Latest posts

  • One Day, Three Flexes: The Roberts Hold, Midway Blitz, and the Birthday Book That Wouldn’t Die

    One Day, Three Flexes: The Roberts Hold, Midway Blitz, and the Birthday Book That Wouldn’t Die

    The news cycle didn’t just turn over. It did somersaults, pirouettes, and then flopped onto the couch clutching its side. By breakfast, Chief Justice John Roberts had played human sandbag for Donald Trump’s freeze on nearly $5 billion in foreign aid. By lunch, Chicago was choking on “Operation Midway Blitz” immigration raids, a branding exercise

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  • America’s New Job Fair: Now Hiring Deportation Apprenticeships

    America’s New Job Fair: Now Hiring Deportation Apprenticeships

    The Trump administration has always treated immigration enforcement less like policy and more like a casting call. But now the casting call has become a crash program: 10,000 new ICE officers and 3,000 CBP agents by year’s end. Funded by a $170.7 billion “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the program is less about public safety and

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  • Tom Hanks, the Wokest Man Alive: How America Lost Its War Against Niceness

    Tom Hanks, the Wokest Man Alive: How America Lost Its War Against Niceness

    Once upon a time, the biggest threat Tom Hanks posed to national security was making every American cry in unison. Whether storming Omaha Beach or talking to a volleyball, Hanks specialized in weaponized empathy. He was our cinematic dad, our comfort-food patriot, the guy who could make a two-and-a-half-hour movie about the postal service (The

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  • E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump: The $83.3 Million Reminder That Defamation Still Has a Price Tag

    E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald Trump: The $83.3 Million Reminder That Defamation Still Has a Price Tag

    The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous per curiam decision that might as well have been subtitled “Actions Have Consequences, Even for Presidents Who Think They’re Immune to Consequences.” The ruling upheld the $83.3 million defamation judgment against Donald J. Trump in Carroll v. Trump (No. 24-644), rejecting his immunity claim with

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  • The Supreme Court Greenlights Guesswork Policing (or How to Arrest Someone for Existing in Spanish)

    The Supreme Court Greenlights Guesswork Policing (or How to Arrest Someone for Existing in Spanish)

    The U.S. Supreme Court once again demonstrated its uncanny ability to treat the Bill of Rights like IKEA instructions: skimmed, misread, and discarded in the recycling bin because who has time for nuance when there are “emergency dockets” to clear. In a 6–3 order, the Court stayed a Los Angeles federal judge’s restraining order that

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  • Trump vs. Newsom and the Battle for America’s Caps Lock Key

    Trump vs. Newsom and the Battle for America’s Caps Lock Key

    The Washington Post unveiled what can only be described as America’s summer-long pay-per-view event: the cage match between President Donald Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom. Forget inflation. Forget foreign policy. Forget climate collapse. The real fight for America’s soul is happening on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, now better known as a

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  • The Man Who Shot Down Shots: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Public Health Hunger Games

    The Man Who Shot Down Shots: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Public Health Hunger Games

    The curtain was finally pulled back on the chaos at the heart of American public health. And behind it wasn’t a wizard, or even a bureaucrat in a lab coat. It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—HHS Secretary, anti-vaccine crusader turned federal kingpin of medicine, and proof that if you complain loudly enough about mercury in

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  • The VMAs Tried on Broadcast TV and Accidentally Staged a Pop Census

    The VMAs Tried on Broadcast TV and Accidentally Staged a Pop Census

    The MTV Video Music Awards are not an award show so much as an annual group therapy session where pop culture confronts its contradictions under a disco ball. For decades, it was a cable-era ritual: eyeliner, explosions, maybe a snake or two. But on September 7, 2025, the VMAs tried on broadcast television for the

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  • Apocalypse Now, But Make It Truth Social

    Apocalypse Now, But Make It Truth Social

    On September 6, 2025, President Donald J. Trump escalated his “law-and-order” offensive in Chicago not with a policy paper, not with a briefing, not even with a garbled campaign rally rant. No, he escalated with Photoshop. The President of the United States posted an Apocalypse Now–style image of himself looming over a flaming Chicago skyline,

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  • The Jobs Report That Wasn’t a Crash, Just a Stall With the Seatbelt Light On

    The Jobs Report That Wasn’t a Crash, Just a Stall With the Seatbelt Light On

    On September 5, 2025, the August jobs report landed like an anemic cough. U.S. nonfarm payrolls rose by a mere 22,000, a number so small you could tuck it into a single suburban warehouse and still have space for a pickleball court. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, the highest in nearly four years.

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