politics
Mass killings: Why we need to see the murdered innocents
Reading Time: 7 minutes For several decades beginning in the 1950s, driver education classes in the United States included screenings of “shock films”—documentary shorts, narrated in police drama style, created to bring the reality of high-speed collisions home to young drivers. Names like Highway o
Lack of trust is the universal acid
Reading Time: 4 minutes Our greatest accomplishments sprang from an era of trust and cooperation. Without trust, all our institutions crumble.
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others.
The Catholic Justices driving the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal
Reading Time: 5 minutes I grew up Catholic, so I know something about the ancient faith’s hammerlock absolutism, especially regarding anything even remotely sexual. That’s why I immediately thought of sexuality when I learned along with everyone else this week about the “leaked draft opinion” of U.S
Could there ever be a Black Trump?
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’re living through a period of rising authoritarianism in US politics. The January 6th Capitol riot was not an isolated incident but a culmination of conservative extremism. Former President Donald Trump regularly flouted political norms and pushed his base toward what were
Christian nationalism in 2022: An interview with Katherine Stewart
Reading Time: 9 minutes Religious freedom advocate Katherine Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, has been writing about politics, policy, education, and church-state relations for over a decade. The Power Worshippers won first place in the Ex
Why aren’t you a Trump supporter?
Reading Time: 7 minutes OnlySky · Why aren't you a Trump supporter? | Dale McGowan So you weren’t a Trump supporter in the last election, and you won’t be in the next one. Same here. Well done us. But the question stands: Why aren’t you a Trump
Why the U.S. desperately needs a domestic anti-disinformation agency
Reading Time: 6 minutes A new anti-disinformation agency in Sweden is simultaneously encouraging and discouraging in the realm of public free speech and truth. On Jan. 1, the government of this progressive, Scandinavian nation established the Swedish Psychological Defense Agency (SPDA). Its fundamen
Will Red and Blue America have an amicable divorce?
Reading Time: 4 minutes During the Civil War, Union General William Sherman and Confederate General John Bell Hood exchanged letters. In their correspondence, Bell expressed disgust at his belief that the Union was fighting to give political rights to former slaves. Hood writes: You came into our co