I remember the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race. I have never lived in Louisiana. It doesn’t matter, because things ripple so I pay attention to everything I can. I was preparing to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

The Republican apparatus of damage and destruction was preparing to vote for white Christian nationalism. David Duke is a crook and a Klansman. Low-income white voters chose the Klansman at 56-63% by income bracket. That’s not my number — that’s the New York Times archive. Those voters are still alive. Some of them are still voting.

The Voting Rights Act exists because Black Americans were being murdered for trying to vote. Medgar Evers. Jimmie Lee Jackson. The marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That law was gutted this week by six unelected lawyers with lifetime appointments who were placed on that bench to gut it.

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On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stepped onto a beach in what is now the Bahamas and met the Taíno people for the first time.

Within two weeks, he had written this in his journal: “They would make fine servants.” That’s how Europeans thought back then. Anyone who wasn’t them was an NPC that existed to serve them.

That is the actual story of 1492. Not discovery. Not encounter. Not the meeting of two worlds. A Genoese sailor working for Spanish imperial capital looked at a civilization of human beings and calculated their value as labor.

Welcome to Unvarnished History.

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In the midst of what should have been good faith negotiations with Iran, Donald Trump decided it was time to launch a surprise attack. He assassinated the 85-year-old Supreme Leader. A US Tomahawk missile destroyed a girls’ elementary school in Minab. At least 175 people died, most of them children. The US military called it a targeting mistake.

There is no such thing as a targeting mistake when you started the war.

Trump has never been in a fight. Not a real one. Those who have know something he doesn’t: the first casualty of any engagement is your plan. You don’t get to control what happens after you throw the first punch. You only get to decide whether to throw it.

He threw it anyway. Because that’s what he does. When the walls close in, he breaks something. The louder the crash, the better.

Trump’s life ha…

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In 1491, the Americas were home to somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.

Let that number gel for a moment. Fifty to one hundred million human beings living in cities, farming land, building roads, governing themselves, trading across thousands of miles, practicing medicine, recording history, building astronomical observatories, and doing every other thing that human beings do when they have been living somewhere long enough to figure out how it works.

Europe, at the same moment in history, had roughly 60 to 80 million people.

I wasn’t taught this in school. Like you, I got the conqueror’s whitewashed version. The story we were taught — the one with the pilgrims and the empty wilderness and the providential hand of God guiding Christian civilization to an unclaimed continent — is a lie constructed after the fact to justify what had already been done. The Americas were not empty. They were not wilderness. They were not a savage land w…

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I’m progressive as fuck. But what does that actually mean? American political toxicity has warped the meaning of words. Socialism, for instance. Socialism in America is not socialism in the rest of the world.

Socialism is a political and economic system in which the means of production — factories, resources, major industries — are owned or regulated collectively, either by the state or by the workers themselves, rather than by private individuals. This is a good idea, unlike capitalism, where the rich get to shit on everyone else.

The core idea of actual socialism is that the wealth generated by labor should be distributed more equitably among those who produce it, rather than concentrated among those who own the capital. In so doing, everyone’s basic needs get met, at least in theory.

In practice the word covers a wide spectrum. At one end you…

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This timeline sucks. Brent crude is at a 53-week high of $119 USD a barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Gulf infrastructure is absorbing Iranian drone swarms faster than Lockheed Martin can manufacture interceptors. Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that controls 12% of the world’s oil — is signing defense pacts with Ukraine while its oil fields burn. The Houthis have entered the war and are threatening to close the Bab el-Mandeb. North Korea is quiet in the way that precedes being loud. For what? All of this was avoidable but for one fragile idiot’s ego. Historians will marvel.

This is what empire looks like when it stops being managed and starts being performed.

The United States has been the planet’s most consequential ecological actor for a century. Not because Americans are uniquely evil — because the American economic model,…

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My wife and I were on the floor. Cleaning dog puke. It was stinky and wet.

Bob had eaten something he shouldn’t have — he always does, pit bulls are optimists about what constitutes food — and Maple and I were down there with paper towels doing what you do. The sun was coming through the window at the angle it comes through on April mornings in the Pacific Northwest. Bob looked sorry. He always looks sorry afterward. It doesn’t stop him.

This is what empire collapse actually looks like from the inside. Not the headline. The floor. The puke cleaning. My memories of brain matter and the randomness of death in war. If the elites hav…

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The official story is falling apart. The question is who benefits from the one they’re replacing it with.

I am a combat correspondent. I have been in close proximity to violent death. I know what high-powered rifle rounds do to human bodies. I know how investigations work when investigators want to find the truth, and I know how they work when they don’t. I know the difference between a case being built and a case being constructed.

The case against Tyler Robinson is manufactured. It is political, not factual.

Here is what we know. Here is what the evidence actually says. And here is the question nobody in American media has the spine to ask in plain language.

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That’s the danger of success. You stop seeing the architecture because it’s been load-bearing so long it feels like gravity.

The relationship with Canada alone required surviving the War of 1812, two competing visions of what North America should look like, the pull of competing empires, and a hundred years of careful, unglamorous diplomatic work that nobody writes songs about. The relationship with Mexico required surviving a land grab that México has never fully forgiven, a revolution that spilled across the border, a century of asymmetric economic integration that benefited one side considerably more than the other, and still produced something functional enough to call a partnership.

Neither of these relationships was inevitable. Both of them were chosen, repeatedly, by…

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The 14th Amendment is not complicated. It was written to be simple on purpose.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.

All. Not some. Not the ones with the right parents. Not the ones whose mothers arrived with the correct paperwork. All. The men who wrote that word had just finished a war that killed 620,000 Americans. They chose it deliberately. They put it in the Constitution — not a statute, not an executive order — because they understood that citizenship is the foundational right. The right, as Chief Justice Earl Warren once wrote, to have rights. And they understood that any government that can define citizenship can un-define it.

Trump knows this. That’s the point.

On April 1 — and yes, April Fool’s Day, feel free to sit with that — the Supreme…

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A convicted felon and an alcoholic are running the United States military.

Let that land.

A man with 34 felony convictions is the commander-in-chief. The man he appointed to run the Pentagon — Pete Hegseth, call him Kegsbreath, he’s earned it — couldn’t get confirmed without seven Republican senators going on record about his drinking, his sexual assault allegations, and his general unfitness to be trusted with anything more consequential than a remote control.

His second wife had a safe word. Not a metaphor — an actual code she could text to friends and family to signal that Pete Hegseth was drunk and volatile and she needed someone to come get her. She used it. She hid in a closet from him. This is in a sworn affidavit, signed under penalty of perjury, submitted to the United States Senate. In 2017, a woman told California police that Hegseth blocked the door of a hotel room with his body, took her phone so she couldn’t call for help, and refused to…

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I’ve been in countries where the government stops pretending to listen. Where the machinery of the state turns its full weight on the people who built it, fed it, and bled for it. I know what that looks like from the inside. I know the smell of it.

I’m watching it happen here.

But today something else is happening.

More than 3,100 demonstrations are erupting across the United States — from Alabama to Wyoming — as millions of Americans take to the streets under the banner of No Kings. Not in blue cities. Not in the usual places. Two-thirds of the people showing up today live outside major urban centers — in small towns, in red states, in places the political class wrote off years ago.

That number matters more than the total count. That’s not a protest. That’s a country waking up.

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JD Vance and I were trained to do the same thing: watch how the military packages reality for public consumption. I used that training to write the truth. He used it to become the package.

We were both Marine combat correspondents. MOS 4341. We were both in Iraq. We both carried rifles, pistols, and notebooks into places where the distinction between journalist and target didn’t matter to the people shooting at us. We were both taught to find the story the brass wanted told, and then — if we were any good — to notice the story they didn’t.

Military public affairs is about positivity and lying. You learn how narratives get built. You learn which facts get foregrounded and which ones get buried in the fifteenth paragraph where nobody reads. You learn that the distance between what happened and what gets reported is where power lives. If you have…

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I still have my Canadian birth certificate. Born there. That never expires. But I also have my old CAC (military ID) and my current US passport. More than that, I have 40 years invested in the idea of an America I thought the majority of my fellow Americans wanted.

I’ve looked into repatriating to my birth country more than once this past year. Not nostalgically. Practically. I was doing the math. What it would take to reclaim my heritage, cross back north, park the travel trailer somewhere in British Columbia, and let my adopted country eat itself without me in it.

I wasn’t daydreaming. I was planning.

A stacked supreme court. A cult built around a man who wouldn’t survive a week in the places I grew up. Republican bootlickers. The toxic two-party dirty money system. Zionism and genocide. American diplomacy turned into pure braggadocio and bull…

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A History of US Interference in Iran

There’s a question Americans love to ask about Iran: Why do they hate us?

The answer isn’t complicated. We just don’t teach it in schools.

Oil and the Original Sin

In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. He committed the unforgivable crime of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry — oil that the British had been extracting at colonial rates through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP, because rebranding fixes everything). Britain wanted him gone but couldn’t do it alone. This was the heyday of American empire, and Washington picked up on the first ring.

The CIA, under the direction of Kermit Roosevelt Jr. — Teddy’s grandson, because empire is a family business — orchestrated Operation Ajax. They paid off Iranian military officers, planted propaganda in newspapers, hired …

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One man doesn’t betray a nation. A system does. People who want a better world do, in the name of ignorance they aren’t aware will kill everyone.

The Republican Party had every opportunity to stop this. They had impeachment — twice. They had the 25th Amendment. They had the simple option of telling the truth. They chose power instead. Every time. Without exception.

Fox News built the stage. Social media and its evil algorithms of profiteering handed out the tickets. Billionaires learned that rage drives engagement, and engagement drives revenue, and revenue is the only god any of these platforms actually worship. Ask Bezos or Musk or any of the several hundred others.

The courts that should have held the line got stacked. The Congress that should have checked the power rolled over. The institutions that were built to prevent exactly this kind o…

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I didn’t grow up believing in America.

I grew up believing in human rights for all humans, in places that did not care about human rights. Places like Bangladesh. Then Haiti. Places the powerful ruined, abandoned, and would rather forget exist.

Flashback to 1971. I was adopted by a Mennonite and Amish couple who believed in God, in community, and in plainness. They didn’t believe in the myth of American exceptionalism because they didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t part of the vocabulary. The world was the world, and you served God in it, and that was enough. America wasn’t the greatest country on earth in my house, because my mom was from the northern neighbor — Canada — which is where I was born, and where they adopted me.

Growing up everywhere and nowhere changes your perspective.

When we moved to the United States, I was old enough to notice thin…

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