The problem is that America is, at its deep core, racist and patriarchal. The obsessions of right wing demagogues derive from the fact that a majority of white people in America will buy into bigotry at the drop of a hat: Drag queens are responsible for widespread harm! (Reality: Zero harm). Immigrants are somehow simultaneously illiterate thugs AND taking all the good jobs. The leap to anti-Semitism, misogyny, and Christian theocracy is a short hop from there.

Photo by Stas Knop from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-and-yellow-analog-clock-3283142/ So, Democrats want to pick up where Donald Trump left off and ban TikTok. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va) claims, with little to no evidence, that the government of Ch!na …

Support is one thing; a proxy war is quite another Let’s get a few things out of the way before I make my argument. No, I don’t support the despot Vladimir Putin or his horrifying war. No, I’m not “parroting Russian talking points.” No, I’m not a horseshoe progressive aligning…

I don't love the term "corporate wage slavery" because it cheapens the experience of American chattel slavery, which was the buying and selling of human beings, their bodies, their offspring, their families. "Modern indentured servitude" seems more apt, because historical indentured servitude used contracts to take away the agency and lives of people under capitalism.

Refusing to see the truth is hastening our collapse Another “once in a generation” weather event strikes the United States in December 2022. This time, at the holidays, thousands of flights are canceled, stranding travelers all over North America. They cry out on social media — on TikTok, Facebook, and…

One in 300 is dead. And new variants are arriving on the scene. What’s the plan? So it turns out that one out of every fourteen Americans suffers from long COVID. Some caveats are in order before we try to process the shock. Technically, those 18.5 million Americans had long…

Photo by Heather Ford on Unsplash We’re all talking about it, right? Climate activists, seeking attention for the climate crisis, threw tomato soup at the Van Gogh painting “Sunflowers.” The backlash has been swift. Liberals tweeted about why we shouldn’t “desecrate art” to bring attention to the climate crisis. (Never…

We’re facing too many risk clusters at once. Our brains weren’t designed for it. We live in an age of escalating risk. America’s always been a risky place to live; we lack the social safety nets of Europe, the social cohesion of Japan, or the communitarian impulses of Latin America…

But there’s a moral obligation attached to becoming “North America’s Netherlands” My personal daily musings on the dire, collapsing state of the United States aren’t terribly original: An ungovernable country beset by creeping fascism, Gilded Age levels of inequality, reinvigorated bigotry, rising attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights, painful inflation…