Watching Israel’s war on Palestine — and on the American left — continue to play out, it’s hard not to notice that the world we’re seeing right now is completely different from the world presented by right-wing media. Just off the top of my head, I can think of at least ten anti-left narratives that have been in circulation over the past decade that Zionism, unintentionally, has completely destroyed: The antiwar movement has realigned from left to right. The left has been captured by the Democratic Party. Leftists are censored because the left censors everyone else. Identitarian ..read more

PHOTO CREDIT: Elvert Barnes. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED. I can hardly check in on the news right now without seeing some update on the plight of advocates for Palestine at Columbia University. The school’s administration has been ruthlessly cracking down on protesters since the war began, Columbia professor Shai Davidai spends every waking minute hysterically trying to ruin their lives, and now the NYPD has gotten involved. Even as campus crackdowns on pro-Palestinian sentiment go this one has been unusually ferocious, and the protesters, for their part, have shown remarkable principle ..read more

Senator Tom Cotton is calling for vigilante justice against peaceful protesters, and he desperately wants you to believe he’d do it himself. Cotton obviously would not do it himself. We know this because he hasn’t even though he has had plenty of opportunity. We know it because Cotton is a lanky chinless kermit-voiced dork who’s never engaged in anything resembling violence without a literal army at his back. And above all, we know this because Cotton is a well-off Senator with way too much to lose. Cotton calling for vigilante justice has predictably sparked all kinds of horrified outrage ..read more

Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, celebrates our ability to predict solar eclipses as the culmination of millenia of human curiosity and intelligence. “If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you’ll do much better with scientists,” he writes. They will tell you where on Earth to stand, when you have to be there, and whether it will be a partial eclipse, a total eclipse, or an annular eclipse. They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, millennium in advance… Think of how many religions attempt to validate th ..read more

Former Vice President Mike Pence, just now: President Trump’s retreat on the Right to Life is a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020...The American people elect presidents, senators and congressmen, and a majority of Americans long to see minimum national protections for the unborn in federal law. But today, too many Republican politicians are all too ready to wash their hands of the battle for life. Pence’s statement comes in response to a video Trump released earlier today where he took a victory lap over the end of Roe vs. Wade and c ..read more

The president is engaged in a ruthless campaign of genocide against the people of Palestine. And he will only conceivably stop if people like you oppose him — but opposing him brings with it a real risk of a second Trump presidency. So do you take that risk? Or do you continue to substantively support him, while continuing to criticize the genocide and hoping that he’ll see reason? It’s a dilemma that has become all too familiar to left voters weighing their voting options for 2024. But it’s also, The New Yorker reports in a new interview by Isaac Chotiner, the exact dilemma facing President J ..read more

CREDIT: From the United States Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, presentation by Janssen. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with depression. Major depressive disorder, to put it in clinical terms; and though I haven’t talked much about it publicly, it has long been a pretty central fact of who I am. One reason that I rarely talk about this is that I generally don’t find subjective accounts of the disease all that useful, particularly since depressed people are often unreliable narrators of their own experience — that indeed seems to be a major feature of the disease, and ..read more

Photo by Alejandro Cartagena ???‍? on Unsplash I always avoided saying “slava Ukraini” when I lived in Kyiv. The opportunity came up a lot — usually at bars — and contrary to what a lot of the contemporary left seems to think, it has never just been a catchphrase for fascists and militant racists. The literal translation of “slava Ukraini” is just “glory to Ukraine.” Some might say it with the Banderites in mind, but for others it’s just what they say now instead of “slava CCCR” or “God bless America.” Every country in the world has some default expression of patriotism that you say when cli ..read more

As soon as news broke about the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key bridge on Tuesday everyone knew it was just a matter of time until the American right started blaming its usual scapegoats. What may have surprised some, however, was their introduction of a seemingly new villain this time around. “Shipping giant Maersk confirmed that the Dali ship [that hit the bridge is] operated and managed by Synergy Marine Group,” Paul Szypula wrote. “Synergy Marine Group promotes DEI in their company.” “The company operating the ship dedicates a huge portion of its budget on DEI, but not mainte ..read more

You may have noticed that Sydney Sweeney, a young celebrity actress, has an enormous base of fans who think she’s hot. This is how she has been presented in mainstream media for several years now, and this is how endless mobs of horny posters online talk about her as well. What you might not have noticed is that her appeal is almost completely non-partisan. This heat map tells the story: If you compare Biden and Trump states, it turns out that Sweeney is actually slightly more popular in blue states (with an average score of 74.2) than red states (72.4) — but that’s an absurd way to tell th ..read more