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Fintan O’Toole on the Next Insurrection, Plus Katha Pollitt on She Said

On this episode of the Start Making Sense podcast, lessons for a future coup and a review of a film about the reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story.

Jon Wiener and Start Making Sense

January 12, 2023

A noose is seen on makeshift gallows as supporters of US President Donald Trump gather on the West side of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)

If you were planning a future coup, what could you learn from the failure of Trump’s efforts on January 6? Fintan O’Toole says it would need a better story—not attacking Congress, but “defending democracy.” He teaches at Princeton, and is the author most recently of We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

Also on this week’s show: who’d want to see a movie about Harvey Weinstein? Well, the film She Said, about the two New York Times reporters who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, is not about Harvey; it’s about the system that protected him. And it’s really good. Katha Pollitt joins the podcast to comment

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Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


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