Justin Katz
If your feelings toward Donald Trump are negative, put them aside and imagine this situation with a non-establishment presidential candidate you would support. If your feelings toward him are positive, then just read on: American Bridge said Trump was using his Save America PAC — registered as a political committee in support of multiple candidates…
According to Jack Perry’s uncritical recitation of the Anti-Defamation League of New England’s warning about an increase in “white supremacist propaganda,” Rhode Island is seeing a dangerous increase. By their own standards, though, the ADL and the Providence Journal are contributing to the threat. Consider the last line of the article: “By using propaganda to spread…
Just as he was out and about regularly reporting on Antifa/BLM protests in the Providence area, just as he was covering large protests against Governor Dan McKee’s vaccine mandate for health care worker, John DePetro has travelled to Poland and the Ukraine border to provide live, on-the-scene reportage. So many young children from Ukraine being…
It’s interesting how topics bubble up in the constant flow of information in which we swim, these days. Yesterday, I came across Martha Rosenberg’s interview with women’s health advocate Mike Gaskins, whose research has investigated the science and politics with which the birth-control pill became a cultural mainstay: Several years ago, I heard a lecture…
The amazing thing about Sarah Doiron’s report on the staged protest of the state Department of Education by teachers union members is that it doesn’t say why the state took control of their schools. The audacity is nothing short of shocking: More than 100 teachers marched the streets of Providence Monday afternoon to demand the state…
John DePetro and Justin Katz talk local politics from around the world.
I’ve been trying to figure out which is the case: Either politicians have developed such thorough contempt for the people that they assume we’re complete fools whom they can deceive with impunity or we’re allowing people to gain public office whom a healthy civilization would have kept well away from the controls. The problem goes…
Almost since I began keeping an eye on it, the unemployment rate has primarily been a means of disguising the underlying weakness of RI’s economy. With the latest iteration, the AP writer seems to accentuate the positive, but you don’t have to dig far to see the negative — as far, say, as the state…
A lack of housing is a problem, and racism is simply wrong, so we have powerful emotional incentive to join the two matters into the story we tell about our society. In a more-specific way, advocates and researchers have even more-powerful economic incentive to do so. In that space, as with “equity audits” in schools,…
For the record, I’ve never tried hallucinogenic drugs. Even as a reckless teenager who was otherwise open to self destruction, I knew myself well enough not to roll the dice on that experiment. This disclaimer is context for my agreement with progressive Democrat state representative Brandon Potter’s proposal to move toward decriminalization of psilocybin, which…