“When speaking to a young man, typical wedge issues came up, specifically women's rights and abortion issues. This young man was an employee at a gun store, immersed in gun culture. His view of guns was one of safety and freedom, and his fear was of having his rights to that safety taken away. We were able to get into a conversation about the rights…We found ourselves aligned on the idea of rights retention and ensuring our own safety. From a "rights" perspective, this was an unexpected alliance that, if harnessed correctly, could open many opportunities for learning and understanding.”

“Freedom to be Me narrative: the rat race isn’t providing us the financial security, nor freedom, that we were promised. What if we could just have the freedom to be ourselves? This tests well with Asian Americans on issues ranging from motivation to vote to solidarity on affirmative action, to mental health, and affordable housing. I don’t think it’s unique to Asian Americans.”

“Progressives may be used to thinking of big business as a source of harm, but for a lot of people, economic success reflects a kind of independence: you gain power, the ability to build your own empire, the ability to have a kind of freedom that many people wish they had. And so that creates an affinity for CEOs, bosses, monopolists, the ultra-wealthy that is very different from what one might expect.”

“Deepfake porn has generated bipartisan support for regulation, indicating a path forward for regulating other online harms.”

“‘Lived experience as expertise’ emerged as an important demand in disability rights and HIV/AIDs activism in order to advocate for the inclusion of directly impacted communities into decisions that shape their lives. Yet the increasing inclusion of people with lived experience into policy processes has started to raise questions about whose ‘lived experience’ is representative, posing questions not only of tokenism, but also the ways that certain interest groups claiming lived experience are achieving increasing power.”

“The thing that differentiates progressive freedom from libertarian freedom is the diagnosis of the sources of anti-freedom. Progressive freedom should be very clear that there are material, structural concentrations of power—in people and organizations and institutions—that are the biggest contributors to our various forms of unfreedom, and that collective action—through government, civic organizations, and the like—can be an affirmative source of freedom. In the absence of an explicit politics around those real structural roots and power centers perpetuating unfreedom, it is easy to fall into more surface-level fights about language, terminology, and the like that feel very high-stakes, but don't by themselves necessarily address underlying power structures.”