Latest posts

  • Mass Shootings, Manufactured Scapegoats, and America’s Favorite Ritual

    Mass Shootings, Manufactured Scapegoats, and America’s Favorite Ritual

    On August 27, 2025, the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis shattered under the hail of gunfire from a 23-year-old named Robin Westman. By the time the shooting ended, two children—aged 8 and 10—were dead, and seventeen others, mostly kids and elderly parishioners, were injured. Westman barricaded exits, terrorized a congregation mid-Mass, and

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  • Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows

    On August 29, 2025, the Florida Department of Transportation rolled out new signage in Orlando, stern warnings planted like weeds beside the Pulse nightclub memorial crosswalk. The rainbow-painted asphalt, created to honor the 49 people murdered in the 2016 massacre, now comes with its own government-issued disclaimers: “Defacing Roadway Prohibited” and “No Impeding Traffic.” The

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  • Tariffs, Treason, and the Long Con of Executive Power

    Tariffs, Treason, and the Long Con of Executive Power

    On August 29, 2025, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 7–4 ruling, finally tapped the brakes on what has essentially been a seven-year joyride through the Constitution conducted by Donald J. Trump in the name of “economic nationalism.” The court declared that most of his so-called “reciprocal” and “trafficking” tariffs exceeded his

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  • 107 Days Without Protection: Kamala Harris and the Trump Doctrine of Spite

    107 Days Without Protection: Kamala Harris and the Trump Doctrine of Spite

    On August 29, 2025, President Donald J. Trump did something both petty and perilous, which, to be fair, is his governing style. He revoked the Secret Service protection of former Vice President Kamala Harris—effective September 1—just as she prepares to launch her 107 Days book tour. The timing is not coincidence. It is choreography. Harris

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  • Hate Speech, Incorporated: How Social Media Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model

    Hate Speech, Incorporated: How Social Media Turned Bigotry Into a Business Model

    By 2025, it is no longer controversial to say that social media has become a sewer. What’s controversial is admitting that it was designed this way. The polite version is to call it “polarization,” “contentious discourse,” “a marketplace of ideas with some bad actors.” The honest version is that platforms like Facebook and X have

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  • SNL at 51: Reinventing Reinvention Until It’s Just a Costume Change

    SNL at 51: Reinventing Reinvention Until It’s Just a Costume Change

    Here’s the thing about Saturday Night Live: it is always dying and always about to be reborn. That’s the premise, the pitch, the myth. Every time someone leaves, the show is declared finished; every time someone arrives, it’s hailed as reborn. By now, SNL has spent 50 years on its deathbed and 50 years being

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  • Welcome to Visa Purgatory: Where Degrees Expire Before You Do

    Welcome to Visa Purgatory: Where Degrees Expire Before You Do

    In late August 2025, while half the country was still coughing on wildfire smoke and the other half was adjusting to troops parked in their capitals, the Trump administration slipped in a bureaucratic bombshell. The Department of Homeland Security quietly proposed new rules that would gut the long-standing “duration of status” system for international students

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  • Katrina at 20: America Remembers, Forgets, and Repackages

    Katrina at 20: America Remembers, Forgets, and Repackages

    Twenty years later, America still doesn’t know how to talk about Hurricane Katrina. Not because there’s nothing left to say, but because the event itself was already so saturated in meaning that everything since feels like a remix. The anniversary observances in New Orleans this August were equal parts solemnity and stagecraft—brass-band second lines echoing

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  • America’s Newest Crime: Fighting Fires Without Papers

    America’s Newest Crime: Fighting Fires Without Papers

    On August 27, 2025, as the Bear Gulch Fire raged through Washington state—thousands of acres incinerated, towns choking on smoke, families evacuating with pets stuffed into backseats—the federal government identified the real emergency. Not the wildfire consuming homes. Not the climate that breeds a new inferno each week. No, the emergency was the possibility that

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  • The CDC Purge: When Science Got Fired by Press Release

    The CDC Purge: When Science Got Fired by Press Release

    In the latest American remake of Night of the Long Knives, the White House traded soldiers for scientists and staged the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez like it was an HR issue instead of a constitutional one. On August 27, 2025, less than a month into her tenure, Monarez was dismissed for the crime

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