Dave Masciotra, Salon

The 2020 presidential election is a life-and-death decision for thousands of people vulnerable to COVID-19, for a globe under the assault from the climate crisis, and for the future of American democracy. And yet for all the urgency, the political campaign still suffers under the weight and stench of bullshit.

Noam Chomsky, one of the world's foremost public intellectuals, has provided the international left with wisdom, guidance and inspiration for nearly 60 years. Proving that he operates at the locus where argumentation and activism meet, he demonstrates indispensable intellectual leadership on issues of foreign policy, democratic socialism and rejection of corporate media bromides.

There is only one political party in the United States.

There are moments when merely following the news replicates how it must feel to enter a portal into a surreal realm of hallucination, where dropping acid is an act of redundancy and Lewis Carroll reads like the newspaper. Take the following sentences from a professional journalist in a serious publication, Vox, on the unique resistance many American men have against wearing face coverings in public during a pandemic involving an airborne virus:

The animating force of American government is war. Every year, the United States bombs multiple countries, conducts special forces raids across several continents and spends hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain a military presence in 70-plus countries, either in the form of occupying armies or large bases. Now that the U.S. is widely seen as a bungling, belligerent pariah, even allied nations no longer want American troops on their territory. The Japanese complain that U.S. military personnel sexually assault women without consequences and spread the coronavirus, while Italian villagers object to the aesthetic and sonic assault of a foreign military installation on their otherwise quiet country lifestyle.