In fact, not only are we going further into debt for no good reason, but we’re going further into debt for a bad one — actually, two very bad ones. The same fiscal hawks that yelled histrionically about refusing to take on debt — even in times of crisis — let the GOP budget bill […]
Project 2025, led by former Trump official Paul Dans and key conservative figures within The Heritage Foundation, sets forth an ambitious conservative and Christian nationalist vision aimed at fundamentally transforming the role of the federal government. Leonard Leo, a prominent conservative known for his influence on the U.S. Supreme Court‘s composition, is among the project’s […]
Below is a list of the covert gang of folks trying to take down the US government — the anti-government oligarchs who think they run the place. The Koch network of megarich political operatives has been anointing itself the true (shadowy) leaders of American politics for several decades. Spearheaded by Charles Koch, the billionaire fossil […]
One of two major parties in our American first-past-the-post voting system of dual-party reality, the Republican Party, has evolved (or devolved…) into a full-throated authoritarian movement seeking to overthrow our democracy, The Constitution, and the rule of law in order to establish a fascist regime in the United States. It’s been a not-so-secret fever dream […]
The Big Lie about the 2020 Election was hardly the first or even the Biggest of the Big Lies in American history — fomented in vast majority by the right wing. Call it a personality trait, an ideology, or perhaps a financial preference — but Republicans seem to lean towards the disingenuous end of the […]
Here’s a signature advantage to the Left: the Right is fighting for Bad Ideas. They’re indefensible ideas that have been discredited and defeated time and time and time again, yet they keep trying to use coercion and force to impose them on Americans — often in the name of “freedom.” They are obsessed with spinning […]
We need to know what our opponents are up to. There is much to learn. Much more to come — stay tuned!
The stock in trade narrative for these right-wing folks is usually a completely invented one that paints them in a flattering light and magically transforms all their criming into noble, virtuous deeds (The Lost Cause, e.g.). I will be continuously collecting these GOP myths and de-mystifying them for posterity, and for the public record such […]
Who Runs Congress: An ASCII Maps Project Here’s a paradox for you: the most powerful people in Congress are the ones most Americans have never heard of. Cable news covers the floor — the speeches, the walkouts, the C-SPAN theater. But the floor is the last stop, not the first. By the time a bill […]
You learned the fairy tale in civics class. The ballot box is the one clean machine — the sacred mechanism, the great equalizer, the place where the powerful and the powerless cancel each other out one vote at a time. The peaceful transfer of power is American scripture. We even built a little ritual around […]
A new long-form data brief on how representativeness has been gerrymandered away — and the first installment of a series on how American democracy was engineered to stop being competitive. In 2024, Americans went to the polls to elect 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. 366 of those races were over before a […]
An Introduction to Doctor Paradox Mini Histories On March 21, 1861, the Vice President of the Confederacy stood up in Savannah, Georgia and said the quiet part out loud. Alexander Stephens told a packed house in his Cornerstone Speech that the new Southern government’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not […]
The Kansas Prophecy: We Already Ran This Experiment and the SAVE Act in Kansas Was a Disaster When Kansas tried its early version of the SAVE Act, a whopping 31,089 eligible American citizens were blocked from voting. Meanwhile only 39 noncitizens were “caught”… over 19 years. And many of them turned out to be administrative […]
In this video, we break down the SAVE Act (H.R. 22) — a bill that demands documentary proof of U.S. citizenship just to register to vote in federal elections. It sounds reasonable for about 3 seconds, until you realize it’s a voter suppression machine dressed up in a flag pin. It is the legislative endrun […]
Five years ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. The man who incited them has since been re-elected president, which scuppered the investigation into him by Special Counsel Jack Smith. If that whiplash isn’t enough to give you vertigo, consider this: we […]