Ami Fields-Meyer
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fieldsmeyer.com
Ami Fields-Meyer
@fieldsmeyer.com
9.1K followers 2K following 720 posts
Co-author of ON COURAGE: Pre-order https://tinyurl.com/yxpvn488 (June 2026 from HarperCollins/Mariner)

Senior Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School | Fmr: White House Senior Policy Advisor

Writing: amifieldsmeyer.substack.com
Get in touch: fieldsmeyer.com
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fieldsmeyer.com
April 17, 2025
'We are all afraid'
January 10, 2026 at 6:06 AM
fieldsmeyer.com
"There is no reckoning with whether a ceasefire that permits one side to continue killing can be called a ceasefire at all."

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
The ceasefire itself has done little to improve the conditions of life in Gaza. Israel has repeatedly opened and closed crossings, including Rafah and Kerem Shalom, during disputes over the remains of hostages and the terms of Hamas’s disarmament. Officials spoke of up to six hundred aid trucks a day entering Gaza, but U.N. figures show that the number between October and November was closer to a hundred a day. Though some Israeli restrictions on permissible aid items have loosened, others remain astonishingly specific: Israel still bars school supplies such as pencils and paper. International organizations warn of the risk of falling back into famine if conditions worsen. Meanwhile, Gaza’s death toll has kept climbing. Since the ceasefire began, on October 10th, about four hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Israel says that these were targeted operations against Hamas militants. Hamas says that Israel is creating pretexts to avoid honoring the agreement. U.S. officials describe the ceasefire as still holding, and have urged both sides to treat the killings as incidents to be managed and not as a return to war. There is no reckoning with whether a ceasefire that permits one side to continue killing can be called a ceasefire at all.
January 2, 2026 at 8:38 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
I'm quoted in this JTA piece on Jews, Darfur, and Gaza by @andrewlapin.bsky.social. Of course, some perspectives voiced by others in the article I don't share, but Andrew did a nice job and it's good that we're grappling as a community. Hope we grow into a more consistent posture on human rights.
“I have this vivid memory of sitting in the Beit Knesset at camp listening to a Jewish World Watch staffer talk about the Janjaweed and show photos of devastated villages,” Ami Fields-Meyer, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and former White House policy advisor under President Biden, recalled about his time at Camp Ramah. “It was shocking. It was almost certainly my first exposure to human rights work.” For more progressive Jews who cut their activist teeth on Darfur, the relative inaction — not just from Jewish communities, but more globally as well — especially stings. “Darfur was in every Jewish space. And it felt like everyone had a green ‘do not stand idly by’ wristband,” Fields-Meyer recalled. “The unmistakable message was that our moral obligations as Jews bound us to people for no other reason other than that they are human. And a lot of us took that to heart. I certainly did.” He continued, “Being consistent about those Jewish commitments means doing what’s necessary for families being torn apart by masked agents in Los Angeles, and for children under bombardment in Gaza, and for people under threat in Darfur, and for fellow Jews who are attacked for their identity. It means that there is no hierarchy of human dignity. We’re all worthy.”
December 23, 2025 at 2:27 AM
fieldsmeyer.com
Happening now, on our planet:

www.washingtonpost.com/world/...
December 16, 2025 at 6:35 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
I just cannot fathom that we are still reading these stories and that these calls are necessary. An utter failure of humanity.

“What's left are daily messages from the only remaining oncologist in Gaza, who is trying to treat children and adults with no resources.”

bit.ly/4iWnbZ1
December 14, 2025 at 5:34 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Wisdom from my friend Becca Levis on another shattering day
"I just need to name the immense pain and deep messiness of being a Jewish person who deeply abhors Israel's actions in Gaza over the past two years and also is committed to fighting antisemitism across the political and ideological spectrum and ensuring collective liberation and flourishing..."
December 14, 2025 at 4:45 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
As House Democrats flirt with “compromising” with the GOP to preempt state AI laws, re-upping the warning @alondra.bsky.social and I issued last summer in @techpolicypress.bsky.social:

“Trump’s AI pledge is…a campaign promise to Big Tech.”

Dems must not cave.

www.techpolicy.press/the-ai-dange...
When it comes to what may be the most powerful technology of our time, its attendant risks and the fulfillment of its potential opportunities, the Republican platform is clear and unambiguous: You’re on your own. You’re on your own if Big Tech squeezes you out of the infrastructure you need to develop an AI small business. You’re on your own if you’re denied critical healthcare benefits because of a decision rendered by an AI system. If your employer uses automated tools to surveil you or stifle your union from organizing. If an AI-enabled seller has defrauded you, tough luck. If you’re a teenage girl who has been the victim of deepfake nudes, or a disabled veteran relying on lifesaving benefits that have been unjustly cut by an algorithm–sorry, you’ll just have to deal with it yourself.
December 11, 2025 at 2:28 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
#EyesOnKordofan

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/wo...
December 7, 2025 at 5:21 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Too long for the character limit but
Spotify wrapped but instead of Spotify it’s Google and they’re like here are the fifty top things we know about you and it’s extremely unsettling and then you realize wait why don’t we have a data privacy law in this country and it radicalizes you and you’re never using Google again and joining the fight to stop oligarchs from stealing and exploiting and enriching themselves on our personal information and you’re demanding data justice and digital reparations
December 5, 2025 at 4:16 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
#EyesOnKordofan

news.un.org/en/story/2025/12/...
December 5, 2025 at 4:07 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Very Obama Armenia coded
Meanwhile, a former FCDO official linked to the department’s atrocity prevention team told the Guardian that they also believed the suppression of the risk of genocide in Sudan was to protect the UAE from scrutiny. Difficulties raising atrocity concerns over Darfur, they said, were comparable to problems they experienced flagging human rights concerns relating to conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They likened the way in which the UK maintained close relations with Rwanda – despite Kigali’s military support for the M23 militia in eastern Congo – with how the UK has stayed close to the UAE despite its backing for the RSF (which the Gulf state denies).
December 5, 2025 at 12:08 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
This is me almost *nine years ago* at a march on the first full day of the first Trump Administration. Astounding that I could (and maybe will) hold the same poster at today's No Kings – with the same relevance and urgency.

But the fight for a true multiracial democracy continues...
Holding an "American Jews Welcome Muslim Refugees" poster at the 2017 Women's March
October 18, 2025 at 12:37 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Lots of talk about big tents, but if you're unable to look at a Yom Kippur car ramming say "that's unacceptable" then I'm not sure what we're doing here.

You believe innocent people should be shielded from violence, or you don't. There are no shades of humanity. I mourn with the Jews of Manchester.
Outside the synagogue in Manchester
October 3, 2025 at 2:00 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
The Guardian on the left, the New York Times on the right

Two different approaches for covering authoritarianism.
NYT: Trump Says He Has Ordered Troops to Protect ICE Facilities in Portland The president characterized Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities as being under siege from domestic terrorists. Guardian: Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon Apparently misled by hyperbolic reporting from conservative outlets on a single small protest, president described peaceful city as ‘war ravaged’
September 27, 2025 at 8:40 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
As the brother of an autistic American, as a person who worked on US scientific integrity policy at the White House, and as human being, I'm boiling at the RFK idiocy. And though I have little to offer beyond surpassing rage and national shame, I did smile at this statement from NYU's Arthur Caplan:
Sept. 22, 2025, 5:46 p.m. ET3 hours ago Christina Jewett F.D.A. reporter My inbox is already lighting up. Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine, wrote: “The announcement on autism was the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recyling old myths, lousy advice, outright lies and dangerous advice I have ever witnessed by anyone in authority in the world claiming to know anything about science.”
September 23, 2025 at 1:05 AM
fieldsmeyer.com
Some exciting news to share: I’m writing a book — with the great @juliaangwin.com for HarperCollins/Mariner. ON COURAGE is a deeply reported case for courage in our age of authoritarianism, weaving the stories and lessons of dissidents on five continents into a guide for Americans. See you in 2026.
Pulitzer Prize-winning NYT contributing Opinion writer Julia Angwin and former White House senior policy advisor Ami Fields-Meyer's ON COURAGE: TO BE A DISSIDENT IN AMERICA'S AGE OF FEAR, a guide to confronting fear, taking risk, and being courageous in our new age of authoritarianism, which expands on The New Yorker essay, “So You Want to Be a Dissident?: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear,” through new interviews with dissidents, opposition leaders, theorists, and movement strategists across the world, to Peter Hubbard at Mariner, for publication in summer 2026, by Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic (world English).
September 3, 2025 at 2:29 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
On days like today I think a lot about Luís Roberto Barroso, the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court. www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/w...
It has put presidents in prison. It has taken on Elon Musk — and won. It has become one of the world’s toughest policemen of the internet. And it appears poised to make Jair Bolsonaro the next former Brazilian president in handcuffs. Brazil’s Supreme Court has become perhaps the most powerful institution in Brazil — and one of the most powerful top courts in the world — in part because it has granted itself that power. For years, the court has overseen sprawling criminal investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters. As a result, many on Brazil’s left believe the court helped save the nation’s democracy in the face of an attempted coup, while those on the right believe it is now the court itself that poses a democratic threat.
August 22, 2025 at 7:52 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
I will say it again and again: dehumanizing language BEGETS DEHUMANIZATION. That there is no accountability for those who refer to their fellow human beings as "cockroaches" is a vicious omen. Remember Rwanda. Especially in an estranged politics, our language lives its own life.

From The Atlantic:
Twenty-five years ago this month, all hell broke loose in my country, which is tucked away in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Hordes of members of the Hutu ethnic majority, armed with machetes, spears, nail-studded clubs, and other rudimentary weapons, moved house to house in villages, hunting for Tutsis, the second largest of Rwanda’s three ethnic groups. The radio station RTLM, allied with leaders of the government, had been inciting Hutus against the Tutsi minority, repeatedly describing the latter as inyenzi, or “cockroaches,” and as inzoka, or “snakes.” The station, unfortunately, had many listeners. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/rwanda-shows-how-hateful-speech-leads-violence/587041/
August 22, 2025 at 4:04 AM
fieldsmeyer.com
It should go without saying, but it is possible for a U.S. president to extract diplomatic and humanitarian concessions from dictators without flattering them in the process. But that would require Trump not to admire them in the first place.

The missing clause here is highly respected "by me."
Donald J. Trump: I had a wonderful talk with the highly respected President of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The purpose of the call was to thank him for the release of 16 prisoners. We are also
August 15, 2025 at 3:21 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
A chilling report on the abuses the Rohingya population of Myanmar is facing today at the hands of the Arkan Army:

www.hrw.org/news/2025/07/28/m...
August 12, 2025 at 7:00 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
“Instead Sudan’s city of the dead”

www.rollingstone.com/politics...
August 8, 2025 at 3:46 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Texas Dems are doing the right thing. But many across the US are rationalizing staying quiet or keeping their heads down.

Has the fear environment led you to disengage? Are you starting to bargain with yourself about why it shouldn't be you who stands up?

Here's what I told the @bostonglobe.com‬:
August 7, 2025 at 4:05 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Horrific. Do not look away: Evyatar David, 24, looks looks visibly gaunt as he ticks off days on a calendar in a narrow tunnel. Another section of the Hamas video shows him being forced to dig a hole in the ground that he says will be his grave.

time.com/7307125/evya...
Evyatar David, 24, looks looks visibly gaunt as he ticks off days on a calendar in a narrow tunnel. Another section of the Hamas video shows him being forced to dig a hole in the ground that he says will be his grave. Evyatar David, 24, looks looks visibly gaunt as he ticks off days on a calendar in a narrow tunnel. Another section of the Hamas video shows him being forced to dig a hole in the ground that he says will be his grave.
August 3, 2025 at 2:43 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Horrific. Saif Hijazi, 13, who suffers from severe malnutrition and was partially paralyzed by shelling lies on a bed. Malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care/poor sanitation. Don't look away.

bit.ly/45gZPah
Saif Hijazi, 13, who suffers from severe malnutrition and was partially paralyzed by shelling lies on a bed to have his picture taken at the Shifa Hospital where he is being treated in Gaza City, Monday, July 28, 2025. In Gaza, malnutrition is often worsened by preexisting conditions and compounded by illnesses linked to inadequate health care and poor sanitation, largely the result of the ongoing war. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
August 3, 2025 at 2:35 PM
fieldsmeyer.com
Playing Dead: Do the Democrats really want reform? (Harper's)

harpers.org/archive/2025/08/p...
August 1, 2025 at 3:13 PM