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.
Liberals who minimize the importance of free speech on Twitter are dead wrong. But we shouldn’t have to hope that a billionaire with a track record of suppressing his critics will live up to his free speech rhetoric.
Millions of dollars of Mississippi welfare funds went to retired Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. That could never have been possible without the grotesque “welfare reform” championed by Bill Clinton.
President Joe Biden will pardon thousands who’ve served federal time for marijuana possession. That’s a step in the right direction, but there are still plenty of people serving federal time for weed offenses. Biden should pardon them too, like he promised.
A referendum to end discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption just won big in Cuba. That’s a victory for the core values underlying the socialist project.
Democratic socialist congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is under fire from the Democratic establishment for saying that support for Israel’s apartheid government is incompatible with progressive values. They’re livid that Tlaib is telling the truth.
After harassing and defaming grieving Sandy Hook parents, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones may finally get what’s coming to him. But as long as the nation’s most powerful institutions fail to earn the public’s trust, hucksters like Jones will always find an audience.
“Dark Brandon” memes are jokes, but they express a deeply felt wish that Joe Biden would turn out to be a firebrand progressive at heart. But Biden is Biden — at his core, he’ll always be a corporate-friendly centrist.
An Oklahoma English teacher helped students apply for library cards so they could read banned books. Now she’s out of a job, receiving a barrage of threats from the Right, and the Republican state secretary of public education wants to take away her license.
There are many things to like about Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman. But his dismal position on Palestine is a reminder of how foreign policy is so often the weak spot of progressive politicians.
Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, was a tragic figure. He tried to build a humane socialism on the rotten foundations of authoritarianism. Today, without the albatross of Stalinism, we can fight for an entirely different kind of socialism.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s new election cops are locking up the state’s citizens for trying to exercise their most basic political right, the right to vote — all to impress the Extremely Online right.
The Right wants it both ways on PPP loans and student loans, insisting it was fine for the government to forgive pandemic loans to businesses but terrible if it does the same with college loans to ordinary people. None of its arguments make any sense.
Student loan debt shouldn’t exist. Neither should medical debt. The Biden administration’s cancellation of some student loan debt is justified — and canceling medical debt would be, too.
Student debt forgiveness is about to become official US policy by a stroke of Joe Biden’s pen. It’s a good time to remember that, just a few years ago, the idea was denounced as hopelessly utopian, a left-wing pipe dream — and that was the liberals talking.
President Biden has announced the cancellation of $10,000 of student debt for borrowers with incomes below $125,000. Even as a matter of naked political calculation, it would be better for him to just cancel it all.
Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro says that “Marxism can’t work in America” because we have too much income mobility. He has a basic misunderstanding of both income mobility and socialism.
Last weekend, British novelist Salman Rushdie was almost killed for a novel he wrote. It’s a brutal reminder of why the Left’s long tradition of embracing free speech is so vital.
In an ad for his daughter Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney denounced Trump as a “threat to our republic.” Dick seems to have forgotten that, unlike Trump, he and George W. Bush successfully stole an election.
Blake Masters, the GOP’s nominee for Senate in Arizona, claims to care about the working class. Don’t believe a word of it.
The resounding defeat of a ballot initiative to strip abortion rights from the Kansas state constitution is a reminder that we don’t need to rely on benevolent philosopher-kings in black robes to protect our rights. We can mobilize popular majorities.