Latest posts
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Texas Passes 835 New Laws in One Night The Midnight Mass of Statecraft
Texas loves a spectacle. Rodeos, Friday night lights, the eternal battle between Whataburger and In-N-Out. But nothing captures the state’s flair for drama like September 1, 2025, when 835 new laws took effect at the stroke of midnight. Not one or two. Not even a tidy fifty. Eight hundred and thirty-five. If democracy is usually
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Workers Over Billionaires: Labor Day as America’s Awkward Family Reunion
On September 1, 2025—Labor Day— America finally remembered what the holiday was supposed to be about: not barbecue sales at Home Depot, not posting an “end of summer” bikini pic, but actual workers demanding rights. Thousands marched in hundreds to 1,000+ “Workers Over Billionaires” rallies nationwide. The very phrase carried its own absurd poetry. Workers.
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The Great Victory Parade: When History Becomes State-Sponsored Fanfiction
There are two things authoritarian governments love more than power: parades and revisionist history. So it was no surprise that on September 1–3, 2025, Beijing gave us both in one dazzling, over-produced spectacle—an 80th-anniversary Victory Day parade so self-congratulatory it made the Oscars look humble. Xi Jinping, standing tall on his reviewing platform, hosted none
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ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation
The Trump administration has a way of treating cities like wayward children—Chicago most of all. For decades, conservative politicians have invoked it as shorthand for chaos, crime, and everything wrong with “blue America.” To them, Chicago is less a place where millions of people live, work, and build lives, and more a stage for proving
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Trump’s Executive Order to Federalize Elections: Democracy’s Paper Cut
The great thing about American democracy is that it’s supposed to be decentralized. States set the rules, counties run the polls, and federal courts swoop in every so often to remind Florida it cannot legally stage a coup in its public libraries. But Donald Trump, never one for details like the Constitution, has now declared
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The Ten Commandments of Horror TV: A Bloody, Bingeable Bible
The history of horror television is a cemetery of failed pilots and half-rotted seasons, a graveyard where shows are buried alive by executives only to claw their way out later as streaming “discoveries.” For every cult resurrection, there are dozens of forgotten corpses—remember Harper’s Island? Exactly. Yet from this restless afterlife, ten shows have not
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Florida vs. Chalk: The State’s Ongoing War on Rainbows
On August 29, 2025, the Florida Department of Transportation rolled out new signage in Orlando, stern warnings planted like weeds beside the Pulse nightclub memorial crosswalk. The rainbow-painted asphalt, created to honor the 49 people murdered in the 2016 massacre, now comes with its own government-issued disclaimers: “Defacing Roadway Prohibited” and “No Impeding Traffic.” The
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“Law and Order” or Martial Theater? Trump’s Crime Emergency in D.C.
On August 11, 2025, Donald J. Trump declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., and like every pageant he has ever hosted, it was less about substance than spectacle. With the flourish of a reality TV host in his twilight season, he seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, flooded the streets with National Guard
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Silicon Nationalism: Trump Buys a Piece of Intel
On August 22, 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government is now the proud owner of 10% of Intel. That’s right—your tax dollars have been converted into ~433.3 million non-voting shares priced at $20.47 each. Wall Street analysts say the investment is worth between $8.9 billion and $11.1 billion, depending on whether you
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Whitewashing the Gallery: Trump’s Smithsonian Revisionism
On August 22, 2025, The Guardian ran Francine Prose’s surgical essay on President Trump’s newest culture-war bonfire: Smithsonian museums, and specifically his complaint that they focus “too much on how bad slavery was.” Imagine saying that in 2025, after four centuries of systemic exploitation, while standing on a marble floor your ancestors never had to