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SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2025 Tomgram: Andrea Mazzarino, Rootless in an Increasingly Foreign Land
War kills in so many ways. These days, Americans are bombarded with images from Gaza and elsewhere of people or broken bodies being ferried on stretchers from the rubble of homes and hospitals, by rescue workers whose thin bodies and stricken faces suggest they are barely better off than those they're helping. Social media and journalists make us eyewitnesses to emaciated children too weak to cry[...]
SHARE Monday, July 7, 2025 Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Checks and Balances? Dream on in the Age of Trump!
"I must say," Donald Trump commented, "I wish we had an occupying force." It was June 1, 2020. The president, then in his first term in office, was having a phone call with the nation's governors to discuss the ongoing Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests taking place nationwide in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman[...]
SHARE Thursday, July 3, 2025 Tomgram: Arnold Isaacs, Airbrushing History, Today and Yesterday
In early June, the Washington Post published a follow-up to earlier stories on a Trump administration plan to remove thousands of photographs from Defense Department websites because of "DEI-related content[...]"
SHARE Tuesday, July 1, 2025 Tomgram: William D. Hartung, The Military-Industrial Complex Is Riding High
The Senate is on the verge of passing the distinctly misnamed "big beautiful bill." It is, in fact, one of the ugliest pieces of legislation to come out of Congress in living memory. The version that passed the House recently would cut $1.7 trillion, mostly in domestic spending, while providing the top 5% of taxpayers with roughly $1.5 trillion in tax breaks[...]
SHARE Thursday, June 26, 2025 Tomgram: William deBuys, It's the Mentality, Stupid
In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain's Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime[...]
SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2025 Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, The United Surveillance States of America
Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration's support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I'd call another friend, "Mary," to update her on the plans. I hung up[...]
SHARE Monday, June 23, 2025 Tomgram: Engelhardt, King Trump
How strange. I've been going to demonstrations for a long, long while now. I began once upon a distant time in opposition to the nightmarish all-American war in Vietnam. And almost 60 years later, that war, in some sense, has come home[...]
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 19, 2025 Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Is Donald Trump America's King Canute?
He lived over 1,000 years ago, but King Canute's life still has some important lessons for our own time. After conquering England, Denmark, Norway, and part of Sweden, he forged a vast North Sea empire that made him, by the year 1030, the greatest of all the Viking kings[...]
SHARE Tuesday, June 17, 2025 Tomgram: David Vine, Some Good News! (Mostly.)
At a time when many may feel that good news has gone the way of the dodo, look no further than the homeland of that long-extinct bird -- Mauritius -- for a dose of encouragement. There, among the islands of the Indian Ocean, news can be found about the power of resistance and the ability of small groups of people to band together to overcome the powerful[...]
SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2025 Tomgram: Robert Lipsyte, Striking Trump Out
Thanks to our current misbegotten model of manhood, we are once again arguing about this moral question: Should former Cincinnati Reds player and manager Pete Rose be inducted into Baseball's Hall of Fame?
In a sane time, the proper answer would be: Are you kidding?[...]
SHARE Wednesday, June 11, 2025 Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, Who Has Freedom of Movement and Who Controls It?
In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot[...]
SHARE Monday, June 9, 2025 Tomgram: Norman Solomon, Nuclear Winter or Climate-Change Summer, What a Choice!
Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour's drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. "Nuclear weapons are like automobiles," one told me[...]
SHARE Friday, June 6, 2025 Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, The Same Technology Powers DoorDash and Weaponized Drones
Recently, I've been turning off my iPhone -- all the way off! -- for 10 to 30 minutes at a time. I leave it somewhere in the house, while I try to live IRL ("in real life"), washing dishes, hanging up laundry, or even going for a walk, phoneless[...]
SHARE Wednesday, June 4, 2025 Tomgram: Liz Theoharis, Aaron Scott, and Moses Hernandez McGavin, The Christian Nationalist Mission to Banish Trans Peop
This year, Pride Month arrives at an especially dire moment for the LGBTQ+ community. Under the second Trump administration, homophobic vitriol and violence are on the rise. On Elon Musk's X platform, a "deepfake" video of Donald Trump canceling Pride Month has gone viral. And even as Pride celebrations continue as planned (in many places without as many corporate contributions), the attacks against LGBTQ+ people[...]
SHARE Monday, June 2, 2025 Tomgram: Todd Miller, Donald Trump's Border World in the Age of Climate Change
Believe it or not, I had a transcendent experience at this year's Border Security Expo, the annual event that brings Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) together with private industry. I hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of the U.S. border-industrial complex[...]
SHARE Thursday, May 29, 2025 Tomgram: Juan Cole, Trump of Arabia
Colorful career criminal Willie Sutton once may (or may not) have been asked why he robbed banks. "Because that is where the money is," he supposedly replied. A similar principle may explain the first foreign trip of President Donald J. Trump's second term, which was not to a traditional U.S. ally in Europe. Rather, he set off to visit the capitals of the Gulf hydrocarbon potentates[...]
SHARE Tuesday, May 27, 2025 Tomgram: William D. Hartung and Ashley Gate, The Coming of a Values-Free Foreign Policy
The Trump administration seems intent on undermining America's ability to make human rights a significant element of its foreign policy. As evidence of that, consider its plan to dramatically reduce policy directives and personnel devoted to those very issues, including the dismantling of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Rights, and Labor[...]
SHARE Tuesday, May 27, 2025 Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, How American Soft Power Turned to Dust in the Age of Trump
With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let's recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you're a this-or-that and you shout back: "Takes one to know one!" Indeed, it does[...]
SHARE Thursday, May 22, 2025 Tomgram: Greg Grandin, The Conquest Never Ends
Leon Golub once related a story to a mutual friend. A Chicago artist famous for large canvases depicting crimson torture rooms in Central America, Golub had been asked what it meant to him to be a "Jewish political artist." The painter's quick reply was that he wasn't a "Jewish political artist," he was just a "political artist." In the end, though, Golub came to believe that he had let himself off too easily[...]