Thinking about...

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Cincinnati was where I wanted to be for No Kings, and I was so glad to be there. We have dozens of civic groups signing people up to work together, and tens of thousands of people down by the river for hours. I was proud to be there and proud to open the rally with this speech. Thanks to everyone who answered and went to work. And thanks above all to the local organizers from 50501 and the good pe...

Five reasons to rally! Another one I didn’t mention — it’s fun and it makes you feel better. Thanks to everyone who is already out there. I’ll be at No Kings in Cincinnati. Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get a...

The Trump administration is trying to seed a panic about «antifa,» one which, if it succeeds, brings the media and the result of us along as collaborators in authoritarian regime change. So let’s be thoughtful. It is not good practice to just repeat the words of those who are trying to manufacture a panic. Nor is it it good practice to juxtapose malicious fantasy with known reality and imagine or...

Today the president is taking credit for a cease-fire in Gaza. But who, in America, was first in calling for that exact thing? Students on campuses. And what happened to them? They were banned from their own public spaces, all over the country. So the president should be thanking them for their foresight. And he and all of his supporters should naturally be calling for campus bans on public assemb...

A week from today, on October 18th, millions of Americans will gather in thousands of places to protest the countless ways our current administration is attacking our freedoms. Some elected officials — details in the video — cannot even bear to say the name of the protests out loud « No Kings ». Instead they are trying to message-discipline themselves into the propaganda line that protestors hate...

At Tuesday’s presidential “roundtable” on “antifa,” the villain du jour, one of the speakers said that its origins were to be found in Weimar Germany. The wrongdoers of history, we are instructed from the White House, were those who tried to prevent Hitler from coming to power. In a busy week, this is a statement worth noting — not just for its shocking character, but for what it reveals about the...

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Friends, One of the many wrongs of this last week has been an attempt by the Trump administration to destroy American higher education: by way of “compacts” in which universities and other institutions would sacrifice their independence and the freedoms of the students, staff and faculty in exchange for essentially nothing — a meaningless assurance though not a binding obligation that the gov...

Basic points on the rule of law, phantom conspiracies, big lies, and civic action. Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit snyder.substack.com/subscribe

I spent the first few days of the month on or near the front in Ukraine and then in Kyiv, and now find upon my return an American reality that needs analysis and action. A few ideas here. Feel free to share. Thanks for being with me. Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode....

How do Ukrainians endure? When will the war end? What kind of war is it? Fresh from travels in southeastern Ukraine and meetings with soldiers, officers and other Ukrainians, I try to give some answers to these questions in this nine-minute video, filmed at sunrise a couple of days ago in Dnipro. We, beyond Ukraine, are not merely observers who can ask questions, but responsible parties whose acti...

It took me a while, but I can now see a purpose in speaking to the discussion of my departure from Yale University for the University of Toronto. Hence this video. I moved with the family last year, largely for family reasons, attracted personally by the prospect of a change to Toronto and to its Munk School in particular; both Yale and the University of Toronto dealt with the transition very grac...

As the assault on American higher education continues, I’ve been asked to explain why I believe this policy is antisemitic. A new video is above. The Trump people claim to be fighting antisemitism, and the media often accept that framing. I believe, on the contrary, that these actions are antisemitic in intention and in execution. The use of the word “antisemitism” as a covering pretext for defund...

The president has issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Like most of these executive orders, it seems illegal on its face: the president can only execute the laws; he cannot just himself decide how our museums and parks will work or look. But perhaps the deeper problem is the implicit claim: that the president himself has a monopoly on truth and sanit...

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Millions of you, around the world, have put these lessons to good use; it has been humbling to learn how from courageous and creative dissenters, protest...

I was asked to make a shorter video summarizing the logic of negotiation. Here it is: five basic tests to establish whether what is proposed by Americans can be regarded as a Ukrainian-Russian peace process. I hope you find it useful, for example in evaluating claims made by the American president in his speech this evening. At the moment, American policy seems to meet none of these tests; it seem...

Wars are hard to end. Peace is easy to say but difficult to achieve. In this video, about ten minutes long, I spell out five logics that a successful mediator seeking peace would take into account: the state of law; the beginning of the war; calculations of the future; paper vs. reality; and ceasefire vs. peace. I have in mind the present Russo-Ukrainian war. But sometimes it helps to recall the f...

In this, my first substack video, I react to the shameful encounter between American leaders and media and the Ukrainian president. No doubt there were more, but I saw five failures on our side: of hospitality, decency, democracy, strategy, and independence. Please watch and share. If you are thinking today about how to help Ukrainians, here are some possibilities: Come Back Alive (Ukrainian NGO t...

This is the podcast version of an essay I published on 16 February at the end of the Munich Security Conference. Since then, its thesis has been confirmed by the Russian-American talks in Saudi Arabia, American slanders of Ukrainians, and the Russian-American concord at the United Nations. The original text begins below. As a television show, American foreign policy is about strength. In reality,...

This is the podcast version of an essay I wrote a week ago, before the Munich Security Conference brought some of the explanation points. Since then, the thesis has only been confirmed by the disastrous Russian-American talks and American slanders of and threats to Ukrainians. Please share this with those who might want or need to hear this. If you are thinking about how to help Ukrainians, consid...

This is the podcast version of an essay I wrote on the night train from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia a week ago. Please feel free to share this with those who might want or need to hear this. If you are thinking as I am about how to help Ukrainians just now, consider Come Back Alive (Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans), United 24 (the Ukrainian state platform for donation...

This is the podcast version of my written post “Of course it’s a coup” of 5 February. Please listen or share with those who prefer to listen. Coming posts will be about the weak strong man, lessons from Germany, and the lines we cross from one form of regime to another. Excellent journalist work on the coup is meantime being done by Mother Jones, Wired, and Notes on the Crisis. Thinking about... i...

This is the podcast version of my post on the logic of destruction behind the ongoing digital coup inside the US government. Please listen and share. Forthcoming posts will be about German lessons (just left Berlin) about fascism, and about Trump as a weak strong man. Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid sub...

I brought a coat for the trip through Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas, but never wore it once. The drought in Ohio was painfully visible in the cornfields. A relative was able to come a talk in Ohio because she had fled a hurricane in North Carolina. In Ohio the days started out in the high 30s but then cleared 70. I ran a 5k in Ohio with people who were struggling in the sun and hea...