Denny Carter

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

Snuffing Out Bad Faith With The Force of Law

That I haven't penned a Bad Faith Times post in a while doesn't mean ideas of BFT columns aren't constantly swirling in my head. They are. It's just that this is football season and I get paid to analyze football. So this will be a quick post about something I

Bad Faith Landed On My Doorstep

It's not often you get a heaping, stinking load of political bad faith delivered to your doorstep. But that's what I found last week: Campaign pamphlets for a range of Maryland's right-wing candidates running in the 2022 midterms, including Dan Cox, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who happens to be a

Optimization, Nostalgia, Fascism, And The Root Of All Bad Faith

We all have a little fascist in us, begging to get out. Since we were children we've been told – sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly – that the most successful among us understand the situation. What situation is that? Any situation. The short term, the long term, the immediate, the hypothetical – the Great

We Don't Have To Live With This Judicial Bad Faith

We all laughed when Donald Trump babbled incoherently about his big, beautiful judges. We smirked and said this is just how a showman talks about his accomplishments. These are legal experts. They do not belong to Trump. It turns out those big, beautiful judges understood perfectly well their assignment when

I'm Obsessed With Dark Brandon's Rejection of Good Faith

Joe Biden, who came of age in an era of relative bipartisan comity and spent three decades bragging about his conservative record in the U.S. Senate, walked right up to the truth-telling line last week. He recently called Trump-style Republicans – also known as all Republicans – "semi-fascist." This is a

Stop Being The Enemy Of The Good

Sometimes those who don't need or deserve government help – the rich, the privileged – are going to get assistance if people who truly need the help – workers living paycheck to paycheck – are going to see a modicum of relief. That's the sobering, teeth-clenching reality of effective political programs in societies dominated

The Infuriating Bad Faith Of 'Quiet Quitting'

Only in the United States could doing one's job be considered quitting. That's how it's been defined by a corporate and managerial class livid about the shred of leverage workers have gained in an unusually strong labor market. Proliferating this week to every corner of American media, the concept of

4 Weird Tricks To Blunt Bad-Faith Politics

I've griped enough about the potency of the American right's bad-faith political arguments and its poisoning of every major political issue we face today, making almost every problem intractable as good-faith centrists and liberals try (and fail) to make nice with nihilists who do not believe what they say. I've

Good Faith Politics Is Going To Ruin A Lot Of Americans

Every game has rules, and every sport has a referee. But only the truly deranged would invent more rules with which to abide and install refs to enforce the rules that don't need to exist for any reason whatsoever. Forcing yourself to play by rules that your opponents do not

Mr. Good Faith Discovers Bad Faith, Then Doesn't

Jon Stewart, as America's rising tide of fascism became highly visible during the 2010 midterm election cycle, appealed for logic and compromise. He urged a detached approach to combatting the right's firehose of bad-faith politics. He wondered why we couldn't all just think straight and get along. Along with Stephen

The Democrats Don't Get It. Or Worse, Maybe They Do.

Maryland, thanks to the state's Democratic Party, is one shitty election cycle away from having a true-blue fascist in the governor's mansion. As a lifelong Marylander, I don't love it. In fact, I hate it. The state's Democratic machine spent millions to boost radical Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox, a

Bad Faith? Good Faith? No Faith.

Your political worldview invariably comes down to whether you think the point of politics is to be right, or to win. Being right – winning the argument, taking the crown in the so-called marketplace of ideas – has long been the goal of the American center-left. The facts will prevail, the thinking

I Yelled At An Old Lady About Her Bad-Faith Politics

I didn't plan on tearing into an elderly woman when I left the house Tuesday afternoon to vote in Maryland's primary elections. The plan was to glide in and out of my local precinct, cast votes for the least detestable gubernatorial and state legislative and school board candidates, collect my

The Bad Faith Times Discord Is Here

If you're like me and get a strange pleasure from drowning in dystopian political developments every hour of every day, we should talk. As a bonus for those who have so graciously supported Bad Faith Times over these past sixty days, I'm giving access to a Bad Faith Times discord

Thurgood Marshall Saw This Shit Coming

By 1991, nearly a quarter century after he became the first Black Supreme Court justice, the venerable Thurgood Marshall saw the coming right-wing takeover of the courts for what it was: A legal coup powered by an entirely bad-faith interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that would – one day – allow

The Hottest Bad-Faith Political Trend Of The Summer

For a long time, after a bunch of people were blown to pieces by a guy with an assault rifle engineered to do maximum damage to the frail human body, conservatives have solemnly talked about mental health, usually in the most vague terms possible. Ted Cruz or Greg Abbott or

How Do We Talk About Massacres?

Hello to you, the good and decent Bad Faith Times reader. I'm once again fielding questions from subscribers for an upcoming post, this time related to how we talk about America's nonstop gun nightmare. I'm guessing, if you subscribe to Bad Faith Times posts, you're horrified by the never-ending string

I Stared Into The Abyss Of The Democratic Party And All I Got Was This Anxiety

My existential terror and spine-crushing dread lifted for a moment and I was, for once, hopeful. Ben Jealous, a fierce advocate for civil rights and the former head of the NAACP, was running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in my home state of Maryland in 2018, four years after Republican

Now Is The Time For Good-Faith Politics

Don't forget to subscribe to Bad Faith Times and get the latest in existential pain sent straight to your inbox. To watch the faces of 2016 Republican presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Scott Walker betray total exasperation on a debate stage before a