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Living in lockdown USA

“Just FYI if you’re seeing the news right now, I’m totally safe,” a son enrolled at Brown University texted me. “I’ve been home for a few hours now and wasn’t there when stuff started to happen. Seems to be some crazy shooting near brown.” What?! I turned on CNN and saw the quaint streets of Providence’s College Hill — lined with front porches — pulsing under emergency lights that washed the cold night sky an eerie red. Nothing like this ever happens around here. Brown was put in lockdown, and so were those of us living a few blocks away on Providence’s East ...

Shameful conspiracy theories

Few would have guessed that Erika Kirk would have to spend energy these last few, heart-breaking months fending off a right-wing influencer bent on implicating her slain husband’s own organization, TPUSA, in his assassination. Here we are, though. Influential voices on the right have become more and more conspiratorial in recent years, and now, the paranoia is being wielded against its own. In the aftermath of the Kirk assassination, the talk was of an energized MAGA movement picking up his baton. Instead, TPUSA has been slandered nearly every single day by one of the loudest ...

Don’t go wobbly on China

As the sun rises on a new Trump-era geopolitical chapter, Washington confronts a defining choice: Will America view the People’s Republic of China and its regnant Communist Party through the rose-colored lens of transaction and diplomacy, or will it soberly recognize Beijing as America’s foremost geopolitical adversary in a multigenerational cold war? The stakes could not be higher, and the answer ought to be simple. We should stop treating China with kid gloves — as a spirited economic or diplomatic competitor — and start treating it as the existential challenge to the ...

Mr. Trump goes to the grocery store

CCTV captured this (completely fake) conversation between President Donald Trump and a grocery store clerk yesterday. CLERK: That’ll be $286.47, Mr. President. TRUMP: Did you swipe my customer rewards card? I thought the Twinkies were half off. CLERK: Yes, I did, but we’re doing this new thing where you have to download our app, log in, create a profile, find the item, scan the bar code and select “clip coupon” to get the discount. TRUMP: Well, that sounds annoying and difficult. CLERK: I’m pretty sure that’s the point. TRUMP: Eh, all right, I just did it. Did it ...

Trump versus reporters

People magazine and former Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi have made separate lists of insults President Donald Trump has recently lobbed at female reporters. It doesn’t matter how the journalists behaved because apparently, women can’t possibly be ill-mannered in press conferences. Or they think you can’t possibly be as rude as Trump. The list of outrages started with “Quiet, piggy” to Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey. She was hogging the spotlight and asking more than one question. Trump could have said something without an animal insult, like, “You’re done” or ...

Immigration policy is ‘beyond inhumane’

Absorbing the news about the brutal treatment of detainees, to say nothing of the outright murder of “suspected” drug runners in the Caribbean, I think back to a conversation I had in February of this year. My interlocutor was a Trump voter who had just had a friendly encounter with an African immigrant striver — the kind who came from poverty and had started a successful business here. I recall saying, “I hope he has his documents in order.” The Trump voter scoffed: “They’re not going after people like him. They’re only going after the criminals.” Eleven months ...