Author: Tom Engelhardt

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2084
Orwell Revisited in the Age of Trump
By Tom Engelhardt

I, Winston Smith… I mean, Tom Engelhardt… have not just been reading a dystopian novel, but, it seems, living one — and I suspect I’ve been living one all my life.

Yes, I recently reread George Orwell’s classic 1949 novel, 1984. read more

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Here’s just a small reminder of the country you now live in. On his Twitter account, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old white-nationalist killer of 22 people at an El Paso Walmart including local Hispanics and eight Mexican citizens, reportedly read more

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After almost 18 years of the war (or rather wars) on (or perhaps of) terror, there’s some good news! The Washington Post reports read more

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Call it a summer whim or something about this grim moment of ours, but I had an urge to post at TomDispatch my very first piece of published writing. It appeared 48 years ago in what was, at the time, one of the more obscure journals on the face of the Earth, one I helped found as a then-antiwar-China-scholar-to-be: read more

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When it comes to Donald Trump’s racism — whether his now-infamous “go back” tweet, his attack on Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Elijah Cummings (D-MD) and the city of Baltimore, read more

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From time to time, to see the world as it truly is, our language needs to be updated. This may prove especially true when it comes to the grim heating of our planet. Few who have lived through this summer so far — July was the warmest month in history — haven’t read more

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Imagine this for a moment: the bipartisan debt and budget bill just passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate will soon become the law of the land. In the next two years, read more

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In recent times, not just U.S. Army troops but National Guardsmen have been dispatched in significant numbers to the U.S.-Mexico border. They are supposedly there to stop what our president likes to call an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants — especially “caravans” read more

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Two weekends ago, here on the East Coast, I was experiencing life under a “heat dome” of striking intensity that stretched deep into the Midwest. As the New York Times put it at the read more

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Recently, at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mark Esper, President Trump’s nominee to be the new secretary of defense, faced questioning on all sorts of subjects, including on his past position as the top Washington lobbyist for weapons-maker Raytheon and on Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system. Strangely enough, however, one subject read more