by David Kordahl
While grading papers last week, I turned on Max (the streamer formerly known as HBO) and watched The Insurrectionist Next Door. This documentary was made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. I’d read a little about the film beforehand, and I was curious how the younger Pelosi would find a way to profile her subjects—characters in various amounts of trouble with the law due to their actions at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—without her kinship with the elder Pelosi getting in the way. But this connection turns out to be the central gimmick, and Pelosi makes no secret of it, casting herself as a shocked diplomat to Trump’s deplorables.
“What do you think of your dad’s song, ‘Fuck Joe Biden’?” she asks an older daughter in one scene as Dad, a White rapper with the words PROUD BOY tattooed across his forehead, sits with a younger child on his lap. Pelosi presents herself as frankly confused by the Trumpists. The White rapper, Billy Knutson, is thought by his family to be a good dad and good husband, and we watch his wife and children cry as they leave him at the prison for a six-month stint.
All leads of The Insurrectionist Next Door face, or have already served, time in prison. Another interviewee, the ex-pornographer Felipe Marquez, is shown baking a cake for Pelosi at his home in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he is under house arrest. As Marquez tells his story, Pelosi refuses to believe it. “So a hooker broke up with you and that turned you into a Christian conservative?” she asks.
“I thought she was just a regular woman who would have a family with me, and we would watch conservative news together,” says Marquez.
Pelosi presses him on this, exasperated. “You’re telling me that the left is responsible for your prostitute girlfriend leaving you, and therefore you took it out on the left by storming the capitol and participating in an insurrection?”
“Men are weird,” he says, frowning while stirring in the eggs. Read more »
Two profound horrors have plagued the world in recent times: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency. And after years of dread, their recent decline has brought me a brief respite of peace.
White Americans get a lot of things wrong about race. And not just the relatively small number of blatant white supremacists, or the many millions (
My Jewish maternal grandparents came to America just ahead of WWII. Nearly all of my grandmother’s extended family were wiped out in the Holocaust. Much of my grandfather’s extended family had previously emigrated to Palestine.
Not long ago there was an article circulating on Facebook about ‘Hating the English’, originally published in a large circulation newspaper. The Irish author says something to the effect that once she thought it was just a few bad ones etc., but now she hates the lot of them. It’s been stimulated, I think, by the repulsive English nationalism that has been raising its head since Brexit, plus the usual ignorance about Ireland, Irish history and Irish interests on the part of your typical ‘Brit’. It’s not a very good piece of writing, and it has a rather slight idea in it. I’d ignore it but for the ‘likes’ and positive comments it’s received, particularly from ‘leftists’. It’s an example of what we could call ‘bloc thinking’ – the emotionally satisfying but futile consignment of entire masses of people into categories of nice and nasty.
According to Donald Trump, in 
People are basically good.
think about that. Though others may have one, I lack an analytic framework. The best I can do is to offer some things I’ve been thinking about.
Is there anything more clichéd than some spoiled, petulant celebrity publicly threatening to move to Canada if the candidate they most despise wins an election? These tantrums have at least four problems:
There is a minor American myth about shame and regret. It goes like this.
Violence : War :: Lies : Mythology
I have an awful confession to make. I haven’t made up my mind about whether President Trump should be convicted and removed from office.
In 1974, noted science fiction author Joe Haldeman published a novel called The Forever War, which won several awards and spawned sequels, a comic version, and even a board game. The Forever War tells the story of William Mandella, a young physics student drafted into a war that humans are waging against an alien race called the Taurans. The Taurans are thousands of light years away, and traveling there and back at light speed leads Mandella and other soldiers to experience time differently. During two years of battle, decades pass by on Earth. Consequently, the world Mandella returns to each time is increasingly different and foreign to him. He eventually finds his home planet’s culture unrecognizable; even English has changed to the point that he can no longer understand it.
April 2018: ‘Tis the Season of Giddiness in Democratlandia. Republicans are saddled with a widely despised President and riven by internal dissension. The Republican leadership in Congress is lurching from fiasco to fiasco – interrupted briefly by one great “success” on tax cuts. The zombie candidates of the Tea Party are still stalking establishment Republicans across the land. And, somewhere in his formidable fastness, the Great Dragon Mueller is winding up for the fiery breath that will consume the world of Trumpism like a paper lantern. And a Blue Wave – nay, a Tsunami – is headed towards the Republicans in Congress, looking to engulf them in November.
In 1790, shortly after the 13 states ratified the U.S. Constitution, the new federal government conducted its first population census. Its tabulations revealed an astonishingly rural nation. No less than 95% of all Americans lived in rural areas, either on a fairly isolated homestead (typically a farm) or in a very small town. How small? Fewer than 2,500 people. Meanwhile, just 1/20 of Americans lived in a town with more than 2,500 people. All told there were only 26 such towns, only half of which had so many as 5,000 people
“It’s a long, long way from the Trump administration to an actual fascist dictatorship,” I said, “but it’s a straight line.”