Authoritarianism Isn’t About the Leader, It’s About Us

Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, New York Times contributing Opinion writer, and founding director of the Independent Media + Audience Project at Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. She founded two nonprofit newsrooms investigating technology's impacts—Proof News and The Markup—and is a Pulitzer Prize winner and two-time finalist in Explanatory Reporting. Ami Fields-Meyer is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a former senior policy advisor at the White House, where he led U.S. policy on civil rights, consumer protection, and technology. His writing on democracy and public policy has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. The full conversation is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgpJUasUobY Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe 250 to 250 | Follow Along • 250 to 250 You can also find me: Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/ © 2026 Heather Cox Richardson. All Rights Reserved. All content in this video is protected by copyright. Reproduction, distribution, or re-uploading, in whole or in part, without prior written consent is prohibited.