The Oscars are this weekend, and I want to talk about a film that knocked me sideways a few months ago.

I saw Hamnet at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on January 4th. I walked out of the theater, didn’t talk to Elizabeth, didn’t check my phone, and hit record on a voice memo. What you’re about to hear is that. Unedited, unpolished, straight from my brain.

I don’t do this often. Usually I process, I research, I build out the references, I pour the mezcal. But some films just need the first impression preserved like a fossil. This is one of those.

I’ll say this much before you press play. We got a few spoilers in the audio and mild one coming right here…..

there is a moment in this film where you realize that the world young Hamnet is seeing, the world beyond the veil, is the stage of the Globe Theatre. The underworld is the theater. The theater is where the dead speak. I’m still not over it.

The last time a movie hit me like this, I turned it into a whole symposium.. with you. That was Sinners, and if you missed that episode, it’s still one of my favorites, a communal breakdown of Ryan Coogler’s spiritual blues opera that became the most alive conversation this community has had.

Hamnet lives in that same sacred space for me: a film so true it feels like it’s channeling something older than itself.

I’m not going to tell you what to feel about it. I’m going to let you hear what I felt, ninety seconds after the credits rolled.

I’m rooting for Hamnet and Sinners and their cast and teams this Oscar weekend! Happy Oscar weekend. Go see the things that move you with people that move you.

I’m putting this straight-from-the-brain thought audio (thaudio?) behind our paywall. And appreciate any and all support as we build out our independent media worlds!

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A few hours ago, I jumped on ’s Defiance Daily to break down what happened in a more-upbeat-than-the-situation-called-for episode with and . We talked about why the shenanigans in Texas are a preview of November, and what we can do about it.

Plus I told the story of the time I literally fixed a broken voting machine in a Black church in Texas in 2008 because the poll workers were, generously, 500 years old. God sent me, apparently.

Also: Kristi Noem got fired, and I may have coined “¡Noem Mas!” on live stream. We must celebrate all wins. You’re welcome.

A bit more on what we covered":

• 🗳️ The Dallas County voter suppression playbook — and why it’s coming for all of us

• 🎖️ A veteran got his hand broken by Capitol Police while senators looked away

• ⚖️ The Florida Bar Association is coming for Trump’s fake prosecutor

• 🧊 Why Minnesota is still the model

• 🫡 They tried to get me to run for president. I laughed a good long while.

Watch the full episode above. I come in around the 25-minute mark but the whole thing is worth your time.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning in live with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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At the bottom of this message I’ll share a video link which will serve as energetic counter-programming to stupid wars of choice. I encourage you to absorb it all and feel the truth of this way of being that channels our deep ancestral connection from all First Peoples. Those who have been forced to relinquish so much are often best positioned to retain the most essential things. They are seed banks of life ways we all need. So it is with Indigenous people. So it is with Black people. So it is with all people who remember we belong to each other.

But before we get there, let me honor my own participation in that video with a story of acknowledgement.

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In November last year, I had the privilege of speaking at Netse Mot: One Heart | One Mind, an annual Indigenous celebration of unity that coincides with the National Congress of American Indians annual gathering. This invitation came on the heels of another, almost exactly one year ago, during the Bioneers conference (coming up end of this month!).

The young people of the Coast Salish community, through Children of the Setting Sun Productions, witnessed my Day 1 keynote on shifting from a story of “Me” to a story of “We” and invited me to join them on their Young & Indigenous podcast. I was blown away by our conversation, and we had a mutual festival of love.

When I arrived to their own event last November in Seattle, I experienced a rare feeling of nerves and slight intimidation. Only on-site did I understand and feel the power of the gathering and the honor of being the only non-Native solo presenter on stage that night. I wasn’t trying to Blacksplain Indigenous history to a theatre filled with thousands of Indigenous tribal leaders!

Instead I spoke as much from my heart as my mind. I shared how I came to learn more of the true roots of democracy present in this land long before European colonization in the form of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. I had just authored a massive, collaborative piece about that history and my own journey to it for Atmos magazine in a piece titled Declarations of Interdependence which is literally written for this very moment.

I shared much of my own journey and the overlapping history of Black and Indigenous struggles, resilience, and joy. I lovingly roasted Dallas Goldtooth (Resevoir Dogs)! And I gave an enthusiastic shoutout to BLIS Collective (Black Liberation Indigenous Sovereignty) of which I am a proud member.

The world we have known is dying. A more beautiful world is emerging. Both are true at the same time. I offer this video as a reminder of that more beautiful world. When you press play, it will jump to my portion of the evening, but if you have time (make time), start from the beginning and feel the full two hours.

Now, let’s invite something new in.

I’d like to honor the other presenters that night:

• Elder Gene Harry (Coast Salish)

• Seattle University’s Indigenous Peoples Institute Senior Director Jill La Pointe (Upper Skagit and Nooksack), and author Sasha LaPointe (Upper Skagit and Nooksack)

• Westshore Canoe Family

• Emcee actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth (Lower Sioux Indian Community)

• National Native American Boarding School Healing CEO Deborah Parker (Tulalip)

• Singer and Musician Isaac Tonasket (Colville, Spokane)

• Delbert Anderson Quartet ( Diné (Navajo) and dance performance by Nakeema Ray (Upper Skagit)

• Activist, attorney and author Amy Bowers Cordalis (Yurok) KLAMATH RIVER!!

• Opera singer Adia Bowen (Upper Skagit Indian Tribe)

• Writer, filmmaker and champion filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc Nation)

• Singer Fawn Wood (Saddle Lake First Nation) and powwow group Cree Confederation

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People in the United States are poorly served by our media ecosystem (just like our food system!). Never is this more important than when the U.S. initiates a war of choice in the Middle East.

Since Saturday, less than 10 percent of my news consumption has come from the U.S. As we conduct a high speed Slip N Slide into right wing state media, it’s even more important to understand our own nation’s action from a different point of view.

So here are some sources I’ve been tuning into I think you’d benefit from.

This is not comprehensive! Please use the comments to add your own.

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We can’t change what’s happening if we don’t know what’s going on.

I really love Canada and have been listening to CBC Front Burner as part of my daily routine for nearly a decade. Today’s episode is a reminder that most of the f’d up things in the world today can ultimately be blamed on the British and past U.S. actions. The two of us overthrew the democratic leader and installed a monarch. We live in the shadow of these choices right now.

The Guardian comes through

And to replace the non-stop pharmaceutical commercials on U.S. cable news, I’ve been watching live streams on YouTube

France 24

Al Jazeera English

BBC News

For U.S. Sources…

Democracy Now!

and PBS Newshour

And of course right here on Substack!

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Not the chocolate-and-roses kind. The hard kind. The kind that asks something of you.

The full video is above. Here’s what stayed with me, and what I think might stay with you. See the end for a full list of links and resources to topics and titles we referenced.

The Declaration of Independence Is Basically Divorce Papers

Look, I love me some founding documents. Great words. But let’s be honest: the Declaration of Independence is mostly a breakup letter. A long, dramatic list of grievances addressed to the King of England. You never respected us. You taxed our tea. We’re done.

Here we are 250 years later with another opportunity to renegotiate the terms of our connection. We’ve done it before: Reconstruction. Labor movements. Civil rights. Women’s rights. American Indian Movement. Each moment asking the same question: Who actually belongs here, and on what terms? What unites us now?

I shared some themes from my Atmos article on Declarations of Interdependence which sparked this live chat.

Esther flipped that into a question: What does the relationship require from me?

Not what do I want? but what does the relationship need?

That’s couples therapy language applied to a country. And honestly? We could use the session.

Love Is a Verb. So Is Citizen.

Esther reframed Valentine’s Day as a way for all of us to deepen our definition of love beyond the simplistic, romantic ideal reflected in so many stories.

That tracks because love, real love, not the Hallmark version, includes accountability and responsibility. “A willingness to be implicated in another person’s dignity” as she said. But that’s part of a long tradition of expanding the idea of love. That’s bell hooks. Love as care, commitment, and truth-telling. That’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-sentimental love. And that’s Valarie Kaur today and the Revolutionary Love Project.

Revolutionary love isn’t soft. It’s disciplined. It asks you to love yourself, love others, and even love opponents, without surrendering truth. That’s a demanding posture.

It also echoes a core idea we’ve been building for years with How To Citizen. (first guest, Valarie!) Citizen is a verb. When the noun gets weaponized—when “citizen” is used to exclude, to intimidate, to build walls, and murder people—the verb rises up as a counter. The verb looks like neighbors protecting neighbors blowing the whistle, offering mutual aid Showing up.

Esther calls this civic intimacy. Acting in ways that protect others’ dignity and safety, not because it feels good but because the relationship requires it.

As Cornel West said, “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” That’s the whole game.

Ancient Wisdom Isn’t Fringe. It’s the Cheat Code.

We talked about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace (more here) and spent some time specifically on the idea of seventh generation thinking. Every decision must consider its impact seven generations ahead.

That’s governance on a timeline most politicians can’t conceive of. They’re thinking about the next election cycle or the shift in the markets in the next few hours. The Haudenosaunee were thinking about people who wouldn’t be born for centuries.

Esther connected that to the sabbatical year in Jewish tradition: debt forgiveness, letting the land rest, leaving the edges of the harvest for the hungry. Interdependence encoded in ritual.

These ideas aren’t new. They’re ancient and available to all of us who maintain a connection to life and Earth. The fact that we keep treating them as radical tells you something about how far off course we’ve drifted. It’s time to come home.

You’re Not Falling in Love with AI. You’re Falling Into a Business Model.

Of course we talked about AI. You can’t have a conversation about relationships in 2025 without the chatbot in the room.

Here’s the tension I keep coming back to: most AI people encounter lives inside commercial platforms. These are not public squares or private spaces. They are essentially malls (h/t ). Every interaction is shaped by a business model optimized for engagement, not connection.

On the topic of loving AI, Esther recently told The New York Times “You’re falling in love with a business product.” All the snaps.

AI can also be a reflective tool. It can help you prepare for a hard conversation. It can surface blind spots. But it gets dangerous when it replaces relational risk, when we outsource intimacy to subscription software. The question isn’t whether we will be in relationship with AI. It’s how we position it inside the system of our lives. Does it deepen our relationships with ourselves, others, and nature? Or simulate one?

Vision Isn’t Fantasy. It’s Design.

I brought up Coraline Ada Ehmke’s book We Just Build Hammers and the work of speculative fiction writer Samuel R. Delany. Delany’s argument is simple and radical: you have to declare the world you want, even if it feels far-fetched, and then ask what needs to change in the world for that to be true.

Vision precedes policy. Imagination precedes infrastructure.

If you want a different kind of relationship, personal or civic, you have to picture it first. What does it feel like? What does it require? What would you have to change?

The Invitation

Esther closed by asking

When you think about interdependence in your life, where is it located? What are the parts that are involved? Is it people? Is it beyond human? Is it art, nature? Ideas?

What are the systems of interdependence that support you and that you are supporting and grounding?

Share it with both of us.

In America’s 250th year, in a moment of strain and redefinition, these questions feel urgent.

What does the relationship require from us now?

Happy Valentining. Happy citizening. Happy loving.

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Resources Mentioned

• Esther Perel — psychotherapist, bestselling author of Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, host of the podcast Where Should We Begin? and Entre Nous on Substack | estherperel.com

• Esther on AI and intimacy — The New York Times Opinion podcast: “Esther Perel on Why A.I. Intimacy Feels Safe but Isn’t Real” GIFT LINK (January 2026); and on civic intimacy in this Substack post

• How To Citizen — podcast co-created and executive produced by Baratunde Thurston | howtocitizen.com

• bell hooks — All About Love: New Visions (2000), foundational text on the love ethic

• The Haudenosaunee Confederacy & The Great Law of Peace — governance framework including seventh generation thinking I wrote about in Atmos

• Valarie Kaur & The Revolutionary Love Project — movement to reclaim love as a force for justice; author of See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love | valariekaur.com

• Coraline Ada Ehmke — We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech (2025)

• Samuel R. Delany — science fiction author and critical theorist whose work argues for declaring and building toward the world you want

• — my media company where we ask how to live well with technology and not just endure it.

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The people of the Twin Cities are living under siege by our federal government. A local told me that all the Mexican restaurants near them no longer deliver. They are in pick-up mode only and have their doors locked and windows covered. They’ve all become speakeasies, forced to go underground… to sell food to people. Do you feel safer now that the beans and rice are on lockdown?

This ridiculously harmful and stupid situation reminds me of another time when a U.S. city was under siege by troops. I’m referring to the forces of the Royal armed services occupying Boston during this nation’s pre-natal moment. Today’s federal immigration agents are the British in this story. They use the rhetoric of freedom while denying it to their neighbors and fellow human beings.

I watched the entire Ken Burns documentary series on The American Revolution, and I’m posting a custom clip I made from the section in the first episode.

Here’s all my writing on the series, and here’s episode 1.

Now someone who has done a massive public service in comparing today in the Twin Cities to yesterday in Boston is investigative journalist . I heard him on my favorite podcast, On The Media, and here’s a moment from his in-depth Substack post on the topic.

The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.

So that’s about it. Here’s a link to Radley’s full piece

The Watch

Two cities under siege

Conservatives are fond of invoking the American Founding, the framers of the Constitution, and the principles that drove the fight for independence. Those invocations have always been selective and opportunistic, but they’ve grown downright farcical as right-wingers…

Read more

3 months ago · 272 likes · 17 comments · Radley Balko

And here’s Bad Bunny saying things we need to hear during his two Grammy award acceptance speeches last night. Excited for Benito-Bowl!!

Below is the transcript from the PBS clip above. There’s some quotable stuff there. Thanks

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Mostly-Accurate Transcript of the 5-min Ken Burns documentary clip

For 17 months, Boston was an occupied city. A rattle of drums awakened residents every morning. Passersby were routinely stopped and searched. Many soldiers had brought their wives and children. Others courted Boston girls or were pursued by them. 40 troops were married during the occupation and more than 100 of their offspring were baptized.

But some soldiers got drunk, robbed people insulted women, profaned the Sabbath. There were brawls, stabbings, suits, and countersuits from London. Benjamin Franklin was concerned.

“Some indiscretion on the part of Boston’s warmer people or of the soldier may occasion a tumult. And if blood is once drawn, there is no foreseeing how far the mischief may spread.”

On the evening of March 5th, 1770, there were tussles between Bostonians and British soldiers all across the city at the Royal Customs House. A crowd of young men surrounded a lone sentry and pelted him with snowballs and chunks of ice. Convinced a citywide uprising was underway. Captain Thomas Preston raced several armed grenadiers to the scene.

More snowballs and rocks and oyster shells greeted them. They fixed bayonets.

Somebody starts ringing the church bells, which in Boston is a sign for fire. Some people are bringing buckets to be part of a bucket brigade. Some people are drawn by the noise. It’s very hard, in fact, impossible to know what happened, which is that somebody yells fire.

All we know really is that when the smoke cleared, there are five people dead or dying.

The first was a tall dock worker, part Native American, part African American named Crispus Attucks. The second was a rope maker named Samuel Gray, who was standing next to Attucks. The third was James Caldwell, a sailor who was in town, it was said, to call upon the girl he hoped to marry. The terrified crowd began to scatter. John Greenwood’s, older brother Isaac was there too and escaped unharmed. But a ricocheting ball hit their friend, Samuel Maverick, in the back. He died in agony. The following morning, Maverick, an apprentice, had shared a bed in the Greenwood home with the now nine-year-old John, who recalled that after his friend’s death, he deliberately slept in pitch black darkness, hoping to see his spirit.

People start arguing already, even before they go to bed about what happened. Paul Revere creates probably the most famous engraving of the 18th century, which he titles the Bloody Massacre. The British Army is very anxious to try to spin this as a story of self-defense, but the language of massacre is the one that holds

A fifth man, a leather maker named Patrick Carr, would die several days later. 10,000 mourners accompanied the coffins of the dead to the old granary cemetery.

“The fatal 5th of March can never be forgotten. The horrors of that dreadful night are but too deeply impressed on our hearts when our streets were stained with the blood of our brethren, and our eyes were tormented with the sight of the mangled bodies of the dead.”
- Joseph Warren.

Not everyone was grieving. An Anglican clergyman. Mather Biles asked a fellow cleric, which is better to be ruled by: one tyrant 3000 miles away, or by 3000 tyrants, not a mile away.

Captain Preston was found not guilty of ordering his men to fire. The other eight soldiers were put on trial separately. Samuel Adams, younger cousin, John Adams, risking his reputation served as the soldier’s attorney. Most of his clients were acquitted as well. Two were found guilty of manslaughter. They were branded on their right thumbs so that if they were ever charged with another crime, they could not make a claim of innocence again.

The British government was relieved by the outcome of the trials. Most of the regulars were withdrawn to Castle William, their harbor fortress. Once again, American colonists had forced the British to back down, and Parliament had already repealed all but one of the Townsend Acts, only the duty on tea remained.

Thanks to the Palm Springs Black History Committee, council member Grace Garner and Mayor Naomi Soto, and always thanks to the fire department!

We can and are doing better.

Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe for more doses of dopeness amidst the deluge of dumbness.

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It’s a hard time in the United States right now, though it’s also always been so.

I’m sharing a short video essay I was moved to record after appearing on MS NOW’s Primetime Weekend last night. I was supposed to talk about the record-breaking film that is Sinners, and I am ready at any time to discuss that revolutionary and liberatory blues opera.

But because this country keeps taking the hard route by failing to take the lessons of its own history, I was invited to comment on the latest assault by the federal government on the very premise of our form of self-government. Sigh.

This post will be long, so let me offer you a guide to what’s inside

1. Resources on what we can do now

2. Lightly edited transcript of the video above for those who prefer reading to watching/listening

3. Full segments from MS NOW last night in which I appeared with

4. Amazing comedic moment we could all use right now

Some Resources

James Baldwin to Angela Davis

I’m deeply frustrated as much as I am inspired. If folks had just listened to Black people and Indigenous people, we wouldn’t be here. I’m not shaming, I’m naming and including myself. For example, I just learned about The Dakota 38, a mass hanging of Indigenous people approved by President Lincoln in Minnesota in 1962. At the same time we will only get out of here (again) if we start listening and applying the lessons.

What inspires me about the Minnesotan response is their embodiment of the spirit of liberation that has always run through the people who have been most discarded by this nation.

So I return to Baldwin. From France, in 1970, he wrote this letter to Angela Davis as she was being persecuted. It’s worth reading in full but here is the section I’m choosing to highlight with bold emphasis added by me:

The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Therefore: peace.

What are the actions

Protect Your Mind and Spirit

We are being subjected to psychological and emotional assaults. It is not healthy to watch murder videos, and we cannot remain in a constant state of agitation and remain healthy. So grab your oxygen mask, and breathe.

• touch grass. get outside and breathe air. make a snow angel. with someone else

• listen to music. make music. dance. laugh. play games.

• eat good food. real food. not just for fuel but for pleasure.

• meditate. daydream. wander.

• it’s essential to take a break from vigilance. joy in community is key. you’re not betraying the movement. you’re ensuring its continuity.

Build Local Networks

No one is coming to save us. We save ourselves. The neighborhood is the primary place where we can build resilience to survive this onslaught and design the better version of ourselves that comes next.

• How To Build Mutual Aid Networks - from American Friends Service Committee. Go Quakers!

• Guide to Creating Neighborhood Resilience for disasters (of all kinds)

• States At The Core has put together this resource guide (PDF) on documenting and responding to ICE

Stand with Minnesota and the Twin Cities

They are putting themselves in the way to prevent the machinery of state violence from crushing us all.

• You can support this GoFundMe for Liam Adrian Cornejo Ramos, the 5 year old who has been kidnapped and rendered to Texas. I have verified this link with humans.

• Also support this GoFundMe. I have verified with humans. Safe Haven was created to help individuals released from ICE detention centers who are often discharged with no phone, ID, transportation, or resources. Many are released into freezing weather after experiencing severe trauma. We provide immediate support, warmth, transportation, and connection to resources so no one is left alone at the gate.

• Tune in to The Minnesota Star Tribune. There’s lots of misinformation flying around and it’s important to support local, actual journalism.

• Added @ 13:15 CT on 26 Jan 2026. Post by

  Letters To Stakeholders

  The High Price of Misdirection

  What We’re Watching…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 1 like · Jason Davis

Defend Dissent

The federal government is attempting to criminalize dissent by labeling any criticism as terrorism. This is something Indigenous and Black people know. The department charged with “managing” relations with Indigenous nations was housed in the Department of War for decades. The weaponization of state surveillance on Black communities via COINTELPRO is legendary.

• Today I urge folks to remember that dissent is duty. Check out DefendDissent.com, see the pattern that connects book banning, university attacks, ICE raids, and state murder. ‘

• At 8pm ET Tonight the ACLU is hosting an online training on how to observe and document ICE.

Defund Fascism

I referenced this Instagram post from The Nation magazine which focuses on ending corporate collaboration with the regime:

Imagine A Brighter Future with Knowledge of our Past

A great video to ground us:

It’s our 250th birthday in the USA, and there’s a powerful history of a life-affirming, justice-infused democracy that existed before colonization. The principles of that democracy are guiding lights for the current moment of darkness. Check out this post for more context on the role of remembering Indigenous democracy in this moment

There’s always more. Please comment with additional resources whether it’s quality explanations of what is happening or guides for what we can all do to support the birth of a better democracy. Our greatest enemy is not the state but despair and overwhelm. The greatest antidote to that is action with others.

Leave a comment

I’m Coming to New Hampshire

I also wanna let you know I’m doing a live, IRL show Feb 7 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire at the Music Hall. I’ll be talking about the good future we can create even out of the madness of today that we’re experiencing in democracy, tech, and climate. Come through!

Transcript of Above Video

Update 13:15 CT on 26 Jan 2026: I changed the transcription service because the first version was trash.

The people in Minnesota are out here fighting for all of us, and they’re doing it with this incredible combination of bravery and restraint, power and peace. And uh, I just want to offer some extended reflections on this. I was recently on Ms Now on the primetime weekend show, and there’s never enough time.

So, uh, here’s some of what I shared and a little bit more behind it. I wanna start with, um, James Baldwin. It, you know, so much of what we are experiencing right now, we have been through before, and, uh, the, the frustrated part of me is like, if you just listen to black folks, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

If you just listen to indigenous folk, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Um, but here we are in this situation, so in some ways. Um, let’s just move forward in other ways. You know, we, let’s remember our history, and Baldwin is really good one for remembering that history. Um, what he wrote to Angela Davis in 1970 is the following.

If we know and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as if it were our own, which it is. And render impassable with our bodies, the corridor to the gas chamber for if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

Therefore, peace. It just seems to me that the people of Minnesota have, if not read this letter, they have embodied its values in so many ways. This is a rich place in our history. Home of the American Indian Movement, the George Floyd organizing that saved the boundary waters effort, which, you know, my America outdoors hat is never far from me.

And I learned that 20% of the fresh, uh, potable water in our national forest comes from boundary waters. Uh, these are the people that gave us prints. Come on, man. And, and they know, they know they are under siege by their own government and they understand the assignment. They understand nobody’s coming to rescue them and save them.

That, that the courts cannot do this. ‘cause we’ve got people who demonstrate they won’t listen to the courts. That Congress has aligned itself with this regime. It’s, it’s very vichy like. So that is a non-starter for now. In the meantime, they’re showing us how to save ourselves and they’re putting their bodies in between the passage to that.

Proverbial metaphorical chamber. They’re standing in front of armored vehicles. They are standing in front of tear gas. They’re standing in front of people who are assaulting an idea and assaulting human beings. And, and you know, I said this on air, but it just, it bears repeating like, immigration law enforcement doesn’t look like tackling.

Elderly people and targeting daycare centers, Medicaid fraud investigation and countermeasures, uh, does not look like murdering a civilian a week. So there is a, there is a great and grotesque lie being foisted upon us. We’ve seen the videos of these murders and the first move is called somebody a terrorist, call him a criminal, call him a suspect.

We know this song, black people have starred in this movie for a very long time. So welcome Arrest of America. Let’s not keep doing this, let’s not keep doing this. Um, there is a, an effort of movement, uh, website all in one is called defend dissent.com. Encourage you to visit it and check it out. There’s, um.

This idea that we are being pushed to believe that dissent is a crime, it is not, and a democracy. Dissent is our duty. So again, just thanks to the people of Minnesota, you get this, you understand what is happening in terms of where we go. I want to elaborate on that a little bit more. Um, I think there’s kind of concentric circles of care and action.

The first is local. The neighborhood is like the, the smallest unit of democracy, actually, I think the individual really is. And we did a whole episode of how to citizen, on how to citizen within your own self, how to practice democracy like in your body. Uh, and then from there, you know, in your, your household, in your building, in your block, in your hood.

So check out the episodes in particular we do with Adrian Marie Brown. Uh, amazing one. Dr. Sam Rader, another really, really good one. And what we’re seeing work on the ground is very local networks of communication, uh, consideration and care. And, and parents are like defending their schools and, and people are, are looking out for their neighbors in a very, very literal sense.

And, and the government is, it’s killing white people. That’s, that’s a very interesting turn of events. I expect, I expect the jack booted thugs to shoot us. I white moms wasn’t in my bingo card. And whiteness is not a protection, it’s not a universal shield, especially when those white people are standing with black and brown people.

Whiteness can be revoked like citizenship. So, uh, appreciation again to Minnesota and for the rest of us, let’s stand with them. Let’s not let their sacrifices be in vain. Let’s not let their model and their playbook go unfulfilled. They are showing us a way of peace and a way of power. Now it’s on, it’s up to us.

It’s up to us to do it. ‘cause this machine, this extractive, colonial, racist, sexist, stupid, wasteful machine is coming for more of us. It is coming for more of us. And that pushed me to the next level here of what, what we’re supposed to be doing. Now, let’s, uh, break the tie between the corporations and, and collaboration with these, uh, extraordinarily dangerous people.

They require the fuel of capital to pursue their dark dreams. We must sever that connection as best we can. Uh, it’s worked with Avelo Airlines. They’re no longer doing these deportation flights. It’s worked with the Minneapolis Hilton. There are other examples that I am not aware of. I’d love to hear, uh, what you are aware of in terms of victories from local businesses refusing to to com to to be complicit, uh, to support this violent fascist attack on the people.

That’s got nothing to do with immigration enforcement or fraud reduction. Also fraud reduction. Really, the, the grifter in chief, $1.4 billion. Come on, man. Like we we’re not stupid. We be thinking. So next, let’s, let’s slow down this connection to corporations and to business and, and then with leaders. I wanna see leaders follow business leaders.

Uh, first off, no more White House screenings of propaganda, fluff films on a day of state sanctioned terrorism. Tim Cook, the fuck are you doing? Like I’ve, these people are living in a bubble and it’s dangerous for us all, and it’s time to wake up. It’s time to wake up. You cannot do that anymore, and we must have a higher standard.

I, I’m not waiting for folks to behave better, but I’m watching and I hope you are too, and we must make our decisions accordingly. We must use that as information to choose where we put our attention and our time, and our loyalty and our money. Enough of that, miss me with that. Cultural leaders keep stepping up the NBA.

Players association did something in that regard. Today with a a statement, political leaders catch up, take a risk, get creative, encourage people to connect with each other, and build information networks and supply networks and resiliency networks. It is not enough to ask us to wait for a chance to vote.

It is not enough. To submit bills that will not be heard or taken seriously. We must slow this machine down. We must build parallel and new and different and better systems. We must acknowledge that something heinous and horrible is coming to an end and is dying, and we must accelerate the birth of what replaces it and make sure it is our vision and our imagination powering it, and not the techno fascists and, and fricking Jared Kushner and whatever.

So yes, that’s some of what comes next. Would love your ideas. Uh, closing thoughts. 250 years ago, some rebels stood up against an empire that was besieging our cities and oppressing people, and, uh, behaving in tyrannical fashion. And the government today of these United States is modeling itself more. On that tyrannical empire, then on, uh, a government by of, and for the people and, and the constitution and, and the values for which it stands.

So that’s information and it’s opportunity. We are in this refounding reset moment, the story we are gonna be living in. And these folks are making it very clear, very clear the story they’re pushing, which is like. Deeper colonization, deeper destruction, deeper racism, deeper kleptocracy and corruption, and flagrant theft.

And I come back to, to the whiteness thing. It’s not a shield, it’s not a universal defense. And they here to take your money and they are willing to take your life. So listen and learn and let’s all of us move together and let’s find our own version of local networks. Let’s find our economic power. Let it let us lead by example and bring formal leaders along with us and share the lessons.

Chicago’s got lessons for us. Los Angeles has lessons for Portland and DC and so many places from this current era have lessons, but also from the Black Lives Matter movement. From people standing for justice in Palestine for civil rights and women’s rights. Like we have been through versions of this before.

This is not a drill. This is not a movie. This is America. But it doesn’t have to be I and these Minnesotans. I’m telling you, man, I spent, I’ve spent time there. I’ve, I’ve made beautiful shows there with America Outdoors. I know amazing people there and they know. Ice, like frozen water, like these are, these people are basically from like the film Frozen.

They are. They are that north, they’re practically Canadian, but without the healthcare and the decent national leadership, which I envy in this moment, but

what they say about ice in the Minnesota is very basic thing. That’s a basic and beautiful thing. They, they just say, it’ll melt. It’ll melt. I remember going there and complaining and like, why don’t y’all, you know, do clean up the streets a little bit? And they were just like, bro, it’ll melt. And that, that’s a, that’s a kind of a long view perspective, and it’s absolutely true.

To quote Lauren Hill after winter must come spring, must come spring the earth. Rotates and we move seasons. We go around that big sun and we channel that light and that heat for a better tomorrow. I don’t know how long this winter is gonna last. A lot of folks been warned about this for a long time, myself included, for a reasonable amount of time.

And here we are and it’s cold. And then Minnesotans are showing us how to literally be in the cold. But metaphorically, we are in the winter. And after that must come spring. So let us also prepare for the spring. Let us have our ideas, our networks, our communities, our resources, better organized to create a country worthy of all the people, liberty and justice for all the people.

We really, we gotta do that. We got to do that. And this is, this is our big chance. This is one of many that we have been given, but this is the one we’re in right now. So there’s always more to be said on this. I encourage you to check out some of my other posts, especially my review of the American Revolution film series, uh, efforts that I’m a part of around, uh, resurfacing, indigenous democracy and some principles from that world.

That are available to us and helpful to us and being demonstrated right now in some of these resilient and resistant moments. And please share what’s working for you in your, in yourself, in your community, uh, and beyond. As we need each other, we are being shown without a shadow of a doubt that we are gonna have to refashion this society.

For all of us, and I’m down to help and amplify and connect and crack stupid jokes along the way with you. I’m Baratunde Thurston, by the way. Um, this is my substack. I don’t know where else I might put this, but you know, baratunde substack.com, call it speakeasy. And uh, I’ll see you soon. We got each other.

Peace.

The TV Parts

Here’s the first of the two segments I joined on MS NOW’s Primetime Weekend show Sunday Night Jan 25, 2026. In this one, from and I talk about the split in the Second Amendment community over the murder of Alex Pretti.

And here’s the second segment where I bring in brother Baldwin.

Now Let’s Laugh

That’s it for now.

Love you.

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Hi you,

Tonight, a lot of attention will be pulled toward noise by the guy who didn’t get enough hugs so he constantly creates groups he can punch instead. I want to offer something different.

Two weeks ago, I did a live reading on Substack of my Atmos essay, “America Needs a Declaration of Interdependence.” I was recovering from food poisoning, the tech was messy, and the moment was real (thus, my suggestion to skip a few minutes into the replay).

What emerged was a conversation about democracy that predates the United States,
about Indigenous governance rooted in relationship, and about what it might mean to move from independence to interdependence with each other, and with life itself.

If you’re looking to tune into something grounding instead of the usual spectacle, the video above is for you.

Aaaand….. it continues.

📍 Tomorrow (December 18, 2025) at 9:30am PT, I’m doing a Substack Live conversation with .

Update 18 December 10am PT… If you tried to join the live with me and Esther, I am so sorry. The Substack platform literally would not let me in despite trying three devices on three different ISPs. There’s nothing more I could have tried. I hope they get their technical acts together as that was a lot of energy spent for such a failure.

We’ll be talking about:

• Sovereignty and interdependence as a both-and (not either-or) tension in relationships and society

• Why intimacy, trust, and repair cannot be optimized or accelerated

• Whatever YOU wanna talk about because you know how I like to bring you in with me

It’s a rare chance to think about the future of human connection together.

📌 I hope you’ll join us. Here’s the link.

For those who joined my messy live two weeks ago, thank you , , , , , and many others! Make it easy to not miss future ones. Install the Substack app.

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This is it. I’m wrapping up my reviews of Ken Burns’s The American Revolution with this post. The full set is available in this collection.

There is a lot to note in this episode, and I won’t get to it all. But I gotta acknowledge this line, “fueled by rum and righteous indignation,” in reference to a mutiny by Pennsylvania Continental soldiers who hadn’t been paid in far too long. This War was the hottest of messes, and I guess that’s the point. We’ve gotten a bit more color, nuance, and truth from this series, even with a few glaring omissions.

Here are my highlights, followed by a transition into very special project I’m part of which picks up where this series leaves off.

1. Hamilton Tried To Warn Us About Trump

2. The First Civil War

3. What Benedict Arnold and George Washington Share

4. Black Folk Been Known

5. Indigenous Omission and a Refounding Opportunity for All

6. I’m doing a Substack Live next Weds Dec 3, 3pm PT.

Hamilton Warns of a Demagogue

 In the closing 15 minutes of this episode and thus the entire series, Burns & Co. rapidly race through the end of the war, the establishment of the Constitution, and the creation and adoption of the Bill of Rights. It’s a lot to cover in a little time, but they managed to squeeze in a small but important bit about the limitations of the structure the Founders created.

They specifically call out the warnings of abuse of power.

They feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment. Alexander Hamilton was concerned that an unprincipled man would mount the hobby horse of popularity and throw things into confusion: "In a government like ours,” he would write, “no one is above the law.”

It’s very popular these days for pundits to proclaim something along the lines of, “The founders could never have imagined the country we live in now… They could never have predicted Trump.” But they literally imagined and warned against it.

How else can we interpret the still-formidable popularity of a president who has betrayed the principles of democracy so fully? The flagrant and open corruption (hello, memecoins); the deployment of military force in American cities outside of wartime; the refusal to be bound by judicial orders; the constant dehumanization of opponents and weaponization of the powers of the state against them. The remarkable thing about Donald Trump isn’t his behavior but the capitulation of much of the Republican Party and the general public into accepting and even celebrating such behavior.

I still have faith that we the people will awaken and remember who we have always had the potential to become, but we are where we are because we didn’t head warnings like those of Hamilton back in the 1780s.

The Revolutionary War as Our First Civil War

The series has made the point repeatedly that much of the ideological and armed conflict of the American Revolution was not between British soldiers and those born on this land but between and among people born on this land torn between loyalty to The Crown and allegiance to and burgeoning republic, aka Patriots.

Historian Vincent Brown, who’s become one of my favorite voices in this series:

 That war in South Carolina is bloody. It’s a gorilla conflict. It’s sometimes brother against brother in this backwoods warfare. It’s an ugly, ugly, ugly conflict. And if one wants a national origin story that’s clean and neat and tells you very clearly who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, the American Revolution in South Carolina is not that story.

Historian Edward Lengel on the brutality

 Patriots murder many of their captives. If they see somebody among the captives who gives them a dirty look, they’ll say, “Oh, I know that guy. He burned a farm just over the next hill, and he killed somebody’s family. Let’s string him up.” And so all kinds of atrocities take place.

The official narrator adds to the chronicle of horrors

 Partisans on both sides seemed bent on being more cruel than those on the other. They tortured and murdered captives, burned homes, and flogged their owners, raped women, and hanged their husbands. Gangs of bandits held up travelers and plundered farms.

This was all preamble to the Civil War unfortunately.

Benedict Arnold and George Washington Are The Same

Hear me out.

There were two major reasons George Washington turned against the British that had nothing to do with morality or noble dreams of an independent nation. First, he was bitter that the British Army failed to recognize his contributions in the colonial era. As was mentioned in the first episode, “after his appeal for a Royal Commission in the British Army was rejected, he retired from military service in 1758, and returned to his plantation at Mount Vernon, filled with resentment at how the British had treated him.” It’s a tale as old as employer-employee relationships. Ole boy wanted a promotion and didn’t get one, so he turned against his bosses. But not only that.

Washington was also greedy. A 1763 royal proclamation declared lands west of the Appalachian mountains off limits to colonial settlement and speculation. Here’s the narrator in Episode 1

After abandoning his dream of serving as an officer in the British Army, George Washington had married an enormously wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis, and had made himself still wealthier speculating in western lands. He saw no reason to stop. “The law was only a temporary measure to quiet the minds of the Indians,” he said, and he directed his land agent to defy the proclamation and secure for him some of the most valuable lands beyond the Appalachians.

Washington felt he wasn’t recognized and wasn’t rich enough. Now that we see Washington for the human he was, let’s take a fresh look at Benedict Arnold.

Update: I forgot to mention my whole-hearted endorsement of the AMC series, TURN: Washington’s Spies. It has some great storylines about the Revolutionary War and Arnold. Very entertaining. Ok now, back to the original post.

This is a man who made repeated battlefield sacrifices but also felt insufficiently recognized. As historian Nathaniel Philbrick notes:

 He had done all these miracles on the battlefield, but he was not seeing any of the recognition he believed he deserved. Why am I doing this? I’ve lost my personal finances. I’ve my destroyed my body. For what?

He also fell in love with a woman on the Loyalist side and probably wanted to build that good life with her, requiring money, which the British handsomely offered. My eyes popped at the sums. Arnold was offered £20,000 upfront and £500 per year for the rest of his life, but the series doesn’t translate that money into today’s dollars. I did.

In very approximate 2025 U.S. dollars, Arnold’s deal looks like:

• Up‑front £20,000 ≈ $6 million in today’s buying power.

• £500 per year for life ≈ $150,000 per year in today’s buying power.

I mean, I completely understand the man’s choices! And more to the point, they look a lot like George Washington’s. These were the same men in many ways, driven by the same personal motivations for recognition in name and in wealth. They happened to land on opposite sides of this conflict, but they were fighting the same war, and it was a personal war for greed and glory.

Black Folks Been Believing In America More Than America From Jump

Back in the 2020-21 era, I was making a lot of appearances on Brian Williams’s The 11th Hour show on MSNBC (now MS NOW). In one moment that went semi-viral, I expressed pain and fury at the matter-of-fact reality that Black people have repeatedly shown up for an America that most Americans haven’t. We have fought for a nation that didn’t fight for us. “You don’t get to be more American than being owned by America.”

I knew this in my body and bones, and it’s pretty self-evident from history. This series has offered multiple specific moments at the formation of the United States demonstrating that beautiful invocation by Black Americans to, as Langston Hughes put it, “Let America be America again.”

So we gotta talk about Elizabeth Freeman neé Mumbet.

 When an enslaved woman in Western Massachusetts called Mumbet was struck by her mistress with a kitchen shovel, she had stalked from the house and refused to return. Her owner went to court to get her back. Mumbet’s lawyer convinced an all white jury that since the preamble to the new Massachusetts State Constitution declared all men free and equal, and since his client was a human being, she should be free. The Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed.

Mumbet changed her name to Elizabeth Freeman and lived nearly 50 years in Stockbridge serving her neighbors as a healer, nurse, and midwife. Her gravestone in a Stockbridge cemetery reads, “She was born a slave. Yet in her own sphere, she had no superior nor equal.”

And we gotta talk about James Forton.

 James Forton was born free in Philadelphia at 9. He had been in the crowd at the Pennsylvania State House that heard the Declaration of Independence read to the public for the very first time.

Forton took the promise of the declaration to heart and never questioned whether its self-evident truths applied to him. Now in the summer of 1781, Forton was 14, old enough to fight for his country.

Forton went on to fight on privateer ships and get imprisoned on a British prison barge on the East River and after the war walked his way, barefoot, home to Philadelphia where he refused a pension because he was a volunteer. Come on, man!

Whether they fully meant it or not, these Founders wrote some things down and made some promises, like we are all equal. As I mentioned four years ago in the clip above, “It sometimes feels like we’re dragging America, kick and screaming, towards its own creed.” We get to decide to take the words seriously and live up to and into them. Words matter.

Back To The Future, Remembering Indigenous Roots

So that brings me to now and then at the same time. What I didn’t know when I spoke to Brian Williams in 2021 and what is glancingly but insufficiently acknowledged in this new series, The American Revolution, is that the Founders themselves were inspired by words and principles and practices of people here before all of us: the Indigenous nations and particularly the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

This week an article I’ve been working on for months is finally in the world in Atmos.

It reads, in part…

Onondaga Chief Canassatego addressed an intercolonial gathering in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, encouraging them to learn from the Haudenosaunee model: “Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable … Do the same. Never fall out with one another.” He said this on July 4, 1744.

Benjamin Franklin paid attention. He printed Canassatego’s speech and shipped hundreds of copies to London. As Pennsylvania’s Indian commissioner, he sat in council with Haudenosaunee leaders and witnessed their governance firsthand. In 1750, he wrote, “It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies.”

The PBS series does more than most stories of such prominence to acknowledge the fact that there was a democracy already present when the colonists arrived. The series paints a more honest picture than most at the degree to which the battle for independence was really a battle for Indigenous land. But the series falls short on the thinking of these times, the revolutionary ideas at play. It does so in service of attention to military battles and campaigns, in a focus on the war more than the revolution. Public historian captures that trade-off in his latest essay. But there was and remains powerful and influential thinking and practice of a deeper democracy that the Founders were invited into.

And that is the subject of our present opportunity and much of my time in this past year and a half, mostly out of public view. With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have an opportunity to renew our vows to each other on a different set of principles, ones less corrupted by the selfish fantasies of empire that drove much of The American Revolution, but instead rooted in deeper principles of equality, ecological reciprocity, gender balance, long-term vision, and peace. These are principles of interdependence, and I believe we are being called to remember them and live up to and into those as well.

There are many efforts in this arena. I happen to come to one through Indigenous relationship that I find deeply weaving with the Black experience and the experience of all who truly value life and freedom, the kind of freedom that doesn’t come at the expense of others but the kind that can only be experience with the liberation of all.

The final words of Burns’s series come from historian Benjamin Rush. He notes that the war may have ended, but, “the revolution is not over.” I agree.

Next week, right here on Substack, I’ll do a live reading and talkback with you about the Atmos article, the Ken Burns series, and anything else on your mind. It’s scheduled for Wednesday December 3, 2025 at 3pm PT, 6pm ET.

Get the Substack app so you are notified when we start and you can pop in!

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Thank you for sharing your power in the form of your time and attention.

This has been a labor of radical love and radical inconvenience, to be honest, but I’m grateful to PBS and Ken Burns for elevating a more complex story of our national origin and providing momentum for the rest of us to run with it, even bigger, into the future.

As always, I welcome your reflection on the series via comments.

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I had to take the weekend off of recapping The American Revolution, Ken Burns’s epic documentary series on PBS. In my brief hiatus, I posted my timely conversation with Gen. Stanley McChrystal about character, enjoyed the 30-minute, MAGA-melting press conference between President Trump and NYC Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, and saw Wicked: For Good in the theatre.

If you’re just joining, here’s my complete set of thoughts on all the episodes in The American Revolution

In this recap:

1. The Horror of George Washington

2. The Beauty of George Washington

3. It’s Self Interest Over Ideology

4. John Paul Ran The Seas

The Town Destroyer

My stomach turned watching this part. George Washington was a hero. He was also a villain. His premeditated slaughter of Indigenous peoples and destruction of their lands was an extraordinary act of horror. I’ve clipped 9 minutes from episode five and urge you to take the time to watch and listen.

This was about land and expansion. As we approached the end of the War, Washington gets about the business of pre-claiming lands he wants to absorb. He unleashes General John Sullivan on one of the largest operations of the entire war, to become known as the Sullivan Expedition, with this order:

 The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more that the country may not merely be overrun but destroyed. You will not by any means listen to any overture for peace before the total ruin of their settlements is affected.

Several of the soldiers ordered to take part in this campaign spoke about it’s extremism and horror even against the corn and fruit trees. Some also took note of the valuable land and planned to return to claim it after the war was done.

This scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee Six Nations that were allied with the British worked and cleared much of the land that’s now Pennsylvania and New York states.

A Multi-Racial, Multi-Gendered, Multi-Lingual Society

The complexity of this series is in its ability to hold the many truths of the early American story. While Washington was indeed a land speculator, expansionist, and ultimately pursuer of empire, he was also at times an evolved and inspired leader who took steps toward the nation that’s always been possible on this land.

The depiction of the scene at Valley Forge, where Washington regrouped and built a village, offered a glimpse of that America, forged as it were, from so many.

 For many, English was not their native language. They spoke German, Irish, Scots, Welch, Dutch, Swedish, French, Mohican, Oneida, Wolof, Kicongo, and more. Nearly 10 percent were African-American. Most of whom served alongside whites in integrated regiments, some 60 men were enrolled in a brand new all black company belonging to the first Rhode Island regiment…  The Native American soldiers and scouts at Valley Forge were Tuscaroras, Oneida, as well as Mohicans and Wappingers

There were 20,000 people living at Valley Forge including women who cooked, cleaned, raised children, cared for the sick, and sometimes, fought.

War is hell and brutal and ugly, but there’s a beauty in the braiding of so many different peoples. And yet…

Money Over Everything

I wanna give some credit to John Lawrence of South Carolina. He was the son of Henry Lawrence, president of the Continental Congress and “one of the biggest slave traders in North America.” The younger Lawrence was with General Washington in Valley Forge.

He wrote to his father words that grabbed me:

 I would solicit you to cede me a number of your able-bodied men slaves. Instead of leaving me a fortune, I would bring about a twofold good. First, I would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind and I would reinforce the Defenders of Liberty with a number of Gallant soldiers. My dearest friend and father, I hope that my plan for serving my country and the oppressed Negro race will not appear to you the chimera of a young mind, but a laudable sacrifice of private interests to justice and the public good.

Amazing words, but Papa Lawrence rejected his son’s noble request. To free some slaves, he said, “ would simply render slavery more irksome to those who remained in it.” True.

Oh, America.

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With Liberty and Justice Self Interest for All

So many times in this episode I found myself rooting for the British which was really me rooting for everybody Black (and Indigenous).

When the British shifted their war strategy to undermining the Southern colonies by undermining the system of enslavement, I was literally cheering. I know how the story ended, but it was news to me that 15,000 Black people chose to fight on the British side of the war while only 5,000 fought for the Patriots.

This was a strategic calculation. As historian Vincent Brown put it, “ For many of those enslaved people, the British represented freedom. The Patriots did not. That’s a hard story to tell to Americans.” Several historians in this series made the point that the British weren’t in principle against enslavement. They were against their colony breaking free of their control and were willing to undermine the Patriot cause by freeing some Black people from enslavement. For Black folks, it was a choice of which white people they thought offered the best path toward liberation.

The same can be said of Indigenous communities who found themselves on both sides of the War. Given the expansionist commitments of the Founders, it made a lot of sense for various tribal nations to align with The Crown. Though others sided with the Patriot out of their own calculus.

Everyone was making the most sensible decisions for themselves amidst a slew of bad options. And for the European powers that entered the war like Spain and France, they were trying to cut Britain down to size, not necessarily fight for a just cause.

This is an obvious point to those who regularly study history and power, but I cannot stress how uncommon it is to say this part out loud. The American Revolution was so much more than a group of people committed to the idea of “freedom” or “liberty” against “tyranny.” It was a massive global conflict that revealed the survival instincts and selfish motivations of people across the world.

Loose Strands

Quick aside: I’m here for the John Paul Jones series, chronicling the escapades of a Scottish-born Continental naval officer who tormented British ships all across the Atlantic. Please someone make this.

I’ll close on this.

King George III knew the ultimate stakes.

 The present contest with America, I cannot help seeing as the most serious in which any country was ever engaged. Step by step, the demands of America have risen. Independence is their object. Should America succeed in that, the West Indies must follow. Ireland must soon be a separate state. Then this island would be reduced to itself and soon would be a poor island indeed.

That foresight into the reduction of Great Britain in the Little Britain must have seriously worried the King at the time. It’s a sad admission that the only way you know how to exist is to subjugate people all across the world to maintain your power and identity.

The Revolutionary War undermined the world’s largest colonial power and stoked a fire that would never die. While the motivations of all its participants were not pure, the consequence was to remind empires that their grip on power is always temporary and that the people can at any moment organize to assert their own power on their own behalf. It’s the irony of Spain and France helping a bunch of insurrectionists overthrown their fellow colonial power, Great Britain, and it’s a lesson that still resonates today.

As always, please share your own thoughts on the series

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Hi you,

I made an intense commitment to watch each episode of The American Revolution each night and post about it the next day. Even amidst travel and live gigs and staying alive in the Year of our Algorithm, 2025.

But like General Washington in late 1777 / early 1778, I need to pause operations in a brief Valley Forge moment. I did watch Episode 5 last night and have my notes, but I’m in no condition to bang that out right now. And it’s Friday.

If you’ve missed the coverage so far, it’s all here.

So instead, I’m going to share my conversation with a living general, Stanley McChrystal.

He and I spoke last month in San Francisco at the Masters of Scale conference. I specifically asked him about President Trump deploying National Guard troops into U.S. cities, and he specifically cited the Revolutionary War in his response.

Here’s my question and part of his response:

How do you respond to the deployment of armed forces in American cities particularly those run by Democrats but really any city or the deployment of immigration officers dressed as special operators? How do you see this, and how do you feel about this use of our military right now?

This is of course personal to me. There’s a tradition of not using the military in the streets of the United States — the posse comitatus rule — and it’s got a really good reason. It’s because you don’t want the American people to identify the military with people that come and police. You’re familiar with the Quartering Act, part of our initial— the founding fathers put in… couldn’t make soldiers live in your homes. And that was because the red coats had done it. And so we were trying to protect ourselves from it. And of course, people grew to hate the red coats.

What we don’t want is we don’t want the American people to grow to fear or be resentful of our own military because the military has to be a mirror of the population. It has to be diverse. It has to be as much talent as we can bring. Parents have to feel good about their sons and daughters going into the service or there won’t be a service.

Enjoy the full episode via Apple or Spotify embeds below, and I’ll be back soon with more reflections on the PBS series by Ken Burns.

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I’m back with a quick reaction to Episode 4 of The American Revolution, Ken Burns’s epic 12-hour biopic? Biodoc? Binge TV series? You can also find my thoughts on episodes 1 through 3.

In this recap here are the highlights

1. Why an educated public matters in democracy

2. The unsung dirty work of women

3. The buildup around Benedict Arnold

4. Vive la France

5. Getting the poor to fight the for the rich

On the necessity of an educated public.

Historian Gordon Wood got me with this one:

The revolutionaries believed that the American people would have to be educated. Without education, there could be no virtue in the populace and without virtue in the populace, the government would fail. Republics are are based on authority coming from the bottom up, not like monarchies from the top down. So you require an educated, virtuous — they use that term over and over, drawing it from antiquity — virtuous population to sustain a Republican government.

Women Were Everywhere

I wrote in a previous highlight about the combat role of women. In episode 4, I was moved by this acknowledgement made by historian Kathleen Duval:

 Imagine what a battlefield looks like after a battle. It has a lot of bodies. It has a lot of blood and gore, and it was the job of women to go in and take care of those bodies, to clean them up, to identify them if they could, to see over the burial of bodies. Part of the work of war is dealing with death.

Corpses don’t clean themselves up, and I appreciate naming how violent this war was and whose job it was to erase the signs of that violence.

Benedict Arnold is really getting built up. Oh, pincer move!

“ The redcoats crumbled then Benedict Arnold galloped onto the battlefield,” goes the voiceover. The name Benedict Arnold today is synonymous with betrayal. But so far we are just seeing a really effective leader getting troops to do all sorts of things, like try to take over Canada or pull off this pincer move which to be honest I learned about most in Tenet. If you know, you know.

We Owe The French A Lot

Historian Stacy Schiff said the very quiet parts out loud:

 The importance of the French Alliance, just in entirely practical terms, we’re talking about what would today be $25 to $30 billion in aid. We’re talking about a war effort that the colonies could not have provided for themselves, and the idea that a foreign power bankrolled that effort and that it would’ve been impossible without them.

That’s the chapter we don’t like to think too much about because our sense of our independence is that it’s something that we achieved on our own.

We Owe Indigenous Americans More

 Most of Washington’s new recruits signed on for three years and a $10 bonus. But those who signed up for the duration of the war were promised a $20 bonus and 100 free acres of Indian land when the war was over.

Unlike 40 Acres and a mule, the federal government delivered and sustained its promises of land to veterans of the Revolutionary War. The first Americans, to be clear, did not consent. This is such an important line in the series.

The initial group to found the country and create the Declaration of Independence largely consisted of wealthy, land-owning, and people-owning white men. They wanted more (as I highlighted in the Episode 1 post). When things popped off in Boston, the idea and excitement over the revolution struck a nerve, but to sustain momentum and continue to recruit new fighters, these elite revolutionaries needed to convince poorer Americans to join the fight. They did so, in part, with a promise of land.

As the voiceover lays out:

 from 1777 onward, the American Revolution, begun in part to defend the interests of property owners, would be fought mostly by men who owned little or no property at all.

But that’s pretty much every war ever, right? Honestly, it reminds me of ICE recruitment efforts today: a signing bonus of tens of thousands of dollars and forgiveness of student loan debt in some cases. Whatever it takes to get the poor to take on the battles of the rich will be pursued and offered. In this case that offer was land that the founders had no right to offer.

In case you haven’t seen the Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment language:

One more thing

Mohawk Joseph Brant

This episode features lengthy explanations about the split in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy between British and American allegiance across the Six Nations, and in particular among the Mohawk, the easternmost nation of the confederacy.

I watched with anticipation to see where the story would go as I’ve come to learn some of its details from Mohawk elders in recent years. So far, at least, Burns and team have only told half the story and focused entirely on Joseph Brant who sided with the British.

I’ll reserve complete judgment until the series ends to see if they balance this with the other side of that split and tell the story of the Mohawks who sided with George Washington and the new Americans.

There’s one character in particular, Lt. Col. Louie Cook, who I’m watching for. He was the highest ranking indigenous officer in the Continental Army. He was also the highest ranking Black officer in the Continental Army. Because he was both. An Afro-Indigenous man who reported to Washington and was critical in many battles. His life and story are the embodiment of what it took to create this nation. I’ll share more later.

That’s the teaser for now.

As usual, let me know what you’re seeing and not seeing in this series.

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I’m back with a quick reaction to Episode 3 of The American Revolution, Ken Burns’s epic 12-hour biopic? Biodoc? Binge TV series? You can also find my thoughts on episodes 1 and 2.

In this recap here are the highlights

1. Hot Take on British Gen. William Howe (secret patriot)

2. Pennsylvania’s Radical AF Constitution

3. Women in War

4. Critiques of Burns from an historian

If you’re new, welcome. I’m Baratunde. I tell it like it is and the way it can be, integrating culture, politics, technology and climate into my work. For a focus on technology, see our media co.

Episode three continues the focus on very specific military campaigns with maps and reenactments and lots of detail I realize I am just not that into. Maybe I watched too many WWII documentaries on History Channel and Netflix but I don’t get as compelled by the play-by-play of battles as I do the larger social and cultural contests playing out in people’s behaviors, newspaper writings, and other off-battlefield activities.

That said…

General Howe Was a Patriot

I said what I said. It’s the only way to explain how he kept letting George Washington and the Continental Army get away. The documentary has mentioned several times that Howe was sympathetic to the American cause before he saw an opportunity for personal advancement if he led the British military crackdown on the colonies. As episode 2 told us, “ Howe had once expressed sympathy with the American cause, but he now saw an opportunity to burnish his reputation as a soldier.” But, I just don’t know how to explain Howe letting Washington “slip” away from Brooklyn and from Harlem other than he was Team America at the end of the day. That’s my hot take.

Also the idea of European forces displacing local inhabitants of Brooklyn and Harlem is proof that white folks have been gentrifying these neighborhoods since the very beginning. Even if it means displacing other white folks!

Pennsylvainia’s State Constitution Was Radical AF

I did not know that the 13 colonies-becoming-states were essentially synchronizing their constitutions to be aligned with a national constitution. They were generally aligned but Pennsylvania was more down for the people than anyone else (Philly has always been home to real ones).

 All of the new constitutions would guarantee freedom of the press fair trials and due process under law. And made sure power rested, not with autocratic governors, but with legislators elected by propertied men.

Pennsylvania took things a step further. They created the most egalitarian constitution in the new United States with the Bill of Rights, and the one house legislature elected by tax paying working men as well as property owners, all of which worried many of the delegates downstairs

This moment was immediately followed by a line from historian William Hogeland:

 People were committed to using the revolution to make it a real social revolution, a real economic revolution, and get free working people, US men, white men, a say in government, um, which was a radical idea at the time. John Adams wasn’t for that. Samuel Adams wasn’t for that.

Y’all got my attention. An economic and cultural revolution. Let’s go! So what happened?

For this I turned to “research mode” in the Perplexity AI tool. You can access the full, brief, report yourself, but suffice it to say Pennsylvania was very much an outlier and this experiment did not last.

The bot, because it actually cites real sources, led me to this 2022 article by Anthony Sanders, director of the Center for Judicial Engagement. He was writing about a mail-in voting decision of the state’s Supreme Court and the challenge of courts looking to a states constitution when there have been many versions of those documents. He wrote,

The 1776 Constitution was perhaps the best example of legislative supremacy in American history. The legislature was almost all powerful, with no independent executive branch, unicameral, and subject to annual elections. After this the state quickly grew tired of this abundance of democracy and the 1790 Constitution heavily cut back on legislative powers and created a more standard tripartite state government.

War Is Bad

I was struck by the excerpt from this letter to the printer in a British newspaper by someone reflecting on the British victory in Long Island

 Because the last action was in our favor, we think we ought to succeed in the next, but Liberty takes a great deal of killing, and the courage of free men is the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans are daily improving in arms and in hatred. We see only the beginning of sorrows. Benefits to neither; misery to both

That’s a pretty good way of describing war. I added emphasis to the hatred part because every occupying force learns that murdering and brutalizing people just makes them oppose you more. But that line “liberty takes a great deal of killing” is about the commitment of people to their own self-determination. That line could apply to the brutal crackdown on the rebellions of enslaved people, or how the French treated the people of Haiti

Women Were Shooting

Big up to Margaret Corbin. Hadn’t heard of her until last night.

From the episode:

 Margaret Corbin, a Pennsylvania Artman’s wife, was standing near her husband when he was mortally wounded. She stepped in and kept up such deadly fire that her position became a target for Hessian guns. Grapeshot eventually hit her jaw and breast and rendered her left arm useless. Three years later, she would become the first woman to receive a lifetime disability pension, but at half the rate wounded men received.

Of course.

If you want to learn more about Corbin and other less-recognized women of the war effort, see this fact-checkable AI-generated research.

Introducing a More Critical Voice on Burns

I came out the gates very excited after episode 1 and literally offered Ken Burns his flowers for expanding the narrative of America’s founding moment. Episodes two and three have calmed that excitement as I’ve pointed out some shortcomings. But there’s another voice I want to highlight in this conversation about The American Revolution. Thanks to comments on my Instagram reel about episode 1, I heard about public historian

Here’s a taste of his reflections on the series. The entire thing is paywalled but after I dig in further I’ll try to synthesize the insights. Meanwhile if you want a gift subscription, ask in the comments and I’ll share the handful i was offered to pass out.

Tad Stoermer

Ken Burns’ American Revolution: 1950s History for a 2026 Audience

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution might seem new and refreshing to audiences, especially on the left, because it acknowledges slavery’s brutality, includes women and Indigenous people, and presents the war as violent and divisive. But it’s actually out of touch with modern Revolutionary War historiography, which has been non-nationalist and transnational for decades now…

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5 months ago · 37 likes · 9 comments · Tad Stoermer

As always, share what you’re feeling, seeing, celebrating, and asking as you engage with this series about one version of America’s origin story.

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I don’t have the time to do as thorough a review of the second episode of Ken Burns’s The American Revolution on PBS as I did for episode 1, but I’m gonna get something out while it’s fresh nonetheless. Here’s that episode 1 post in case you missed it:

The second episode was a lot about battles and warfare tactics and more typical military documentaries that I’m used to. I’m gonna skip over all that because it was less interesting than the following:

1. The voice and choice of enslaved people at the time of the revolution

2. Missing indigenous depths

3. Assorted thoughts including empire

Voices and Choices of the Enslaved

Let me just say I’m loving Amanda Gorman as the voice of Phyllis Wheatley. The voice of America’s would-be, should-be conscious during all this talk of liberty in a nation founded in human bondage through chattel slavery.

Watching the series, I recognize Gorman’s voice every time she begins, but it’s not just the sound that’s familiar. It’s the truth she is channeling across time for those of us who still need to hear and feel it today.

Darby Vassal is a name I hadn’t heard about. He was a Black boy at the time George Washington took up residence in Cambridge, Mass. This exchange caught my attention:

 Washington urged him to come inside and get something to eat. He had plenty of chores for him to do. When Darby asked what sort of wages he could expect, Washington thought the question impertinent and unreasonable. Darby. Vassel lived to be a very old man, and when asked, he liked to say that in his experience, George Washington was no gentleman, since he’d expected a boy to work for free.

I think this episode did a good job complicating Washington without totally undermining him. You can feel the evolution from Virginia enslaver to leader of multiracial, integrated troops.

Liberty Further Extended

I also had never heard of Lemuel Haynes until this episode. He was a free Black man from Granville, Mass. and likely the first Black ordained minister in the United States. He was one of the first to seize on the language of the Declaration of Independence in a call to make it real for all people, like the words say, in a piece called Liberty Further Extended.

 Liberty is a jewel, which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven. It has pleased God to make of one blood, all nations of men for to dwell upon the face of the earth. And as all are of one species. Therefore, we may reasonably conclude that liberty is equally as precious to a black man as it is to a white one and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.

Here’s more of his essay from the National Constitution Center.

Some Missing Indigenous Depths

While I was absolutely excited and impressed to have the series kick off with the words of Haudenausaunee spokesperson Canasatego, this episode didn’t go much further in the indigenous storyline in terms of weaving that parallel thinking and likely influence on the ideas surfacing during this revolutionary time.

I do appreciate the inclusion of indigenous allies who sided with the rebels. Like Captain Solomon Wa-haun-wan-wau-meet of Stockbridge who said:

 Wherever you go, we will be by your sides. Our bones shall lie with yours. We are determined never to be at peace with the red coats while they’re at variance with you. If we are conquered our lands, go with yours, but if we are victorious, we hope you will help us to recover our just rights.

But there were other statements in this episode that simply failed to acknowledge the precedence of indigenous thinking and falsely attributed ideas of equality uniquely to white Americans or European thinkers.

There were some slippery quotes in this episode from the voiceover:

 Proclaiming the equality of all men was a genuinely revolutionary idea, but that equality was not yet extended to Native Americans, enslaved or free Blacks, the poor, or any woman

and, in reference to the writing of The Declaration of Independence

 Thomas Jefferson was proposing something altogether new and radical in the world.

Yeah, but no. The idea of the equality of all was only revolutionary in the world of Europeans. But indigenous democracy had an even more radical concept of equality, one that extends rights and consideration to all life, not just human. As Chief Oren Lyons has shared on multiple occasions in reference to the Haudenausaunee Great Law of Peace, equity and justice were part of the worldview. Humans do not sit above nature, and certainly not above one another.

There was ample time given to OG wordsmith and satirist Thomas Paine and his Common Sense essay in this episode as well as nods to Enlightenment thinkers. But there was no acknowledgement, as is done well in the book The Dawn of Everything, that those Enlightenment thinkers were enlightened by the freedom and equality and thinking they encountered in The New (to them) World.

Other Thoughts

Like I said, this breakdown needs to be shorter as I’m short on time and literally preparing to go on stage (at the Netse Mot gathering in Seattle). A few more things

• I appreciated the sophistication assumed of enslaved people in their decision about which side to be on in the conflict, British or American. Folks were just trying to do the best for them and choose between two untrustworthy options

• It’s important that this series is highlighting the degree to which The Revolutionary War was also a civil war, pitting neighbor and family members against each other.

• And I have mad respect for the British historian (need to look him up later) who drove home the point that from jump, the soon-to-be-Americans were pursuing empire. It’s in the names: Continental Congress and Continental Army. The fact that we sent Benedict Arnold north to take Quebec and that so much of what set off the separation from England was greed and hunger for westward land is important to remember.

What about you? What has stood out from the series so far? As always, share in the comments.

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Hi you,

All week, PBS is airing the new Ken Burns documentary, The American Revolution. I’ll be watching it and offering a set of post-episode highlights and observations so keep coming back! You can watch the series for free at the link above. I strongly urge you to do so! Here’s my enthusiastic IG post:

If you’re new, I’m Baratunde, and this is my newsletter. I try to tell it like it is while reminding us of how things can be. Sometimes there are jokes because living in these times without them is a terrible idea.

Here’s the quick highlights of what stood out to me about Episode 1, (and Episode 2 is live!)

1. Acknowledgment of indigenous democracy that preceded European colonization

2. America was a DEI nation from the get go

3. and America was a genocidal business with a “growth mindset”

4. Boston has always been rowdy

5. What this all has to do with troop deployments in U.S. cities today

Quick Background

I’m heavily invested in the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. I’ve spoken and written on this idea that we are who we tell ourselves we are.

• My 2019 TED talk was a reminder that we can tell a different story about race

• The How To Citizen podcast series I co-created celebrates democracy as something we do, not something we have

• My 2025 keynote at the Bioneers conference was a call to declare interdependence and expand from “me” to a bigger “We” with specific citation of indigenous democracy on this land

• My partnership with PolicyLink around the We Are Founders effort to finally create a democracy that works for all. More on this in the coming months!

As we enter the season of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it’s even more important to revisit our origin story so we can celebrate the right things and find solid ground and principles upon which to create the next chapters of the American story. Not being British, while quite satisfying, is not enough of a reason to remain together.

Despite my lifetime of awareness that the official story of the United States has consistently excluded large groups of people (including my own), only in the past two years did I come to a more full understanding that democracy was present and practiced on this land by indigenous people long before any European arrived and continues to be practiced today.

I wrote in July 2025 about this right on Substack.

Later this month my magazine piece for Atmos will run providing even more context about this history (and present) of indigenous democracy and what it might offer us still.

In the meantime, here are six thoughts that stood out to me about Episode 1 of The American Revolution. I invite you to share your own in the comments and share this piece with others to encourage us all to learn together and actually become the democracy we’ve been talking about for the past 250 years.

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The First Words from The First People’s

I got chills hearing these, the first words spoken by an historic participant in The American Revolution series. You hear the drum first and then these words. The official voiceover continues:

Long before 13 British colonies made themselves into the United States, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Tuscarora, Oneida, and Mohawk had created a union of their own that they called the Haudenosaunee, a democracy that had flourished for centuries.

That part. Democracy was already here. Just under two years ago I was assigned a curriculum in preparation for a meeting with elders from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. High on the list was the out-of-print book, Indian Roots of American Democracy. In it I read the words of Canasatego

The words of Canasatego continue:

We heartily recommend union. We are a powerful Confederacy, and by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh strength and power. Therefore, Whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.

The precedent of democracy on this land is a mind-blowing, story-expanding thing, and the fact that the Haudenosaunee encouraged a similar practice among the fragmented colonists which then inspired the future founders is something we should all be learning as part of U.S. history.

One last quote from episode one

In the spring of 1754, the celebrated scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin proposed that the British colonies form a similar Union. He printed a cartoon of a snake cut into pieces above the dire warning, Join or Die. A few weeks later at Albany, New York, Franklin and other delegates from seven colonies agreed to his plan of union and then went home to try and sell it. But when the plan was presented at the Colonial capitals, each of the individual legislatures rejected it because they did not want to give up their autonomy. The plan died, but the idea would survive 20 years later, Join or Die would be a rallying cry in the most consequential revolution in history.

Kudos to Ken Burns and team for starting off with the drum and the words of the first people. This is a radical and overdue update to the narrative.

Founded as a DEI Nation

I fist-pumped hearing this from historian Christopher Brown in the first 10 minutes of the episode:

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Revolutionary War is that you had such different places come together as one nation. I’m not sure there is a state anywhere in the world in the late 18th century that has. As wide variety of people who inhabit it. And so it really is actually kind of remarkable, the way that that nation ends up cohering, not around culture, not around religion, not around ancient history, it was coming together around a set of purposes and ideals for one common cause.

Say it louder for the white supremacists in the back! (and in the front leading the country right now).

This matters because we are in yet another moment in which white supremacists and Christian nationalists are trying to rewrite the story of the nation as one founded solely by White Christians. That’s the 1776 backlash to 1619. That’s the book banning and attacks on universities and other educational institutes. That’s the use of our own American Gestapo, aka ICE, to attack anyone remotely brown and kick them out of the country, explicitly claiming this is a country by white people and for white people. That is the lie.

White Christians could not have formed this nation on their own, and they did not. It was the combined effort of free and enslaved Africans and their descendants, multiple indigenous nations, descendants of multiple European nations, and practitioners of multiple flavors of Christianity and more that worked together to forge this union. Without everyone, we would be no one.

Founded on Expansion and Land Theft

The colonists were eyeing westward expansion from the start, and there are absurd maps to prove it.

This is key. We have been taught that the revolution was about taxes, representation, and “liberty,” but it was also about land, speculation, and profit-seeking. The founders of the nation were also founders in the corporate and business sense.

I learned a slice of this history in my America Outdoors series with PBS upon visiting The Great Dismal Swamp. None other than George Washington himself was a shareholder of the corporation seeking to drain this swamp and convert it into cash crops worked by enslaved Black people.

Here’s a short TikTok clip I posted about the Maroon societies that lived in that swamp, followed by my conversation with Larry Wilmore on his podcast where we go deeper in the George Washington of it all.

@pbsHave you heard about the swamp that helped start a new life for thousands who escaped slavery? #pbs #americaoutdoorspbs #outdoors #dismalswamp #greatdismalswamp

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So take another look at the map above which reflects much of the pre-founding intention of the colonists-turned-rebels. They wanted to get rich and were eager to displace and even kill untold numbers of indigenous peoples to do it. Also, those state lines would have been seriously ugly. Very little imagination there: “Just draw parallel lines to the left, all the way.”

Ned Blackhawk, featured in the series, has a must-read piece in The Atlantic about how part of what stoked rebellion against the Crown was the King and Parliament preventing further expansion west. George Washington, ever the entrepreneur, was a land speculator who stood to lose money due to the restrictions the Crown imposed on the colonies.

The founders were businessmen who had business interests and didn’t want far-away England cutting into their profits. The center of the resistance was Boston.

Boston has always liked to fight

I know the saying goes, “Don’t mess with Texas,” but we really should update that to reference Boston. They are the real ones. I lived in Boston for 12 years and have constantly joked about the raucous, chaotic spirit of that town. When the Red Sox win, the people riot. Turns out they come by that trait naturally.

Episode 1 really lays the groundwork for Boston as an always-been-turnt town ready to fight. All those frat boys I encountered on Landsdowne Street were just channeling their inner anti-tax, pro-democracy ancestors.

The amount of fighting, rioting, burning, and assaulting that Bostonians did to kick off the Revolution was astounding. Boston straight up provoked The Crown on multiple occasions and then Sam Adams kept adding fuel to the fire, not through his beer but through his newspapers. This quote stands out to me from the series:

 In Boston, 42-year-old Samuel Adams helped rally the opposition against implementation of the Stamp Act, a failure as a brewer and as a collector of local taxes, Adams was a master of propaganda.

Yes it was the taxes that British Parliament was trying to levy, but it was also the dissolution of local town halls and self-government that really irked the people.

Also from the series:

he would try to end every vestige of self rule prized by the people of Massachusetts first, the Prime Minister convinced the parliament to repeal that colony’s long standing charter, then dissolved the elected assembly again and limited each town and village to just one town meeting a year

The additional acknowledgement I love from this first episode is the mention that the men who took part in the Boston Tea Party dressed like indigenous folks, not to actually try to fool witnesses but to attempt to claim an identity as more native American, in opposition to the United Kingdom and Europe.

As I’ve learned in my own studies repeatedly, “American” originally referred to the indigenous peoples of this land. The American Revolution created a wedge between Europe and the white people of the Americas which drove them to further self-identify as American.

Now About Deploying the Military into U.S. Cities

Very shortly, I’ll be able to point you to the recording of my conversation with former General Stanley McChrystal that I held at the Masters of Scale conference last month. I made a point of seeking his thoughts about the deployment of federal troops (or those dressed up as federal troops) to terrorize, assault, and kidnap people in American cities at the behest of President Trump. The general was impassioned on the subject and cited the American Revolution in response.

I don’t have the direct quote, but he reminded us that the King’s imposition of troops in Boston, allowing them to quarter in people’s homes, was something the founders strongly rejected. The risk being that the people see the military as an occupying force and grow to distrust them.

Episode 1 drove this point home.

And more from that same part of the episode:

 There were brawls, stabbings, suits, and countersuits from London. Benjamin Franklin was concerned. “Some indiscretion on the part of Boston’s warmer people or of the soldier may occasion a tumult. And if blood is once drawn, there is no foreseeing how far the mischief may spread.”

This is what the Trump administration is attempting to provoke by unleashing under-trained personnel dressed as U.S. military (and in some cases actual military) into cities run by Democrats and inhabited by large numbers of immigrants. They have tackled, fired upon, tear gassed, and kidnapped people including documented citizens. Fortunately the people from LA to DC to Chicago to now Charlotte have not taken the bait. But let’s see it for what it is: an intentional provocation meant to justify the escalated use of force by the government against the people.

That’s the very thing that set this nation into being in the first place. We would do well to remember it.

What have you noticed from The American Revolution so far? Are you learning anything new, or maybe frustrated at the exclusion of some element?

I asked this in my Speak Easy Chat, and Sam Murphy replied in part:

• White People marching in Charleston yelling “Liberty!”, and enslaved folks joining in, and they shut that down.

Here, here! The exposure of rank hypocrisy in cries for freedom and liberty while building a society and economy based on denial of that very thing to others is one of the things I’m most grateful for about this series so far.

We can celebrate democracy while also calling out its absence. In fact, to truly do the former, we must also do the latter. Otherwise we’re just talking.

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Here’s my thoughts on episode 2

Quick note from the IRL world, I will be doing a public talk / show at CSU Long Beach, Saturday November 15. Tickets are still available. The theme is our future, life with machines, democracy, Earth and more. And there will be lots of time for Q&A. We’re gonna keep things very real because the times demand it. Also, there will be jokes. Because the times demand it. See you soon!

Get Tickets

And for my Seattle and nearby people, I’m honored to be performing at the Netse Mot (One Heart | One Mind) gathering next Tuesday November 18th. It’s a celebration of solidarity among all peoples, hosted by the First Peoples. Find out more and get tickets.

My goal with this email is to share a little bit of where my head is at as well as literally share content that’s been helping me see the world in its more beautiful state as so much ugly/stupidity has gripped the United States lately.

I’ve been living mostly on the road mostly since August. It’s been a mix of birthday travel (vive la France!), heads down work on building out our media company where I do most of my speaking, show-making, storytelling work, and hitting stages in places all across the USA spreading a message of humanity and life-first, interdependence, and occasional tomfoolery.

For a while I worried that my initial travel pattern (Los Angeles, DC, Portland) was the reason masked, jack-booted, under-qualified men were storming those same U.S. cities and kidnapping people. Then I realized, no, I just have good taste in metro areas.

And now, some highlights from the feeds that are feeding my soul right now:

A Revolutionary Approach to Education with Zero AI

I had such a fun conversation with of that I decided to publish the entire thing in our Substack.

Life With Machines

Rethinking Education in the Age of AI

Read more

5 months ago · 7 likes · Life With Machines, Abby Falik, and Baratunde Thurston

A Museum Heist Worth Celebrating

From Artnet via my IG feed:

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently home to a guerrilla art project featuring the work of 17 Native artists. The unsanctioned augmented reality exhibition, “Encoded,” was launched by nonprofit media and design lab Amplifier on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, taking over the institution’s American Wing.

California Is Leading in Participatory Democracy

Yes we voted hard yes on Prop 50, but that’s playing defense in a system that’s increasingly out of touch. Meanwhile, citizen assemblies and other forms of participatory democracy (beyond voting) are gaining steam across the country.

From in my Substack feed:

This state government office has built a deliberative democracy tool called Engaged California, and they’ve been using it to engage with Californians directly affected by LA fires. Starting with open-ended, almost philosophical questions, they used the platform to get a sense of where people were and what was on their minds. Then, they refined that feedback into specific policy options and invited deliberation. Soon, that feedback will go directly to the governor and state legislature, to guide LA’s rebuilding and recovery.

New_ Public

🧑‍🚒🤝💬 How California turned wildfire recovery into a deliberative democracy experiment

We’re still seeking a Social Media Fellow interested in building a career in public interest technology…

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6 months ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Josh Kramer

We Can All Be Lesbians

Showed up on my YouTube homepage.

Elbows up! Love our Canadian neighbors to the north and this comedy series, Mr. D.

We Can All Live Like Billionaires

From We Wing Any Car and Oli Frost on LinkedIn

You pay fuel duty. Why don’t billionaires? This week, we launched WeWingAnyCar.com to help you qualify for the same tax breaks that private jets get. Because tax loopholes shouldn’t just be for billionaires. They’re for everyone.

Chicago Is Showing Us How To Do It

In response to a question about “illegal aliens,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said, “We don’t have illegal aliens… We have human beings.” From my IG feed.

Share what’s giving you life from your feeds in the comments. And let me know what you think of this as a newsletter format.

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Thank you.

With love and peace.

Below is a loose transcript of the video above, recorded in my car this morning because I got feelings about the 2025 election results and miss sharing them with you! Inside

• Cuomo Loses Twice!

• Mamdani is not the real socialist in America right now

• My favorite ballot is the Prop 50 ballot in Cali

• A reminder of who we are.

Opening

Good morning after.

I just want to say I feel good about many of the choices. I take all the choices that the United States of America made on this election night one year later to choose the people over fascism and destruction and military invasion of our cities. I just wanted to put something out there to say, thanks. Let’s keep moving. Let’s keep going. And here’s some observations.

I watched some of the coverage last night. I voted myself and dropped off my ballot in California. That was a party. That was fun. As a former New Yorker, I got thoughts about Mamdani. But just spoiler alert, it’s good. We had a good night. I think we needed this reminder of who else we are. Where we keep feeling this tug of well this is just what the country is now the country is just like nazis and racists and fascists and militarists and there’s always been that in in these united states these dis united states and there’s decent people and there’s folks who stand with working people and there’s folks who stand for humanity so that’s the headline.

New York City

New York City. Let’s start with my former city. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. That’s great. To defeat. Like, I think the headline for me is Mario Andrew Cuomo loses twice. I really would love to see more of that in writing because that’s what happened. And it’s got to be embarrassing. I don’t know what you do from there. So wish him the best.

Love Mamdani being like, this is the last time you’re going to hear me say this man’s name. His victory speech had what one might call swagger in it. And I think it’s deserved. I think someone who was polling at 1% less than a year ago to clear 50% and beat a former two-term governor and son of a governor. You got to give that man a moment to feel it and the people who supported him a moment to feel it. That’s just wonderful.

And I think, you know, he’s charming and he’s articulate, but he’s also focused. And really the core thing is that he’s in alignment with the people. And I think if you look at his position, as you look at the polling, he’s much more in touch with where the people are than, say, someone like Chuck Schumer. So Mamdani reveals more of who New York City is.

I heard a comment on one of these cable news joints last night, which was like, oh, the Republicans are across the country going to have a field day running against Mamdani in the midterms. Mom Johnny’s not running in the midterm elections, so good luck with that. I think if your midterm reelection in North Carolina or Pennsylvania depends on you running against the mayor of New York City, you’d have already lost. And it’s a pretty easy deflect for the people, for any of their opponents to be like, look at me. Like you’re in a contest with me, not the mayor of New York City. So whatever state we’re in, whatever congressional district we’re in, New York made their choice. It’s time for us to make ours.

On Socialism

I’ve heard, you know, a lot of claims of socialism as a negative thing. And that’s rich. It’s like literally rich when it comes to criticizing Mom Downey, because I’m just I’m confused about the types of socialism that we find acceptable. You know, the socialism of bailing out banks. Cool. That’s old news. But what about the socialism of the U.S. federal government taking a stake in non-government owned companies. Like just, I want a percentage of all your sales. That kind of socialism, that Donald Trump socialism, that MAGA socialism. So again, good luck running against socialism. So long as the people you’re running against remember that we’re doing some crazy levels of socialism in the United States right now, the likes of which a Democrat has that proposed. So it’s pretty exciting times.

Other Results

All right, you got governor’s races, yay for women, yay for decency in New Jersey, Virginia. Supreme Court victories in Pennsylvania is also very good. Maine elections, good.

California

So that brings me home for my recent home of California. I wanted to drop off my ballot in purpose and in person. Yes, that was a flub, but it also kind of works because I did drop it off in purpose and in person. Toward the end of the day, the moon was rising. It was like a full moon rising. And we were out there, y’all. There was a line to drop off the ballot for people voting, not even just doing the drop off. I was able to slide on by because I pre-filled out my joint. And most importantly, got my sticker, which is really why we do this. We’re all just five-year-olds who want a star of liberty, not fascism.

So long lines in a special election signify the degree to which folks wanted to be on the record against this record-breaking abuse of power that’s come from the Trump administration, from Stephen Miller, from Darth Vader, the Vought guy who doesn’t believe in voting, ironically, who’s running Office of Management and Budget and disassembling our republic. So California, for me, this election was like, look, if I wanted more Texas representation in the U.S. Congress, I would have moved to Texas like Elon Musk and the rest of them. I live here, so I want my vote here to not be diluted. And what we have, when you have, like, Southern states attempting to dilute the political power of non-Southern states, that’s like low-key civil war. That’s not violent. It’s not armed. But it is a shot, nonetheless, in an attempt to weaken the rest of us.

So California had to do it. And I think the way Newsom did it is actually very responsible. I marvel at how quickly this came together. This was like two to three months of effort. And to see lines on, there was one thing on the ballot. There was one thing on the ballot, which is my favorite type of ballot, by the way. I voted in a lot of different places over time, not because of voter fraud, because I’ve moved. And it can get pretty complicated out here, especially in California. This was like worded for human consumption and interpretation and understanding. It was great.

So I think standing up for our own voting rights, but also using our position as a very large state, to stand up for those of others. It’s essentially, it’s leadership. It’s actually leadership for the people of this state and the leaders of this state to show, to demonstrate by example, this is how you do it. This is how fast you can do it. And then these other states, I watched Newsom’s speech and it’s an open playbook. It’s like an open source approach. And he’s like, all right, let’s go Virginia. Let’s go Pennsylvania. Let’s go New York, Illinois, whatever other democratic leading states I wonder about Minnesota, who have the ability to counteract the attacks on our voting rights by these former Confederate states. Former.

So good on us for that and good on people for wanting to be on the record. I think it’s also really interesting. I heard some analysis talking about, you know, there were folks who were able to vote in this special election who were too young to vote in the last one. I imagine there’s people who were trying to cancel out their vote for Trump with this one. Because the real, real is like we have military occupation of many of our cities by a under-trained, under-qualified, personal army of Donald Trump. And we are seeing effective ways to counter that. We’re seeing mayors in Boston, in Chicago, in Portland, in Evanston, and not just the mayors, but the people. Standing up, forming mutual aid, helping out their neighbors, walking kids to school, providing funds, and keeping a spotlight shined on the dirt.

Donald Trump is less popular now than he was right after January 6th. Yeah, that was actually a breakthrough for me because even I was like, I don’t know, maybe this is just who we are now. And it can take some time. But people are waking up. Becoming well well they’re waking up people are waking up to the truth and we don’t want this. The vast majority of us do not want this. He pulled off an insurrection attempt on January 6th, and now he’s essentially stormed the capitals of multiple states run by Democrats using ICE and Customs and Border Patrol officers and a national card, and in at least one case, the U.S. Marine Corps. Nah, we’re not having it.

Closing

So thank you if you voted. Thank you if you encouraged others to vote because you couldn’t. And if you didn’t, remember that feeling. And it’s not just about voting, but it does matter. It does matter. And let’s remember, there’s more of us who believe in a decent way and a good way than this noise and this nonsense. And we are not through this yet, but we are very much in it.

And we need moments like this 2025 election to remind us that we can position this country differently in a way to be the best of what is possible here, even as we fight the worst of what is also possible at the same damn time.

All right, I’m Baratunde and you can find me on Speakeasy on my substack. I try to tell it like it is and the way it could be. And I think this 2025 election revealed both those things. So my sincere appreciation to everybody who put some effort into these elections and to everybody who every day is putting effort into reminding us of who we can really be. In standing up against, I don’t know, monarchy. Literally like in the founding documents, all this, we’re not supposed to be about this life. We’re supposed to be about life.

That’s the rub of my short video clip above (and on Instagram and TikTok), but I want to use this space to briefly expand and then remind us of people fighting to create the nation we’ve always been capable of becoming. But first, on dictatorial dumbassery, Trump promised vengeance and retribution, and he’s delivering.

Here are some of the historical parallels revealing just how much Lost Cause ideology is driving his agenda and that of the formerly strong political party known as the GOP.

1. Use of Forced Authority in Historically Black or Liberal Cities

   Just as the Confederacy exercised control over dissident regions, Trump’s deployment of federal troops in cities opposed to his ideology echoes tactics of subjugation as well as propaganda. The selective application of excessive force and intimidation tactics only in Black or Liberal cities with declining crime rates is a flagrant return to Jim Crow era abuses.

2. Erasure and Romanticizing of History

   Confederate narratives often romanticize lost causes while minimizing the atrocities of slavery. Trump’s push to sanitize history at the Smithsonian, return Confederate names to military bases, and wine endlessly that accounts of slavery focus too much on how bad it was, reflects that same impulse.

3. Mobilization of Grievance as Political Strategy

   Confederates framed their cause as defense of tradition and race. So much of their motivation was driven by a severe insecurity in their own power and fear of Black people doing unto them as they had done unto us. Today’s grievance-based rhetoric—“vengeance,” “taking back America,” punishing dissent, protecting against “white replacement”—mirrors all that. At the end of the day it’s a small mindedness and weakness of spirit: you lack faith in your own ability to hold your sovereign identity amidst a changing and diversifying culture. We’re also seeing an exploitation of that economic and identity-based grievance by thieves… people willing to scapegoat an immigrant or trans person or Black person so they can rob you of your Medicare and Medicaid and of your right mind.

4. Suppressing Critical Inquiry, Promoting Ideological Indoctrination
   Southern states before and during the Civil War tightly restricted teaching that challenged slavery. They passed laws banning abolitionist literature, censored Northern textbooks, and criminalized teaching enslaved people to read. The defunding of education and censorship of true history today mirror these efforts.

I’m sure there’s more but this is what the trees revealed to me on my walk so I thought I’d share it with you (and I know it’s been a while).

I’ve been steady dropping deeper thoughts and analysis about this whole AI thing so make sure you check out some recent posts on the Life With Machines Substack:

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In the meantime, here’s some other, more hopeful and actionable things I think you should be aware of

I’m so proud of my hometown. A few months ago I posted some videos just before a pageantry of fascism swept through Washington DC. Since then the current administration has unleashed military force on the nation’s capital. But the people are standing up. A prime example is the Free DC Project, which I urge you to support.

I was especially excited to see the people of Columbia Heights, where I grew up, standing in solidarity against the American Gestapo forces known as ICE.

In the spirit of highlighting resilience. We are in the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. There’s a great opportunity to stand in solidarity with folks in the Gulf South affected by that storm via solidarity rides, walks, boating etc. Please share with those who want to move their bodies to the beat of freedom and justice. Much respect to Taproot Earth for spearheading this week of commemoration.

And in some good news, the people of Southeast Georgia have helped preserve a major source of freshwater as well as as natural carbon sink in the Okefenokee Swamp. I had the honor of visiting this swamp while filming America Outdoors and was moved by the overlooked people facing overwhelming odds to preserve this crucial part of Mother Earth for the benefit of the many. A key figure in that struggle as been Reverend Antwon Nixon. He recently shared this victory story with me: their coalition stopped the mining project (!!) which threatened this incredible part of our natural world. They bought it and the mining rights, and they’ll protect it.

Even as we face the most unsubtle form of white supremacy and fascist brutality, built on a story of domination and separation from each other and the planet, there’s another story happening. People are awakening to the essential truth of our interdependence with each other and the Earth, and we are starting to behave accordingly. Take heart in these stories of resistance, resilience, and creative alliance. This is what will get us through the storm and in a position to build something better on the other side. All storms end.

Finally, I’ll leave you on a laugh from King Willonius who had some fun with the Cracker Barrel situation. Enjoy this satirical music video.

The United States has always been best defined by those it seeks to exclude: indigenous people, Black people, women, poor people, immigrants, LGBTQ+. We are on a constant journey toward liberty and justice for all, and sometimes we move backwards, but it’s these Others who call the nation into a higher state of being. Many in the nation resist the evolution. Sometimes we take in some of the principles and ideas. Sometimes we forget and need to be reminded.

We are in that moment again. We need to remember and re-member. We are being called to be founders again.

The First People of this land practiced democracy. The French called them the Iroquois Confederacy, but they call themselves Haudenosaunee. Five Nations, then Six. Once in a constant state of war, brought together to live under the Great Law of Peace. You know some of their names: Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Tuscarora. The Founding Fathers knew their names as well and admired their ways of self governance and of freedom, especially Benjamin Franklin. Our independence was only possible because of hundreds of years of interdependence with native nations already here. Here’s an excellent and accessible writeup from the of that story, and I’m working on sharing more. In short: our elder indigenous brethren were co-founders.

Black people too have played this role. We represent America’s pride and its shame. We were the literal economic foundation setting the stage for the wealth that powered the nation’s rise, financially and culturally. There are too many to name, but Frederick Douglass was uniquely gifted in reminding the nation of its promise and possibility while holding it to account. His lifelong efforts to call this nation in to its higher self make him a co-founder as well.

In 1852 Douglass channeled a brilliant address in Upstate New York, Haudenosaunee land, asking “What to the slave is your Fourth of July?” Here’s a version of the full text. In the summer of 2016 I performed a version of this address at the Brooklyn Public Library, and I’m sharing that recording today. I produced it as an annotated reading with some music, graphics, and commentary with the direction of . It still works! That is a beautiful and sad fact.

I could go on. In the future I will. But suffice it to say that indigenous and Black people in this land have a very special bond and have played a special role in making the United States a worthy nation. We are the people who this nation stole from and the people who this nation stole; we are those here since time immemorial and those dragged here from afar. And we are founders. We all are. Remember that in this season of remembrance.

Thanks. Happy independence, and interdependence. One is not possible without the other.

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