The Fate of American Democracy Is in the Hands of Cable News
The 2020 presidential election could very well be messy, complex, and slow, defined by an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, legal challenges, and possibly recounts reminiscent of the fiasco in...
View ArticleThe Violence and Hope in Texas Is Our Future
In 2020 in Texas, depending on which county you live in, a voter can head to the polls at 3 a.m. Or they can drive for several hours to drop their ballot off at the one box in their county of millions,...
View ArticleIt’s Already Happening Here
Fascism is the outcome of a collective incapacity to think. This is how, in 1939, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges explained the success of Adolf Hitler. From his marginal observation post in Buenos...
View ArticleWhat Do We Do About All These Trump Supporters?
Hockey icon Bobby Orr broke the hearts of millions last week when he declared his support for Donald Trump in a campaign ad in New Hampshire. Not because he exercised his free-speech rights. Not...
View ArticleThe Crushing Anxiety of the Worst Election of Our Lifetimes
I’ve always had trouble watching the countdown to Election Day. Even in a cycle that passes for normal, issues get reduced to talking points trotted out for their appeal to marginal polling...
View ArticleThis Was Always Going to Become Normal
The warnings started early: Just weeks before the 2016 election, after the leak of the Access Hollywood tapes that captured Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault, Michelle Obama told a crowd at a...
View ArticleEven the Pandemic Couldn’t Kill Trumpism
The promise at the heart of Joe Biden’s campaign wasn’t simply that he would beat Donald Trump, although his entire candidacy was premised on the idea that he could do that better than any of the...
View ArticleThere Will Be No Emphatic Rejection of Trump
It has become an All About Eve election. Everything that happened before 1 a.m. on Wednesday has fulfilled Bette Davis’s cinematic prediction, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy...
View ArticleElection Day Was Peaceful—Then Trump Opened His Mouth
The 2020 election was never going to be easy to conduct. This year saw a pandemic kill more than 230,000 people throughout the country, widespread protests and civil unrest over police brutality...
View ArticleThe U.S. Is Now Officially Out of the Paris Agreement
Two years after a flashy press conference in the White House Rose Garden, the United States officially filed notice last fall that it would be leaving the Paris Agreement—the international community’s...
View ArticleUber and Lyft Bought Themselves Impunity, Again
This year’s presidential race has, as initially predicted, refused to end in any kind of timely or tidy manner. But we do know a bit about what happened last night in several down-ballot campaigns. One...
View ArticleNever Trust the Polls Again!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Heading into Tuesday’s election, the public polling told the same story, over and over again. Joe Biden had a commanding lead in the national popular vote, somewhere...
View ArticleTrump’s Legal Threats Have More Bravado Than Merit
President Donald Trump spent election night doing what everyone expected him to do: baselessly claiming that the vote counts were fraudulent and issuing vague legal threats on that basis. “This is a...
View ArticleVoters Said They’re Worried About the Climate. Many Voted for Trump Anyway.
Early Tuesday night, Fox News gave Democratic viewers rare cause for optimism. Exit polls, the network reported, had found that 70 percent of voters support increased government spending on green and...
View ArticleThe Futility of the Democrats’ Record-Breaking War Chest
If the election returns stay on track, Joe Biden will be president, but with a Republican Senate standing in his way. Good news for a president who was, in the face of all evidence before his eyes, so...
View ArticleNothing Was Inevitable About This Election
No presidential candidate had hit 270 electoral votes by the close of Election Day, which was more or less expected. Other outcomes were cleaner while holding true to prediction: Republicans were still...
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The Majestic Alaskan Rainforest in Trump’s Crosshairs
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote naturalist John Muir in 1911. Last week, news broke that the Trump administration exempted the...
View ArticleWhat If Democrats’ Message Just Doesn’t Matter?
Joe Biden supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. I know this because I follow political news for a living, but also because he said so, on television, in one of his two nationally...
View ArticleThe Trump Campaign’s Farcical Attempt to Steal an Election
In the chaos following Fox News’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adult doll Jared Kushner got to work. He picked up the phone to try to find a...
View ArticleThe Cops Protested This Election, Too
Kettling is, by definition, a trap. It is a tactic most commonly used by police to surround and immobilize a group of people, often protesters, in an attempt to stymie and diffuse their momentum, even...
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