Verticals

“He reminds me of Hugo Chavéz”, I blurted out to the group discussing Donald Trump and the current state of the US presidential election. Befuddled looks abounded. Much has been written and plenty discussed regarding Trump’s authoritarian streak. Mainstream media is rife with articles, memes, and comments comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Two Mexican presidents, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon, have already compared Trump to Hitler. Trump’s call to ban all Muslim travel to America is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi regime.  The Huffington Post has linked Trump’s style of politics to the historical populist regimes of Adolf Hitler and Silvio Berlusconi, …

While Europe struggles desperately to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, the refugee crisis we have here in the United States is increasing. Thousands of people from Central America (especially from the three “Northern Triangle” countries, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), many of them mothers with children, many of them children alone, are coming to the United States largely through our southern borders. Although more such people came in 2014 than in any year thus far, in 2016 an even greater number is expected. They come because violent drug-related gangs have taken over in their home countries, where women …

The Committee in Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji, or KOD) appeared to start suddenly out of thin air. It is now the biggest mass mobilization of Polish citizens since the days of Solidarity 25 years ago. On the one hand, this is clearly a response to the electoral victory in October 2015 of the right-wing Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS), but on the other, it is also the result of a spontaneous idea by a certain Internet surfer.

The idea for KOD first appeared on a website called Studio Opinion, a somewhat old-fashioned site edited by respected journalists …