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TomDispatch
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[l] at 4/29/25 7:29am
It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones. Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the... Read more Source: Seven-and-a-Half Propositions for Journalism in the Age of Trump appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/27/25 4:48pm
America desperately needs a united front to restrain the wrecking ball of the Trump regime. While outraged opposition has been visible and vocal, it remains a far cry from developing a capacity to protect what’s left of democracy in the United States. With the administration in its fourth month, the magnitude of the damage underway is virtually impossible for any individual to fully grasp. But none of us need a complete picture to understand that the federal government is now in the clutches of massively cruel and antidemocratic forces that have no intention of letting go. Donald Trump’s second presidential term has already given vast power to the most virulent aspects of the nation’s far-right political culture. Its flagrant goals... Read more Source: What’s Preventing a United Front Against the Trump Regime? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/24/25 7:31am
The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows. And while it might be tempting to... Read more Source: This Mental Health Awareness Month appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/22/25 7:33am
Under the guise of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government. The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations. The speed with which civilian programs... Read more Source: The Ever-Expanding War Machine appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/20/25 3:08pm
In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their black sites. For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on... Read more Source: Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/17/25 7:25am
Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Colonel James H. Harvey, one of the last of the famed Tuskegee airmen of World War II, blamed Trump, saying, “I’ll tell him to his face. No problem. I’ll tell him, you’re a racist.” In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery. Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties... Read more Source: Facing Trumps America appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/15/25 7:31am
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world including nine Americans expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. Were living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires. With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether,... Read more Source: You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/13/25 3:23pm
Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all and I first read the book in high school was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens. Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people... Read more Source: Fortress America appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/10/25 7:31am
In the colonial view of the world and, in its own strange fashion, Donald Trumps view couldnt be more colonial White European colonizers were embattled beacons of civilization, rationality, and progress, confronting dangerous barbaric hordes beyond (and even, sometimes, within) their own frontiers. Colonial violence then was a necessary form of self-defense needed to tame irrational eruptions of brutality among the colonized. To make sense of the bipartisan U.S. devotion to Israel, including the glorification of Israeli violence and the demonization of Palestinians, as well as the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Black South Africa, student activists, and immigrants, its important to grasp that worldview. On the Caribbean island of Barbados, Great Britains 1688 Act “For the Governing... Read more Source: Trump Faces Palestine appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/8/25 7:35am
From childhood, I think I had some eerie sense of just how bad it could get in America.After all, in junior high and high school, I was riveted by this countrys Civil War. Among all my toy soldiers cowboys and Indians, British marching troops in red jackets, and plastic Army-green World War II soldiers (from my fathers war) and those Landmark Books on American history that I piled up on my floor to create hills and valleys where I could play out the cowboy and Indian ambushes and battles I had seen at local movie theaters, my favorites were always the blue and grey lead soldiers of the Union and Confederacy, including Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant on... Read more Source: President Bankrupt appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/6/25 3:33pm
What put the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with an annual budget hovering at just about 1% of federal spending, at the top of Elon Musks budget-cutting target list? Was it just a political calculation that foreign aid is a safe target because its unpopular with so many Americans and cutting those funds will only hurt foreigners, not U.S. voters? Or was Musk motivated by some other grudge we havent even heard about? A related question: Why is his invective about that particular agency a criminal organization, a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America, and similar blasts so much more inflammatory in tone and content than his statements about other government programs? As reported by... Read more Source: Elon Musk, Meet Christine Sheckler appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/3/25 7:33am
I read the news today, oh boy. About a lucky man named Elon Musk. But he lost out on one thing: he didn’t get a top secret briefing on Pentagon war plans for China. And the news people breathed a sigh of relief. With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles, a day in the life is getting increasingly tough to take here in the land of the free. I’m meant to be reassured that Musk didn’t get to see America’s top-secret plans for yes! going to war with China, even as I’m meant to ignore the constant drumbeat of propaganda, the incessant military marches that form America’s background music, conveying the message that America must have war... Read more Source: Ending Militarism in America appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 4/1/25 7:30am
The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come. Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness. They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs. They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to... Read more Source: The Costs of Trump’s War on Federal Workers appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/30/25 3:52pm
The news of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest surprised me. It’s not that I doubted the former leader of the Philippines was guilty of the horrific crimes detailed in his International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant. Duterte himself boasted quite openly of the mass killings he’s been accused of. But I always thought that the prospects of bringing that brutal, outspoken politician to justice were remote indeed. After all, Duterte’s daughter Sara is currently the vice president of the Philippines and that country is no longer a member of the ICC. On top of that, Duterte himself was so sure of his immunity that he was running for mayor of the city of Davao. In mid-March, after returning from campaigning in the... Read more Source: Surviving a Political Dark Age appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/27/25 7:36am
During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico and by implication Puerto Ricans as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry. Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and White nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump... Read more Source: Making America White Again appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/25/25 7:33am
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of national security in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law. And lo and behold! now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of... Read more Source: The First 50 Days appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/23/25 3:32pm
Allow me to stipulate that I do not wish to die. In fact, had anyone consulted me about the construction of the universe, I would have made my views on the subject quite clear: mortality is a terrible idea. I’m opposed to it in general. (In wiser moments, I know that this is silly and that all life feeds on life. There is no life without the death of other beings, indeed, no planets without the death of stars.) Nonetheless, I’m also opposed to mortality on a personal level. I get too much pleasure out of being alive to want to give it up. And I’m curious enough that I don’t want to die before I learn how it all... Read more Source: Trump Rages to Snuff Out Democracy’s Candle appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/20/25 7:31am
Yes, shock and awe is back in the second age of Donald Trump. His border czar, Tom Homan, used that very phrase to describe border policy from day one of the new administration and, whether the president has actually said it or not, its now regularly in headlines, op-eds, and so much else. If you remember, it was the phrase used, in all its glory, to describe Americas massive bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003. (You remember! The country that supposedly threatened us with nuclear weapons but, in fact, didnt have any!) We Americans were, of course, going to shock and awe them. But from that moment on (if not from the moment, in the wake of the 9/11... Read more Source: Shock and Awe appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/18/25 7:28am
Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract. As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of... Read more Source: The New Age Militarists appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/16/25 3:31pm
Some years ago, I faced up to the futility ofreportingtrue things about America’s disastrous wars and so I left Afghanistan for another remote mountainous country far away. It was the polar opposite of Afghanistan: a peaceful, prosperous land where nearly everybody seemed to enjoy a good life, on the job and in the family. It’s true that they didn’t work much, not by American standards anyway. In the U.S., full-time salaried workers supposedlylaboring40 hours a week actually average 49, with almost 20% clocking more than 60. These people, on the other hand,workedonly about 37 hours a week, when they weren’t away on long paid vacations. At the end of the work day, about four in the afternoon (perhaps three in... Read more Source: American Democracy Down for the Count appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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[l] at 3/13/25 7:29am
Not even two months since Inauguration Day and it’s already been quite a trip. Ping-ponging between vindictive pettiness and unconstitutional overreach while using everything in his power (and much that isnt), Donald Trump has served up a goulash of dubious orders with a slathering of venom on top. Hes been abetted in the upheaval he promised on the campaign trail by the richest man on Earth, a cabal of lickspittles, and a cabinet filled with people who appear to have answered job ads stipulating, “Only the unqualified may apply.” As it became clearer what the battles to come would be, a friend wrote me: “I feel now like were watching it all happen. It being that thing that cant happen... Read more Source: How to Resist This Fresh Hell appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

[Category: Tomgram]

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