The Republican National Convention’s Carnival of White Grievance
The Republican National Convention’s speaker lineup is the sign of a party that knows itself well: First there’s Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director who had a very lucrative...
View ArticleJoe Biden Has Found His Big Idea
Not that long ago, Democrats spoke of ideas. The 2020 presidential primary was rooted in policy: universal health care, the Green New Deal, immigration reform. It also bravely faced what it meant to be...
View ArticleThe Biden Era Will Put the New Left to the Test
All eyes this week have been focused on the Democratic National Convention, which should probably be considered the formal kickoff of this year’s general election campaign. Although the coronavirus...
View ArticleThe Conservative Misdirection of the Affirmative Action Debate
Last week, concluding a two-year investigation into the university’s admissions process, the Justice Department accused Yale of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in order to...
View ArticleTrump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America
“So, I just heard that,” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday. The conference, like the rest of Trump’s regular press briefings, was ostensibly about...
View ArticleBiden’s Setting Himself Up to Get Blamed for Lost Blue-Collar Jobs
The Democratic Party sure knows how to piss off climate advocates. Tuesday, party leaders cut a promise to end fossil fuel subsidies from their 2020 platform, telling The Huffington Post that the...
View ArticleJoe Biden Finds His Voice
Throughout his entire political career, stretching from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, Joe Biden has been searching for his voice and for words that were authentically his own.Thursday night, flanked...
View ArticleHealth Care Reform Is Being Slashed Into Oblivion
If one issue dominated the Democratic presidential primaries this cycle, it was health care. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal set a standard that other candidates vied to match while...
View ArticleBan Yachts
It’s been a big week for yacht news. Yesterday, white supremacist shirt-layering aficionado Steve Bannon was arrested on a $28 million, 150-foot yacht in Connecticut for defrauding donors to his Build...
View ArticleWhen the Republican Party Was Sane
After five losses in a row, Republicans were desperate to regain the White House following the 1948 election, when Harry Truman surged in the polls at the eleventh hour to defeat GOP standard bearer...
View ArticleTrump’s Incredible Ignorance of Suburbia
It says a lot about President Trump’s misunderstanding of the suburbs that the Republican National Committee has designated Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the Midwestern couple who two months ago pointed...
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How to Break a Big Pharma Monopoly on a Covid-19 Vaccine
In mid-July, the U.S. media lit up with a big story about the global race for a Covid-19 vaccine. State-backed Russian hackers, it was alleged, were poking around the vaccine trade secrets of U.S.,...
View ArticleRepublican Voters Embrace Trump’s Cult of Destruction
There is a certain kind of sputtering disbelief that characterizes a lot of liberal reactions to Trump, for good reason. Even after four years of this routine, it can still seem unbelievable to watch...
View ArticleWhen “Police Reform” Came to Kenosha, Wisconsin
Six years before Jacob Blake was shot and critically injured by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the city made national headlines for a case that became the impetus for groundbreaking reforms concerning...
View ArticleRepublicans Invite America to Play the “Dear Leader” Lottery
David Bossie knew he’d fucked up as the word started to emerge from his mouth. The 2016 Trump campaign veteran, now representing Maryland in the Republican National Convention’s roll call of delegate...
View ArticleHéctor Tobar’s Radical Road Trip Novel
A quarter of the way through Héctor Tobar’s novel, his young, blond protagonist stands on the edge of National Highway Number 9 in Chile, thumb pointed south in hopes of hitching a ride. Drivers speed...
View Article“Everything Was Destroyed”
On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria, which had already devastated the island of Dominica, hit Puerto Rico as a Category 4 hurricane with winds reaching 155 miles per hour. The island had seen other...
View ArticleDonald Trump Declares Total War on the Civil Service
Monday was the first day of the Republican Party’s national convention to renominate President Donald Trump, and it dwelled on little else. The quadrennial conventions are typically used by the parties...
View ArticleCarl Hiaasen’s Secret to Writing a Good Trump Novel
Speaking to Poets & Writers in the fall of 2017, Salman Rushdie admitted that he saw a silver lining in Donald Trump’s election. “It’s an awful thing to say,” he said, “that this thing that is very...
View ArticleJerry Falwell Jr.’s Filthy, Predatory Finances
The overnight fall of Jerry Falwell Jr. from high evangelical grace feels in many ways like a Trump-era gloss on the fabled preacher sex scandals that have dogged our self-appointed Protestant...
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