First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack. Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out
All right, America, here we are again. I guess we’re fucking doing this. It’s October 2016 again and it’s back to coin-flip odds between sanity and madness. I often find myself hoping that my talking about American politics so much doesn’t count as foreign election interference
“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” — Cecil Rhodes, from his last
As the southern United States picks up the pieces after being smashed by two insanely powerful hurricanes in under a fortnight, the political discourse is tenser than ever, which is exactly what nobody wanted going into an already terrifying election. Every year there is a brand new “biggest storm ever
Last week the independent journalist Matt Taibbi spoke at an event that was essentially a softcore Trump rally. It wasn’t a Jonestown tent revival, it was a pop-up market stall just outside of Jonestown, enticing the public with a taste of the goods and the promise of some much
All right, so Matt Walsh has another deplatformed documentary out that you’re not allowed to see. This one is in cinemas, too, so it’s even more widely unavailable than his previous film, What Is a Woman?, which was so blacklisted that Elon Musk, the new owner/operator of
I honestly never thought that anything was going to surprise me anymore about US politics, let alone shock me. There’s always been some degree of plausible deniability involved in the insinuation that Donald Trump and his party are “racist”—not that I’m among the deniers (on a scale
As many of you know by now, I’m somewhat critical of capitalism, which is why it might surprise many of you to learn that, in my weaker moments, I yearn for the return of the days of relentless, ubiquitous advertising. I’m not just referring to some of those
On July 13, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, the then-only-presumptive Republican nominee for president, a guy named Donald Trump who might be familiar to you if you follow the news closely, was shot in the ear by a kid who managed to sneak a gun onto the roof of a
If you ever want to invoke in yourself the desire to throw your body headfirst into a threshing machine then simply wade into an internet discussion that is ostensibly about communism. Or socialism, or for that matter, capitalism. You will quickly find out that nobody knows what any of these
I’ve been hearing the name “Curtis Yarvin” a lot in recent weeks, mainly due to his connections to Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance. In researching Vance’s ideological underpinnings the media is only just now discovering this Yarvin guy and his bizarre political philosophy. But I’d
The Alien series has a very strong brand, deceptively so for a film franchise with, by most people’s reckoning, two hits. After 1986’s Aliens, the series has been limping along on the excess energy generated by those first two phenomenal movies. Only the Terminator series has gone to