Was Donald Trump Reinstated as President Today?
Friday was supposed to be a big day. “The morning of August 13 it’ll be the talk of the world,” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow impresario and purveyor of discredited conspiracy theories about a stolen...
View ArticleSay Goodbye to Senate Reform
For Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, a week of momentous accomplishments has wrapped up. On Tuesday, the Senate advanced a $1 trillion infrastructure package, 69–30. Wednesday morning, their even...
View ArticleThe Democrats Responded to the Latest U.N. Climate Report With Business as Usual
Last week I wrote about the gap between Democratic leaders’ rhetoric on the climate crisis and the reality of their actions, put in stark relief by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s...
View ArticleAfghanistan Is a Disaster. But It Was Always Going to Be.
It was tragic to watch events unfolding Sunday in Kabul. Blame Joe Biden for a terrible miscalculation based on intelligence estimates that were obviously crap. But also blame Donald Trump and Mike...
View ArticleWill the Squalid Rot of the Wisconsin Republican Party Become America’s Future?
As the Covid-19 virus experiences its second life in the form of the Delta variant, the lion’s share of national attention has focused on how the surge has affected the South. America’s favorite...
View ArticleCan Biden Defy History in 2022?
In politics, the rule is treated as immutable, like the law of gravity that Isaac Newton supposedly conceived while sitting under an apple tree in 1666. The political equivalent is the dictum that the...
View ArticleHere’s a Terrible New Idea: Making the Unvaccinated Pay Higher Insurance...
A very bad idea has picked up more steam than it deserves in recent days. Fed up with surging Delta cases and lagging vaccination rates, commentators have begun to opine that unvaccinated people ought...
View ArticleThe Far Right Thinks Wokeness Is Why America Lost in Afghanistan
As the Taliban reconquers Afghanistan, producing bloody scenes of reprisals and desperate attempts to get on some of the last planes out of the country, the blame game is operating at full tilt. Who’s...
View ArticleThe Afghanistan War Was Founded on Lies. Some People Are Still Telling Them.
From its inception in 2001 to its ignominious end, the U.S. war in Afghanistan has been defined by lies. It was a lie when, in 2001, President George W. Bush told service members that “your mission is...
View ArticleDemocrats Continue Their Doomed Push to Save Voting Rights
It would be fair to say that the eyes of the nation are not currently focused on the uphill battle to advance voting rights legislation in Congress. Images of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, after 20...
View ArticleBiden’s Reckoning on Afghanistan Has a Gaping Hole
Joe Biden delivered Monday’s speech with grim determination as he tried to take—and deflect—responsibility for the greatest American military debacle since the fall of Saigon. The tone Biden aspired to...
View ArticleBiden Has Two Weeks to Save As Many Afghans As He Can
While the United States lost the Afghanistan War a long time ago, the scale of the defeat became undeniable when Kabul fell to the Taliban on Sunday. The Afghan government, built in the awkward image...
View ArticleSteve Bannon Wants to Turn Brazil Into the Next MAGA Battleground
Former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, indicted on charges of fraud and money laundering last summer, is plotting a political comeback. And going by his appearance last week at a madcap “cyber...
View ArticleThe Radicalization of Clarence Thomas
In 1992, an electrician named Robert Joiner sued Monsanto, the immense and powerful agrochemical corporation that had, for many years, manufactured the toxic chemical compounds polychlorinated...
View ArticleNew School Year, Same Old Covid Chaos
The dust had seemed to settle on questions of school reopenings—one of the most polarizing political debates of the pandemic. In the spring of 2021, as vaccine shots were administered into arms, and...
View ArticleHow Mass Persuasion Works
The term “Stockholm syndrome” comes from a 1973 bank heist that started out perfectly normally. An experienced robber named Jan-Erik Olsson entered Kreditbanken in Norrmalmstorg square, Stockholm,...
View ArticleFacebook Wants to Ban the Taliban. It’s Another War That Can’t Be Won.
The news about how social media companies might handle the resurgence of the Taliban is fragmented and conflicting. According to early reporting, Twitter and Facebook intended to let Taliban...
View ArticleHow the Pandemic Became an Unplanned Experiment in Abolishing the Child...
It began as a natural, unplanned experiment. In March 2020, when schools shut down to curb the spread of Covid-19, the system charged with keeping kids safe also went on an unprecedented pause. As...
View ArticleRichard Rorty’s Warning Against Authoritarianism
Of all the recently departed thinkers who might have helped us puzzle through the dismal political, intellectual, and socioeconomic prospects of the Trump era, perhaps none looms as large as Richard...
View ArticleThe New WikiLeaks
As Freddy Martinez tracked the latest impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump on Twitter, he saw a screencap of a CNN broadcast that struck him as odd. Right there in his feed was a clip from some...
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