Resources and Voices
People and sources to help you learn and stay informed.
Hello all.
I thought I would kick off this substack by directing you away from it, funnily enough. I am all too aware that there are a myriad of reporters, academics, and even content creators which can do many things I can not. So here, I want to first shout out journalists and outlets that I trust, to direct folks to better sources of news. I then proceed to books and online resources for anyone who might be interested in independent learning.
I even include YouTubers in my recommendations here out of interest in providing as much learning as possible. I am well aware that comprehensive videos on a subject can be more thought-provoking, digestible, and educational than books or papers. While I highly encourage engaging directly with scholarship, I do love and highly respect the video essay as a format, and certainly find it to be more approachable in many ways than solely text-based formats.
On the opposite side of things, I end by talking a little about theory and academic literature. While I don’t believe that everyone needs to read theory or similarly dense material, I do think that there is a lot more to glean than might be immediately obvious. A leftist unfamiliar with Foucault does not need to read him, but they may find his ideas to be quite helpful in understanding how power operates. They aren’t always the most fun texts, but there is a reason they’re considered fundamental.
I do not claim exact alignment with everything I list here, and I encourage readers to use their own judgement. I simply aim to lay out people, texts, and resources I’ve learned from, in the hopes they may do the same for others. For more about where I might recommend getting this content, I refer readers to my PC Privacy and De-Googling articles. The main relevance to this article is that you can follow the journalists via RSS feeds in NetNewsWire or similar and follow the YouTubers on FreeTube or similar.
Journalists and Similar
Dr Devon Price - Nonbinary author who writes about kink, transgender and autistic experience, and leftist activism (among other things). It posts its essays to its substack (I don’t love how icky that feels without context, but Dr Price uses it/its pronouns).
Chris Hedges - Journalist, author and commentator, covers “US foreign policy, economic realities, and civil liberties in American society”. Chris also platforms a number of academics and journalists who cover similar topics, making The Chris Hedges Report a fantastic source of political discussion and analysis. He can be found on both YouTube and substack.
Erin Reed - Journalist who writes about transgender legislation and life. Beyond her regular, clear coverage of trans issues, Erin is also behind the Anti-Trans National Legal Risk Assessment Map, which she regularly updates to visualize the level of threat trans people in the US face. She has a similar but separate map tracking the risk to trans youth specifically. Erin’s articles and the risk map can be found on her substack.
Kat Tenbarge - Journalist who covers internet culture, politics, and media, particularly as relates to gender-based violence. She has broken major stories involving sexual assault and harassment allegations, and continues to be an extremely dependable voice. She can be found at her own outlet, Spitfire News.
Aaron Parnas - Truth be told, Aaron’s coverage can be surface level, and I would not recommend his occasional international news coverage. If, however, you find yourself overwhelmed by the news, he does a decent job at aggregating the biggest US news for the day into a short digest. He writes The Parnas Perspective.
Zoe Baker - Author and expert on the history of anarchism. She has a YouTube channel with videos explaining various historical social movements, including communism and anarchism. I would highly recommend her book Means and Ends for its description and analysis of anarchist movements in the US and Europe. The book is primarily a historical one, but I think that walking through the history of anarchist action and thought is incredibly enlightening to how we should think about power and leftist action today.
Brian Merchant - Tech journalist and author. I am new to his work, but he writes on substack and is perhaps best known for his book Blood in the Machine, which details the origin and ramifications of the fight against big tech. I have not read it yet myself, but I can confirm that his blog, at least, is cutting and insightful.
Cory Doctorow - Science fiction author and tech writer. He is credited with coining the word “Enshittification” (which he discusses in a book of the same name) and works with the EFF. I’d highly recommend keeping up with him on digital freedoms and tech policy; he posts daily on his blog Pluralistic.
Soatok - A furry security engineer who writes about cryptography and software on his blog. He also posts regularly on Mastodon. For a better understanding of cryptography (and why, for instance, Signal is the standard for E2EE), I would highly recommend him.
News Outlets
As for US news organizations, I would recommend keeping up with the ACLU, FactCheck.org, 404 Media, ProPublica, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Mother Jones. I’ve found all to be very honest in their reporting. The ACLU mainly covers civil liberty violations and FactCheck.org fact-checks statements made by politicians, as you would expect. Mother Jones, 404 Media, the FPF, and ProPublica are more general in their coverage, though each with their particular foci. 404 Media focuses slightly more on tech and the internet, ProPublica on “investigative journalism in the public interest”, and the FPF on journalistic freedoms. Mother Jones is the least focused of the four, which I do find to occasionally be reflected in their reporting quality, but I’d still recommend them overall.
I get most of my international news from Chris Hedges, but Al Jazeera is quite good for coverage on the Middle East from what I’ve seen/heard. Any outlets that collaborate with the aforementioned ones tend to be pretty good as well, though typically they only cover the international news as relates to US politics. I know that Chris Hedges has recommended outlets before in the past (including Al Jazeera if I’m not mistaken), so if you want more recommendations, I’d certainly turn to him. For another general recommendation - I know thanks to Chris that Unlimited Hangout is home to some excellent investigative journalists.
Tech Privacy and Security
In addition to the people mentioned above, there are a few websites that are worth checking out. I will give the disclaimer that these sites are not always the best, but their tech recommendations are usually fairly good, and they present information in a more visually engaging way than I do. Security In a Box and Surveillance Self-Defense are good for general tips and privacy best-practice. Prism Break recommends different tools / software to use, and while they aren’t always the best, they cover a wide scope. Avoid the Hack and Privacy Guides have better recommendations, so go to them first. I’d also recommend the FPF’s writings on the topic, though they are often directed towards journalists. The EFF is an excellent resource as well. Lastly, AlternativeTo can be quite helpful if you’re looking for alternatives to different software you use.
As a brief aside - you should consider privacy to be political, and not trust overly corporate or right-leaning organizations to be in your best interest. Brave, for instance, claims to be all about user privacy, and yet they are significantly worse for user privacy than other options like Mullvad and Librewolf. They’re quite gung-ho about crypto and AI as well, and the CEO is against gay marriage. These details may seem disparate, but what do they all point to? A lack of true care for their users and for the human rights they may claim to champion. Any discard of the most vulnerable, of certain user freedoms, any hyper-focus on profit, indicates that these people are willing to turn on you if incentivized to do so.
YouTube
Given the amount of time that I myself spend on YouTube, it felt necessary to include some true “YouTubers” that are politically engaged. Much more so than previous sections, I stress the need to think critically and not take only from one source. Having said that, I recommend The Kavernacle, Prince Shakur, and BadEmpanada for political commentary, overzealots for historical/political commentary and education, Taylor Lorenz and Benn Jordan for tech coverage, and Big Joel, Ophie Dokie, FD Signifier, and Olurinatti for (political) cultural and media commentary.
Of course, those initial categorizations I give are what I consider to be their main strengths; it isn’t to say that they’re their only ones - I quite enjoy The Kavernacle’s cultural commentary, for instance. On the other hand, I will again stress that I do not necessarily 100% align with these creators - Ophie is too focused on electoralism for my tastes, for example - but they’re pretty good overall. They may be especially helpful for any of you readers who may wish to educate yourself on certain topics, but don’t want to start reading a bunch of academic literature or long articles (just yet at least, I highly encourage serious education!).
This includes myself, in all honesty. I’m now hearing from enough smart and well-educated people that I’ve become better educated by proxy, but my formal political or historical education is still pretty lacking. I think it’ll become clear to people who explore leftist politics that constant education is a necessity. Implicit biases run deep, and the interests of oppressors can infiltrate even more “left” groups - consider many union’s complacency with the genocide in Gaza (with laudable exceptions). All that to say, I never want to claim I’m as well-educated or as “good a leftist” as I could be; constant forward self-work will always be what’s best, and that can be super draining to actively do. I have a book list, but yet to get through most of it.
Books
I’m passing on part of my reading list. The following list is by no means comprehensive, nor can I guarantee that there are not better books that deal with the same topics, merely that I’ve heard good things.
The list includes the aforementioned Means and Ends, Enshittification, and Blood in the Machine alongside American Fascists by Chris Hedges, Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan, I Am on the Hit List by Rollo Romig, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King, Cults in Our Midst by Margaret Singer and Janja Lalich, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.
Theory
I am far from as well read as I could be, but I wanted to suggest a few things here. First, I’d recommend my own entry into theory, How to Interpret Literature by Robert Parker. It is, of course, a broad overview of various philosophical and literary thought, and one aimed primarily at English students, but an excellent read nonetheless. I’d recommend The Invention of World Religions by Tomoko Masuzawa for an analysis of Western imperialism’s impact on religious discourse and study. Moral Philosophy: A Reader by Louis Pojman and Peter Tramed served me well as an intro to ethics, though I would not be surprised if there are better books on the subject.
Based on my own interests, I am inclined to recommend the works of Althusser, Aristotle, Edward Said, Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Girard, Hegel, Sartre, Judith Butler, and Marx. To drastically over-simplify the lot, for gender look to Butler, economy to Marx and Althusser, power to Foucault, race to Said and Fanon, art to Aristotle, desire to Girard, and meaning (or lack thereof) to Hegel and Sartre. To say that summary is drastically over-simplified almost feels an understatement, but those topics are the primary areas of interest for me.
I’ve yet to read all their work firsthand, admittedly. Most I at least know secondhand through How to Interpret Literature, but not all. Of course, my list may be rather biased for that reason. Girard certainly wouldn’t be on the list unless my literary theory professor had us cover him separately; I hear little discussion of him, and he isn’t in most textbooks. I leave out Plato because I didn’t personally care much for him (though you need him for Aristotle), and in my little reading of Butler, I find them to be far less headache-inducing when read secondhand. Which is not, of course, an unpopular opinion with some of these people. From what varying amounts of them I’ve read firsthand, I thought Girard, Foucault, Aristotle, and Said were pretty digestible.
Addendum: for those interested in anarchism, I’d again recommend Zoe Baker’s Means and Ends. Influential anarchists include Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. I am not well-read enough on anarchism to speak to their particular strengths or recommend any specific anarchists, but those three are at least a decent starting point to my understanding.