Here are the individuals who will keep you informed about solutions that will help us preserve and defend the freedoms that define our democracy at a time when we are facing threats on multiple fronts. They speak truth to power and as such they question fundamental assumptions that our corporate dominated media would often prefer to ignore.
Andrew J. Bacevich is the President of the Quincy Institute for responsible statecraft. He grew up in Indiana, graduated from West Point and Princeton, served in the army, became an academic, and is now a writer. His frank, honest appraisal of US foreign policy and its runaway militarism is refreshing from someone whose patriotic pedigree is unquestioned. His latest book, The Age of Illusions: How American Squandered Its Cold War Victory is the best explanation of America’s foreign policy delusions and failures that have cost our country trillions of dollars, thousands of military killed and hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilian deaths.
Anand Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” published by Knopf in 2018. He is an editor-at-large for TIME, an on-air political analyst for MSNBC, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times, having written, most recently, the biweekly “Letter from America.” He has appeared regularly on TV and the radio in the United States and globally, and has given talks on the main stage of TED and at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the United Nations, South by Southwest, the Asia Society, PopTech, the Royal Society of Arts, and Google.
Rana Foroohar is Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times. She is also CNN’s global economic analyst. Her first book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business (Crown), about why the capital markets no longer support business, was shortlisted for the Financial Times McKinsey Book of the Year award in 2016. Her most recent book Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles And All of Us (Crown) is the Porchlight Business Book of the Year for 2019.
Thomas Frank is a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist for Salon. He is a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, authoring “The Tilting Yard” from 2008 to 2010, and a founding editor of The Baffler. He is the author of a number of books, most notably What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal. A historian of culture and ideas, Frank analyzes trends in American electoral politics and propaganda, advertising, popular culture, mainstream journalism, and economics. His topics include the rhetoric and impact of culture wars in American political life and the relationship between politics and culture in the United States.His latest book is The People, No.
Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Team Human, based on his podcast, as well as the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks and the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another.
Danielle Allen is a James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017). She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Allen is also the principal investigator for the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. For 15 years, he was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan’s The American Empire Project.
Donald Cohen is the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, a national resource and policy center on privatization and responsible contracting. Donald is the co-author of The Privatization of Everything: How the plunder of public goods has transformed America and how we can fight back, and Dismantling Democracy: the 40-year attack on government..and the long game for the common good. He is a founding board member of the Partnership for Working Families. He is the former Political Director of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council and founder and executive director of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego-based think tank and policy organization. He is currently on the board of the Ballot Initiatives Strategy Center. His opinion pieces and articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The New York Daily News, The New Republic, and other online and print outlets.
Drew Westen is a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; the founder of Westen Strategies, LLC, a strategic messaging consulting firm to nonprofits and political organizations; and a writer. An active clinician, researcher, and political consultant, Dr. Westen is the Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator for two grants from NIMH. His book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, has had a wide influence on elections internationally. He has advised a wide range of candidates and organizations, from presidential campaigns to the U.S. House and Senate Caucuses, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and a range of other publications.
Robert Reich‘s latest book, “THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It,” was published March 24, 2020. He is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written 17 other books, including the best sellers “Aftershock,””The Work of Nations,” “Beyond Outrage,” and “The Common Good.” He is a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, founder of Inequality Media, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentaries “Inequality For All,” and “Saving Capitalism,” both now streaming on Netflix.
Scott Galloway is a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business where he teaches Brand Strategy and Digital Marketing to second-year MBA students and is the author of the Digital IQ Index ®, a global ranking of prestige brands’ digital competence. He is the bestselling author of “The Four” and “Algebra of Happiness”, Cohost Pivot Podcast, as well as writing the No Mercy/No Malice online newsletter and hosting videos on VICE TV. In 2012, Professor Galloway was named “One of the World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” (Poets & Quants). Professor Galloway is also the founder of several firms including: L2, a subscription business intelligence firm serving prestige brands; Red Envelope, an e-commerce firm (2007, $100mm revs.); and Prophet, a global brand strategy consultancy with 250+ professionals.
Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host whose shows are available in over a half-billion homes worldwide. He’s the New York Times bestselling, 4-times Project Censored Award-winning author of 24 books in print in 17 languages on five continents. His radio show is syndicated on for-profit FM and AM radio stations nationally, on non-profit and community stations nationwide by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio (Progress, Channel 127), on cable systems nationwide by Cable Radio Network (CRN), via subscription audio podcasts, worldwide through the US Armed Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann iOS and Android apps.
Katherine Stewart is an investigative reporter and author who has covered religious liberty, politics, policy, and education for over a decade. Her latest book, THE POWER WORSHIPPERS: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, is a rare look inside the machinery of the movement that brought Donald Trump to power. Stewart’s journalism appears in the New York Times op-ed, NBC, the New Republic, and the New York Review of Books.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for fifteen years for The New York Times. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR, and is currently host of the Chris Hedges Report. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University, is the author of numerous books, including America: The Farewell Tour” (2019). He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has taught college credit courses through Rutgers University in the New Jersey prison system since 2013.