On Thursday, January 23 at 7 p.m. US Central Time, Laurie will host an hour for a check-in with patrons and supporters. She will discuss what’s coming up at TMA, especially a special guest speaker for February, Prof. Fred Neuhauser! His talk will be at noon Central Time, Saturday, Feb. 22, and will be hosted by TMA’s Jakob Hanschu.
Spencer and Laurie talk with Benjamin Studebaker about his new book, Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies. Studebaker will give a speech for the Maurin Academy March 3, 2025.
Donald Trump will be our president for the next four years. We are living through unprecedented times. It’s hard not to see this as a huge protest vote—with several sometimes competing things being protested. The effects of globalization. Job insecurity. Alienation from others and anxiety about the future. Anxiety about rapid and continuous cultural change. Anger over elite privilege. The list goes on. I doubt if Donald Trump is going to change anything in a direction that fixes those problems. The fact that Elon Musk loves him, and Jeff Bezos is willing to play ball with him by shutting down the Washington Post editorial board says that he’s ultimately very friendly to large corporations. The stock market is going up.
Hillbilly Elegy has become an important part of our public discourse, so Dr. Laurie Johnson is going to dedicate a public book club to this 2016 book. She’ll go chapter by chapter through the book, giving a picture of what JD Vance is saying, from her perspective. Along the way, she’ll be looking at the public comments on the Maurin Academy’s Political Philosophy YouTube channel and responding to them in the next video.
The last session in our food preservation series, next week on March 26, is a roundtable (including but not limited to Ryan, Chris, Spencer, Emily, Laurie) on the reasons why you should consider taking the time to do food differently. We will be getting into the social, cultural, economic and political ramifications of our food system and our choices. Join us by supporting u on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/maurinacademy