One of my colleagues has been named a terrorist by the Egyptian government. Authoritarian regimes, it turns out, don’t like it when human rights organizations criticize their efforts to quell dissent. For now, my colleague is safe, as he lives in the United States, yet in retaliation, Egypt has jailed and tortured his cousin and […]
Tag: Obama
Dissecting the Death Rattle of American Decline
I’ve been critical of “Hillbilly Elegy” and other theories that made the rise of Trump more the result of economic disparity than white supremacy. It’s the same argument that populism is a reaction to a dying Republican party, a “death rattle” as the party becomes smaller and has to resort to extremes to win. The […]
Is America Headed Toward Civil War?
Societies–because they’re made up of people–function a lot like people do as individuals. Just as you or I might bottle up our anger and then one day explode, so can a society bottle up its collective anger and then explode all at once. On an individual level, as well as a societal one, we can […]
The Final Hours of America, or How Trump is turning the U.S. into a Banana Republic
A few weeks ago, I laid out a detailed picture of the failures of Trump not only in his fecklessness to do what needs to be done to save human lives during a pandemic, but also detailing how those failures display gross, criminal negligence on the part of Trump and his Republican party. Just to […]
The Republican Promise of a Negligent Homicide against America
America believes, perhaps because of our history, that freedom is our most cherished quality. Maybe because of violent beginnings, our independence has long been interpreted to mean “freedom from tyranny,” as opposed to “freedom from want.” That is, when we obsess over the need to be free, we assume ourselves victims of some fast-approaching enemy […]
Hope beyond Depravity
In its heyday, Dexter was one of my favorite television shows. A serial killer with a code of honor to only kill “really bad” people? I’m captivated. I mean, my love of Dexter wasn’t really surprising; most popular television shows of late are probably going to draw me in given their care for the complexity […]
