Voices of insight in a time of ignorance

Much of my writing has been dedicated to exposing the failures of institutional “journalism” and its complicity in the rise of the right wing. That pattern is as disturbing as it has been longstanding, and has prompted many readers to write back asking for recommendations about constructive alternatives.

Everyone reading this newsletter—or, for that matter, others on Substack—is supporting one part of the solution: cultivating an independent media ecosystem outside the gatekeeping powers of professional editors beholden to the corporate political parties and their patrons on Wall Street.

In order to offer a more specific set of further recommendations, I wanted to highlight a series of voices whose work has informed my understanding of the dystopian era to which others are finally waking up.

A renaissance voice in the crosshairs of the neoliberal right wing

As someone whose passions encompass law, politics, history, academia, culture, music, dance, sports, independent journalism, and counterculture, I tend to find people who confine themselves to silos somewhat uninspiring. Conversely, figures who manage to cultivate multiple skillsets tend to be more compelling to me.

Leonardo da Vinci may have been among the historical figures who inspired the term “renaissance man,” but he was far from the last—and some of the most compelling renaissance voices are those of women.

Dr. Rupa Marya is a quintessential example of a renaissance woman. A doctor, medical professor, author, commercially successful musician, and activist, she has consistently championed causes over the course of her career that others often overlook. Today, she is facing a coordinated campaign to silence her.

One of Dr. Marya’s stated concerns relates to the public health implications of environmental racism, visible even in parts of the country that pretend to have overcome racism. San Francisco—where she teaches medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, and where I endured what Black journalists described as a “civic lynching” when running for office to challenge a corrupt oligarch largely responsible for the continuing corporate co-optation of the Democratic Party—offers a perfect example.

San Francisco is renowned as a Mecca for LGBTQ communities and individuals often ostracized in other places. It also happens to host one of our country’s most revealing examples of environmental racism.

The city’s last Black neighborhood has been poisoned by the U.S. Navy since the Second World War, when the Hunters Point shipyard was used to clean ships used in nuclear bomb tests in the South Pacific. Beyond the quarter million Japanese people killed when Washington deployed weapons of mass destruction in an unnecessary and calculated show of force, and the residents of South Pacific islands poisoned by American nuclear tests in their backyards, tens of thousands of Americans—the vast majority of them Black—have been subjected to radiation poisoning by our own military.

Dr. Marya has not only worked to expose this sordid and continuing history (in the midst of America’s supposedly most progressive city), but also reframed it as a concern for health professionals. After all, radiation poisoning dramatically increases the risks of any number of other ailments, from cancers of various kinds to organ failure and ultimately, untimely death.

Beyond Hunters Point and the environmental racism with which San Francisco should be synonymous, Dr. Marya has also written about other overlooked dimensions of public health. Her latest book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, co-authored with Raj Patel, examines a wide variety of social and environmental factors that drive public health.

Exploring the COVID-19 epidemic and how it disproportionately impacted low-income communities, Dr. Marya & Patel wrote that:

Not all patients were equal….Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) were over-represented, their bodies subject to inflammation of all kinds, long before the SARS-CoV-2 virus ever settled into their lungs. Not only lack of access to health care, but systemic social and economic disenfranchisement rendered their bodies most susceptible to Covid when it hit.

As Rupa explained in an interview with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!:

If we understand disease with this new kind of diagnosis, the treatment options become radically different. The deep medicine we prescribe to address the inflammation of people and planet has been prescribed by others before us.

Citing examples of caregivers such as “Huda Sha’arawi and B.R. Ambedkar and Harriet Tubman,” Rupa said that “We need a world rebuilt with care at its heart,” and went on to observe how “Indigenous communities defend the greatest range of biodiversity on the planet and, as a result, host the most diverse microbiota inside their bodies. These microbes confer protection against inflammatory disease.”

Most recently, Dr. Marya observed the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and stood in solidarity with human rights principles treasured across the world despite remaining in exile within the United States and in areas subjected to the whims of Washington.

She has written and spoken out about the plight of medical professionals targeted by the Israeli “Defense” Forces, while sharing her “analysis as a scholar who assesses how power dynamics around oppression impact health outcomes for oppressed people.”

For this, she has not only been falsely accused of anti-semitism, but also targeted—by the public university where she works as tenured faculty—for potential termination. It sickens me, but also reminds me how ad hominem attacks on prescient voices can offer an indication of their insight. We are far from the first Americans of color to be publicly condemned for speaking the truth.

While the casual racism and bigotry that pervade San Francisco ended my career as a public advocate, there remains a chance to save Dr. Marya’s that I implore you to support.

We need to cultivate every voice dedicated to justice that we can find—which includes defending noteworthy advocates against counterattacks from a self-interested establishment.

A voice of reason in a city of madness

Washington, DC is a cesspit. Having worked there for ten years, organizing grassroots resistance in the evenings while leading a series of non-profit advocacy organizations during the day, my stomach turns when I consider the international and intergenerational horrors that city has birthed.

From 2010-2015, I led a national organization known at the time as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC). I continue to serve on the board of directors of an organization formed by the merger of BORDC and an allied organization (known at the time as Defending Dissent) formed in the 1950s to defend Americans from the McCarthy witch hunt. The organization formed by that merger is Defending Rights and Dissent (DRAD).

DRAD operates with a small staff punching well above their weight, including policy director Chip Gibbons. I remember meeting Chip when he had recently graduated from law school, and recall feeling impressed at the time with his grasp of history and political nuance. In the time since then, he has grown to become a vital asset not only to DRAD, but also the movement to restore civil liberties in the U.S.

Chip has appeared on Democracy Now!, most recently to discuss a pair of Trump’s nominees and the Senate hearings examining their appointments before forthcoming votes on whether or not to confirm them.

Discussing proposed FBI Director Kash Patel, Chip insightfully explained that the FBI is a political police force with a long history of suppressing constitutional rights, and that Patel is poised to make those historical problems only worse.

In a further discussion about the Senate examination of proposed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Chip observed that Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) got it wrong when condemning her for supporting Edward Snowden, the heroic whistleblower inspired by Daniel Ellsberg to expose the crimes of the surveillance state.

What does corruption look like?

As I casually suggested to someone just yesterday, the new administration’s most promising aspect is that it is unbeholden to the corruption that preceded it. Its exposure of long suppressed CIA’s records about political assassinations, for instance, suggests a willingness to burn down some of Washington’s most secretive (and criminal) government organizations.

Of course, the new administration is instead beholden to its own brand of corruption, which I can’t pretend is any better than the one it aims to displace. But, especially as ideological lines are being redrawn around us, it behooves us all to surround ourselves with accurate sources of insight.

There are none I could recommend more highly than Dr. Rupa Marya and Chip Gibbons. Each of them write on Substack, so I’d encourage you to subscribe.

Paid subscribers can gain access to a further section listing a handful of other contemporary authors whose work continues to inform my views of history and contemporary politics...