WEDNESDAY: Fascinating interview comes and goes!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2026

Feeling a bit like John Book: Last evening, Anderson Cooper did a fascinating interview with Stella Carlson, the Minneapolis woman who recorded a deeply informative, close-up videotape of the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.

We thought the interview was fascinating in any number of ways. Depressingly, CNN seems to disagree. We're surprised by how little attention is being paid to the interview at CNN's various sites.

That said:

As broadcast, the interview ran just over 19 minutes. In fairness to CNN, you can watch the full interview here, with selected excerpts available. To read the CNN transcript, click this.

To our eye and ear, Carlson seemed more like an admirable, good and decent regular person, less like some sort of actual "activist." Her picture of the way ICE agents behave on the street was essentially subjective and unverifiable, but it seemed to create a picture of current life in Minneapolis which surpassed anything else we've read or seen.

In a similar way, also this:

Adam Serwer's up close and personal report for The Atlantic struck us as top notch. He was interacting more with people in and around Minneapolis who might be described as dedicated "activists." He too expanded our sense of life on the ground. The dual headline on his lengthy portrait says this:

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong

The pushback against ICE exposed a series of mistaken assumptions.

For whatever reason, the Carlson interview and the Serwer essay struck us somewhat similarly. They each made us feel how little is being communicated by the endless reports in newspapers like the New York Times, or by the endless segments on cable news programs on CNN and MS NOW (horrible new name).

We feel a bit like the John Book character at the outset of Witness. To quote (in translation) from Plato's Seventh Letter, the Book character has begun to feel overwhelmed—dismayed—by "the wickedness of the times."

(Warning: "Of all the letters attributed to Plato, the Seventh Letter is widely considered the only one that might be authentic.")

Whatever! We haven't been able to find the translation of the Seventh Letter which we find most striking. This fragment does survive online and in our notes:

"When I saw all this, and other things as bad, I was disgusted and withdrew from the wickedness of the times."

So said Plato, in translation, if the document is authentic. He would have been speaking about the brief period of time when the so-called Thirty Tyrants came to power in Athens:

Thirty Tyrants

The Thirty Tyrants were an oligarchy that briefly ruled Athens from 404 BC to 403 BC. Installed into power by the Spartans after the Athenian surrender in the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty became known for their tyrannical rule, first being called "The Thirty Tyrants" by Polycrat. Although they maintained power for only eight months, their reign resulted in the killing of five percent of the Athenian population, the confiscation of citizens' property, and the exile of other democratic supporters.

[...]

The Thirty Tyrants' brief reign was characterized by violence and corruption. Historian Sian Lewis argues that the violence and brutality the Thirty carried out in Athens was necessary to transition Athens from a democracy to an oligarchy. However, the more violent the Thirty's regime became, the more opposition they faced.

The increased level of opposition ultimately led to the overthrow of the Thirty's regime by Thrasybulus' rebel forces. After the revolution, Athens needed to decide the best way to govern the liberated city-state and to reconcile the atrocities committed by the Thirty. It was decided to give amnesty to all of the members of the selected 3,000, except for the Thirty themselves, the Eleven (a group of prison magistrates appointed by lot who reported directly to the Thirty, and the ten who ruled in Piraeus (directly appointed by the Thirty).

And so on, at length, from there. That's the way it worked out back then. We may (or may not) be so lucky.

At present, it seems to us that the whole game turns on what President Trump may (or may not) decide to do at some point in the next three years (or in the next three days). All we can do is sit and wait. It seems to us that Red America has largely gone down a rabbit hole at the present time, and that Blue America may lack the skill and the self-awareness to find a way out of this dangerous mess—a dangerous mess in substantial part of our own Blue American making.

In the past week or so, we've found ourselves thinking again about the more interesting [INSERT TOPIC HERE]. We'll fill in the blank tomorrow.

In disgust, Plato withdrew from the wickedness of the times. Borrowing from the screenplay of Casablanca, John Book, by the end of Witness, had agreed to "return to the fight."