Denny Carter

There Is No Anti-Wokeness Without Bad Faith

Unless your friends and family have been vacuum sealed and protected against the brain-altering venom of the Culture Wars, you know “woke” has, quite tragically, become a catchall term for anything a conservative doesn’t like. Anything that scares or annoys a reactionary is woke. Women fighter pilots flying jets

One Weird Trick To Turn Libertarians Into Socialists

Fascist puppet master Peter Thiel last week helped trigger a run on Silicon Valley Bank that now threatens the foundation of the global economy, and every time I log on to Twitter for updates on the cascading effects of Thiel's highly suspicious actions, tech bros sound less like Ayn Rand

The Bad Faith Machine Cannot Be Unplugged

The agitation, the sense of persecution, the standoffishness, the directionless anger: I always know when my dad has been binging conservative media. It’s not unlike dealing with a relative who struggles with alcohol or drugs. My dad, when he’s pumping far-right propaganda into his boomer, low-information brain 16

Canada Has A Defense Mechanism Against Bad-Faith Fascists

I was on my way to a ski lodge in Quebec, desperately trying to avoid a maze of potholes on a snowy, slick road, my kids excitedly chatting in the backseat, my wife giving me directions, when the radio grabbed my attention with a report so foreign I nearly drove

I’m Begging Marjorie Taylor Greene To Keep Operating In Good Faith

It can most generously be called a strain of laziness that runs through the conservative movement, or most accurately described as an everlasting authoritarian impulse: The deep yearning for struggle to end, to be done with politics, to stop with the messiness of representative democracy. Probably by now you had

The Bad-Faith Anti-War Movement Is Driving Me Insane

It was February 2003 and we were so steadfastly certain of our rightness in opposing the Iraq War as not only a strategic blunder on the part of the U.S. government, but as a profoundly immoral attack that would surely kill hundreds of thousands or millions of innocents. We

Class Dealignment Is Real, And It's Spectacularly Bad

It’s the most romantic political notion: A working class coalition putting aside their cultural and racial and religious differences to elect legislators who will ram through explicitly pro-worker policies and save us from the yawning darkness of creeping fascism in the United States. I get the appeal, truly. The

Friday On Our Minds

My pledge to you, the good and decent Bad Faith Times subscriber, is to soon get back to writing about the never-ending loop of bad faith politics that makes our culture go around and around. I'm in Arizona this week covering the Super Bowl, as you may or may not

The Politics Of A Wood Chipper

Last year I wrote a follow-up to my maturely titled 2017 e-book, 69 Ways to Own The Libs. Owning The Libs Across America was an update on how right-wing media ecosystem had changed during the Trump years, and how the pandemic had completely altered the brain chemistry of every Republican

I'm Not Afraid Of Cops

A cop’s flashlight shined in my wincing eyes as I was questioned about my sobriety, about guns and drugs in the car. A police dog sniffed around the passenger door of my Mercury Sable. Chatter on the police radio was the night’s only sound. It was two in

Is It Bad Faith Or A 'Fog Of Ideology And Error'?

I believe in my bones that failing to identify a person's bad-faith arguments is the missing ingredient in our deteriorating, endlessly confusing, and ultimately futile 21st century cultural and political discourse. Those on the left – far more prone to earnestly believe in causes and to (foolishly) assume everyone operates similarly

The Bowel-Shaking Bad Faith Of The Debt Ceiling Bullshit

Millions of hours of podcasts and cable news segments and countless thousands of Very Serious Thinkpieces have been dedicated to helping Americans better understand the so-called debt ceiling debate, and none of it – not one word – has been honest. One can't have an honest conversation about such a brain-breakingly dishonest

Trolls Need Love Too

Logging on and hurting the feelings of total strangers with invective and deeply personal insults is as natural as waking up and pouring a cup of coffee in this age of profound alienation. It's what many of us do when we plug into our various social media platforms, and it

House Republicans Are Acting In Good Faith

I'm finding it difficult not to respect the most radicalized House Republicans these days. You don't "gotta hand it to them," but I wouldn't blame you if you did. In their ritualistic, days-long humiliation of Kevin McCarthy, the hard-right faction of the Republican caucus extracted stunning concessions from McCarthy, by

I Asked AI About Bad Faith Politics And It Gave Me A Bunch Of Stupid Answers

Our horrifying machine-run future coming into focus with alarming speed, artificial intelligence mimicking human behavior, people ceding their agency to sleek little robots strapped to their bodies and crowding their homes: This is life during the final, desperate gasps of humanity as we've known it. It won't be long before

The Matrix, The Red Pill, And Our Glorious Censorious Future

A note to Bad Faith Times readers: Thanks for subscribing this year and following along for the latest in political bad faith and how it's short circuiting our institutions, our media, our culture, and our discourse. I appreciate your support more than you know and plan on posting 2-3 weekly

Gaslighting, Bad Faith, And Trauma: The American Gun Nightmare Will Spare No One

The American gun violence nightmare, worsened every day by right-wing lawmakers and judges while we become numb to the horrors it has wrought, has taken the form of a never-ending gaslighting campaign. Some of that gaslighting is expertly wielded by those who defend unfettered access to weapons of war at

The Right Hates America

For my entire adult life I've been told that I hate America. Conservatives have informed me that I hate my freedom (I like it just fine), I hate capitalism (guilty as charged), I hate the troops (it's the imperialism I dislike, really), and I hate the founders (well, OK, that's

Bad Faith Is Turning Us Into Monsters

The sweetest, most earnestly good-hearted woman I know – a paragon of selflessness and unconditional love – sorta kinda wants conservative Supreme Court justices to take a permanent dirt nap. It's not that this lady wants the Court's six frothing right-wing justices to die. She would never say so directly; she's far

Domestic Terrorism Through The Lens of Bad Faith

Political issues are easier to digest when you start with the assumption that all politics are equally good and bad. And it's easier to cover politics in the grand tradition of toothless American both-sides journalism if neither right nor left is right or wrong about anything and everything. The right

Bad-Faith Bothsidesism Makes Gerrymandering Impossible To Understand

Technocratic policymaking is the best, most efficient way to get over on the average American voter because explaining such terribly boring technical and political machinations will sooner induce a coma than inspire someone to vote. Scurrying behind the curtain of politics and altering the playing field is the surest way

The Midterms Were A Total Rejection of Bad Faith

I would like to think the red wave that would have ushered post-democratic authoritarianism failed to swamp the United States because enough people saw through the right wing's bad faith, or, at the very least, finally internalized the irreversible harm the right could do to the republic if their bad

Elon Musk's Brain Worms Are Our Brain Worms Now

The speech is free and the bad faith is flowing a million miles an hour now that the world's richest man controls our digital town hall. Elon Musk, after pulling off the biggest self own in human history with his accidental $44 billion purchase of Twitter, has made it clear

John Fetterman Finally Caved To Bad Faith

John Fetterman, unlike any Democratic congressional candidate in my lifetime, had for months batted away any and all opportunities to engage in the crazy TV doctor's bad-faith campaign. Fetterman, Pennsylvania's former lieutenant governor running for the U.S. Senate, had deployed a strategy not of good faith, but of no

The Inevitable Endpoint Of The Right's Bad-Faith Voter Fraud Obsession

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis isn't a real fascist, but he sure plays one on TV. He's too soft, too educated, too fake in his hatred of marginalized groups to be a true-blue fascist. DeSantis is smart; he has to feign his ignorance, unlike Donald Trump, who, like so many of