Weekend News

Anyone with normal sensibilities who does not tune the world out completely cannot help but find the Trump presidency disorienting and upsetting – not only because the fate of the planet is in the hands of an illiberal, willfully ignorant, inept, sleaze ball with a Mussolini smirk, whose modus operandi is to stir up racial animosities, and who delights in gratuitous displays of cruelty towards black and brown people, but also in the way that people feel in the course of a nightmare from which they cannot awaken.--AL

A Mussolini smirk, and more.

The good stuff doesn't stop.


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It Must Be Thursday

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Perfect

The next 10 days of summer!


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Fascist Surge

The terror of the unforeseen becomes ominous when history is used to hide rather than to illuminate the past, when it becomes difficult to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations, and people allow themselves to be both seduced and trapped into spectacles of violence, cruelty and authoritarian impulses. Reading the world critically and developing a historical consciousness are two important preconditions for intervening in the world. That is why critical reading and reading critically are so dangerous to Trump, his acolytes and those who hate democracy. Democracy as both an ideal and site of struggle can only survive with a public attentiveness to the power of history, politics and the rigor of informed judgments and thoughtful actions. It can only survive when we are willing to engage the power to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.--HG

If you cannot connect the dots between Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric around "the squad" (she bitched them out in private and public spaces) and Trump's full-on overt racism, you've missed the point, i.e., you haven't comprehended how totally consumptive the drift to fascism is in our current polity.

Henry Giroux goes into the depths.

The setup.


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Big News!

Alongside and consistent with other privilege- and power-serving missions, so-called mainstream corporate media’s role is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time.--PS

Street with a truthy mouthful.

Democratic hopefuls will be back at it over two nights in Detroit later this month; more or less the same twenty candidates as in June, presumably again at ten a pop. The composition of the two groups will be determined later and, as before, left to chance.--AL

Levine takes a deep dive into the future.


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Gene Faulkner

www.genefaulkner.com


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Sunday Sermon

In the exclusive Truthout interview below, renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky — one of the world’s most astute critics of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era — sheds considerable light on the current state of U.S. foreign policy, including Trump’s relations with the leaders of North Korea, Russia and China, as well as his so-called “Middle East Peace Plan.”--CJP

Get your political religion on.


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Alternatives

The United States’ Independence Day celebrations are marked each year by gaudy displays of red, white and blue, violent-sounding fireworks and inaccurate claims of America being the world’s greatest country.--SK

I'm pretty much disgusted with all U.S. national celebrations, but July 4 slightly edges out Thanksgiving for the biggest slice of my antipathy.

Sonali makes a reasonable request in this piece.

Instead of watching military tanks roll through the streets of Washington, D.C., in Donald Trump’s fascistic tantrum of a July 4th celebration, consider spending Independence Day reflecting on those writers, activists, even soldiers, who, decades ago and today, have bravely spoken out against the horrors of forever war.--IN

Another suggestion.


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