Defiant Optimist

Hot-button issues. Cool-headed history.

The creator of Under the Desk News revisits the last four decades of American politics and culture to prove we’ve been here before, we can talk across our divides, and there is always hope.

During the pandemic, V Spehar crawled under their desk to give people a soft place to land in a hard news cycle. They broke down the day’s events in a digestible, digestible, and humorous way. But the more they explored our present turmoil, the more questions arose about how we got here and how the hell we're gonna find our way out.

In Defiant Optimist, V is turning their signature empathy and wit to the issues that have plagued America from inception to present day. What we are facing today isn’t new. The issues just look a little different in the glow of the internet age. V is tackling everything: our collapsing trust in the media, our contagious culture of cruelty, the manosphere and hucksters preying on America’s “Lost Boys,” white supremacy, sexism, our fixation with war, and the policies that fail children while claiming to protect them.

Smart, funny, and optimistic in equal measure, Defiant Optimist is a roadmap that shows us not only that we’ve been here before, but that we’ve always managed to find our way out, and how hopefully we can get somewhere so much better.