Slate

Michelle Goldberg used a Tuesday item for Slate to tout Micah Naziri's open-carry protest outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Goldberg zeroed in on how Naziri's clothing "made him stand out...[as] an armed Muslim in a sea of often explicit Islamophobia." She later played up how "a group of burly men who called themselves Bible Believers" held anti-Islamic signs near the…

Adam Ragusea, writing at Slate.com, believes that the word "terrorist" has become "uselessly arbitrary and loaded," because it "has acquired a powerful religious—and specifically Islamic—connotation" that "is substantively consequential." As a result, Ragusea believes that the Associated Press, whose Stylebook sadly exerts nearly ironclad control over language used in U.S. establishment press…

Much like Phil Mickelson took a big early lead in the British Open, Esquire’s Charles Pierce has taken a big rhetorical-excess lead in early blogging about Donald Trump’s VP pick, Indiana governor Mike Pence, calling him a “very strange and completely unreconstructed wingnut” whose paper trail contains “a rich deposit of sweet crude crazy.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones described Pence as "not…

Liberals aren’t exactly pro-law and order, except for the TV show, long one of the most left-wing on TV. Anything else and they are ready to storm the barricades and sing like a bad version of “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables. From Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson to Black Friday to Hands Up, Don’t Shoot to Freddie Grey to Black Lives Matter, liberals love to protest, hate cops,…

In the upcoming movie, Imperium, Daniel Radcliffe plays an FBI agent infiltrating a neo-Nazi sect. That should be a movie everyone can get on board with: the freedom-loving American versus the oppressive Nazis. Think again. 

Omar Mateen claimed at various times to be aligned with terrorist groups including ISIS, Hezbollah, and the al-Nusra Front. Tim Dickinson does not consider any of those bloodthirsty outfits “the greatest threat to our homeland security today.” That description, Dickinson argues, best fits the National Rifle Association. “The NRA's unhinged gun advocacy,” he wrote in a Wednesday article, “has…

Conservative Paul Ryan and liberal Lithwick agree that Donald Trump’s recent digs at Gonzalo Curiel were racist, but disagree about their significance. Ryan considers the attacks peculiar to Trump, while Lithwick sees them as of a piece with the Republican party’s “wider assault on the judiciary in the Obama era.” Lithwick even wondered rhetorically, “Do Trump’s smears of Judge Curiel differ all…

As the media pivots with the candidates towards the general election so are their narratives about them. As reporter for The Daily Best Betsy Woodruff put it on MSNBC Live Thursday, “this election is becoming a battle of the sexes.” A social justice warrior’s dream election between “not just the first female presidential candidate, but the first feminist presidential candidate” Hillary Clinton…

Last week, a long Vox essay by Emmett Rensin asserted that “contempt” for supposedly “stupid” blue-collar whites -- in response to the exodus of those voters from the Democratic party -- has become pervasive among liberals. The piece has gotten some pushback from lefty writers, including Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, who thinks that Rensin greatly overestimates the spread and influence of what Rensin…

In Slate’s weekly “Political Gabfest” podcast, CBS News political director and Face the Nation host John Dickerson proclaimed that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal is “a stupid issue” unlike the debate over a $15 minimum wage because that’s “the central question of the campaign, which is how do you help people with wages.”

Eight Is Enough was a popular television series in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Dahlia Lithwick hinted in a Saturday article that a show about Republicans’ sour attitude toward the current Supreme Court situation might be called Eight’s Not Enough, with the key role played in absentia by Antonin Scalia. Lithwick theorized that for Republicans, “the 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s…

Media coverage of Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia typically noted that it reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s opposition to gay marriage. Slate’s William Saletan acknowledges the literal truth of that reporting, but suggested in an April 8 article that the document contains seeds that will sprout into Vatican acceptance of same-sex unions, though he admits that process “might take centuries.”…

There’s a saying, attributed to Woody Allen, that “showing up is 80 percent of life.” Dahlia Lithwick suggested in a Tuesday piece that showing up might be even more important for Merrick Garland if he wants to become a Supreme Court justice. Lithwick semi-seriously wrote that if “by the end of September of 2016” Senate Republicans still haven’t given Garland a hearing, he “should simply suit up…

A certain January 20, 2009 private dinner in Washington is famous because the Republican bigwigs in attendance resolved to stymie President Obama’s agenda. William Saletan implies that gathering also should be known for inadvertently getting the Donald Trump presidential ball rolling. “The Republican Party decided to be what Obama wasn’t,” opined Saletan in a Monday article. “And what Obama wasn…