The Great American State Fair opened on June 25th on the National Mall. It was supposed to run sixteen days and celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. It was supposed to be a world’s fair, a unifying spectacle, a moment that transcended the noise. It lasted about forty minutes before the Ferris wheel […]
Month: June 2026
In Act 2 of Macbeth, the king lies murdered upstairs and a drunk man is laughing at the gate. Roused by knocking he can barely hear over his own hangover, the Porter imagines himself the doorman of hell, sorting souls before he lets anyone through. One arrival amuses him more than the rest. Knock, knock! […]
Freedom to Degrade
On June 14, the White House South Lawn hosted a UFC card, the first professional sporting event ever held on the grounds of the presidential residence. The marketing was thick. 250 years of America. Flag Day. The president’s 80th birthday. All stacked into one broadcast. Then heavyweight Josh Hokit beat Derrick Lewis by TKO in […]
Today, Donald Trump turns eighty. The White House marked the occasion this weekend the way it marks everything now: with spectacle, with a growing bill for We the People, and with no apparent awareness of how any of this looks to everyone not on the MAGA cult. Saturday night, the South Lawn hosted the U.S. […]
June arrives, and so does the annual conservative grievance convocation. They already scheduled their Festival of Snowflakes for the 14th. Dear Leader’s birthday. A fitting occasion. So just like every June, the flags go up. The rainbow flags, not only the American ones, though they will tell you it is the American ones they are […]
There is a man you should know. His name is Russell Ellis. He grew up in the mountains of North Carolina inside a home where racism was not a flaw to be corrected but a foundation to be built upon. He was raised, as he puts it plainly, not merely around racists, but by them. […]