“William Tecumseh Sherman said, ‘War is hell.’ And he was right, though I can’t remember if he said that before or after torching everything he could on his march to the sea. Of the latest military adventure, enlightened commenters sit in their easy chairs and slap cheap bumper-sticker assessments on the Web for all the world to see. They baptize themselves in their own rectitude, having neither dodged a bullet in Fallujah nor watched a buddy’s legs get blown off by a roadside IED. Nor have they had to live a life of conformity forced by zealots pretending to believe in a religion they never converted to. They never had to be beaten and raped for showing their hair, or singing an ancient song, or dancing an ancient dance.” (03/09/26)
“I’m a practical person. Ideas matter, but they only come to life when we put them into practice. So if you haven’t heard from me recently, it’s because I’ve been out there, around the country, putting the Organizing Revival into practice on the ground with People’s Action organizers and our growing family of allies. And I’ve been cooking! Yes, I mean that literally. As I’ve met with different people, we’ve been making chiles rellenos, one of my most cherished dishes! Cooking and eating together has become an important part of these strategic gatherings, as we commit to move forward together into an uncertain landscape that holds dark but certain challenges. I’ll share more about this, and my recipe, in a bit. But first, I want to talk about the moment we’re in. I recently wrote an article in Convergence Magazine that I hope you’ve seen.” (03/09/26)
“In October 2025, the Trump administration slammed the door shut to the world’s most miserable, slashing the annual cap of refugee intake by 94 percent, to an all-time low of 7,500. Even the COVID-19 years of 2020–2021 averaged more, at 11,600, than this cap would allow. In the year that Reagan left office, the U.S. brought in more than 107,000 refugees. America is choking off demand for refugees at a time when the planet has been jacking up supply.” (for publication 04/26)
“A long-running theme in the right-wing critique of progressive politics in the 2010s was mockery of its reliance on fantasy fiction. Left-leaning commentators appeared to have been trapped within the reference points of the novels of their childhood. Harry Potter was especially prominent in left-wing arguments. … we critics of ‘social justice’ activism found this discourse entertaining. We mocked its Manichaean vision of the world, in which everyone was either a goodie or a baddie. We made fun of its at least implicit reliance on magic. ‘Read another book’ was a popular jibe. This was more than legitimate. Still, as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues, I can’t help feeling that some people on the right were laughing without thinking. Now, some right-wing figures seem to be viewing the world through the lens of childish fiction. Prowar rhetoric is seething with cheap comparisons to popular culture.” (03/09/26)
“The primary obligation of any government, the Declaration of Independence tells us in its famous second paragraph, is the ‘safety and happiness’ of its citizens. The necessity of securing safety is obvious (except to progressive politicians in big blue cities, who are often diffident about crime and disorder), but it is thought something of a novelty of the Declaration to set out ‘the pursuit of happiness’ as one of the central ‘inalienable rights’, along with life and liberty. It is well established that Thomas Jefferson and his collaborators in writing the Declaration (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston) followed the language and logic of John Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’. But Locke and other social-contract theorists of the era typically spoke of the inalienable natural rights to ‘life, liberty and property’, or ‘life, liberty and estate.’?” (03/08/26)
“First Trump claimed an attack by Iran was ‘imminent’ — which has been proved false even by his own intelligence agencies. Then it was necessary to ‘take out’ Iran’s nuclear capability, which even those with short memories will recall he claimed to have ‘obliterated’ in last year’s Israel-U.S. attack on Iran. Then it was for regime change to get rid of what he dubbed “the lunatic” 87-year old ruler. But then it was we had to attack because Israel was going to attack first — and being the stalwart ally in Israel’s Gaza genocide, our Middle East assets would also be attacked. MAGA politicians can’t even agree if it’s a war.” (03/09/26)
“‘Everyone saw this coming except the President.’ An ‘unmitigated disaster of epic proportions.’ Were these the words from Democrats decrying Donald Trump for failing to plan to evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians under a blizzard of retaliatory fire raining down on the Gulf States? No, those were Republicans excoriating former President Joe Biden for the botched 2021 exit from Afghanistan. Back then, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) thundered, ‘It’s a very dire situation when you see the United States Embassy being evacuated.’ Fast forward to last week. The Trump regime closed down three of our embassies (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Kuwait), abandoning U.S. citizens in those countries. Trump’s minions failed to consider advanced planning to evacuate Americans from the region, leaving them to fend for themselves in places where missiles are flying and buildings are ablaze.” (03/09/26)
“When the Middle East journalist Omid Memariam was arrested by the Iranian government, his interrogators intentionally chose not to wear masks in order to convey both the legitimacy of the government and the propriety of the interrogation. ‘Once a mask is involved,’ Memariam explains, ‘people understand it as a sign of weakness, that the government has something to hide.’ With the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, it is hard to see how the government can convince large portions of the American public that they do not have something to hide. This raises a core issue at the heart of the mask discussion: the erosion of certain basic and long-standing moral and legal norms in America.” (03/09/26)
“A week into Trump’s illegal war against Iran, the White House released a 42-second video on X, featuring movie scenes spliced with real military footage of strikes in Iran, promising ‘justice, the American way’. Rather than sober statements about national security or the grim human realities of war, the March 5 video resembled a movie trailer. The clips stitched together real footage of missile strikes with pop-culture heroes: Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Keanu Reeves’ relentless assassin in the John Wick films. Even SpongeBob SquarePants made an appearance. The video was immediately mocked for reflecting the militaristic fantasies of teenage boys (see Hegseth, Pete), more than that of the US starting a war. The editing followed a familiar formula: a heroic movie quote, a dramatic cut to real explosions, then a video-game style victory sound. War, apparently, has become content.” (03/09/26)
“Any time a U.S. president deploys U.S. forces overseas, it is worth revisiting one of the most influential books about the U.S. war in Vietnam: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. The book serves as an enduring reminder of the mistakes presidents and their advisors have made when sending the U.S. military into harm’s way, always with the promise of acting in the nation’s best interests.”
