Latest posts
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Merit, Excellence, and a Half-Billion Dollar Shuffle: The Education Department’s New Hunger Games
The Department of Education has always been a strange beast—part accountant, part social engineer, part referee for our endless cultural blood sports. On September 15, it decided to moonlight as a pit boss, shuffling chips from one table to another, all while insisting this was about “merit and excellence.” Translation: somebody’s walking out of the
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Trump Declares War on Anti-Fascism: Guess Which Side That Puts Him On
The Big Announcement Donald Trump took to Truth Social and, in his usual slurry of caps lock and grievance, announced he would designate Antifa as a “major terrorist organization.” He tied it to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, because everything in MAGA world must be shoehorned into a neat morality play. And what better villain
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The Return of Red Scares: Trump and Vance Turn Grief Into Witch Hunt
From Mourning to McCarthyism The assassination of Charlie Kirk should have been a tragedy contained by grief, accountability, and legal process. Instead, it became fuel. Within days, the White House pivoted from mourning to manufacturing a new Red Scare. President Donald Trump, flanked by Vice President JD Vance and professional apocalypse salesman Stephen Miller, decided
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The Glitterball Hunger Games: Dancing With the Stars Season 34 Kicks Off by Breaking Its Own Math
Opening Night, Chaos Optional “Dancing With the Stars” opened its 34th season like only an American reality juggernaut can: too many contestants, too much glitter, and not nearly enough functional technology. Fourteen couples poured onto the ballroom floor, the disco lights blinded half the audience, and the producers announced no eliminations this week—as if America
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Republicans Canceled Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert Because Free Speech Is Only for Them
The Blood in the Water Let’s get this out of the way: Jimmy Kimmel is off the air. Pulled by ABC. Indefinite hiatus. No return date. Disney—the big corporate mouse with the oversized ears and the even bigger fear of FCC regulatory hellfire—yanked “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” because he made jokes about Charlie Kirk after Kirk
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The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Politics of Selective Grief
Violence Is Not the Answer Let’s start with the obvious: I condemn political violence. All of it. Every bullet, every act dressed up as “justice,” every attempt to turn disagreement into bloodshed. No cause, no grievance, no ideology makes murder acceptable. And yet here we are, talking about another assassination carried out on a public
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The Half-Mast Presidency: Selective Empathy as a National Ritual
Flags for Some, Not for Others There is nothing quite as American as fighting about flags. We argue about who can kneel before them, who can burn them, whether rainbows belong on them, and now—who gets the honor of lowering them. President Donald Trump ordered U.S. flags lowered nationwide for Charlie Kirk. A right-wing commentator
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Shutdown Theater: Now With More Subsidies and Security Funds!
Welcome back to Washington, America’s longest-running soap opera, where every September the same plotline airs: Will the government shut down? Will Speaker [insert name here, they rotate faster than NFL quarterbacks] hold the caucus together? Will Chuck Schumer furrow his brows meaningfully? And will anyone, at any point, think about the millions of actual humans
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The Party of Free Speech Wants a Muzzle—As Long as It’s for You
Ah, yes. The brave defenders of free speech. The warriors against cancel culture. The self-styled martyrs of the “say what you want, snowflake” movement. They’ve spent years assuring us that America needs to be a safe space—for their offensive jokes, for their racist uncle’s Facebook rants, for their senator’s homophobic tweets typed at 3 a.m.
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Trump’s War on the Calendar: Why Four Quarters Are Just Too Many for Capitalism to Handle
Once again Donald J. Trump has logged on to Truth Social, thumb trembling with the divine power of an unpaid intern, to announce that America no longer needs quarterly earnings reports. Semiannual will do just fine, thank you. If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Trump tried the same thing in 2018, after a