Author: Tom Engelhardt

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Yes, his first act on returning to the White House from Walter Reed Medical Center was to step out on a balcony and rip off his face mask to display to the world that thoroughly contagious look of his. He’s been a killer president in all sorts of ways (as I wrote read more

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The MQ-9 Reaper, a drone armed with Hellfire missiles, has been a workhorse in Washington’s forever wars across the Greater Middle East and Africa, but its days could be numbered. According to Air Force Magazine, that service “has grown skeptical that the Reaper read more

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Terracide and the Terrarists
Destroying the Planet for Record Profit
By Tom Engelhardt

We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for the conscious act of destroying the planet we live on, the world as humanity had known it until, historically read more

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After six months away with my children and grandchildren, I’m soon heading back to one of the safer places in pandemic America. I know this will sound strange, given that it once was a hub read more

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History? This is history?

I mean, in this country it is historic when this president, in one of his classically chaotic “news” conferences, refuses in advance to accept the results read more

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It’s odd. These days as right-wing “militias” multiply — that is, armed groups of whites taking to the streets of our cities to protect Donald Trump, white supremacy, and god knows what else — I always think to myself: if such groups were Black, what would they be called? And you know the answer to that question perfectly well. They would be called “gangs.” read more

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It certainly tells you something about our political moment. Of the two women who were reported to be Donald Trump’s leading candidates to jam instantly into the Supreme Court seat of the barely dead Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the first, 48-year-old Appeals Court judge Amy Coney Barrett, is an extreme anti-abortion read more

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It was the end of the world, but if you didn’t live in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you didn’t know it. Not in 1945 anyway. One man, John Hersey, brought that reality to Americans in an unforgettable fashion in a classic 1946 report in the New Yorker magazine on what happened under that first wartime mushroom cloud. When I read it in book form as a young man — read more

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Here’s your “Who said that?” quiz of the day:

1. He called on the president, should he lose to Joe Biden, to declare martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, arrest Bill and Hillary Clinton (of course), Mark Zuckerberg, and other prominent figures and simply take control of the country.

2. Of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Trump fan who shot three people read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It’s hardly news that we’re heading for 200,000 American Covid-19 deaths within the next week, at least 300,000 by December or even, as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington recently read more