Support Ted’s Work

I Am a Victim of Republican Cancel Culture

•
Ted Rall
    The debate over “cancel culture” centers around how Democratic Party, “woke” activists and politically-correct “social justice warriors” expel people from social acceptability or force them into joblessness because something they said or did provoked an online mob. But Republicans have been canceling people for much longer. I am living proof. My career grew to national prominence during the 1990s. By the time Bill Clinton left office, my cartoons and columns regularly appeared in well over 100 American newspapers and such magazines as Time, Fortune and Bloomberg. My editor at the New York Times added up the paychecks and calculated that his newspaper had published more cartoons by yours truly than by any other artist throughout the decade. I had a talk show on KFI radio, a 50,000-watt megastation in Los Angeles. I won major journalism awards, including two RFKs and a Pulitzer finalistship. Because my cartoons and columns criticized Bill Clinton and the Democrats, the right-wing censorship squads…
Read More

There Are More Socialists Than Democrats or Republicans. We Should Act like It.

•
Ted Rall
            American leftists find themselves at a tactical crossroad. Will the 39% of Americans (and more than half of those under 30) who steadily oppose capitalism stand up for themselves? Will socialists, progressives, communists, left anarchists and left libertarians boldly fight to build a movement, thus inspiring other allies of the working class to join the struggle to abolish the vicious and vacuous capitalist system? Or will leftists continue to tolerate and support a corporate Democratic Party that exploits them for their votes, financial contributions and labor while it contemptuously promotes everything they deplore? Two out of five voters is a plurality. If the other three out of five split their votes between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Left wins. But those big numbers cannot win if they remain scattered. Tragically for workers and the environment, the Left has no organization. No party. No media. No voice inside the establishment. Progressives and other leftists are powerless. The only “major”…
Read More

In Praise of Bad Weather

•
Ted Rall
            There is joy in the air. That joy is misplaced.             For that joy might kill us.             I set down these words on the 9th of March in Manhattan. Historically, the average temperature on this day of the year is 40°. If the weather forecast for today, March 9, 2021, is correct, and at this writing it looks like it will be, the temperature will hit 61°.             “Today is going to be a beautiful day,” the radio said this morning.             Everyone is happy. People are making plans to eat outside, go running, walking, whatever, everyone in New York who can break away from work or other obligations is determined to enjoy today’s “good weather.”             I feel it too. I have a meeting after I finish writing this. The sun will feel sweet on my face. More people will be smiling; even if I have to surmise that from the twinkle in their eyes above a…
Read More

Joe Biden Doesn’t Need More Time. He Needs Progressives to Demand an Ambitious Agenda

•
Ted Rall
            “Give Joe Biden time.”             “He just got there.”             “Trump left him a hell of a mess. It’s unreasonable to expect him to turn things around in a month or two.”             “Now is not the time to criticize him or the Democrats. When would be a good time? I don’t know, but certainly not now. Later.”             These are talking points used by Biden and his defenders against progressive critics—progressives who, for the most part, voted for him—who attack the president for doing too little on COVID-19 stimulus, healthcare, the minimum wage, student loan debt forgiveness and other important issues.             Though couched in an oh-so-reasonable-sounding tone, “give the man more time” makes zero sense.             Asking the Left to be patient would be reasonable if President Biden had an ambitious agenda. But he doesn’t. Like fellow incrementalists Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Joe Biden isn’t proposing any big fixes or programs. His ideas are nips and…
Read More

Don’t Hate Rush Limbaugh. Copy Him.

•
Ted Rall
           My death will make some people giddy with joy. That’s cool. I like to make people happy.             In the unlikely event that I’m  somehow able to witness the gleeful grins and chortles of those who savor the sweet news of my demise, I hope that whatever is left of me on the astral whatever will remain sufficiently objective to recognize the fundamental fairness of the celebrants’ reaction. After all, criticizing the dead is one of my things. Rejecting the traditional maudlin obituary cartoon format that depicts every boldface name showing up at the pearly gates to check in with Saint Peter — why are American political cartoonists so certain that the next world will be configured in accordance with Christianity? — I have occasionally acquired notoriety by publishing critical observations about such dearly departed figures as Ronald Reagan, Jerry Garcia and other politicians and celebrities whose life stories I believed to have benefited from grade inflation. I have…
Read More

Biden Offers Moderate Solutions to Radical Problems

•
Ted Rall
“Radical problems require radical solutions,” I wrote in my 2010 book “The Anti-American Manifesto,” a polemic that calls upon us to save ourselves from imminent social, economic and political collapse by overthrowing the system and rebuilding society from the ground up. We currently face several radical problems. But we’re not likely to rise to the challenge, because the Biden Administration’s adherence to the Democratic Party’s cult of militant moderation ensures that their proposed solutions will mitigate these grave issues—at best—with zero chance of avoiding disaster. There is a time and a place for tweaks and minor adjustments. You don’t amputate a leg to cure a sprained ankle. Extreme situations require going big; if your oncologist suggests removing half your tumor and then waiting to see how it goes, fire her. Our planet has cancer. Exponentially increasing temperatures have killed most of the world’s reefs and threaten widespread food shortages and thus political stability. Garbage, toxins and other pollutants are clogging…
Read More

It’s Not That Biden Is Too Slow. It’s That He’s Going Too Small.

•
Ted Rall
           In the intraparty Democratic war between progressive leftists and corporate centrists, each side speaks a different language. The two factions’ takes on Joe Biden’s first weeks as president starkly demonstrate that inability to communicate.             Biden’s base is his centrist supporters, those who backed him against Bernie Sanders during the primaries on the grounds that his moderate demeanor and years of wheeling and dealing would allow him to find common ground with Republicans who would probably continue to control the Senate. Centrists’ response to criticism of Biden is that Donald Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis, the shattered economy and the deep wound to our national psyche caused and embodied by the January 6th Capitol insurrection will require a long time to fix. Impatience, they say, is unrealistic and unfair. The same principle applies to Biden’s response to longer-standing policy issues that predate Trump, like climate change and the healthcare system. They say, he just moved into the White…
Read More

No, Virginia, It’s Not Too Early to Criticize Joe Biden

•
Ted Rall
Joe Biden approves of this message.             Censorship in mainstream corporate American media outlets is subtle. It’s not so much that they spin the truth. It’s that they omit pertinent facts and exclude relevant points of view.             So it is with politics. Among the tools available to messaging and framing experts is “flooding the field” — dominating the news with a blizzard of headlines in order to obscure actions they ought to be undertaking but are instead ignoring. That’s what we are seeing, or not seeing, from the new Biden Administration.             Donald Trump and his predecessors left behind a hell of a mess. But much of what you and I consider unfinished disasters to be reversed or cleaned up is to this centrist Democrat’s cronies and top administrators just business as usual, perfectly desirable neoliberal policy that, as far as they are concerned, can and should continue. Only one thing to get in the way of the continuationists:…
Read More

Biden’s Presidency Has Already Failed

•
Ted Rall
            Donald Trump may soon look back at his defeat as the best thing that ever happened to him. The former president has been disgraced, double-impeached and faces criminal prosecution. Fortunately for him, he slipped out of D.C. just in time to avoid the blame for an economic catastrophe no one can fix.             No one inside this political system, anyway.             5.2 million Americans filed for first-time unemployment over the last month. The key civilian labor force participation rate is 61.5%. Those are staggeringly bad numbers, comparable to the Great Depression. And this is following a year of atrocious job losses. “It’s literally off the charts,” Michelle Meyer of Bank of America said in May. “What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time.” A little history: The last time the economy tanked was at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, during the 2008-09 subprime mortgage…
Read More

If You Miss Donald Trump, You’ll Love Joe Biden

•
Ted Rall
            From mainstream left to mainstream right, the media deluge of Trump postmortems share the assumption that 45 represented a departure, deviation or innovation from the comportment and policies of previous American heads of state. True, he was the first man elected president without political or military experience. And as I have previously observed, Trump revolutionized campaigning by relying on social media instead of big travel budget and ad-libbing rather than repeating a pre-packaged stump speech.             But there was nothing new about the way he governed.             In policy, even with his vicious tone, Trump was a typical Republican president.  Ford told New York City to drop dead, Reagan called Blacks “welfare queens” and dog-whistled to the Klan, Bush legalized torture—nothing Trump did was worse than those. In some respects, Trump wasn’t much worse from Democrats. Trump’s low approval ratings following the second impeachment for his January 6th coup d’état attempt, and the revulsion most Americans currently feel for…
Read More
keyboard_arrow_up
css.php