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Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 4
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what over here.
A friend today told me she listened to a New York Times interview with one of the architects of the current fascist takeover of the US government. She was grateful for the chance to go deep, as she said it, into the belly of the beast. I told her I hadn’t been thrilled about the NYTimes granting him such a wide and uncritical platform. She just started reading this little essay series of mine, so she asked me to write today’s micro essay about this question: Who should be speaking on our shared platforms as we confront our present collapse?
This isn’t easy to write about in a micro essay, as you can imagine. But here is my attempt: I understand that people may want to listen to authoritarians to learn more and understand the context in which we do our work from the primary sources themselves. But I have a problem with mainstream media platforming these people when they have captured so much of our media infrastructure already. Our global media is oriented toward them, for clicks and likes, and so the permission structures for authoritarianism keep growing.
Today, people protested outside the USAID building to protect due process and aid funding, the Treasury to protect…
