Joel Mathis

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor . "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west." It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But. I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task. Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did wa

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it. Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw: “I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained. I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person. And honestly, who cares? Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasu

The president is talking a lot about "dominance" today. It would be one thing if he was talking about "restoring order" in the wake of protests that have -- to some extent -- morphed into violence. (Some of it is real rebellion, some of it is simple looting, and some of it instigators trying to create disaster. I don't know how much of each go into the mix.) If the president simply was trying to bring about calm, that might be welcome. Instead, he is talking about dominance. That's different. It is undemocratic and authoritarian. But it reflects Donald Trump's truest ideology. More than appointing conservative judges, more than stopping immigration, his real goal is dominance -- those other goals simply help him achieve the thing he desires most of all.

A few weeks ago, I wrote for THE WEEK that democracy was slipping away, and I wondered if we would notice if and when we hit the tipping point. Many Americans understand that Trump and his allies have given the country's norms and institutions quite a beating, but they may not realize how close our democracy is to outright failure. The breakdown will not come all at once, in a single moment. Instead, constitutional governance might die a death by a thousand cuts . The shutdown of the Michigan legislature is a warning sign: American democracy is still alive, for now, but the end could be nearer than we think. That was before George Floyd. Tonight, the president threatened to send the military into American cities if protests over Floyd's death continue. He seemed to offer praise to peaceful protesters -- "we cannot allow ... peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob" -- but his words were immediately belied by his actions. Simply put, the president of the

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman: And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday. The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent. One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's adm