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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is a cut-and-dry free speech issue that makes two things clear. First, the Right was always disingenuous when it claimed to care about free speech. Second, the Left should never have ceded the issue.
Donald Trump and his allies are claiming to restore “free speech” in America even as they yank federal funding from Columbia University to punish student protesters. They were never serious about defending free speech.
Donald Trump’s speech last night sounded like a deranged remix of Ronald Reagan. Instead of slamming him where it hurts, Democrats responded by claiming Reagan’s poisonous legacy for themselves.
By banning perspectives critical of the status quo, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is turning a major news outlet into a mouthpiece for market fundamentalists. If the ideas he champions are so defensible, why is he squeamish about debate?
DOGE’s slashing and burning has nothing to do with “efficiency” and everything to do with further enriching Elon Musk and his fellow plutocrats.
Donald Trump and his allies have often promoted him as antiwar. Yesterday Trump said that he wants the US to “own” Gaza and kick out all its inhabitants — which, in addition to being ethnic cleansing, would require more war to accomplish.
In his confirmation hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr told Bernie Sanders that he opposes health care as a human right. His reasoning reveals how libertarian talking points are being used to defend a cruel and irrational health care system.
Donald Trump’s first executive orders should dispel any fantasy of him as either a noninterventionist or an economic populist.
Joe Biden came into office promising to be the next FDR. Instead, his presidency of empty gestures and moral failures has given us something far more dangerous: a reinvigorated Donald Trump armed with a popular mandate and a drive for retribution.
From price gouging to risky developing to insurance dysfunction, the dynamics of private housing markets are making the Los Angeles fire disaster considerably worse. We don’t need to prioritize real estate profits over people’s housing needs.
From budgetary neglect to climate inaction to private monopolies, political choices have fanned the flames of California’s devastating fires.
In his refutation of the famous libertarian arguments of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, socialist thinker G. A. Cohen showed the absurdity of thinking that we had to accept an unequal society in order to preserve liberty.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, just used his political influence to shut down a bipartisan deal to keep the government open. It’s obscene — but it’s just one example of the ways billionaires dominate American democracy.
Commentators like the New York Times’ Bret Stephens have called slain CEO Brian Thompson a “working-class hero.” You don’t have to condone murder to see through that ridiculous claim about a man who was at the helm of a legalized extortion racket.
Yesterday Donald Trump confirmed that he’s considering privatizing the US Postal Service. That would be a big step in the direction of a libertarian dystopia.
Some observers are hoping that Tulsi Gabbard, as Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, will be a counterweight to warmongering “neocons” in his administration. But a sober look at her record doesn’t inspire much confidence.
It’s obscene for President Biden to withhold pardons for far more deserving people while helping his own son.
Israeli ultraright football hooligans rampaged through Amsterdam, and regular fans were targeted with violence in turn. The whole episode was atrocious, but calling it a pogrom is historically ignorant and trivializes genuine horrors.
No law of history dictated that a right-wing billionaire would win over vast swaths of the working class in this year’s election. It simply didn’t have to be like this.
Donald Trump went on The Joe Rogan Experience to connect with young men and demonstrate he has solutions to their concerns. Instead, the conversation showed the hollowness of his brand of fake populism.