We are now racing toward the most important midterm of our lifetimes, probably the most important in the history of midterms, and we can’t do enough. Sorry.
That’s not a guilt trip or dooming. It’s our nightmare come true. The evil from the regime never stops, continually gets more absurd, and is designed to defeat, despirit, and debase us. AI’s domineering invasiveness into our lives is bad enough, but it’s going to be targeted at us (and key voters) in ways no one should have to imagine. And we know the first election after an autocratization event (and I know there is debate if this is the “first”) tends to decide a country’s fate for years, if not decades.
The stakes could not be any closer to our hearts. This is a problem that Rogan's List is uniquely designed to solve, every weekday, one rung at a time.
And Joe Katz, who runs the List in Susan Rogan’s footsteps, inspires us to do more to meet this ridiculous moment with more. His job is to translate that urgency into something actionable before the reader closes the tab. And he does it with clarity, insight, and contagious joy. The result is that Rogan’s List isn’t just a launch pad to activism. It’s a people’s history of this moment and the fight against the forces of division, hate, and oppression, a constant catalyst and mirror into a movement that constantly confronts the worst by bringing out the best of us.
In our talk, which we’ve been planning for months, Joe told me that the List’s design is meant to float us up the engagement ladder.
You read it.
You take one step.
Maybe you forward it to someone who takes a different step.
Repeat.
What’s actually on the ladder? Well, to me, at the bottom: a restack, a comment, a phone call to a member of Congress who needs to know the appropriations fight is still alive in their district. In the middle: virtual phone banks, already running three days a week for the Talarico campaign in Texas, that you can join from your couch in Massachusetts. At the top: canvass-captain shifts, ICE rapid-response networks, the kind of face-to-face neighborhood organizing that Republicans kept insisting came out of nowhere. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from a decade of people deciding to move up one rung, funded by nothing, run by people who couldn’t get press.
Those networks have already delivered something that looked impossible six months ago: ICE and DHS still aren’t funded for next year. Democrats held longer than anyone expected. That wasn’t procedural luck. It was the direct result of people calling their members of Congress and refusing to let it go — until those members understood that letting it go had a cost.
Joe picked this week to talk because the Texas primary has officially concluded, kicking off midterm season. Ken Paxton won. Which, if you’re James Talarico, is the kind of opponent you light a candle for (though in 2026 one must remind oneself to be careful for what we carelessly wish for). Tom Tillis — a Republican senator, not a Democratic operative — described Paxton as someone for whom “ethically challenged” works the way “eating disorder” works for a hungry Jeffrey Dahmer.
Paxton, as you should know by now, was indicted for securities fraud. Impeached by a Republican-controlled Texas House for abusing his power to benefit a donor after his own aides reported him to the FBI. He committed mortgage fraud. He once stole a fellow lawmaker’s thousand-dollar pen.
And there’s this!
Still, he won reelection twice after the indictment. Texas Republicans really did that twice. This is the maddening math of the Lone Star state: the most alluring target in American politics, the one that shatters the GOP’s national advantages the day it flips, and the one that keeps not flipping.
Talarico has been running explicitly on oligarchy and rigged systems and billionaire power — the top-versus-bottom frame that the democratic left has been arguing about for years — and Paxton is the living argument for it.
Beto O’Rourke got within two points against Cruz in 2018, and Cruz is a debate champion who knows how to position himself. Paxton knows none of that. Joe thinks this could actually be the year. If Texas flips, the Senate goes with it. I think he might be right if we get very, very lucky, the kind of luck that only comes with doing an enormous amount of work. And the Talarico campaign needs canvas captains right now, not in October.
So! In conclusion, read Rogan’s List every day. Forward it to someone who needs a rung. And if you’re on Substack, hit restack on the day’s post — it takes four seconds, and you’re using Marc Andreessen’s own infrastructure against him, which, as far as I’m concerned, is its own reward. Free dopamine.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you may know I tried to do my best to elevate and promote daily activism back in 2024. When I discovered Rogan’s List, far too late, I felt like a third grader trying to play one-on-one with Lebron. We simply cannot expect a better daily resource at the national level, and I pray for a day when some blessed souls choose to replicate this model in every state/county/town (whichever works) in America.
Rogan’s List is the easiest first nudge into activism you’ll find, and a daily shot of pure fish scale urgency for everyone already in the fight.
