“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson Lears



Yesterday Charles Kupchan [https://keenon.substack.com/p/can-america-bring-order-to-global?r=ktr9], a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us how America might bring order to global anarchy. Today’s guest thinks that Washington DC foreign policy insiders, with their imperial vision of an American brokered international order, are the problem.

The Rutgers historian Jackson Lears [https://history.rutgers.edu/people/details/60-faculty-emeriti/187-lears-tj-jackson], who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/founders-nightmare-jackson-lears-anti-imperialism/] Lears argues that anti-imperialism was the original American revolutionary dream, and that the United States has spent the last eighty years betraying this vision. He dates the nightmare back to 1947 — the year of the National Security Act, the Truman Doctrine, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about using the Cold War to scare the hell out of the American people.

Lears argues that contemporary American foreign policy has been governed by the very things that George Washington warned against: passionate overseas attachments and habitual hatreds. Take, for example, he says, America’s historic attachment to Israel and its abiding hatred of Russia. He calls Gaza a genocide. He describes Putin as a serious man and a rational actor in Ukraine. He would dissolve NATO. He doesn’t think the CIA is above having killed JFK. And then there’s Iran….

So what to do? We must learn, Lears says, from the founders. Lafayette, he reminds us, was a master of the retreat. America should step back from both its passionate overseas attachments and its habitual hatreds. Given the anti-war sentiment of both left and right in the midterms, it would seem as if the vast majority of Americans agree with Lears rather than the DC foreign policy establishment.


FURTHER READING



•   “The Founders’ Nightmare” [https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/founders-nightmare-jackson-lears-anti-imperialism/] (Harper’s, November 2026) — 5,800 words, and the whole argument. Read it before you argue with it.

•   Lears’s Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374719944/animalspirits/] (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most recent of the books, after Rebirth of a Nation and Fables of Abundance.

•   The establishment this episode is answering: Charles Kupchan [https://keenon.substack.com/p/can-america-bring-order-to-global?r=ktr9] on governing the world to come, and Eliot Cohen [https://keenon.substack.com/p/eliot-cohen-is-the-strategist?r=ktr9] on The Strategist.

•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Edward Luce on the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski [https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2543-edward-luce-on-the-life?r=ktr9], Janet Reitman on The Inheritance [https://keenon.substack.com/p/an-american-tragedy-in-five-acts?r=ktr9], and Alexander Mikaberidze on the Louisiana Purchase [https://keenon.substack.com/p/americas-grand-faustian-bargain?r=ktr9].


ABOUT THE GUEST



Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers, where he taught from 1986 to 2025, and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include No Place of Grace, Fables of Abundance (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History), Something for Nothing, Rebirth of a Nation and Animal Spirits</

The Founders’ Nightmare: Jackson Lears on How the American Republic Became an Empire

Recorded just before the midterms, the DC-based foreign policy guru Charles Kupchan [https://x.com/CharlesKupchan?lang=en] predicted they weren’t going to be kind to the Republicans. He was right. So if he can predict the future of domestic politics, what about international relations? Can he tell us what is about to happen in our increasingly anarchic global system?

Kupchan’s new book Bringing Order to Anarchy [https://www.cfr.org/books/bringing-order-to-anarchy] is less predictive than prescriptive. He argues that the answer to our multipolar disorder is not the United Nations but something older and, frankly, less democratic. His model is the Concert of Europe, the club of five great powers that, in his view, maintained peace on the European continent for most of the nineteenth century.

His diagnosis of our current disorder is that two tectonic shifts have occurred simultaneously. Firstly, international power has moved west to east and north to south on a scale not seen in centuries. Secondly, the digital revolution, particularly the automation of work, has dismantled the social contract of the industrial era. The result is the international version of a Gramscian interregnum. The old is dying and the new cannot be born. And everywhere around us are the morbid symptoms of decay.

So should Trump sit down with Putin and Xi to (re)create a 21st-Century Concert of the World? Kupchan’s answer is not yet. A concert needs conservative powers practising restraint, and Putin is a revisionist who wants the status quo overturned. The concert, he says, will have to await the post-Putin era.

What he also says is that America needs a “national conversation” about both the digital revolution and its role in the world. This conversation, I suspect, is about to begin. But it will be increasingly a post-MAGA, post-Trump one. He’s waiting for a world after Putin. The rest of us are waiting for the one after MAGA. Post-Trump and post-Putin. That’s how the world can bring back order to the international system.


FURTHER READING



•   Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come [https://www.cfr.org/books/bringing-order-to-anarchy] (Yale University Press for the Council on Foreign Relations, October 2026, 328pp).

•   Kupchan’s Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/isolationism-9780199393022?cc=us&lang=en] (2020) is the prehistory of the present mood, and the book he was on the show with in 2021.

•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Michael Dobbs on The Six Minute War [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-six-minute-war?r=ktr9], Eliot Cohen on The Strategist [https://keenon.substack.com/p/eliot-cohen-is-the-strategist?r=ktr9], and Anthony Badger on Prosperity Road [https://keenon.substack.com/p/prosperity-road?r=ktr9].

•   Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Notebooks] — the source of the interregnum and its morbid symptoms, which Kupchan has now used on this show twice.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Charles A. Kupchan is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. He served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and is the author of Isolationism, No One’s World and How Enemies Become Friends.


ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA



Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New

Can America Bring Order to Global Anarchy? Charles Kupchan on How to Govern the 21st-Century World

“You don’t accidentally end up with five wives.” — Mark Binelli on Martin Scorsese



We are filming in New York today, which is appropriate for a show about Martin Scorsese. Mark Binelli’s Just a Shot Away [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250905130/justashotaway] is out today, the first substantial biography of the great New York City film director. Binelli [https://markbinelli.com/] got no cooperation from Scorsese with the book, which isn’t really surprising given the author’s interest in the Scorsese family’s connection with organized crime. Binelli himself is more generous about the refusal. A big book about his life that he wouldn’t have had control over, he says, offered Scorsese no obvious upside. Control, of course, being the key word. Binelli directs Just a Shot Away, not Marty.

The surprising thing is how close the mob actually was to a working-class Sicilian-American family like the Scorseses. Not as a recreation of Goodfellas or even Mean Streets, but more as the mechanism by which an Italian family in Little Italy got a job in the garment district or settled a dispute with a neighbor. Binelli suggests that Scorsese’s father was not a gangster. But his uncle worked for one, a bootlegger and hitman who let the young Scorsese film part of his first feature on his roof.

Then the two obsessions. Films, which Scorsese could recall with a memory his friends called freakish, in an era before Google, YouTube or Wikipedia. And the church, which came relatively late in his adolescence — his parents were barely observant, and he only found Catholicism when the family moved back to Elizabeth Street. For Scorsese, of course, the cinema became the church and both his life and work are always a shot away from God.

What all this cost is the other half of the Scorsese story. Five wives, two daughters he was barely a father to, and a rock ’n’ roll style decade of drugs. It’s an astonishing history of one of America’s greatest 20th-century artists. And Binelli tells it all with the loving grace of both a wide-eyed fan and a sophisticated cultural historian. “You talkin’ to me?” De Niro’s Travis Bickle asks in Taxi Driver. Binelli suggests that Martin Scorsese has been talking to all of us for the last sixty years.


FURTHER READING



•   Just a Shot Away: Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250905130/justashotaway] (Metropolitan Books, 3 November 2026, 544pp). Binelli writes for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be.

•   The two documentaries Binelli wishes Scorsese had made more of: Italian American (1974), on his parents, and American Boy (1978), on his friend Steven Prince — drug procurer, bodyguard, roommate.

•   Jonathan Taplin produced both Mean Streets and The Last Waltz, and has been on this show several times.

•   Scorsese on Scorsese, from the other side: Italianamerican aside, the key primary sources Binelli drew on are archive recordings — including Scorsese and De Niro brainstorming the earliest version of Raging Bull.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Mark Binelli is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be and the novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!. He grew up in a Catholic family outside Detroit and lived for years in Scorsese’s old neighborhood, on the corner of Spring and Mulberry.


ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA



Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books a

Just a Shot Away: Mark Binelli on Martin Scorsese’s Life in Film

How to resist bad government? Become a dissident is the standard response. But what happens if you work in that government? And if that government tampers with or eliminates your job?

That’s the focus of Blockers [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131656], the new bestseller by Michael Lewis [https://www.michaellewiswrites.com/#top] about the rebels in the deep state that resisted the second Trump administration. It takes its title from Elon Musk, who instructed the DOGE twenty-somethings he sent to Washington to find the “blockers” and eliminate them. On Musk, Lewis is withering. A man of incessant lies, he concludes. And worse. When Musk named a USIP contact as a Taliban ally on Fox News, the Taliban — who knew perfectly well he wasn’t one — rounded up his family for beatings. Lewis calls that “treason.” Perhaps the deep state should investigate.

Lewis features six blockers. They are mostly career civil servants who knew the law and declined to break it. Kathleen Walters, the chief privacy officer at the IRS, was asked to hand the Department of Homeland Security a database of seven million undocumented workers, including their home addresses, so that ICE could round them up. Walters said no, and it cost her her career. Others in the same building folded and, presumably, are still at their desks. One wonders how well they sleep at night now. Maybe, as I suggest to Lewis, his next book will be about them.

Michael Lewis is careful not to call any of his blockers dissidents, a mantle, he says, they wouldn’t accept. But he does say some of them are admirable in the same way as the people who resisted the Germans rolling into Paris. Dissidents or not, deep state rebels like Kathleen Walters are case studies in civic virtue. All Americans should recognize their quietly heroic work.


FURTHER READING



•   Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324131656] (W. W. Norton, October 2026). The companion volume is The Fifth Risk [https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393609615], his 2018 book on the first Trump transition.

•   Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State [https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324098423] (Norton, August 2026) — the case against technologizing the state, which AK puts to him here.

•   Max Stier’s Partnership for Public Service [https://ourpublicservice.org/] — the organization Lewis calls the most worthy of your dollars, and the body behind the Sammies.

•   Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488] — the argument about state capacity that this book joins from the other direction.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Michael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk and Going Infinite, among many others. He hosts the podcast Against the Rules and lives in Berkeley, California.


ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA



Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

Blockers: Michael Lewis on the Rebels in the Deep State

“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler



A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? [https://keenon.substack.com/p/what-was-america] we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler [https://storyofacting.com/isaac-butler]’s The Perfect Moment [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/perfect-moment-9781639733491/] is a history of the eighties and nineties, when America’s culture wars became political cudgels of the right. It’s the story of an increasingly imperfect America in the age of Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The title is Mapplethorpe’s. It was the name of his retrospective that the Corcoran Gallery cancelled in 1989. The same show that later resulted in a Cincinnati museum director being indicted for obscenity — a first in American history.

Butler reminds us of the strangely consensual world that existed before the culture wars. It was an America in which the CIA covertly funded the artists that the FBI was investigating. An America where Louis Armstrong was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador while the agency plotted in the countries he was touring. An America in which a congressman was convinced that drip paintings were encrypted maps of American military assets. A liberal America where the culture and the state maintained a polite, albeit tangled, relationship.

And then, with the birth of the culture wars, God, sex and art all acquired instant political charge. Butler’s argument is about power, not taste. He reminds us that a giggly Jesse Helms kept the Mapplethorpe catalogue in his office and showed his favorite (ie: most vulgar) pages to visitors. Butler suggests that Helms was having the time of his life. Perhaps. Although this culture war wasn’t a lot of fun for the rest of us. Certainly not for the under-fire artists. Nor for an art-loving public caught in its hysterical crossfire. That, I’m afraid, is what America has become.


FURTHER READING



•   The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars [https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/perfect-moment-9781639733491/] (Bloomsbury, June 2026). Butler also wrote The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and, with Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Angels in America.

•   “Anything Could Become a Battleground” [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/perfect-moment-god-sex-art-culture-wars-butler/] — the Los Angeles Review of Books on why the first culture war was fought over photographs.

•   The Washington Monthly on the galleries where it happened [https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/06/23/when-americas-culture-wars-were-fought-in-art-galleries-religious-right/], and the Boston Globe on Butler, AIDS and New York [https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/17/arts/isaac-butler-the-perfect-moment-aids-new-york/].

•   James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-davison-hunter/culture-wars/9780465015344/] (Basic Books, 1991) — the book that coined the phrase, a year before Pat Buchanan made it a slogan.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Isaac Butler [https://storyofacting.com/isaac-butler] is a writer, director and cultural historian based in Brooklyn. He is the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America

The Perfect Moment: Isaac Butler on God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars

“The lynching itself was the explanation. The adults who were participating in a communal homicide are the curriculum.” — Stacey Patton



For Halloween, a true American horror story. Last week, Joseph Kelly came on [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-souths-most-successful-export?r=ktr9] the show to argue that racialized American fascism has a prehistory running back to 1818. But today’s guest goes much, much further — both in time and in criminality. Stacey Patton [https://profiles.howard.edu/stacey-patton] wrote her doctorate on the racialization of American childhood and her new book is entitled Strung Up [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804108/strung-up-by-stacey-patton/]. It’s the story of how white America learned to lynch Black children.

“Learned” is key. Patton writes about the people who turned up to watch the lynchings so endemic in American history. She traces the practice back across the Atlantic, to a Europe with centuries of history of public execution and the punishment of children as theater. And she sets out the two versions of 19th-century American childhood. The Lockean child to be nurtured and rewarded. The fallen child to be corrected and punished. White childhood and Black childhood. Trick or treat. No candy for guessing who got what in America.

Patton describes an image from Waco, Texas in 1916, then a supposedly modern and progressive town. The first people to reach the lynching of Jesse Washington were children, running as though to a parade. Small boys were paid to gather kindling. A reporter asked a father why he had a toddler on his shoulders and was told the child could not learn the “proper way” too young.

There will be those who say that Patton exaggerates in order to vilify American history. But last night I saw Once Upon a Time in Harlem [https://www.onceuponatimeinharlemfilm.com/], the excellent documentary by David Greaves, built from his father William’s 1972 footage. It’s not really about racial crimes, but there’s one scene in the movie featuring photos of White kids at the lynching of Black people. Stacey Patton’s Strung Up [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804108/strung-up-by-stacey-patton/] is already a USA Today best-seller. It’s not hard to understand why. Happy Halloween.


FURTHER READING



•   Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804108/strung-up-by-stacey-patton/] (Beacon Press, October 2026). Patton also wrote Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America and the memoir That Mean Old Yesterday.

•   Kohen Wiley was shot by an officer in a Walmart parking lot in Senatobia, Mississippi in June. The state attorney general ruled the shooting justified [https://www.mississippifreepress.org/police-shooting-of-1-year-old-kohen-wiley-was-justified-mississippi-attorney-general-says/] on 19 October; the officer has since resigned and the family is seeking a federal investigation.

•   Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights — the scholarship Patton builds on about who was allowed to be innocent.

•   Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, is the thesis Patton pushes back on: childhood as a modern invention, a claim later historians have narrowed.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Stacey Patton [https://profiles.howard.edu/stacey-patton] is a journalist and academic in the School of Communications at Howard University. Her doctorate in African American history examined the racialization of childhood in America between 1880 and 1954. She is the author of That Mean Old Yesterday and Spare the Kids, and writes a widely read newslette

How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children: Stacey Patton on Strung Up

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis


INTRO



You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html] proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.

His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward.

And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it.

His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School.


FURTHER READING



•   “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html],” New York Times, 18 October 2026. The headline is the paper’s; Marquis wrote “abolish.”

•   Marquis tells Poets&Quants what he would build instead [https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/19/exclusive-the-professor-who-called-to-abolish-business-schools-tells-pq-what-hed-build-instead/] — and the trade press rounds up the reaction [https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/20/the-business-school-world-responds-to-chris-marquis-and-not-all-of-it-is-pushback/], which is less hostile than you would guess.

•   His books: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs [https://chrismarquis.com/the-profiteers-how-business-privatizes-profit-and-socializes-cost/] and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise [https://chrismarquis.com/mao-and-markets-the-communist-roots-of-chinese-enterprise/].

•   Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Incorruptible/Eric-Ries/9798893311860] — the governance argument Marquis leans on here.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Chris Marquis [https://poetsandquants.com/2026/10/19/exclusive-the-professor-who-called-to-abolish-business-schools-tells-pq-what-hed-build-instead/] is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School,

Kill B-School? Chris Marquis’s Case for Abolishing the MBA

“President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were, in fact, working with the CIA to kill Castro. The CIA wasn’t plotting behind the Kennedys’ back.” — Mark Allen



A few days ago we had the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs on the show talking about the thirteen days in 1962 [https://keenon.substack.com/p/the-six-minute-war?r=ktr9] when John F. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihilation. That was him at his best, the Kennedy we want to remember. Today we have the JFK we want to forget. The one who was passing envelopes to the Chicago Outfit via Judith Exner, a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend, while his brother was busy putting mobsters in prison.

Mark Allen [https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Mark-Allen/267851646], a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney, knew Exner. He flew out to California in 1991 to get the rest of the JFK story from her. She told him that she carried not only messages but money between Kennedy and the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, beginning before the 1960 election.

All this is in A Dangerous Beauty [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Dangerous-Beauty/Mark-Allen/9798895653029], a new book Allen has written with the Los Angeles writer Tricia Aurand [https://www.triciaaurand.com/]. Frank Sinatra introduced Exner to both Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana — JFK at the Sands in February 1960, Giancana at the Fontainebleau a few weeks later. Nobody disputes Exner’s familiarity with either man. It’s the envelopes that historians have spent fifty years trying to decipher. Especially given all the conspiracy theories about the interconnectedness of the Kennedys, the mob, the CIA, Castro and Dallas.

The twist in A Dangerous Beauty is not what we expect from a book about JFK’s tangled relations with a beautiful young woman. If Exner was telling the truth, Allen and Aurand argue, then the Kennedys knew exactly what the CIA was doing to Castro, because they themselves were running the operation. Which destroys the premise underneath every rogue-agency theory of Dallas. So Allen and Aurand are anti-conspiracy theorists. The CIA, they suggest, probably wasn’t behind the 1963 assassination.

Allen is agnostic on who shot the president. What he wants to demolish is the idea that JFK was betrayed and even murdered by his own government. A conspiracy theory that, he warns, is being peddled today by, of all people, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.


FURTHER READING



•   A Dangerous Beauty: The Kennedys, the Mob, the FBI, and Judith Exner, the Woman Who Linked Them All [https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Dangerous-Beauty/Mark-Allen/9798895653029] (Post Hill Press), with a foreword by Patt Morrison.

•   The Church Committee [https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm] investigated CIA assassination plots in 1975. Exner testified that September, three months after Giancana was shot dead in his basement.

•   Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), gave Exner’s courier account a chapter and broad acceptance. It changed few minds.

•   Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is the recent bestseller on the wider pattern.

•   Mark Allen, “RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories do a disservice to his father,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 7 July 2023 — his dismantling of the three stories RFK Jr. tells about his father and the CIA.


ABOUT THE GUESTS



Mark Allen is a retired Department of Homeland Security attorney and a longtime student of the Kennedy presidency. He came to the subject through the JFK assassination and interviewed Judith Exner in the last years of her life, after Anthony Summers made the introduction. He lives in Sarasota, Florida. T

A Dangerous Beauty: Mark Allen & Tricia Aurand on JFK, the Mob and Judith Exner

“We have to be willing to lose elections. That is the very essence of a democracy.” — Michael G. Miller


Will the midterms be free and fair? With only six days to go, these are now the questions about American democracy that we most fear. But much of this nervousness might be misplaced. Rather than militiamen in balaclavas, the real damage to American democracy was done quietly, thirteen years ago, by five Supreme Court justices.

That, at least, is the view of Michael G. Miller [https://sps.columbia.edu/faculty/michael-g-miller-phd], a Barnard political science professor. With the Brennan Center’s Kevin T. Morris [https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/kevin-t-morris], Miller has written An American Problem [https://www.brennancenter.org/american-problem-how-country-built-and-supreme-court-broke-voting-rights-act], a book accusing John Roberts’ 2013 Supreme Court of breaking Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act. The book title is LBJ’s, from the speech he gave a week after Selma, when he told Congress that denying the vote was neither a Northern problem nor a Southern one. The law Johnson got is, according to Miller, the most effective Congress has ever passed. Its sword was section two, which let citizens sue if their voting rights were compromised. Its shield was something called “preclearance,” which meant that local authorities required the Federal government’s explicit permission before tampering with any kind of electoral logistics.

The 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96] took away this shield. Without preclearance, Miller argues, local authorities started tampering again — closing polling places, redrawing wards, purging rolls. Often there was no evil intent — but it impacted Black voters anyway. He and Morris built a national voter file running back to 2008 and found that in the counties that lost preclearance, the gap between white and Black turnout widened sharply after the ruling. That means hundreds of thousands of Black votes were never cast. John Roberts’ Supreme Court broke LBJ’s Voting Rights Act, Michael Miller says. Forget martial law. With Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96], five Supreme Court justices created the most existential threat to American democracy.


FURTHER READING



•   An American Problem: How the Country Built — and the Supreme Court Broke — the Voting Rights Act [https://www.brennancenter.org/american-problem-how-country-built-and-supreme-court-broke-voting-rights-act] (Princeton University Press, October 2026), by Michael G. Miller and Kevin T. Morris.

•   Shelby County v. Holder [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-96] (2013) — the 5–4 ruling that ended preclearance, with Roberts’s majority and Ginsburg’s dissent.

•   Johnson’s “American Problem” address to Congress, 15 March 1965, delivered a week after Selma and the source of the book’s title.

•   Kevin T. Morris [https://www.brennancenter.org/experts/kevin-t-morris] is a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center, where much of the underlying voter-file work lives.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Michael G. Miller [https://sps.columbia.edu/faculty/michael-g-miller-phd] is associate professor of political science at Barnard College, where he has taught since 2014, and works on election law, election administration and political behavior. An American Problem is written with Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice.


ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA



Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conv

Will the Midterms Be Fair? Michael G. Miller on How the Supreme Court Broke the Voting Rights Act

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen



The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Reckoning], Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.

Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Cohen], former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.

Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/technology/harvard-facebook-history-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss] Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.

My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.


FURTHER READING



•   The Social Reckoning [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Reckoning] (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.

•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” [https://www.harvardmagazine.com/technology/harvard-facebook-history-mark-zuckerberg-winklevoss] — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.

•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).

•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia [https://massivebookshop.com/products/9780393881882] (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.


ABOUT THE GUEST



Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.


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On the Social Reckoning: Noam Cohen Watches Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Sequel

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