Latest posts

  • Orwell Meets New Trump Reality: 2 + 2 = Whatever the Algorithm Says

    Orwell Meets New Trump Reality: 2 + 2 = Whatever the Algorithm Says

    Somewhere between your tenth doomscroll of the morning and your third attempt to remember which war we’re supposed to care about this week, PBS quietly aired the most important documentary of the decade — Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 — and almost no one noticed, because there wasn’t a trailer trending on TikTok. It’s a film

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  • JD Vance and George Stephanopoulos: Cut to Commercial The New Language of Transparency

    JD Vance and George Stephanopoulos: Cut to Commercial The New Language of Transparency

    It’s a rare thing to see George Stephanopoulos lose patience. The man has survived a decade of D.C. gaslighting and several hundred Trump surrogates without cracking. But on This Week, the famously unflappable anchor finally snapped. He’d spent five full minutes trying to extract a yes or no answer from Vice President JD Vance about

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  • Grand Juries & Grandstanding: The Imminent Indictment of John Bolton and the Weaponization of Justice

    Grand Juries & Grandstanding: The Imminent Indictment of John Bolton and the Weaponization of Justice

    On the heels of a government shutdown, a stock market trembling under tariff scares, and a political climate so charged it could detonate, comes news that seems tailor-made for the age of rival prosecutions: former National Security Adviser John Bolton is expected to be indicted as early as next week. FBI agents searched his Maryland

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  • Chicago Judge Hits Pause on Trump’s Troop Show: Sovereignty on Life Support

    Chicago Judge Hits Pause on Trump’s Troop Show: Sovereignty on Life Support

    When America elects a man who treats the Constitution like a napkin for his Diet Coke spills, you get weeks like this: federal helicopters dangling agents over Chicago apartment buildings, immigration patrols conducting fashion-police stops downtown, and the President attempting to cosplay Lincoln while importing National Guard troops from Texas as if Illinois were suddenly

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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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  • 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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  • Trump’s Bin Laden Time Machine: A Masterclass in Historical Fan Fiction

    Trump’s Bin Laden Time Machine: A Masterclass in Historical Fan Fiction

    The thing about Donald Trump’s storytelling is that it is less history than it is improv theater. He does not so much recall events as audition alternate scripts, testing which version gets the biggest laugh, gasp, or cheer from the crowd. The fact-checkers arrive on cue, scripts in hand, to point out that the timeline

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  • Speaker Johnson’s Imaginary Health Plan: How to Invent a Shutdown Crisis in One Sound Bite

    Speaker Johnson’s Imaginary Health Plan: How to Invent a Shutdown Crisis in One Sound Bite

    The playbook is simple. Find a bureaucratic chart so boring it could put actuaries to sleep, then scream into a cable-news camera that it means “Democrats are shutting down the government to give illegal immigrants free health care.” If you’re lucky, you’ll trend on X by lunchtime. If you’re Mike Johnson, you repeat it on

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  • The Guard Was Called (and Illinois Put On Notice)

    The Guard Was Called (and Illinois Put On Notice)

    The White House confirmed that the president authorized federalization of three hundred Illinois National Guard troops to “protect federal officers and assets” in Chicago. Governor J.B. Pritzker answered with fury, saying he had been handed a manufactured performance disguised as an ultimatum: activate the Guard himself or watch Washington seize control. The move followed a

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  • Resistance Cities Under Siege: Targeting Suggests “Feature, Not Bug” Fascism

    Resistance Cities Under Siege: Targeting Suggests “Feature, Not Bug” Fascism

    What do Portland, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, and Memphis have in common? Not just good food, iconic skylines, or an endless supply of artists who never get paid on time. No, their shared distinction is more sinister: each is a bullseye on the Trump administration’s dartboard of dissent. If you’ve noticed that raids, patrols,

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