By Ira Chernus ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Count on one thing: the next four years are going to be tough. If you can muster the energy for political action while Donald Trump and his minions rule Washington, it will have to be channeled in two ways: first, resisting the worst excesses of him (and his […]
Lifting from the Bottom: How to Survive Donald Trump’s America
By Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes ( Tomdispatch.com ) – “If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31) Before November 5th, millions of us were already struggling with poverty, extreme storms, immigration nightmares, anti-trans bills, criminalized reproductive health, the demolition of homeless encampments, […]
A Democracy of Voices, If we can Keep It: Threats to Free Expression in the Trump Era
By Nan Levinson ( Tomdispatch.com ) – I thought I was done with free speech. For nearly two decades, I reported on it for the international magazine Index on Censorship. I wrote a book, Outspoken: Free Speech Stories, about controversies over it. I even sang “I Like to Be in America” at the top of my lungs […]
The “Black Lives don’t Matter” President: Holding Trump accountable for a Lifetime of Racism
By Clarence Lusane ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Donald Trump was the worst president for Black people in the modern era, if not the nation’s history. Given a life of unremitting racial animus, under no circumstances should he receive a single vote from the Black community or other communities of color. After all, he’s never moderated […]
Elderly Activists vs. Decrepit Plutocrats: It isn’t Age that matters but What you use it For
By Robert Lipsyte ( Tomdispatch.com ) – After Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot? At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or […]
“What Should I Do With This Pain?” Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians urge Peace and Reconciliation, drawing on their Grief
By Helen Benedict ( Tomdispatch.com ) – With the first anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel approaching, the death toll in Gaza climbing to more than 41,500, and Israel inflicting ever more extreme violence on the West Bank and now on Lebanon as well, something very different happened recently in a poky classroom at Columbia University. Two young men, one […]
America’s Catch-22: Not enough Affordable Housing, but it’s increasingly Illegal to be Homeless
By Cedar Monroe and Liz Theoharis In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless […]
Facing a Smart, Confident Younger Black Woman Trump Is Running Scared
By Clarence Lusane | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – One of the nation’s best-known Black Republicans is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In the twenty-first century (and perhaps ever), no African American woman rose higher in Republican politics than Rice, who served as President George W. Bush’s national security adviser and then his secretary […]
Inside the Nuclear-Weapons Lobby Today
By Hekmat Aboukhater and William D. Hartung ( Tomdispatch.com ) – The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and […]