“Well, the train has pulled into the station: It’s putting out a poison steam. The cloud is rolling across the platform; It’s like you’re living in a fever dream…” Don’t Get on the Train, by the Holy Fools One reason why it’s so hard to get a handle on American politics, to say anything sensible about it, is that it takes place almost entirely in a hallucination. The country that most Americans feel they are living in does not actually exist.  In this, as in so many other ways, Trump’s reign has been a powerful – I would even say

The UK election is over. Now many Britons will have to learn what so many of us Americans learned long ago: you don’t live in the country you thought you lived in. The country you live in is a much colder, meaner, nastier, more bitter, unfeeling and hard-hearted place than you ever imagined. You will also have to learn what many Americans have learned, over many decades: to follow the example of the Soviet dissidents of yore, and become an “internal exile,” fighting to hold on to and, as best you can, to transmit the richer, deeper, more humane values

In response to the mass slaughters this week, the “writer” and “political thinker” David French tweets:  “Few things concentrate the mind more than the terrifying knowledge that a person might want to kill someone you love. It makes you aware of your acute vulnerability.  [Here’s] why a criminal who comes to our house will face the business end of an AR-15…. French then links to an article he wrote for National Review — complete with a picture of AR-15s “on sale while supplies last” — which speaks of death threats he’s received. (You will forgive me if I don’t link to

Robert Mueller’s testimony on Wednesday was the very definition of anti-climax. After months of frantic build-up by the ‘Resistance’ (“At last, Mueller is going to nail Trump to the wall!”) Mueller merely noted — mildly, haltingly but correctly — that his report laid out evidence of obstruction of justice, and that is up to the House of Representatives to decide whether to use this evidence to impeach the president or not. This is precisely what we knew months ago. The report he released had already said all he had to say. His testimony was never going to add anything to

This is one of my recent columns for the print version of CounterPunch. It was written several weeks ago. But the only thing that’s really changed is that Nancy Pelosi’s resistance to impeachment has grown even more adamant, even as the grounds for impeachment reach ever-more monstrous heights. The impeachment conundrum is remarkably simple. As I’ve said before, every single day of his presidency, Donald Trump violates the emoluments clause in myriad ways, all of them eminently impeachable. We don’t need to know how many angels can dance on the spine of the Mueller Report; we don’t need to parse

(This is my column from the latest print version of CounterPunch Magazine.) Looking at America today, you swing back and forth between two poles, both of them magnetized by despair. At one pole, you find yourself saying that things have never been as bad as this: we are in uncharted waters, in a foundering ship being swept toward the reefs. And when the crack-up comes, its horrors will outstrip our imaginations, making our cinematic dystopias look bucolic in comparison, as we devour each other in a dying world ruled by psychopaths, gangsters and warlords. Yet at the other pole, you

Evan McMullin is a former (presumably) CIA operative who once declared that his main job with the Agency was “to go out and convince al Qaeda operatives to instead work with us.” In 2010 he left the CIA (presumably)  to become an investment banker, then served as an adviser and policy director for the berserk right-wing extremists in the House of Representatives until 2016. In that year, he launched a brief campaign for president, offering himself as an “anti-Trump” Republican (and garnering just over half of one percent of the national vote). Since then, he has postured as an above-the-fray voice

There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of anti-Semitism lately. But in the ceaseless and almost entirely cynical media-political imbroglio that has followed the “Benjamins” tweet of Rep. Ilhan Omar, I’ve seen nothing said about perhaps the most intense and thoroughgoing form of anti-Semitism in America today: an anti-Semitism that is not only prevalent but dominant in the halls of power at the moment. This virulent anti-Semitism — which in at least one respect surpasses that of the Nazis themselves — is passionately embraced by millions of Americans. Its most prominent adherent right now — in

Do the American intelligence services knowingly plant false stories in mainstream newspapers? Do reporters for mainstream news agencies know of this practice? Do they approve of it? Yes, yes and yes. A 2014 story by The Intercept (which I ran across recently) revealed the collusion and kowtowing of an LA Times reporter (now at AP) in his dealings with the CIA, the agency he was supposed to be covering as one of ever-fierce watchdogs of out freedom-loving Fourth Estate. Drawing on a trove of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Intercept’s story lays out the embarrassing work

Making the social media rounds at the moment is a transcription of Rachel Maddow’s “utterly terrifying” and “deeply chilling” take on one tidbit from Trump’s surreal and probably drug-addled rambling in front of his Cabinet this week. At one point, Trump said the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to fight Islamic terrorism. But Maddow assures us, in great detail, that no one, anywhere — not even among Trump’s most rabid supporters, not even the bug-eyed goobers on Fox and Friends — has ever advanced the notion that the Soviet incursion had anything to do with terrorism. In fact, the only