Reading Time: 4 minutes Are (white) evangelicals backing away from Donald Trump? You might think that if you read this headline at Semafor: The article is mostly a short list of prominent white evangelicals who appear to be done with Trump. They’re fed up with his fixation on the 2020 elections and they’re disturbed by his more recent meetings […]
Donald Trump
Posted inHuman Story
Inflation isn’t what’s making Americans unhappy
Reading Time: 4 minutes “It’s the economy, stupid.” It was a memorable 1992 quip that quickly went viral—and it’s still popular today—after being uttered by then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s political guru, James Carville, the “ragin’ Cajun.” Turns out, that theory may not necessarily be quite right, though. Carville was saying that the state of the economy, more than any […]
Posted inFree Expression
‘Free speech’ must be reformed before it destroys US democracy
Reading Time: 7 minutes The midterm elections are over. But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter—because the virulent, now-years-long epidemic afflicting American politics remains: cynical Republican mendacity, which is to say, purposeful lying and duplicity—spearheaded by former president Donald Trump. And zero accountability so far for the merchants of this corrosive assault on the nation. Make no mistake, this […]
Posted inPolitics
Vote for character, not shady characters
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you go to the polls to vote in Tuesday’s midterm election, if you didn’t vote early, keep one word in mind: character. The critical importance of that under-emphasized virtue to the health of the republic is eloquently underscored in a wise (as always) essay by David French in The Atlantic magazine’s “The Third Rail” […]
Posted inPolitics
The crisis of democracy: on remaining vigilant without freaking out
Reading Time: 4 minutes The fiery rhetoric of the campaign trail might make you might think American democracy has failed or is failing. There is declining trust in government, elections, and in democracy itself. And some people are freaking out. This is a crisis of democracy. But there is no such thing as a stable, happily-ever-after version of democracy. […]
Posted inHealthcare
Report: At least 318,981 dead Covid anti-vaxxers can thank Trump
Reading Time: 6 minutes White Americans are now more likely than Black Americans to die of COVID. That’s just one more telling artifact littering the landscape of destruction Donald Trump’s one-term presidency inflicted—and continues to inflict—on the United States. In the early days of the pandemic in America, Black Americans were dying of COVID at triple the rate of […]
Posted inSocial Media
Trump was never king of Twitter. This guy was (and is)
Reading Time: 3 minutes Among the more depressing news tidbits I recently ran into informed me that Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has 1.1 million Twitter followers. 1.1 million! It’s true. I checked. By comparison, I have, uh, 170 followers (.00001545% of Greene’s), which may or may not be a function of never using it. And virtually everything […]
Posted inCulture
When humanists became haters
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the last several years, many humanists who had never hated anyone before were taught to hate. They were taught to hate a particular man. And they were taught to hate this particular man by the man himself. It was as if the man looked humanists in the eyes and said, “I was chosen to […]
Posted inPolitics
Voters hammered Trump in 2016. So how did he end up president?
Reading Time: 4 minutes You may be unaware of it, but the Democratic Party has been on quite a win streak of late, capturing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections (1992-2020), including when Donald Trump won the White House in 2016. The question is, how was Trump able to win that election when he […]
Posted inPolitics
From Hitler to Trump, strongmen’s lies have devastated the world
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the risk of exaggerating a connection to today’s American political environment, bald-faced lies disingenuously and persistently applied over time destroyed Germany’s pre-World War II Weimar Republic. The lies were spread by the racist Nazi Party’s fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, in a cynical and diabolical propaganda campaign inflicted on the German people during years of […]