Latest posts

  • The Riyadh Comedy Festival Where the Joke Is You

    There’s a new punchline in Riyadh this week, and it isn’t coming from the mouths of Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Bill Burr, or Pete Davidson. It’s the sound of cash registers ringing, echoing louder than any laugh track, in a hall where more than fifty Western comics are performing for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

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  • When DHS Becomes the PR Department for Trump’s Enforcers: Zach Bryan, “Bad News,” and the Federal Trolling Tour

    When DHS Becomes the PR Department for Trump’s Enforcers: Zach Bryan, “Bad News,” and the Federal Trolling Tour

    Country music has always had a rebellious streak—train lines, stolen kisses, dusty roads, heartbreak. But when your protest song provokes the Department of Homeland Security to scrap together a montage of ICE raids and set them to your chorus, you’ve officially crossed from troubadour to target. On October 8, 2025, Axios dropped a story that

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  • The Party of No Consequences: Why Approval Ratings Are a Dead Metric in a Dead Democracy

    The Party of No Consequences: Why Approval Ratings Are a Dead Metric in a Dead Democracy

    There was a time back when reality TV was still filmed in actual mansions and not in crumbling democracies that people used to care about approval ratings. Pollsters would trot out their little charts, cable news would plaster bar graphs across the chyron like an EKG of democracy itself, and voters would argue about whether

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  • Trump’s Jail Talk: When Presidents Play Sheriff of Dissent

    Trump’s Jail Talk: When Presidents Play Sheriff of Dissent

    It starts, as so many American breakdowns do now, with a social media post typed out between the golf course and the motorcade. On October 8, 2025, President Donald Trump fired off on Truth Social that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” for “failing to protect ICE Officers.” He added, as a flourish,

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  • America’s Great Sleepwalk Amongst Fascism: Snoring Through the Funeral of Democracy

    America’s Great Sleepwalk Amongst Fascism: Snoring Through the Funeral of Democracy

    The first rule of dying democracies is that nobody notices until the casket is already lowered into the ground. By then, the guests are too busy checking their phones to clap, or to care, or to even remember whose funeral they’re attending. America, it turns out, is the kind of family that shows up late

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  • The Art of the Pardon: Trump, Maxwell, and the Cult of Selective Mercy

    The Art of the Pardon: Trump, Maxwell, and the Cult of Selective Mercy

    October 7, 2025. Mark it. That was the day Michael Wolff—yes, the man who has made a career spelunking through Trump’s psyche like it’s a haunted mineshaft—announced to The Daily Beast that a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell could be coming “as soon as this week.” Not next month, not in a season finale cliffhanger, but

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  • Shutdown Roulette: Now Playing, “Will You Get Paid for the Work You Already Did?”

    Shutdown Roulette: Now Playing, “Will You Get Paid for the Work You Already Did?”

    The United States government has perfected a kind of experimental theater in which the actors are unpaid, the audience is hostage, and the script is rewritten mid-performance by whichever lawyer has the best thesaurus. This week’s act: the White House Office of Management and Budget arguing, with the straight face of a man who has

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  • Stephen Miller’s Plenary Power Hour: When Fascism Becomes a Talking Point

    Stephen Miller’s Plenary Power Hour: When Fascism Becomes a Talking Point

    On October 7, 2025, in what might generously be called a “CNN moment” (though it felt more like a YouTube conspiracy livestream accidentally slipped into prime time), Stephen Miller declared with a straight face that Donald Trump has “plenary authority.” He said it in the kind of lawyerly monotone that makes you think it’s a

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  • Charlie Sheen and the Eternal Circus of American Redemption

    Charlie Sheen and the Eternal Circus of American Redemption

    We are a nation addicted to watching houses burn down and then clapping when the insurance check arrives. That, in essence, is the plotline of Charlie Sheen’s life, which is now getting the full treatment—documentary, book, the kind of cultural reappraisal usually reserved for wars or Woodstock. Why Charlie Sheen? Because he’s perfect for us.

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  • The Supreme Court’s New Term: Now Playing, the Trump Cinematic Universe of Unlimited Power

    The Supreme Court’s New Term: Now Playing, the Trump Cinematic Universe of Unlimited Power

    On October 6, 2025, the United States Supreme Court flung open its majestic marble doors to launch the 2025–26 term, and the BBC wasted no time pointing out what the docket really is: a season pass to the Trump Expanded Universe, where executive power is both the script and the punchline. Forget your garden-variety disputes

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