Category

US Politics

August 6, 2023
1

I used to be part of this dilettante conservative intellectual class until I realized that while my colleagues and I fashioned ourselves as thought leaders for the right, we were really just puppets for decrepit, out-of-touch oligarchs. Republican billionaires created the hellish state of our current politics. Some of them, like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, are outright fascists who want to create dictatorship. Some are Christian supremacist theocrats. But many are just delusional rich kids.

Matthew Sheffield
August 4, 2023
1

Thirty years ago, a different future was available. Gradual climate policies could have slowly steered our economy towards gently declining carbon pollution levels. The costs to most Americans would have been imperceptible. But that future was stolen from us. It was stolen by powerful, carbon-polluting interests who blocked policy reforms at every turn to preserve their short-term profits. They locked each of us into an economy where fossil fuel consumption continues to be a necessity, not a choice.

Matto Mildenberger
May 3, 2023
1

I'm the father of a 21 year old daughter. There are lots of things I worry about. I worry about her being sexually assaulted, because that happens a lot. I worry about her being the victim of a drunk driver, because that happens a lot. I worry about her being the victim of gun violence, because lots of people die from gun-related injuries. Here's what I do not worry about: I don't worry about her being attacked in a restroom by a trans woman because (a) it has never happened; and (b) trans women are the most victimized group of people I've ever met, and the least likely to commit a crime of indecency in a restroom, because they are afraid of getting beat up when all they want to do is pee. And here is something else I don't worry about: I don't worry about my daughter being cruel and inhumane to trans men, women or kids, because my wife and I have raised her to have values and because she is a kind person. There are things to worry about, and then there are things people want you to worry about to conceal their agenda of discrimination and hate. Wake up.

Steve Rudner
April 28, 2023
1

Throughout American culture and politics, billionaire cash often works in a crudely transactional way, but it much more commonly operates more subtly. This, more than anything else, is what undergirds the machinery of American conservatism: a relatively small number of rich donors fund right-wing organizations and think tanks; those organizations and think tanks cultivate voices and personalities who serve as spokespeople, Republican-aligned operatives and public intellectuals; they, in turn, get to enjoy the favor and flattery of the wealthy people whose interests they protect and whose money fuels it all. The end result is a vast and powerful network of organizations and individuals whose ideological bonds are constantly lubricated by injections of cash from a tiny pool of plutocratic patrons.

Luke Savage
March 29, 2023
2

[On Trump] Talented and well-practiced in every vice, a stranger to compassion or empathy, a liar and a cheat so complete in perfidy that he has elevated his dishonesty to hold it up as an ersatz moral principle, violent, so long as he can order someone else to do the dirty work, grotesque in body, graceless in action, in possession of a wounded self-regard so colossal as to smother any spark of grace, treasonous, not only to country, but to every ally he has ever had, the poisoned fruit and rankest flower of racism and contempt for women, and utterly devoid of shame for his moral and spiritual bankruptcy.
That is your leader. That is to whom you give your money. That is who you follow and laud. That is whose banner you willingly carry. Why? Because he is a mirror, not a lighthouse. You see yourselves in him. He is what you would be, if you had inherited money and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame.
No, I do not “respect your choices,” nor do I admire your loyalty and dedication to this miserific, demoniac vision. You have demonstrated not only a lack of civic virtue, loyalty to the Republic and to the rule of law, but a willingness to engage in violence and sedition at his slightest expressed wish. And you will never, ever admit you were wrong.
Because you see your dark, twisted, resentful dreams in him. And to renounce him is to renounce yourselves.” https://similarworlds.com/public-figures/4229795-Stable-Genius-Talented-and-well-practiced-in-every

Advocatus Peregrini
Bitnami