Hi, all, John Bewin, ducking in here between favorite things episodes, there's one more coming,

to share another reading of a Keeping Score newsletter essay. In case it's still news to you, I started a

newsletter around the new year, and mostly you need to go to the Keeping Score newsletter to subscribe so you get these written pieces by email.

But from time to time, I have said I might read one out and drop it in the podcast.

Because, well, for one thing, frankly, there's a lot more of you here at this point than there are subscribe to the newsletter.

And I kind of want to share some of this stuff that I'm getting off my chest.

If you want to subscribe so you can see all my essays, the easiest way to find it is just search for keeping score newsletter, but you got to know that

score is spelled without the E at the end, keeping S-C-O-R newsletter. So here we go. This is me reading

the latest installment, Keeping Score Number Seven. It's called Making Ignorance Sacred Again.

It starts with an epigram. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory

against forgetting. Milan Kundera. It seems if you're trying for an autocratic takeover, you want to control just about everything.

You want power over the administrative state and everyone in it, including agencies that are

meant to be independent. You'll try to neuter or commandeer the legislature, the courts, the big law firms, you'll seek to

control the news media and the universities. If you can, you're going to take charge of the

immigration system so you can decide who is a citizen, who stays in the country or gets

whisked away to a foreign gulag, who is or isn't a person deserving of basic human

and legal rights. You'll want possession of private information on everybody so you can use that

data to attack your enemies. You want all this power so you can shape the future, but you'll also

want to seize control of the past.

So right on schedule, while brazenly attempting all of the above,

the second Trump administration has launched efforts to wrangle control of the national story and how it's told.

Just days after taking office in January,

...