Charlie Kirk’s murder hit me harder than I ever could have anticipated, not because I liked or agreed with him but because I disliked and disagreed with him so vehemently. I felt as though I had a personal relationship with Kirk over the past decade, one that consisted of him making my life worse.

In about 30 minutes, we’ll be hosting a great event and, if you’re not in Lincoln, you can tune in online using the following link:

The surest sign that a liberal democratic society is falling apart is when it becomes commonplace to use and to celebrate violence against people because of their politics. This is an extremely bad and dangerous time.

On Tuesday, in my first class of the semester, the students had a lively debate about the limits of toleration … though perhaps not in the way you might imagine. They weren’t interested in figuring out when they could “cancel” someone.

I'm incredibly honored to announce that I've been named the inaugural Kripke Chair of Judaic Studies at @unlincoln.bsky.social. Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke were pillars not only of Nebraska's Jewish community but the wider Jewish world as well, making this appointment especially meaningful to me:

I was incredibly privileged to spend several days last week in Chapel Hill at a joint Duke/UNC seminar on teaching civil discourse. I joined professors from universities around the country to talk about why and how to teach controversial topics at a moment of deep polarization.

In this week's post, we’re not going to solve the Israel/Palestine problem. Instead, I write about the central point of Matti Friedman’s recent article, namely that facts are an uncertain thing, especially when bad actors can benefit from the spread of misinformation.

When a moment of moral emergency comes—when vulnerable people are in danger or when liberal democracy itself is threatened—we look to those leaders to make the hard choice rather than the politically convenient one.

This is how you behave when the leader of your party definitely isn't implicated in an absolutely horrific child trafficking and sexual exploitation cult, right? Right?

If liberalism was a dish at a restaurant, it would be buttered noodles. If liberalism was a musical genre, it would be pop hits of the 2010s. It feels like the political philosophy of people who want to stay home on a Saturday night and take a nice warm bath. Read more here:

I love arguing, always have. This penchant for argument is part of my heritage as a member of both a liberal democratic society and the Jewish people. In both traditions, debate and disagreement is absolutely central.

I’m always surprised when I hear adults who have subscribed to the infantile idea that prayer is basically just making a wish, that God is some sort of lamp-bound genie or rarely-glimpsed shooting star. It’s such a sad and impoverished vision of the Divine.

The thing is, when a person’s off-the-cuff remarks are salted with bigoted language, it’s because he’s used to thinking and saying them. In case anyone wasn’t clear on why this man keeps saying bigoted stuff, across a whole decade of ad libbing during political speeches.

This is the guy we’re supposed to believe is devoted to fighting the antisemitism, right?

Happy 4th of July! This week, I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about political violence and what it means for liberalism. Before you start grilling burgers and lighting sparklers, check it out: arikohen.substack.com/p/political-...

News flash, if the president is successfully coercing news coverage of him in major national outlets, it’s not a free country with a free press.

There’s something about political liberalism, with its vocabulary of toleration, pluralism, deliberation, and process, that feels, to many people today, like weakness.

There is a temptation, I think, to view last weekend’s “No Kings” demonstration as a protest about the political landscape in one country (the United States), of one policy (the treatment of migrants), or of one person (the current occupant of the White House).

It’s fun because Tucker spent something like three full years peddling the classic antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory on his Fox show but Cruz can’t call him on that because then he’d lose all his extremist supporters who totally bought into that when Tucker was selling it every night.

Not caring what Tulsi Gabbard said is, in fact, the most defensible stance, especially regarding what she says about the Middle East or Europe. Except that's why she should be a kook doing hits for Russian State media, rather than Director of National Intelligence for the United States.

Last week, I wrote about antisemitism and what its resurgence means not only for the Jewish people but also for liberalism. At the same time, I wrote a companion piece about the danger of using illiberal tactics to combat antisemitism. That's here: arikohen.substack.com/p/the-enemy-...

It’s impossible to write something that doesn’t discuss the back-to-back attacks on American Jews in DC and in Colorado. I had a couple of days over Shavuot to do some quiet thinking about what terrorist attacks on Jews can tell us about the health of American liberal democracy.

I think the clue in him being an anti-semite might be the time he went to a Jewish event and shot two random people.

The “common good” might sound like an old-fashioned phrase pulled from your grandparents’ civics textbook, but there’s really no question of its urgency in this moment. So how do we (re)build it?

Personality cult authoritarianism

We know what's up

As much as we argue with one another these days, we’re getting worse and worse at it. And that's extremely bad news because liberalism relies on citizens to engage in deliberative debate. I wrote about getting back to productive disagreement, so you should read and comment. Do it for the Republic!

Three seems low.

Pretty big deal here in Omaha, folks.

An unprecedented & complete Article I constitutional crisis, happening right in front of us.

This is a post about why we need to read novels, which we're mostly not doing, in order to bring empathy back into our politics. So, you know, read it. And then share it. And then go read a novel.

Happy Monday! While you’re trying to get back into the whole work headspace, you've probably got some time to think about John Rawls. And, once you do, then you should Like or Share this post or leave a comment. Because then your friends can also learn about John Rawls. If you don't, no one will.

Illiberal beliefs are designed to tell us we can have whatever we want. They’re seductive in their approach to tyranny. They give us permission to skirt the rules or make new rules if the issue is really important. But that isn’t how things work in a liberal democratic constitutional republic.

My grandparents were Old World Jews; I don’t think I ever heard them say the word “liberalism.” But they became liberals to their core because they personally experienced the way that illiberal ideas are the driving force behind authoritarian regimes that turn millions of people to ash.

My latest Substack post is a Top 7 list of what liberals like about liberalism. It’s a quick read—just 2 minutes!—so go check it out: open.substack.com/pub/arikohen...

We ought to think carefully about a) why we think political liberalism is a solid philosophy for ordering our society and b) why some people completely disagree with us.

OK, so we’re really doing this whole Substack thing. Which means I need to talk for a minute about the core ideas of liberalism before we get into our whole current illiberal mess. So go here and subscribe and tell your friends, please and thank you. open.substack.com/pub/arikohen...

this is a staggering amount of money to build camps—suggesting that building & running a gulag will be the primary function of the otherwise gutted Trump-state in last fiscal yr: "D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE" www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/u...

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) has a bill to return tariff authority to Congress. If it were to pass, the purposeless tariffs would end. Speaker Johnson is blocking it. Call your member of Congress, R or D, & urge a discharge petition on the bill, which forces a vote. U.S. Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.

I would actually be interested to speak with a Trump voter right now to hear the explanation for why this absolute financial disaster is actually smart and good.

Economics, how does it work

Ugh. I did a thing.

The most serious Nazi shit in this extremely Nazi shit executive order may be the idea, just slipped in there, that one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is that "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

At a moment of extravagant executive overreach, a good chunk of the populace is openly flirting with accepting rather than challenging authoritarian actions.

As a dad, I can recognize a toddler’s temper tantrum a mile away. The Speaker of the House is having a temper tantrum.

If people talk themselves into supporting the loss of civil rights for people they don’t like or with whom they disagree, I’m pretty tempted to say they never actually cared about civil rights at all.

…which is both unconstitutional and obviously fascistic.

Opinions vary.

Opinions vary.

Oh, no kidding?