Latest posts

  • First They Came for Free Speech: Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and America’s Fascist Curtain Call

    First They Came for Free Speech: Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and America’s Fascist Curtain Call

    Picture this: you’re sitting on your couch, remote in hand, waiting for Jimmy Kimmel to make a joke about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s latest word salad. Instead, you’re greeted by a rerun of one of their other really shitty shows—not because ABC thinks pratfalls are funnier than politics, but because the Federal Communications Commission, under Brendan

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  • The Return of Red Scares: Trump and Vance Turn Grief Into Witch Hunt

    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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  • Republicans Canceled Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert Because Free Speech Is Only for Them

    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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  • Kash Patel’s Senate Hearing: When Oversight Becomes Cage Match

    Kash Patel’s Senate Hearing: When Oversight Becomes Cage Match

    The Director in the Hot Seat The FBI director is supposed to radiate calm authority. Buttoned-up, even boring. Kash Patel did not get the memo. At his Senate Judiciary oversight hearing, Patel delivered spectacle instead of stability—part wrestling promo, part courtroom drama, part Fox primetime audition. Patel denied politicizing the bureau, denied purging Trump critics,

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  • The Death of Charlie Kirk and the Politics of Selective Grief

    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

    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!

    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

    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

    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

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  • Brian Kilmeade and the “Just Kill ’Em” Doctrine: Fox News Accidentally Says the Quiet Part Louder

    Brian Kilmeade and the “Just Kill ’Em” Doctrine: Fox News Accidentally Says the Quiet Part Louder

    If satire is dead, Brian Kilmeade personally strangled it on live television when he suggested, with all the seriousness of a man discussing football stats, that unhoused people with mental illness should receive “involuntary lethal injections.” His actual phrasing—“just kill ’em”—landed with the thud of a guillotine blade hitting the stage floor of Fox &

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