In the face of a worldwide pandemic, massive economic upheaval, a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism, and a loss of a shared reality, according to Fox News and everyone who takes their word as gospel, our most urgent existential threat right now is something called cancel culture. Before we address the disingenuity of the term itself, let’s first acknowledge that this dynamic of blaming and shaming is nothing new.

Although I’m not a biblical scholar, I have seen the movies, and I know enough to assert with some authority that the first major incident of cancel culture emerged when Moses…

It’s been six months since I last wrote to you. Some of you no longer fall into the category of those who love Donald Trump, but some of you probably still do. Which side you now belong to is something I don’t know, and I’m responsible for that. Why? Because up until this point, I didn’t want to know, or more specifically, I have been afraid to know. Let me explain why.

For so many Democrats like me, Trump was a known quantity from the start. It all began in 2011 with birtherism and descended from there, to his attacks…

Here in Georgia, the definition of insanity is counting the votes from an election over and over and expecting a different result. It’s calling the Republican governor a hapless moron and a nutjob because he didn’t sufficiently suppress the vote, and it’s having that same governor authorize an investigation of voter fraud that doesn’t exist to win back the favor of the president and his disgruntled followers.

For the anti-democracy Republicans — which includes Donald Trump — no amount of proof of a fair and honest election is sufficient. Many have long been led to believe that their emperor would…

As the 2020 election approached, we were repeatedly bombarded with a particular nugget of propaganda — an assertion intended to call out the “fake news” and ridicule all those who dared to be vocal and vigilant about the impact of Covid-19. To quote the current President of the United States at one of his many ill-advised (no pun intended) campaign rallies:

“That’s all I hear about now. That’s all I hear. Turn on the television — ‘Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ A plane goes down. 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid.’ …

January 20th 1981 was a monumental day in American history. I was home for college on winter break the day that Ronald Reagan took office, a day when 52 American hostages were simultaneously being released from more than a year of captivity in a newly hostile Iran. The synchronicity of these two events cemented in our national mythology the belief that this new president had been solely responsible for springing them free.

Our nation had just weathered a decade of international humiliation — Watergate, a military vanquishing in Vietnam, waiting in lines for gasoline, and the disorienting powerlessness we felt…

In their desperate attempt to gaslight the nation during our recent impeachment trial, the lawyers of our former president utilized their client’s favorite go-to tactic to create a postage stamp sized fig leaf for the anti-democracy wing of the Republican Party. What-about-ism, both-sides-ism, false equivalencies — in a word: Conflation.

Conflation, as it was employed by the defense team on February 12, 2021, was a distraction effort inspired by bad faith, and, as we have so often seen in the past, the volume and breadth of nonsense used to distract is proportional to the severity of the crime. The big…

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act soon after he took office in 1933, it marked one of the most wide-reaching and audacious responses of an American government to the ravages of disease and destitution. The TVA was a massive depression era hydro-electric project that brought electricity, jobs and prosperity to a large swath of the American southeast. What was once a region of dirt floors, devastating floods, malnutrition, malaria and soil erosion was transformed into an industrial powerhouse — homes with electricity and modern appliances, agricultural best practices, well-paying jobs and a dynamic economy.

The…

When President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act in 1964, he famously said, “We have lost the South for a generation.” It was a lament from a Southerner who knew, with a stroke of a pen, that he would be flipping many millions of Southern White Democrats to the Republican Party — the Democrats who felt threatened by all those Black people, who “didn’t know their place.” …