MAY 9, 2025
Sebastian Bennett is a foreign affairs officer in the nation’s capital. He has held a number of jobs in government, including as an aide to a Senator on Capitol Hill and as a presidential management fellow at a major federal department. Sebastian has also worked for think tanks, both in the nation’s capital and in Madrid. He was also a White House Intern. Sebastian has a post-graduate degree in international relations. Due to the sensitive nature of his current position, he is writing for The Daily Dissident, which he co-founded, under an assumed name.
If you can judge a man by the company keeps, then Donald Trump belongs in one of hell's inner sanctums given his longtime friendship with a truly evil man, Roy Cohn, a former acolyte of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy and amoral legal rogue. Birds of feather fly together. Continue Reading...
Welcome to the modern Orwellian workplace, replete with bogus paeans to changing the world and congratulatory parties for being cashiered. Labor has evolved over the decades and centuries, to be sure, but some thing never change. Fundamentally, the worker is an expendable drone who must be plied with bogus moral-boosting empty gestures to hide that fiction. The solution: be a trust fund baby and avoid peonage entirely. Continue Reading...
Why do they hate us? That was the question de jour after 9/11. A host of answers proffered relate to the West's many misdeeds in the Middle East: colonial machinations, shameless support for brutal regimes, brutal interventionism,etc. But perhaps responsibility runs, at least to some degree, both ways. Maybe "they" are also culpable for the lousy state of affairs in the Middle East and, more generally, the problem of Islamic Continue Reading...
Is the Republican "establishment" being trampled on by Trump? Not really. The GOP's elite has been selling Trump-lite - whispered bigotry - since at least 1964 when the party rejected that year's seminal civil rights legislation. That Trump is hawking a plutocratic fiscal policy indicates that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree regardless. Who better to unpack this than the redoubtable Frank Rich? Continue Reading...
The "student-athlete" canard is something of a zombie myth that just won't die. We know that basketball and football players at D1 schools must devote upwards of 40 hours a week to training, thereby obviating any possibility of meaningful study. And that's the tip of the iceberg. The story of Keith Frazier, once a promising basketball player at SMU, bears this out, yet again. Continue Reading...
The GOP "establishment" is going apoplectic over the prospect of a Trump winning the party's nomination. Hell hash no fury like the right's monied elite scorned. 2012 standard bearer Mitt Romney is the latest to weigh in against the crude real estate magnate, even though he sought out his endorsement just four years ago. The truth is, the GOP establishment would still prefer a crypto-fascist to center-left Hillary Clinton. Amazing. Continue Reading...
Why do so many evangelicals support Donald Trump, a crude, thrice-married, non-practicing Christian? According to the author, because they have given themselves to mammon. True. But the role of bigotry cannot be overstated. As the piece notes, racism has animated the religious right for some time. Such are many evangelicals "family values." Continue Reading...
Republican intransigence may inhibit President Obama from nominating a successor to recently-deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. This act of congressional defiance has sopped up much bandwidth that might otherwise be dedicated to the Scalia's malignant influence. He was, to be blunt, a bigot. A nice summation here of a man cloistered in his own ideological igloo. Scary. Continue Reading...
Criminals in this place are beheaded publicly, homosexuality is a capital crime, and ecumenism is verboten. Behavior is strictly monitored. Dissent isn't tolerated. ISIS-controlled Iraq and Syria? Yes, but also Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabi kingdom that, arguably, is the greatest contributor to global instability in the world. Continue Reading...
The 1920s was a tumultuous decade. A series of economic shocks following WWI gave rise to "ethnic nationalism" that took the form of a white protestant backlash against Asians, Jews, and other minority elements thought to be undermining all that was good and great in America. The apotheosis of this was restrictive Immigration Act that put an end to immigration from southern Europe and Asia. The Klan rose in prominence concurrently, as did Continue Reading...
Is terrorism a threat to Americans? Yes. How much of a threat? Not much. About as many Americans die every year from slipping on soap in the bathtub than from terrorism. Roughly 45 Americans have been killed in the US from jihadists since 2001, or slightly less than half the number that are killed every day from guns. Then why are we so spun up about it? Why are our politicians, media outlets, and citizenry so bent out of shape about it? Continue Reading...
What is the "Grey Zone?" It's the space inhabited by any Muslim who has not joined the ranks of jihadists, at least according to the same extremists. What's it like to live in this place when you're not really accepted by your fellow citizens in the West as one of "us?" It's to occupy a netherworld, or, to use the jihadist parlance, it's to be in a grey zone. Continue Reading...
Israeli PM recently made news for claiming that Jerusalem's Grand Mufti was a key progenitor of the Holocaust. Before that, Netanyahu made international headlines for his turgid opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, a campaign of his that included addressing the US Congress without full coordination with the White House. That's the tip of the iceberg. Netanyahu has been catastrophic, for Israel and for the world. Read and weep. Continue Reading...
For much of the twentieth century, marginal tax rates were very high, reaching, for example, 92 percent during WWII. During the post-war boom, those rates remained high. All income groups prospered. It was a golden age. Then things changed. For nearly 40 years, we've had a trickle down philosophy, which has privileged the wealthy (and corporations) in the tax code. The predictable result has been growing wealth inequality and relative Continue Reading...
The US and China could never go to war. Both countries' economies are too intertwined. Both have too much to lose. Not true. Rising powers always spark great insecurity in established powers, a dynamic famously identified by the great Greek historian Thucydides. In over a dozen instances studies covered in this article where a rising power begins to nudge aside an established power, wars generally result. Be worried. Be very worried. Continue Reading...
