by Matthew Friedman | Feb 7, 2022 | Commentary, Politics
They came in their thousands – by the tens of thousands, if you believe them – belching diesel fumes and blasting air horns. The Freedom Convoy of big tractor-trailer rigs, semis, and private pickup trucks and vans converged on the Canadian capital of Ottawa from...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 27, 2022 | Commentary
I spent much of the day rereading Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus. It felt like the right thing to do after the Mcminn County, TN schoolboard voted unanimously to remove it from the eighth-grade curriculum. “There is some rough, objectionable language in...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 7, 2022 | Commentary, Politics
On 2 January 2016, a band of armed anti-government extremists occupied the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. Ammon Bundy, the Stetson-wearing leader of a right-wing militia with the anodyne name Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had been addressing an...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 3, 2021 | Commentary, Editorial, Politics
A white man wearing a Stars and Stripes bandana threw a Molotov cocktail into the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters in Austin, TX on Wednesday, and then casually walked away. The bomb did not ignite, and damage was minor. You might not have heard about the...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 19, 2021 | Commentary, Politics
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Met Gala dress blew-up the Internet last week. For a brief moment, the social- and conventional-media commentariat on the right and the left were able to agree on a matter of critical political import: The congresswoman’s Aurora...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 5, 2021 | Commentary, Essays
I am enraged. The decision by the Supreme Court of the United States last week declining to hear the Center for Reproductive Rights’ challenge to the Texas “Heartbeat Act,” no less than the law itself, has left me apoplectic. The Texas law is the most egregious...
