Opinion

In the end, the Ottawa occupiers were left literally waving white flags.

After weeks of holding the Canadian capital hostage — with relentless honking and other abuse of the residents — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally brought an end to what pretended to be an uprising by truckers opposing vaccine mandates but was really a fringe minority trying to recruit more followers into a fascist movement. There had been a great deal of trepidation about violent resistance from the occupiers, who were big into chest-thumping and acting tough. Instead, they pulled out the most notorious symbol of surrender.

One of the most popular lies being circulated by the Republican Party and the larger white right is that white men are somehow oppressed in America. To say that such a claim is absurd would be an understatement. To be white is to have access to unearned advantages in almost every arena of American society and throughout the world. And to be male is also to have access to resources and life opportunities that in general are de facto still denied to women and girls.

By almost all indicators, men as a group dominate and control America's networks of power, influence, wealth and other resources.

Arizona Republican State Representative Mark Finchem (District 11) is not a widely-known figure outside of the Grand Cayon State’s most intimate political cliques. But that will soon change.

The lawmaker from Tuscon is a deeply loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump and his lies about the 2020 election having been stolen. Finchem pushed baseless and mathematically impossible claims that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally for President Joe Biden. He signed a resolution asking Congress to recognize a false slate of Electoral College electors that aimed to overturn Biden’s win and hand it to Trump. He has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol because he was in the nation’s capital on the day of the Trump-led insurrection. And he is running as his party’s candidate for Arizona secretary of state, a position that controls how elections are conducted in his state.

We who abhor gun violence and loathe gun merchants have been dreaming of the day when a few aggrieved parties pull off a miracle and gain a small measure of justice.

So it was sweet last week to learn that nine families devastated by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012 had extracted a $73 million settlement from Remington Arms, the company that had manufactured and hyped the Bushmaster AR-15 that enabled some loser to decimate 20 little kids and six grownups with 154 bullets in a span of 264 seconds.

During my time as a boy attending an evangelical church and then later, when I attended an evangelical seminary, it was hard not to notice an underlying misogyny that seemed consistently present. As a man, I would be the head of the household. I was like Christ to my future wife. In fact, I once heard a sermon by prominent evangelical minister Tony Evans where he declared that wives must refer to their husbands as "Lord." In my church youth groups, we were separated by sex and the boys had bizarre discussions on the type of men we should become. There was a strong emphasis on being what they considered to be manly and tough, whereas young girls, of course, were encouraged to be nurturing, submissive and, most important, sexually pure.

When contemporary evangelical leaders push a message around Christian nationalism, I can promise you it always refers back to a time when the "traditional" roles of American households held fast. Making America "great again" is truly about bringing back a time when women were subject to their husbands' wills and whims, and the husbands were lords of the house.

How did we get so politically divided? Well, it’s not because both sides have gotten more extreme.

I got my start in American politics 50 years ago. My political views then — to grossly simplify them — were that I was against the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, strongly supportive of civil and voting rights, and against the power of big corporations. That put me here: just left of the center.

Tow trucks are on the move in Ottawa. Local and federal police, empowered by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent declaration of national emergency, are finally dismantling the truck blockades that have paralyzed Canada’s capital city for over three weeks.

A crisis that local police declared unsolvable under existing law is being methodically dismantled thanks to the temporary powers invoked under the Emergencies Act. The act puts teeth in enforcement without suspending the constitutional rights of the truckers.

On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.

Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.

The big news on Thursday morning was that President Biden had sent a letter to President Putin and was awaiting his reply. Then the big news changed: They had received Putin's reply and were waiting while it was "analyzed." All of this followed the big news from Wednesday, shooting down the Russian claim that they had moved forces back from the border with Ukraine when, according to Western sources, they had moved 7,000 more troops into position to attack.

This article first appeared in Salon.

When a church announces what’s called a Jericho March (or a Jericho Walk), you might picture congregants praying, walking around a building, trumpets blasting and an odd gospel song here and there.

You might forget, however, what comes next.

The Times reported this week a story about a woman’s DNA, stored in a rape kit, being used to catch her for an unrelated property crime.

While there isn’t evidence of rape kit DNA being used to prosecute any other cases, it has been confirmed that it is standard practice in San Francisco to use a database of rape kit DNA in other investigations.

Violent behavior on airplanes has reached such epidemic proportions that the President of Delta Airlines last week asked the Department of Homeland security to allow the airlines to submit passengers who have terrified or otherwise abused flight crews for placement on the government's no-fly list.

Authoritarian followers submit to control by their chosen leader because it makes them feel like they're drawing power (and, thus, authority) from that person.

An attorney for Donald Trump turned a (virtual) New York courtroom into a Fox News-style proceeding Thursday.

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is attempting to force Donald Trump, the former president, along with his adult children to sit for depositions related to her investigation into possible fraud at the Trump Organization. Thursday's hearing was called so New York Supreme Court District Judge Arthur Engoron could hear arguments on the issue.