Latest posts
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Article II and a Boatload of Problems: How to Commit Extrajudicial Murder Without Even Calling It War
America has always had a complicated relationship with international law. We like to write it, we like to invoke it, and—when convenient—we like to fold it into a paper airplane and see how far it flies before bursting into flames over someone else’s territorial waters. On September 3, 2025, U.S. forces killed 11 people in
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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 EV Jobs Miracle That Ended in Handcuffs
On September 5, 2025, the largest worksite immigration raid in DHS history turned Hyundai’s much-hyped “Metaplant” electric vehicle complex in Ellabell, Georgia, into a live broadcast of American contradiction. About 475 workers were detained—most of them South Korean nationals—during a sweep that hit not just Hyundai’s $12.6 billion EV complex but especially the adjacent Hyundai–LG
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From a Mountain of Solitude to a Lifetime of Yes: The Love Story I Didn’t See Coming
One year ago today, I stood on a mountain in Hawaiʻi with the wind in my face and the Pacific unrolling itself in that impossible blue. It was the kind of view that makes your chest go quiet—the kind that feels like an answer without words. I had come there alone. I was traveling alone.
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The 33,295-Page Transparency Illusion: Congress Dumps Paper, Not Truth, on the Epstein Files
Transparency, we are told, is democracy’s disinfectant. Shine light on the secrets, cleanse the rot, and let citizens bask in the glow of accountability. On September 2, 2025, Chairman James Comer’s GOP-led House Oversight Committee took that adage and set it on fire, dumping 33,295 pages of Jeffrey Epstein–related records into the public sphere. Thirty-three
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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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Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose
By 2025, prestige television no longer means anything. It’s like calling water wet, or calling Marvel “cinema” just to rile up Scorsese. Prestige used to be rarefied air—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men. Now it’s practically background radiation, humming behind every streaming app. Prestige has metastasized. Every show arrives pre-packaged as “prestige,” the way cereal
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Chicago Doesn’t Need an Occupation, but Trump Wants a Backdrop
On August 28, 2025, while most of the country was still digesting the last “crime emergency” episode in Washington, the Trump administration quietly started drafting a sequel. This time, the stage is Chicago. The proposal: turn Naval Station Great Lakes—a training hub for sailors just north of the city—into a makeshift operations center for ICE