Emails and doomscrolling make up too much of my life these days, and if I’m not grieving what I know is coming for our planet in the next twenty-odd years, I’m grieving what’s happening to our country and what feels like an inevitable collapse into entrenched authoritarianism. To be honest, I’ve found this reality really […]
Tag: authoritarianism
Death in the Face of Death
Watching the country’s long-expected rapid descent into fascism is numbing. The images out of L.A. aren’t just reminiscent of 2020; they evoke a foreboding of something somehow worse. The scenes of tanks on train tracks into DC for a military parade are the hallmark of a dictatorship in the making, yet too many people remain […]
Fear and Loneliness – and Hope
I oscillate these days between crippling fear and endless hope. It’s a strange dichotomy, actually. The fear is both very real and very fantastical. By that, I mean what I have an imagination for – climate collapse, the collapse of our democracy, economic collapse, the pending authoritarian threat and the very real damage it could […]
The sin of empathy
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, prelate of the Episcopal Church had the audacity to do something truly radical recently: she asked a president for mercy. Mercy is not necessarily entirely foreign to this particular president. He showed “mercy” to 1,500 men and women pardoned on his first day in office, some charged with violent crimes, for […]
To be silent, or not
This morning brought unsettling news. The Court of Appeals in the Philippines upheld the conviction for Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and her former colleague at Rappler, Rey Santos Jr., all but ensuring she could see as many as 100 years in prison on charges of criminal cyber libel. You read that right: if convicted on […]
The QAnon Cult
In the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection, it probably comes as no surprise that I’ve devoted a lot of time to trying to understand QAnon, cults, and the rise of white supremacist violence. Being a trained seminarian, this isn’t a new topic to me; if you study religion, you’re bound to spend time studying […]
The Formation of Paramilitary Forces within the United States
Much has been written about the recent rise of authoritarian power here in the “free world,” but when we live it day-in and day-out, it’s also easy to dismiss these claims as alarmist. That’s fair on some level; we live in a world where every “memetic” moment is driven by some degree of hyperbole, and […]
Trump Appears to be Flirting with Genocide
What seemed at first to have been a feckless and ignorant response to the spread of COVID-19 is starting to look more malicious over time. You can only bungle something for so long before the repeated missteps reach a point where they have to be more than just missteps. There is reporting out this morning […]
