Keen On America

“The systematic erasure of the Chinese was not an accident. It was, in many ways, structured.” — Beth Lew-WilliamsHer Chinese-American grandfather asked her to turn off the tape recorder as they spoke. Beth Lew-Williams was a history student interviewing her grandad, her YeYe, two weeks before he died. He had come to America in 1930, aged nine, in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and was held on Angel Island for what he always said was nine months. Years later she looked up the file. It was “only” thirty-four days.It was the shame of it all, he confessed to Lew-Williams, after she switched off the recorder. For his whole life, he blamed himself rather than American racial laws for his humiliation.That student is now a professor of history at Princeton, and this year she has won more or less every prize for John Doe Chinaman, her history of Chinese life under American racial law. The Bancroft. The American Book Award. The Merle Curti for social history. The Langum for legal history. The Western History Association’s book prize. And now the grand Canadian one, the 2026 Cundill, worth seventy-five thousand dollars, the most lucrative history prize in the world.“John Doe Chinaman” is the term Lew-Williams kept meeting in the archives — in the court records, in the census, in the newspapers. Record after record of that nameless Chinese man. Such anonymity, she argues, was purposefully manufactured by thousands of local and state laws governing where Chinese people could live, who they could marry, and whether they could testify against a white man in court.A Chinese Jim Crow? Lew-Williams reminds us that the earliest racial zoning laws in America were aimed at the Chinese. So were the earliest restrictive covenants, written into deeds in the 1880s. First Chinese-Americans. Then African-Americans. The subtitle of John Doe Chinaman describes it as a “forgotten” history. No longer. This acclaimed book forces us to remember the humiliation of nameless Chinese immigrants like Lew-Williams’s YeYe.FURTHER READING•   John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.•   The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.•   The 2026 shortlist, Cundill History Prize.•   The 2026 Bancroft Prizes, Columbia University Libraries.•   Beth Lew-Williams, Department of History, Princeton University.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Sophia Rosenfeld on the age of choice, Joseph Kelly on the prehistory of American fascism, Stacey Patton on how white America learned to lynch black children, and Susan Neiman on calling it evil.ABOUT THE GUESTBeth Lew-Williams is a professor of history at Princeton, where in 2014 she became the university’s first appointment in Asian American history. She grew up in Davis, California and took her doctorate at Stanford. Her first book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, won two book prizes from the Organization of American Historians. John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law is published by Harvard University Press and won the 2026 Cundill History Prize, along with the Bancroft Prize, the American Book Award, the Merle Curti Social History Award, the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History and the Western History Association’s book prize.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — Joe MarcheseINTROI’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?FURTHER READING•   Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business (Amplify), by Joe Marchese and Jonathan Bing.•   “Reimagining advertising with AI,” OpenAI.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Noam Cohen on Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg film, Mustafa Suleyman on containing and controlling AI, Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism, and D. Graham Burnett on the war for your attention.ABOUT THE GUESTJoe Marchese is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, the New York venture firm he started with Heather Hartnett in 2015. He founded the attention-based advertising company true[X], which Fox acquired in 2014, and then served as president of advertising revenue at Fox Networks Group until 2019. He has sat on the board of Clear Channel Outdoor since 2019 and was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement in 2016. Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business, written with Jonathan Bing, is published by Amplify. He lives in New York.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

A few days ago, B-school prof Chris Marquis came on the show to argue that we should shut the business schools down because students arrive wanting to do good but graduate with banal corporate jobs. Today’s guest, Scott M. Curran, went to law school but then spent a decade doing good as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation. So doing good is his thing. His calling.“There are two ways to run this world,” Curran told me. “Guns or lawyers.” No prizes for guessing his preference. In his new book Better Good, Curran argues that it’s not the seminar room that hammers the good out of us. It’s the banality of our monthly mortgage payments. So maybe the best way to build the good is by bringing mortgage rates down.Anyone who has ever sat through a TED conference knows that good can be a four-letter word. But it doesn’t have to be that way, Curran argues. Yes, he acknowledges, Musk’s foundation barely clears the five per cent a year the law requires, and Bezos has far more and gives much less. But good, he argues, can be found in the most unexpected places. The luxury watchmaker Rolex, of all corporate ironies, is wholly owned by a charitable foundation — the watches being just its fundraising arm.And then there’s Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has given away over twenty billion dollars with almost no strings attached. So philanthropy can still work, Curran argues. MacKenzie Scott didn’t even go to B-school. And she probably doesn’t wear a Rolex. Or have a mortgage.FURTHER READING•   Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact (Simon & Schuster), by Scott M. Curran.•   Curran’s website.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Chris Marquis on shutting down the business schools, and Eric Ries on why good companies go bad.ABOUT THE GUESTScott M. Curran is a lawyer and social impact adviser who spent a decade at the Clinton Foundation, latterly as its general counsel, as it grew from a library fundraising effort into a global operation working in forty countries. He now advises foundations, nonprofits and companies on doing good more effectively, and teaches social enterprise law. Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives outside Chicago.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

“I feel like I’m cheating when I’m defending people I agree with.” — Greg LukianoffThree years ago, free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), came on the show to discuss The Canceling of the American Mind. Co-authored with Rikki Schlott, the book argued that the crisis of free speech in America existed mostly on the campus left with students shouting speakers down and administrators doing nothing about it.Three years is a mighty long time in American politics. Today, as Lukianoff recently argued in the Washington Post, the crisis of free speech has gone off campus and is now being spread by mostly conservative politicians.FIRE has quantified this new virus of intolerance. It points to over two hundred attempts in the last year to punish the opinions of a scholar, student or speaker. The state of free speech in America has never been worse, Lukianoff asserts, citing the case of a former cop in Tennessee who did thirty-seven days for forwarding a meme of an actual Trump quote.Greg Lukianoff has an uncute term for this intolerance. Political cooties. It’s the habit of discounting an argument because of who’s making it. A word on cooties for non-Americans. It’s playground slang for an imaginary disease you catch by touching the wrong child. But its etymology is actually more grown-up. British soldiers in World War One invented it to describe body lice. Then the doughboys carried the word (not the lice) back to 1918 America. From real to imaginary vermin in a single generation.Lukianoff admits he caught the bug himself, once writing off the conservative opinions of Alan Charles Kors, a man who helped found FIRE. So what to do? He thinks identifying today’s epidemic of intolerance is the key. Maybe there’s a book in it. The Shaming of the American Cootie?FURTHER READING•   “Universities normalized attacks on free speech. Now it’s all-out war.” (Washington Post, October 29, 2026), by Greg Lukianoff.•   Lukianoff’s Substack, where The Academic Filibuster is being published in installments.•   The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Press), with Jonathan Haidt, and The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster), with Rikki Schlott.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jacob Weisberg on eight profiles in cowardice, and Greg Lukianoff’s previous appearance.ABOUT THE GUESTGreg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which he has led since 2001, and a graduate of Stanford Law School. He is the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind, and, with Rikki Schlott, of The Canceling of the American Mind. He is currently serializing The Academic Filibuster on Substack and writing Reality Test with the neuroscientist Heather Berlin.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam KestenbaumI’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.FURTHER READING•   “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age” (Harper’s, November 2026), by Sam Kestenbaum.•   Kestenbaum’s author archive at Harper’s.•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jack Hanson on the American pope and the American president, and Matthew Avery Sutton on how Christianity made America.ABOUT THE GUESTSam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

“There is a pandemic killing us all. It’s a pandemic of dishonesty.” — Tim DisneyINTROIn March 1965, Martin Luther King suggested that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. Sixty-one years on, we have another arc which definitely doesn’t bend toward justice. A.R.C. stands for Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy. It lies dormant and undetectable in its host, and it activates when he tells a lie, and then it kills him. Tim Disney — great-nephew of Walt, grandson of Roy — came up with Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy during the COVID lockdown. The result is The A.R.C., Disney’s satirical graphic novel about our untruthful times, co-written with JC Lacek and illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg.Tim Disney’s The A.R.C. opens at the Global Reinvestment For Tomorrow Conference in the Amazon, a T.E.D. festival of hypocrisy where the moral powers-that-be have assembled to announce the solution to climate change. They catch the virus instead, and carry it home on their private jets. The diagnosis associated with the joke is less funny. Disney thinks that shame and public opprobrium have been replaced by a pandemic of lies and lying.Then there’s the explicit question that I should have asked Disney but didn’t. The company his great-uncle and grandfather built is amongst the most successful entertainment machines ever constructed for spreading lies about an idyllic America. An epidemic of cheerfulness. I asked Tim twice whether The A.R.C. was a Disney production. Both times I allowed him to dodge the question. Maybe Keen On America should be a Disney show too.FURTHER READING•   The A.R.C. (Gungnir, 333 pages) — by Tim Disney and JC Lacek, illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. Buy the physical one. Disney is right that the form does not survive a screen.•   JC Lacek’s page on the book has the artwork, which is the fastest way to understand what kind of satire this is.•   King’s March 1965 speech in Montgomery, “Our God Is Marching On!”, is the one that asks how long and answers not long.•   The KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Steven Rosenbaum on truth in the age of AI.ABOUT THE GUESTTim Disney is a writer, filmmaker and the creator of The A.R.C., which he co-wrote with JC Lacek and which is illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. He directed the feature A Question of Faith and began his career in the animation department at Disney. He is the great-nephew of Walt Disney and the grandson of Roy O. Disney, and he runs Uncommon Productions.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson LearsYesterday Charles Kupchan, 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, who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” 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” (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 (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 on governing the world to come, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Edward Luce on the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Janet Reitman on The Inheritance, and Alexander Mikaberidze on the Louisiana Purchase.ABOUT THE GUESTJackson 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. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the London Review of Books.ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICANobody 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.

Recorded just before the midterms, the DC-based foreign policy guru Charles Kupchan 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 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 (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 (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, Eliot Cohen on The Strategist, and Anthony Badger on Prosperity Road.•   Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks — the source of the interregnum and its morbid symptoms, which Kupchan has now used on this show twice.ABOUT THE GUESTCharles 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 AMERICANobody 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.

“You don’t accidentally end up with five wives.” — Mark Binelli on Martin ScorseseWe are filming in New York today, which is appropriate for a show about Martin Scorsese. Mark Binelli’s Just a Shot Away is out today, the first substantial biography of the great New York City film director. Binelli 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 (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 GUESTMark 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 AMERICANobody 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.

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, the new bestseller by Michael Lewis 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 (W. W. Norton, October 2026). The companion volume is The Fifth Risk, his 2018 book on the first Trump transition.•   Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (Norton, August 2026) — the case against technologizing the state, which AK puts to him here.•   Max Stier’s Partnership for Public Service — the organization Lewis calls the most worthy of your dollars, and the body behind the Sammies.•   Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance — the argument about state capacity that this book joins from the other direction.ABOUT THE GUESTMichael 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 AMERICANobody 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.