Opinion

In anticipation of Donald Trump's Global Chaos Tour a couple of days ago I told everyone to get ready, because it was going to be wild. Upon his arrival in Brussels for the annual NATO meeting, the president opened the show with a fusillade of insults toward America's allies, a grand display of ignorance on every key issue and a total disregard for history, diplomacy or the national security of the United States. And then it got really crazy.

There was a time when California’s Santa Clara Valley, bucolic home to orchards and vineyards, was known as “the valley of heart’s delight.” The same area was later dubbed “Silicon Valley,” shorthand for the high-tech combination of creativity, capital and California cool. However, a backlash is now well underway – even from the loyal gadget-reviewing press. Silicon Valley increasingly conjures something very different: exploitation, excess, and elitist detachment.

In many countries, studying foreign languages in public school systems is not only encouraged—it is mandatory, which is why so many Swedish, German, Norwegian and Dutch high school students have learned to speak English fluently even though it isn’t their native language. But among many right-wing Republicans in the U.S., being monolingual is considered a badge of honor. And in the Trump era, some ugly racial incidents demonstrate that speaking a language other than English in public can be met with verbal abuse.

Donald Trump is engaged in a systematic effort to make the United States less powerful and less respected around the world. America is too great a country to be defeated and brought down by an outside power. Such damage can likely only be inflicted from within at the hands of a dangerous president, a feckless political party and their tens of millions of authoritarian followers.

According to Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and Mitch McConnell, “We can’t have a nation with open borders!” This is quite ironic since the United States of America, more than any other nation, was created on the foundation stone of open borders. If Native Americans could have enforced closed borders in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, there would be no United States of America. No visa was required to enter the North American continent, and no restrictions were placed on immigration until Chinese were barred by the immigration act of 1882.

President Donald Trump has named Brett Kavanaugh, a judge from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to be his second Supreme Court nominee. Like Trump's first pick Justice Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh is a man who is likely to push the court to the right on issues like abortion, gay rights, consumer rights and environmental protection.

The name “Bernie Sanders” can inspire very different reactions in Germany, France or Sweden than it inspires in the U.S. While the Vermont senator and self-described “socialist” is considered hard-left or radical by Republicans and even by some neoliberal Democrats, Europeans tend to view him as simply a New Deal liberal rather than someone with genuinely Marxist ideas. And the Washington Monthly’s Gilad Edelman ponders just how far to the left Sanders and his supporters really are in the publication’s July/August issue and poses the question: are Sanders’ young supporters really just New Deal liberals?

A little more than a year ago, I posted and pinned the following predictive tweet: “Get ready. A year from right now we'll be up to our asses in Russian fake news, malware, hacks, mayhem aimed at the midterms. Pinning this.” Granted, it wasn’t a difficult forecast knowing what we knew at the time.

The crisis that has befallen America under Donald Trump's presidency is not ripped from the pages of a John le Carré or Jason Matthews spy novel. It is all too real.

There are lots of things to try in our pressing mission to tool up quickly to disappoint trolls.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Why did so many working class voters choose a selfish, thin-skinned, petulant, lying, narcissistic, boastful, megalomaniac for president?

Back in the 1960s, with the war in Vietnam raging and young Americans getting killed every day, it cost about $1,000 to dodge the draft. You got an automatic deferment for college, but once you graduated, or if you dropped out, you went back to 1-A status, which meant you were eligible for military service and could be drafted.