This is a selection of Vanessa Wills’s writings and podcast interviews which have appeared in popular venues.
“Philosophy in Times Like These” in the Los Angeles Review of Books
“PHILOSOPHY DREW ME IN by offering something highly unique and valuable to a Black teenage girl from an immigrant working-class family in 1990s Philadelphia. Among the logical puzzles, the formal linguistic analysis of abstract metaphysical concepts, and the thought experiments about possible worlds, the concrete limitations of the actual world hardly seemed real. Where worldly obstacles of privilege and prejudice made themselves nonetheless felt, I could console myself with the logical certainty that these were irrational, unjustified, and perhaps, therefore, impermanent….”
“From the Lockdown Protests to the Capitol: January 6 and the Enduring Lessons of Black Lives Matter” in n+1 magazine
“IN THE AFTERMATH of the coup attempt at the Capitol, the notion that Donald Trump’s politics most closely reflect the aspirations—either imputed or self-identified—of the “white working class” has become increasingly untenable. Like other Republican candidates, Trump received significant support from poor and working-class whites in 2016 and 2020. But the Capitol attack confirmed in the starkest possible terms that he has found particular favor with an affluent, privileged layer of middle-class and petit-bourgeois whites; they have been at the forefront of the most visible and militant pro-Trump street organizing, of which January 6 was the most spectacular example….”
“Border Policing and the War on Terror Fuel Trump’s Authoritarian Agenda” in Truthout
“‘The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.’ So declared Donald Trump in late May. Commentators quickly noted the U.S. has no such legal designation that would apply to all those groups and individuals which constitute antifa, an extremely broad swath of anti-fascist resistance. Still, it would not be the first or last time Trump invoked the language of counterterrorism to justify repressing dissent.
“Trump and others, including Democratic politicians, have curated choice phrases to describe Black Lives Matter protesters. Within one recent 24-hour period, Trump announced his secret federal police would ‘clean out’ the ‘anarchists and agitators’ protesting in Portland; Joe Biden, while preferring that local law enforcement perform the task, agreed that ‘anarchists should be prosecuted.’
“’Outside agitators,’ ‘antifa,’ ‘anarchists’ and especially ‘terrorists‘ — these terms recast domestic dissidents as foreign threats against whom the ‘homeland’ must be defended. In this way, they deploy the logic of the ‘war on terror’ and of borders — a rhetorical trend sharply pronounced amid the domestic upheaval of 2020, but not new. The policing of national borders has played a key role in emboldening and empowering Trump specifically, and promoting the deepening fascistization of the U.S. state generally. Given the growing threat of far right authoritarianism, residents of the U.S. might reasonably wonder whether border policing itself does significantly less to keep us safe than it does to place us in grave political danger….”