Opinion

Reading the coverage of Donald Trump’s latest philippic calling for the prohibition of Muslims traveling to the United States, I noted that some reporters and commentators mentioned Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, his imagining of a United States taken over by a fascist dictator.

In the wake of the recent murders in Paris at least two GOP presidential candidates—Donald Trump and Marco Rubio—have said that American mosques should be shut down because they pose a security risk.  The assumption is that mosques serve as breeding grounds for ISIS, the Jihadist extremists who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks and who have targeted the United States.

The economic hoarding by those at the top has been termed “income inequality”, but that’s neither a strong nor accurate enough phrasing. I have never heard poor people complain about “income inequality”; poor people complain about being screwed out of housing , or about working more hours for less pay or about having to choose between medicine and food .

When is it okay for public officials and the news media to withhold information from the public? Although “never” might seem like the right response, perhaps the correct answer is “When it saves lives.”

Even before the facts of the San Bernardino mass shooting are in, a familiar argument is dividing Americans along political, religious and racial lines: was this terrorism? The right-wing news site Breitbart.com wasted little time describing Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik as the “ jihadis next door ”, even before initial reports emerged that the couple may have visited radical Islamist websites and had unspecified forms of contact with people being investigated for links to extremist groups. Other outlets preferred to focus on the fact that Farook worked for the county public health department whose holiday party was targeted without immediately assuming his religion or political beliefs had anything to do with it.

The high costs of running the Islamic State’s “caliphate” and fighting a ground war are largely met from selling oil, supplemented with donations and money extorted from Christians and hostages. Preventing the jihadists from profiting from oilfields under its control should be a priority for the military coalition – indeed, Britain’s first strikes in Syria were against oilfields.

Like Brandon Ellingson, James Bava died at the hands of the Missouri Highway Patrol –but in Bava’s case, those hands were his own. Trooper Bava perished on August 28 when he crashed his patrol vehicle while giving pursuit to a speeding motorcyclist, later identified as twenty-year-old Serghei Pavel Comerzan.

This article first appeared at Yes! Magazine.

The traditional rules about how to be a “real man” in America are breaking down. Economic upheaval has shifted wage earning from men to their wives or partners. The rise of men as primary caregivers of their children is challenging our most fundamental assumptions about gender. The gay rights and trans rights movements are creating expansive new definitions of masculinity. Millennials are leading a much broader acceptance of diversity.

For reasons hard to fathom, the Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union.

MythicAmerica explores the mythic dimension of American political culture, past, present, and future. The blogger, Ira Chernus, is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. 

In the wake of the Islamic State (IS) attacks in Paris, many American liberals, from the president on down,  have accused conservatives of something like warmongering – rushing to demand large-scale U.S. military force in response to a perhaps exaggerated IS threat. There is plenty of truth to the charge. But before they point the finger of blame, liberals should take a good look in a mirror framed by historical perspective and consider their own role in the move toward wider war.

This article was originally published at Yes! Magazine.

In much the same way that 9/11 saw the birth of a new era of perpetual war in the Muslim world, the 11/13 Paris attacks are giving rise to a new phase in that perpetual war: a relentless state of emergency, in which citizens are expected, in the words of British Home Secretary Theresa May, to possess “vigilance”—a euphemism for constant paranoia, suspicion, and fear in their everyday dealings with other citizens.

This article was originally published at The Washington Spectator

One of the reasons I’ve been writing so much about the Donald Trump phenomenon has little to do with Trump himself. Rather, it concerns a subject of deeper fascination to me: the moeurs of America’s pundit class. That in any given era, the content of their opinioneering says more about them as a class than any particular subject of their maunderings. In these Disunited States, those who rise to rarified heights in the profession of opinion-mongering almost always do so by dint of their success in stretching our messy reality to fit a certain single socially approved conclusion: that America is in fact united. That extremes always revert to the mean, and that radicalism of any stripe always eventually fails, or falls away. They pronounced that Barry Goldwater, because he was on the verge of running for president, was going to quit being conservative, a “fascinating biological process, like watching a polliwog turn into a frog (The New Republic’s TRB, in 1963). “This is probably the end of Reagan’s political career,” they said in 1976 after he lost the Republican nomination to moderate Jerry Ford (the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew). And in 2002, they prophesized that the conservative movement was on its deathbed because it was “mired in ideological warfare at a time when the nation demands ideological peace” (Nina Easton of Fortune).

American police have once against demonstrated that their agenda is not to protect and serve, but to dominate and control by any means necessary. On November 20th, sheriff deputies in Coweta County, Georgia were summoned to help subdue a man having a psychotic breakdown and ended up tasing him to death.