Bad Faith Times

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

Alexander Hamilton And Our Crisis of Bad-Faith Politics

That we're in the midst of a nonstop political crisis is hardly a secret. There are certainly villains to blame for our ever-worsening predicament, but it seems some unlikely heroes are also partly to blame. Including, dare I say, Alexander Hamilton, the man on the ten dollar bill, the face

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

It's Not Just A Phase, Mom

Millennials, according to every think piece of the past decade, are extremely successful killers. We have killed everything from department stores to chain restaurants to shopping malls to movie theaters to the mere concept of a guest bedroom, which is funny because I had thought we already killed home buying;

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

The Right's Fretting Over 'Child Exploitation' Is Just More Bad-Faith Politics

The best bad-faith arguments balance on a thesis whose agreement is universal. Lets say – god forbid – you are a lobbyist working for an outfit with interests in destroying our planet. Your goal is, of course, to delay, obstruct and damage legit climate science that has been proven for decades. These

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

The Dizzying Speed of Bad Faith

Bad Faith Times readers mostly came of age in a materially awful era of American politics. The 9/11 attacks and the 2008 recession broadly drove the policy and discussion of politics as I was finding my own way. Before these historic events, and before I was able to vote,

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