Understanding, Surviving, and Resisting Our New Reality
Crypto! The currency of choice for criminals, money launderers, kidnappers, influence peddlers, arms/drug/human traffickers, and dictators stuffing their own pockets. Trump & Sons is launching its own cryptocoin. No one is even talking about such quaint notions as corruption or conflict of interest. That’s so over! This White House is For Sale, baby! Even if […]
Most people probably won’t pay much if any attention to this story, but it is very scary because it is part of a trend where big, wealthy, powerful institutions make concessions to Trump as soon as their financial interests are threatened–when they might not even have to. The road to subservience begins here, and we […]
We should not be surprised that he voted to pass the Trump/Musk spending bill. On Gaza: “Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, […]
Columbia University has become ground-zero for MAGA efforts to stifle “liberal bias” on university campuses. The Trump administration has canceled $400 million in federal grants to the university, ostensibly for Columbia’s failure “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.” The focus on the university stems from demonstrations on campus last year […]
On August 24, 1939, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany signed a secret pact that became known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after its existence came to light after World War II. The agreement divided eastern Europe into two spheres of influence, and both Germany and the USSR pledged not to invade the other’s domain—an agreement […]
Today the Washington Post’s senior editor David Shipley resigned in apparent protest over owner Jeff Bezos’ directive that Post editorials henceforth would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics. The only reasonable interpretation is that criticism of America’s oligarchs is now verboten and that America’s second […]
What are we to make of the astounding passivity of the Democrats in the face of Trump’s wanton smashing of America’s rule of law, the federal government, and US foreign policy? What doesn’t the party understand about what is happening? Here’s James Carville’s recommendation in today’s New York Times: “And there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately […]
There is something truly odious about the decision by Georgia Republicans to nominate Herschel Walker to replace Raphael Warnock as senator. Walker is manifestly unqualified for the office, as evidenced by his preposterously incoherent statements, his obvious ignorance of the issues, and his frequent lies about his own resume and personal history. But the malign […]
Of everything I’ve read since the rise of Donald Trump, The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder comes closest to providing a unified theory for understanding the bewildering events of the past decade. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale with a distinguished resume of books and other publications on modern European history. This […]
“In America, Negroes do not need to be told what fascism is. We know.” –Langston Hughes Americans usually think of fascism as something that happened somewhere else–in Europe, or Latin America, not in the United States. But as the country lurches toward the all-too-possible prospect of being under the control of an increasingly fascist Republican […]