Egge is a songwriter affiliated with the Inclusive Democracy Culture Lab. Her 12 th album, “Between Us,” was released last year.
At the end of February 2020, I was scheduled to fly from my home in Brooklyn to play three concerts in the Pacific Northwest. I was glued to news reports of a new type of virus rapidly spreading in Seattle. I read about the outbreak in an assisted living home and watched scary videos of emergency rooms in China. I quickly decided that I would not be flying into the eye of the storm in Seattle, so I canceled flights and shows and let my fans know that their tickets would be refunded.
I repeated these steps for my shows in Texas the following month — and on and on again. The pandemic has been quite a tough time for me. I’ve been on the road touring since I was 21 when my debut album came out in 1997, and now I found myself without work. The last two years have been extremely challenging, as they have been for so many people.
In June 2020, I got a call from Eric Ward, senior advisor at Western States Center, an organization that works to strengthen inclusive democracy across the country. He invited me to join the group’s new Culture Lab, a program supporting singer/songwriters to build authentic community connections that combat the political and social divisions of our era. Ward is not only an experienced civil rights leader but a diehard music fan and musician himself — so I was very excited to join the group. The Culture Lab was a great opportunity to learn and to extend my community, an antidote to the isolation I felt at the time and a chance to learn more about what I could do to counter hate while sowing love, acceptance and understanding in a world in crisis.
The program mixed political education with relationship-building sessions held virtually over Zoom. We learned and practiced some basic skills to connect with people through shared values. I made friends and connections. Mostly, I began to comprehend the potential power that I have through my music to foster inclusion and belonging and that musicians can serve as trusted messengers to their fans to foster positive change. My mind was blown. My heart was opened.
A few months after the sessions wrapped up, I was invited to lead a new New York-based group – a smaller, more concentrated version that we named The Neighbor Project. I was joined by fellow musicians J. Hoard, Mali Obomsawin, Rench (of the bluegrass/hip-hop group Gangstagrass), Diana Jones and Lucy Wainwright Roche for virtual sessions seeking to promote the ideals of belonging and inclusion through collaboration with a neighbor.
The musicians in the cohort are all different, but our goals are the same. We’re trying to combat hate by bringing more inclusive messages and practices to our listeners (especially listeners who don’t tend to spend much time around people of different backgrounds than their own).
In my two years working with this amazing group of songwriters, we’ve all learned a simple lesson: Stopping the bigotry that threatens our democratic society can start with getting to know your neighbors and appreciating them for who they are. Our experiences show that it doesn’t take a huge investment, either. It just takes a little time and attention.
In the spirit of this, I now volunteer weekly through Mutual Aid South Brooklyn and my local Chinese-American Planning Council delivering meals to eight homes of mostly elderly Chinese Americans in my neighborhood. I realized this would be a good opportunity to work with some of the tools I was learning from the Neighbor Project.
My first few deliveries were more than a little awkward. Most of the people on my route seemed to live alone. I needed to put them at ease, so they wouldn’t just withdraw and quickly close the door in the face of a masked stranger. I turned to Google Translate on my phone to communicate. I thumbed out a message on my phone, held it up and pressed play. Out came my message from the speaker in a language they could understand.
“Hello, my name is Ana,” it said. “I’m happy to see you today. I hope you are well.”
It worked — sort of. Many folks were intrigued and nodded or waved thankfully. A few were a little put off and hurried back into their apartments before my greeting could play all the way through. The next week I tapped out a new, slightly longer message about the nice spring weather. I watched as some of their eyes lit up — one man gestured proudly to his small garden showing me his flowers.
Eventually, my neighbors got more comfortable with me and my halting use of technology. and our interactions have become more and more relaxed and welcoming.
One day last spring, I was walking in my neighborhood with my daughter, who was 7 at the time. We stopped to take in the beauty of the cherry blossoms and she befriended another little girl. They introduced themselves, but didn’t get much further than that because my daughter speaks English and her new friend Mandarin.
They did, however, share many other interests — like climbing trees, playing with sticks, drawing in the dirt, and swirling their arms in the air as the wind blew the pink blossoms from the trees.
When I told my daughter it was time to go, she asked if we could get the girl’s telephone number so we could meet up and they could play together again soon. I tried to explain to her why I couldn’t do that — I didn’t speak Mandarin.
“So?” my daughter begged me. “Please?”
I paused, took out my phone, and walked up to the girl’s mother. As I awkwardly motioned to my device, we eventually successfully”‘spoke” to each other — once again with the help of Google Translate, much to our daughters’ delight.
A month or so later we ran into my daughter’s new friend, Rachel, and her mother again in the park. We reunited like old friends. Even though we don’t speak the same language, it didn’t take much more than a few taps to break the ice.
These interactions might seem small in the face of everything that’s happening in the world, but I believe that through these connections we can make a difference. It’s now early summer of 2022 and I finally find myself going out on the road again. I’m looking forward to taking everything with me that I’ve learned during this destabilizing time and sharing them with my audience and the people I meet along the way.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivers a keynote speech at the 62nd Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2026, in Munich, Germany.
Marco Rubio is the only adult left in the room
Finally free from the demands of being chief archivist of the United States, secretary of state, national security adviser and unofficial viceroy of Venezuela, Marco Rubio made his way to the Munich Security Conference last weekend to deliver a major address.
I shouldn’t make fun. Rubio, unlike so many major figures in this administration, is a bona fide serious person. Indeed, that’s why President Trump keeps piling responsibilities on him. Rubio knows what he’s talking about and cares about policy. He is hardly a free agent; Trump is still president after all. But in an administration full of people willing to act like social media trolls, Rubio stands out for being serious. And I welcome that.
But just because Rubio made a serious argument, that doesn’t mean it was wholly persuasive. Part of his goal was to repair some of the damage done by his boss, who not long ago threatened to blow up the North Atlantic alliance by snatching Greenland away from Denmark. Rubio’s conciliatory language was welcome, but it hardly set things right.
Whether it was his intent or not, Rubio had more success in offering a contrast with Vice President JD Vance, who used the Munich conference last year as a platform to insult allies and provide fan service to his followers on X. Rubio’s speech was the one Vance should have given, if the goal was to offer a serious argument about Trump’s “vision” for the Western alliance. I put “vision” in scare quotes because it’s unclear to me that Trump actually has one, but the broader MAGA crowd is desperate to construct a coherent theory of their case.
So what’s that case? That Western Civilization is a real thing, America is not only part of it but also its leader, and it will do the hard things required to fix it.
In Rubio’s story, America and Europe embraced policies in the 1990s that amounted to the “managed decline” of the West. European governments were free riders on America’s military might and allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy as they funded bloated welfare states and inefficient regulatory regimes. Free trade, mass migration and an infatuation with “the rules-based global order” eroded national sovereignty, undermined the “cohesion of our societies” and fueled the “de-industrialization” of our economies. The remedy for these things? Reversing course on those policies and embracing the hard reality that strength and power drive events on the global stage.
“The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending,” Rubio said, “because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life.”
I agree with some of this — to a point. And, honestly, given how refreshing it is to hear a grown-up argument from this administration, it feels churlish to quibble.
But, for starters, the simple fact is that Western Civilization is an abstraction, and so are nations and peoples. And that’s fine. Abstractions — like love, patriotism, moral principles, justice — are really important. Our “way of life” is largely defined and understood through abstractions: freedom, the American dream, democracy, etc. What is the “Great” in Make America Great Again, if not an abstraction?
This is important because the administration’s defenders ridicule or dismiss any principled objection critics raise as fastidious gitchy-goo eggheadery. Trump tramples the rule of law, pardons cronies, tries to steal an election and violates free market principles willy-nilly. And if you complain, it’s because you’re a goody-goody fool.
As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said not long ago, “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” Rubio said it better, but it’s the same idea.
There are other problems with Rubio’s story. At the start of the 1990s, the EU’s economy was 9% bigger than ours. In 2025 we were nearly twice as rich as Europe. If Europe was “ripping us off,” they have a funny way of showing it. America hasn’t “deindustrialized.” The manufacturing sector has grown during all of this decline, though not as much as the service sector, where we are a behemoth. We have shed manufacturing jobs, but that has more to do with automation than immigration. Moreover, the trends Rubio describes are not unique to America. Manufacturing tends to shrink as countries get richer.
That’s an important point because Rubio, like his boss, blames all of our economic problems on bad politicians and pretends that good politicians can fix them through sheer force of will.
I think Rubio is wrong, but I salute him for making his case seriously.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.