now being disrupted by something called Public Venture Capital (PVC). That, at least, is the view of That Was Th...

"150 universities have adopted neutrality policies just since October 7th. I'm on the losing end of this trend." — Brian Soucek Universities keep claiming what they see as the moral high ground of neutrality. But Brian Soucek , who holds the MLK chair at UC Davis School of Law, believes that's a dangerous myth. In his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth...

"72% of Americans say they hate big corporations—including Republicans." — Charles Derber It's not just the right that's reacting against liberal democracy. Some progressives are also embracing populism. Charles Derber , longtime professor of sociology at Boston College, has a new book called Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America . Rather than a dirty word, he argues, popul...