George Packer
speaker
697 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So far, at least, I think they've done a poor job of it if they've tried at all.
So when I began to go through all that, I thought, this is what authoritarianism looks like.
We just have to get out of our heads the images we have from the 20th century because it's a different kind now.
I think it doesn't feel like it because...
most Americans are lucky enough not to encounter it in their personal lives.
Most Americans are not undocumented immigrants who might be swept up off the street or show up to a court appointment and get taken away by ICE.
Most Americans are not getting sued by the president because they're publishing things that he doesn't like.
So it's...
We're just this big, distracted, divided, commercially-minded, busy, noisy country.
And it takes a lot to break through the noise of our lives so that we can actually see clearly
those things that I talked about a minute ago, if they're not hitting you in the face, I think there's a human temptation just to say, well, how bad can it be?
It's never happened before.
It's very hard to imagine something that has never happened happening.
So you just assume the thing that has always happened will go on happening until it hits you in the face.
And high electricity prices are not enough to tell people
This is authoritarianism.
That seems more like just maybe bad management or corporate malfeasance.
And we're used to those.
So we don't think that this is necessarily anything new.
I mean, human beings just want to get along with their lives and not have to think too hard about...
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