Suddenly, with a single flap of the Angel of History’s wings, America has experienced a shuddering change: the American swastika has finally become toxic—a liberation that last month seemed so impossible that we’d forgotten to bother to think about it. One doesn’t waste energy worrying over the fact that America controls over 700 military […]

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  I am a Southerner by both birth and heritage. I come from a long line of poor white cotton farmers on both sides of my family. Three of my four great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate Army. The fourth had been told by his parents that he could join the army when he turned 13; […]

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  In the United States, money spent on candidates, politics, or public policy is protected speech under the First Amendment. What happens when protected speech is wrapped in a cloak of secrecy? How to reconcile Citizens United, which gave corporations the same rights as individuals with regard to political speech while shielding them for any […]

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  During a mid-April meeting of the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee, Congressman Mo Brooks—an Alabama Republican best known for his nativist campaign against undocumented immigrants—was hectoring NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. One of seven climate-change deniers in the nine-member Republican majority on the subcommittee that authorizes NASA’s budget, Brooks was working a GOP meme […]

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  Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, corporate funding to political campaigns, often indirect and routed through nonprofits, has been the focus of news media coverage of a democratic electoral system that grows more plutocratic each election cycle. Yet individual mega-donors are reshaping the electoral landscape. One percent of the nation’s wealthiest one […]

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