Recent Articles
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Woods: Don’t Mourn, Organize
When I first moved to Baltimore, my wife and I would walk up Park Avenue and I would point at the brownstone that hosted the old City Paper offices. “I’m going to work there,” I would say. When I finally did, I felt like I had been Babe Ruth calling my home run. I’d grown up on alt-weeklies, buying...
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Snoozing Through Fascism: A slow-motion academic protest of fascism emerges after conference
The great Russian-American writer Masha Gessen was standing on the stage at Bard College in New York in front of a sign that read “Crises of Democracy.” It was the name of an Oct. 12-14 conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center there. "I think it's safe to say that all of us are living in...
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Proud Boy lawyer demands alt-weeklies not call "western chauvinist fraternity" alt-right
After last week's column, we got a cease-and-desist letter from the Proud Boys' lawyer, complaining that we described the "Western chauvinist"™ "far-right"™ "fraternity" as "alt-right." He took issue with this sentence: "'Western civilization' is often code—for people like Bannon and the alt-right...
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Bridge Over Troubled Water: How the right acts as a "bridge phenomenon" for white supremacists
In his tax speech in Pennsylvania last week, President Trump gave a shout out to "the great Jeffrey Lord." He went on to explain that Lord "was on fake news CNN for a long time. He was one of my few sources of truth." CNN severed ties with Lord after he tweeted "sieg heil," a Nazi salutation. Trump's...
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Democracy in Crisis: Coincidence and Quantum Politics in the Age of Trump
A few moments before Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, chair and co-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee respectively, came out to present an update on their investigation into Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, a man walked out carrying a large cardboard sign—not...
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Democracy in Crisis Episode 35: Trump and country music
In this week's episode cohosts Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg talk about right-wing politics, country music, guns, and the terror in Las Vegas. This episode was engineered and edited by Brandon Soderberg, with music by Ruby Fulton and the Rhymes with Orchestra, and the Barnyard Sharks.
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Strange Times: The Alabama special election and Trump's attack on Kaepernick point toward an even more racist Republican future
Last week, the populist theocratic authoritarian former Alabama chief justice Roy Moore beat Luther Strange in a special election to fulfill the rest of Jeff Sessions' term in the Senate. Strange, who had been filling the seat, was endorsed by President Trump, even though Moore, who pulled a gun...
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Where the Hell is Kekistan?: How Pepe-posting meme warriors responded to real violence of the alt-right
In Charlottesville, when it seemed like the Nazis had been driven from town, shortly before the terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer, a group of anti-racist protesters gathered in a small park and set fire to several Confederate flags and a big green, white, and black Kekistani flag. I stood...