Every now and then, a new article (or a repost of an old one) makes the rounds on social media discussing how liberals are more likely to unfriend people over politics both online and in the real world. Usually the context of the post is to show how "intolerant" the left is but ...read more
If you don't follow Elliott Lusztig (a pseudonym) on Twitter, you really should. He's insightful and his tweets are good for clarifying the ongoing tragedy that is American politics. One of Wednesday's threads is a helpful look at why Republicans are ignoring the threat Trump ...read more
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post is worried about the growing trend of Republican candidates aping Trump's authoritarian style to excite the GOP's base:The question all this raises is whether there is a large swath of GOP primary voters who are fully prepared to march behind ...read more
Milo Yiannopoulos is very distraught. On Saturday, he was just minding his own business, trying to have lunch, when a group of people at a bar in Manhattan recognized him as one of America's leading purveyors of racism and hate. They started chanting "Nazi scum get out!" and ...read more
Wednesday morning, Donald Trump woke up and started rage tweeting at California and its governor, Jerry Brown:Ignoring the gibberish of "breeding concept", who says the people of California aren't happy? Only 4 polls since 2013 have shown Brown's popularity dipping below 50%. The ...read more
The Banter Long Read: After Bill Maher leapt to Laura Ingraham's defense against the dreaded power of the Parkland teens and their oppressive boycott, it kicked off the debate on the left again about freedom of speech versus progressive censorship, particularly on college ...read more
The Banter Long Read: This is not going to be a popular message but it's a necessary one: The election of Donald Trump has only delayed the inevitable rise of widespread domestic terrorism in America. These terrorists will not be self-radicalized Muslims or Black Lives Matter ...read more
When Antifa (the ANTI FAscist movement) first appeared in the American lexicon, the media rushed to pass judgement on them as the flip side of the alt-right: extremist leftists bent on violence, oh woe is America! The problem with this narrative is that Antifa, as I've explained ...read more
The Banter Long Read: CPAC is the yearly gathering of the right wing's loudest and nastiest elements. It's the weekend when the media gets a good look at the true face of conservatism and immediately develops amnesia by Monday morning. But while CPAC is always filled with the ...read more
The Banter Long Read: It's been over two years since Trump oozed his way down that escalator and launched his explicitly racist campaign to be a white nationalist president. Yet, the media is still reluctant to call him racist and his followers still clutch their pearls when ...read more
The Washington Post's Marc A. Thiessen is deeply confused. After a full year of Trump making America great again, why is he so unpopular? No, seriously, he really said this.Despite a year of achievements — including historic tax and regulatory reform, confirmation of conservative ...read more
Meet Ashley Beaver, mother, alleged abuse survivor, and self proclaimed "hippy that just wants weed legal and to raise happy healthy kids."You may also recognize her from her slightly more famous photo:Ashley contacted The Daily Banter a little over a week ago, asking that we ...read more
It's no secret that along with an obsessive need to feign persecution, the American right wing also has a fairly deep streak of antisemitism running through it. It's also no secret that white Republican voters are some of the most horrible people to ever be produced by this ...read more
By now you've probably heard the sad story of poor Harley Barber, the dumb as rocks 19-year-old college student who inexplicably thought posting a video of herself bragging about how much she hates ni**ers would be a good idea. She got kicked out of the sorority she's been dying ...read more
After learning of Steve Bannon's hostile (yet accurate) comments about both the infamous Trump Tower meeting and the ridiculous palace intrigue of the Trump White House, Donald Trump did was he always does: Threw a public temper tantrum and attacked Bannon.In a blistering ...read more
If you don't know who Paul Nehlen is yet, you really need to keep an eye on this one. He's running what could very well be the prototype campaign for the coming wave of white nationalist GOP candidates that are going to primary "establishment" Republicans in much the same way the ...read more
Remember Paul Nehlen, the Republican candidate looking to unseat Paul Ryan? He's the nice businessman from Wisconsin who recently decided to come out of the Nazi closet and tell Trump's voters that he thinks Jews are a dangerous threat to the vaunted white race.But Nehlen is not ...read more
The Banter Long Read: Trump is an albatross wearing a pair of cement shoes tied to an anchor strapped to the deck of the Titanic and logic dictates Republicans should be heading for the lifeboats with all due haste once they get their tax cut.There's just one tiny little ...read more
The F.B.I. recently invented a new category of racial extremists in America called "Black Identity Extremists" or "B.I.E.". The idea seems to be that black people are organizing and radicalizing and that just won't do:The 12-page report, prepared by the F.B.I. Domestic Terrorism ...read more
On Saturday, 200-300 Trump supporters marched in Shelbyville, Tennessee in their neo-Nazi regalia, chanting Nazi slogans:Billed as a "White Lives Matter" rally, there's no pretense of "free speech" being made here. This is a purely white nationalist rally and they were not shy ...read more
The Banter Long Read: For the past eight years, a civil war has been waged for control of the Republican Party. It has been "The establishment" versus "The extremist fringe of white nationalism", and the fringe has been winning over and over and over again...(UPDATE: We have ...read more
In a sane society, Thursday's damning report from Buzzfeed would be the end of Steve Bannon as a face on cable news and in the mainstream press. The report, ironically relying on a large number of leaked emails, details how Steve Bannon, at the behest of the billionaire Mercer ...read more
Richard Cohen, Iraq War booster and all around racist weasel, has a dire warning for America: Don't impeach Trump or his supporters will be super duper extra angry.I wish I was kidding.How would Trump’s hardcore supporters react to the removal of their president for a high crime ...read more
As the days drag on and the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico threatens to become a full-blown disaster, people have started to ask why the delay? Trump sent the the full force of the federal government into both Texas and Florida within hours of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma ...read more
Ta-Nehisi Coates' "The First White President" is mandatory reading if you truly want to understand just how much trouble we are in as a nation. I have a general rule of thumb: When people who are smarter than I am come to the same dark conclusion, that's when I should start ...read more
Two months ago, an ostensibly liberal man from Ohio with a history of violence opened fire on a group of Republicans practicing for an upcoming baseball game. Several were injured, one of them, Congressman Steve Scalise, seriously. The reaction from the media was swift and ...read more
The Banter Long Read: I recently sat my 7-year-old daughter Anastasia down and watched Vice's report on the events in Charlottesville. Here's why.To continue reading this MEMBERS ONLY article, please go here. You'll get unlimited access to all our member's content, and your ...read more
Now that Bannon has "voluntarily" left the White House, Axios reports that he will be the attack dog of the billionaire Mercer family and he's ready to take on the "globalists" (read as: "Jews") that are running the world.In other words, despite ridiculing the KKK and Nazis, ...read more
On Saturday, Donald Trump sent a message to his white nationalist base by not speaking out against them. On Tuesday, he made sure the world understood exactly what that message was by openly defending white nationalist terrorism:“You had some very bad people in that group. You ...read more
This cannot be repeated often enough: The American right wing no longer exists in the same universe as the rest of the world. They have been completely isolated from reality by an all encompassing media bubble that feeds them pure propaganda 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 ...read more
Ever since a group of deeply oppressed white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia on Friday night, social media has been hard at work identifying the Citronella Nazis with the intent of getting them fired from their jobs and ruining their lives:The question is ...read more
Back when I, and everyone else including Donald Trump, thought that Hillary Clinton would be our next president, I warned that the right was primed to explode with violence. Faced with the loss of a Supreme Court willing to uphold the GOP's numerous voter suppression schemes and ...read more
In just the last week, Trump and his band of White House deplorables have:1. Announced that the civil rights division of the Department of Justice will sue colleges for oppressing white people (No, seriously).2. Told the police to go right ahead and hurt people (read as: Black ...read more
Salon is (rightly) sounding the alarm over the increasing likelihood that Trump will try to declare himself King of America but they're not giving enough attention to what happens when he fails:Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a ...read more
Just a decade or two from now, white conservatives will have been rounded up and put into concentration camps...To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine and all our Members Only content. Your membership also directly ...read more
The Washington Post is not prone to Onion-style headlines but I still started to smile when I read what had to be a joke of some sort: A neo-Nazi with explosives and a framed photo of Timothy McVeigh is not a threat, judge rules. I started to read the article expecting a weird, ...read more
As I wrote about last week, my Trump-voting in-laws came down from New York to visit us in Alexandria, Virginia this past weekend. My wife had asked them to stay at a hotel instead of with us as they usually do, not because of me but because she was struggling to deal with the ...read more
A few weeks ago, I wrote about what it means to be a Jew in Trump's America and I made the following point:If there's one thing I learned from my casual acquaintance with Jewish history, it's this: Sooner or later, they always come for us.So imagine my utter lack of surprise at ...read more
Jeff Sessions is already living up to his promise as a white supremacist with two back to back moves that will embolden institutional racism like nothing we've seen since Jim Crow.On Monday, Jeff Sessions' Department of "Justice" announced it would no longer oppose Texas' ...read more
God, I hate this. Let me say that right off the bat. I despise the fact that we're so far down the rabbit hole in terms of what the Trump administration has unleashed on our nation that I'm actually willing to even entertain something I'd normally dismiss as pure conspiracy ...read more
Amid the flurry of executive orders banning Muslims, attacking Obamacare, dismantling Dodd-Frank and sucking up to Russia, Donald Trump (under the control of white nationalist Steve Bannon) is quietly preparing to take the gaze of the federal government off of right wing ...read more
David Brooks has spent years giving the Republican Party ideological cover as it devolved into the radicalized mess it's become. But now, he's so horrified by what he helped create that he's abandoned any attempt to whitewash what is happening and he's calling it like it is:Many ...read more
On Wednesday, Donald Trump ordered a weekly list to be published of "crimes" committed by undocumented immigrants. On Friday, he blocked Muslims fleeing from war and persecution while giving Christians preference from the same countries....To continue reading this article, please ...read more
One of the most difficult and daunting things about chronicling the early, traumatic days of the Trump presidency is trying to decide how much alarmism is acceptable and necessary and how much really is hyperbole. It feels wrong to warn of the worst case scenario in just about ...read more
It might be comforting to believe that Trump accidentally stumbled into a constitutional crisis his first week in office, but it's far more likely that this is a test. And if we as a country fail it, our system of checks and balances takes one enormous step closer to ...read more
In a disturbing post by Axios' Mike Allen, the first week of the Trump Disaster suddenly comes into focus:White House and Hill GOP leaders are astonished by the unambiguous, far-reaching power of Steve Bannon and policy guru Stephen Miller over, well, just about everything.They ...read more
Over the past couple of weeks, Trump's Nazis supporters have grown bolder in their plans to terrorize the Jewish residents of Whitefish, Montana. After publishing the names, faces and addresses of several Whitefish Jews, Andrew Anglin of the white nationalist website The Daily ...read more
It is pretty well established that Donald Trump has connections to Russia. And we know with certainty that he also has connections with people like Steve Bannon, who are associated with the white nationalist (aka "alt-right") movement. But on Monday morning Russia and American ...read more
John Gilmore is, to put it mildly, a bit of a prick. Back in 2011, the right-wing activist and writer harassed two Muslim women on the street and when the police showed up to deal with him, he threw a temper tantrum and got arrested. The charges were later dropped but Gilmore has ...read more
2016 was the year that decency died in the United States. Sure, every year has its share of disasters, deaths, violence and tragedies but 2016 stood out for how poorly we as a people acted. Instead of compassion or empathy, we were faced with the sheer callousness of a ...read more