On Monday, April 26, progressives on Twitter were caught up in a whirlwind of outrage over a video clip of former senator Rick Santorum’s comments to a conservative political group.

Santorum, currently retained as a commentator by CNN, claimed that “We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

Many on the left pounced on the apparently offensive nature of Santorum’s remarks, noting how his phrasing invoked Birth of a Nation, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century film depicting the Ku Klux…

Hail Caesar! Tuckus Hannitus here with today’s roundup of news from around the empire.

The radical Judean zealots have long been trying to cancel Rome. It seems they’d love nothing more than to give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and give to their God that which belongs to their God. Don’t they even know that what belongs to their God also belongs to Caesar?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Jews. Some of my best friends are Jews. King Herod, for instance. Great guy. Loves Rome.

But these zealots are really too much. Take this Jesus of Nazareth…

Despite the raving critical success of Netflix’s I Care A Lot, many ordinary viewers have given the film the thumbs down. According to Rotten Tomatoes, 81 percent of professional film critics have reviewed I Care A Lot positively while just 36 percent of viewers approve.

The reasons for the audience’s hatred for the film are numerous, but they largely boil down to one thing: The film’s main character Marla Grayson (whose portrayal earned actress Rosamund Pike a Golden Globe) is irredeemably despicable. Marla operates a scheme in which she serves as the court-appointed guardian of otherwise healthy elderly adults fraudulently…

A recent interview with a Capitol Police officer reveals a lot about how Americans expect the police to react to dangerous situations, and how such expectations are rooted in white supremacy.

On March 10, Michael Barbaro of the New York Times podcast The Daily interviewed Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who was on duty during the January 6 Capitol riot. A major focus of the interview was the relative lack of force deployed by Capitol Police during the insurrection.

MB: I think for all of us who watched these events unfold through videos, what stood out was that yes…

The new Netflix film I Care A Lot is Britney Spears’ worst nightmare. In it, Rosamund Pike Plays Marla Grayson, a professional court-appointed guardian who takes over the financial assets and medical care of seniors deemed incapable of caring for themselves. While it could be the case that Marla’s line of work provides an important social service to the severely handicapped, what Marla has instead engineered is an extremely immoral con that amounts to legalized kidnapping, imprisonment, and robbery. …

On Sunday, March 7, Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle sat down for a riveting interview with Oprah Winfrey. Likely the most jaw-dropping bombshell moment came when Markle related an anecdote about how members of the royal family had expressed concerns that the couple’s first-born child would be too dark-skinned. Though the couple declined to say exactly which member of the royal family had made these comments, they did add cryptically that, “It rhymes with Blarles and Blablilla.”

American conservatives, operating on autopilot to push back against any claim that anything is ever racist, took the side of…

The far right of the Republican Party is not a monolith; it is split into separate factions. These factions are best understood not as warring parties that compete with one another but rather as the outcome of a division of labor, with each group playing a particular role in the movement.

While the strains of GOP fascism are different, they are all working together toward a common cause, like the various positions of a football team laboring together to bring about brain damage or the numerous ingredients in a Cracker Barrel entrée working in concert to cause diarrhea.

The smart fascist

The smart…

On February 10, 2020, Disney-owned Lucasfilm announced that Gina Carano, the actor known for portraying Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, would no longer be a part of the franchise. For months, Carano had caught the ire of liberal fans of the show incensed by her anti-mask, transphobic, and anti-democracy posts to social media. At last she was cut loose after posting an anti-Semitic tweet in which she compared Trump supporters to Jews in Europe under Nazi rule.

Carano’s anti-Semitic tweet is worth examining in depth because it reveals important features of present-day anti-Semitism that make it not only hateful but…