Every democratic society takes pride in having open discussion and debate, even when their governments prefer to keep certain subjects off the table if not out of sight. Freedom of thought and expression stands as a fundamental precondition to keep people involved in the business of government. In...
Let me rant for a moment. I don’t do it often, maybe ever. I’m not Donald Trump. Though I’m only two years older than him, I don’t even know how to tweet and that tells you everything you really need to know about Tom Engelhardt in a world clearly passing me by. Still, after years in which...
There seemed to be a lot more bright stars in the sky in recent weeks, even over Washington, DC. Then suddenly, as national “leaders” slept wrapped in a bubble of delusion while disease was taking its ghastly toll, a black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota, pleaded for another breath to the...
I met David Frum once. That was in 2000, at a Bilderberg conference in Belgium. I had just given a brief analysis of the success of radical right-wing populist parties in liberal democracies when he stormed up to me. Visibly irate, he berated me for having mentioned Preston Manning’s Reform...
Who needs reporters to cover the drama that takes place in the streets of the United States? People with cameras on their cellphones have conveniently replaced traditional news teams. The news media merely selects the videos shot by ordinary people that it will broadcast. The star journalists and...
In ordinary times, for the bulk of the American population, presidential election years resemble a period of deep moral sleep whose fitful dreams are stimulated by a media that plays a role not unlike that of the Freudian unconscious. It proposes various devices that include the tracing of...
As protests unfold night after night in city streets across the United States, President Donald Trump, never previously accused of being camera shy, was nowhere to be seen. The New York Times reports on his newfound taste for discretion: “The president spent Sunday out of sight, berating...
