Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “Straining to Care About This Year’s Election,” on why he’s going to be sitting out this year’s presidential election. (more…)
Tag: Trump administration
-
Now that we’ve taken off our holiday party masks and furtively tiptoed into 2024, the presidential election looms only ten months away.
I find myself violently uninterested in the whole sorry affair. I can’t recall a time in my life when I cared less about the candidates or the outcome.
It wasn’t always this way.
I was barely out of diapers when Lyndon Johnson thrashed Barry Goldwater in 1964, so I can’t be faulted for not doing my civic duty and paying attention to that election. (more…)
-
In December of this year, Ilya Somin reviewed Christopher Zurn’s book Splitsville, USA: A Democratic Argument for Breaking up the United States, which was published in May. Somin offers several good-faith critiques of Zurn’s position on national divorce, and even praises Splitsville as “. . . the most significant, fully developed, and intellectually respectable, defense of the claim that breaking up the union is actually a good idea.” Somin’s main concerns are the feasibility and effectiveness of a national divorce. As a staunch proponent of national divorce myself, I would like to reply to Somin’s counter-arguments. (more…)
-
Hamas fighters attacked Israeli military positions and settlements near Gaza on October 7 and took the Israelis completely by surprise. Around 1,400 Israelis, many of them soldiers, were killed, and hundreds of Israeli civilians were taken captive to be used as barter in the eventual ceasefire negotiations. (more…)
-
The ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict has been a tragedy of global proportions, not only for the combatants but the United States as well. (more…)
-
Robert Lighthizer
No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers
New York: Broadway Books, 2023See also: “Intrigue in the Indo-Pacific,” “After the Empire of Nothing,” “The Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” and “Globalism”
It is no secret that Americans have suffered under the free trade ideology which came to the fore during the Clinton years. In the 1990s, for example, every small town in Illinois had a factory. (more…)
-
Part 9 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 6 Part 1 here)
In a representative “democracy,” “public opinion” is a fiction. The people have no voice. They are never consulted directly on policy matters, and they are not given any mechanism through which they can express their honest opinion. Instead, an illusion of public sentiment is artificially generated by a small minority of private actors controlling institutions with disproportionate power and influence that can circumvent organic social pressures and coerce people into conforming to their artificially-produced social norms. (more…)
-
4,237 words
Part 8 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here, Chapter 6 Part 2 here)
All of them portray themselves as defenders of democracy, but they’re attacking liberal democracy from the inside and using its concepts against it. That makes these people both new and potentially dangerous. – Alejandro Castrillón, Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy (more…)
-
Jim Goad has produced a short video to accompany his latest essay, “The Barbarians Are Here, But There’s No Gate,” on the fact that Title 42, the law invoked by Donald Trump in 2020 to reduce immigration across the US-Mexico border in response to COVID, expired last week — and no one seems to have a plan to replace it. See below. (more…)
-
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
The United States is in the throes of another “border crisis,” a tiresome phrase which always refers to its southern border, because as annoyingly spiteful as Canadians can be, they don’t bring with them nearly the panoply of problems that Central Americans do. (more…)
-
1,603 words
Todd Bensman
Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History
New York & Nashville: Post Hill Press, 2023Many on the Left, especially liberals, are bedazzled by men who commit violence in the name of Left-wing social theories. One such man was a Dutch immigrant to the United States named Willem van Spronsen. Van Spronsen attacked an illegal immigrant detention facility in Tacoma, Washington on July 13, 2019 with Molotov cocktails and an AR-15 rifle — but not, as one might assume, as a protest against illegal migration. (more…)
-
2,397 words
Christopher C. Miller (with Ted Royer)
Soldier Secretary: Warnings from the Battlefield and the Pentagon about America’s Most Dangerous Enemies
Nashville & New York: Center Street, 2023It is no secret that President Trump operated in the midst of a viper’s nest of traitorous officials throughout his valiant tenure in office, and the worst offenders were in the Department of Defense. Trump was elected on a policy of reducing America’s endless involvements in foreign quarrels in which America has no interests. (more…)
-
3,207 words
At our recent conference in the subterranean stronghold supplied by our Vril-ya comrades, there was an evocative item that came up for discussion. Specifically, it invoked the proverbial image of a drowning man grasping at straws. I’m not at liberty to quote directly, but a brief paraphrase shouldn’t be a problem. (more…)