That’s what the man told them. That’s what the masked American thugs who are ICE just ignored again. Ricardo Gonzalez is forty years old. He was born in Hanford, California. He worked for the city of Long Beach for about eight years, first in the health department and then in utilities, and he left that […]
Category: Defiance (Page 1 of 5)
Within hours of a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday night, a clip was circulating of Donald Trump saying “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The reaction was immediate and furious. California’s governor wrote that the President was saying America’s foreign enemies should take out the two cities […]
The Allies nearly skipped the trial completely. Early in 1945, Churchill and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau favored summary execution of the top Nazis. Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that a court would do what a firing squad could not: build a record. President Truman appointed Robert Jackson, a sitting Supreme Court justice, as chief […]
There is a population growing in this country that the country has not found a good name for, because the country does not want to look at it directly. These are not radicals. They do not burn anything. They pay their taxes, help a friend move a couch, look for moments of joy. What they […]
I have hiked the forests that ring this lake. I have walked a dog along its shoreline when the water was the color of wet slate and the gulls were screaming. I have run its paths in July heat and February ice. I know this lake the way you know a neighbor for a lifetime. […]
Settle down and pay attention. I have uncovered a statistical relationship so strong, so consistent, and so entirely unexamined, that it demands to be published before someone else takes credit for it. In 1971, the United States licensed the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Practically every American child born after that year received […]
Shakespeare gave us the phrase for nights like this one: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Thursday night, in a primetime address he demanded the networks carry (but most didn’t anyway), the President of the United States told his tired tale again. He shared not one fact that […]
The Independence of Conscience
Every Fourth of July, Americans light fireworks to celebrate a piece of paper. It is wise remembering what that paper was. The Declaration of Independence was not a legal filing. It was fifty-six men committing treason against the Crown, in writing, names attached, knowing failure meant the gallows. Jefferson did not hedge. He signed his […]
She lived a few miles from where I am writing this: Irondequoit, New York. A (reasonably) quiet suburb of Rochester, the kind of place with lawns and school pickup lines and absolutely nothing that looks like a terror cell. Federal prosecutors say Catherine Beth Washburn ran one anyway. On Tuesday, the FBI arrested the 37-year-old […]
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 […]