This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen […]

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CityCenterDC takes up four square blocks in the heart of downtown Washington. The mixed-use development was built atop the rubble of the former Washington Convention Center, a brutalist concrete structure that was demolished in 2004. The hulking complex had been a testament, of sorts, to an era when Washington wasn’t just America’s capital but its […]

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There was a moment of reckoning on election night when the enormity and irreversibility of what was taking place across the nation hit home with the force of a jackhammer. The talking heads were looking at two state maps, first Pennsylvania and after that Wisconsin, both enlarged on the screen so that each state was […]

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In a defiant speech in late September, North Korea Foreign Minister Ri Young warned the U.N. General Assembly that the Korean Peninsula “has now been turned into the world’s most dangerous hot spot which can even ignite the outbreak of a nuclear war.” This was not speculation, but rather a warning from the former Chief […]

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FBI Director James Comey frequently describes how his Irish-American heritage formed him. Here, for example, is Comey at Georgetown University in February 2015. I am descended from Irish immigrants. A century ago, the Irish knew well how American society—and law enforcement—viewed them: as drunks, ruffians, and criminals. Law enforcement’s biased view of the Irish lives […]

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