I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelly at UCLA,

who has the nerve to ask, where have our thinkers gone in Trump time?

Not the experts or the influencers, but the grander minds who might tell us where our country went.

Robin, you've hooked me with your piece in Boston review on the responsibility of intellectuals

in the age of fascism and genocide. Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like

a sort of waking nightmare or a revolution going backward.

Will we ever see Benjamin Franklin's Common Sense Republic again?

Put it another way, where is Noam Chomsky or James Baldwin for that matter?

Will we ever again meet an unflinching truth teller about our real condition in this autumn of 2025?

You're one of my small group of model, multipurpose intellectuals.

How are you feeling in this fall of 2025?

How am I feeling? That's a great question, because in this moment, everything is happening

in real time. Changes are happening at a pace in which, you know, to kind of paraphrase Lenin,

whole months, whole years, are taking place in days. Things are changing so quickly.

I'm a historian, and that gives me a certain kind of privilege to remember or think back

to times when things were incredibly worse, at least for some people.

I was having a conversation with my dear friends, Derek R. Pernell and Nile Fort last night,

who were also brilliant intellectuals,

about how is it possible to live our kind of everyday lives

in the midst of this kind of terror?

And what I said was people living in slavery had children,

they married, they loved, they argued, they found time to play, you know, as

...