Author name: davidswanson

When I was a kid it was fun to hang out on the U.S. National Mall by the Washington Monument, which reflected just fine in the Reflecting Pool, on the Fourth of July. The Beach Boys would jam on an outdoor stage with about 35 opening acts. We’d bounce beach balls overhead. There were no jets or tanks in sight.

Now the psychopath across the road prefers weapons parades and is planning to put gladiators in a cage on the White House lawn and have them fight for his entertainment. This bothers read more

Is voting for a boot to your own face exclusively a Kansas problem?

What is going on in California?

There’s a primary election for governor with three leading candidates, the top two of whom will compete in a runoff.

One of the three is a pro-corporate-oligarchy rightwing Republican who will lose the runoff. He wants to stop regulating businesses, slash taxes on gazillionaires, end income taxes on most people to reduce their interest in government, and cover California in sprawling roads and read more

In 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory. He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC’s Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication. CNN discussed read more

What do Donald “a whole civilization will die” Trump, Pete “kill all Muslims” Hegseth, Army Secretary who couldn’t be found on January 6 Ryan McCarthy, Trump supporters Douglas Macgregor and H.R. McMaster, former CIA Director Mike “we lied, we cheated, we stole” Pompeo and his aides Ulrich Brechbuhl and Brian Bulatao, Trump confidant David Urban, many U.S.-backed foreign dictators, private-sector mafiosi like John Gotti, and their ilk back through the read more

The Democrats’ autopsy doesn’t simply not mention Gaza. It doesn’t mention anything at all. Kamala Harris’s platform doesn’t come up. What the candidate said she’d do if elected isn’t apparently relevant to why she lost. Therefore, what policy proposals she might have offered that she didn’t must be irrelevant too.

This is typical political campaignthink. Plenty of Congressional campaign websites have no policy positions whatsoever. Most have no foreign read more

Trump is eager to steal a pile of government money and hand it out to people who tried to overthrow the U.S. government. In the first round of prosecutions of those people, 20% of them were in or had been in the U.S. military. And many of them were in neo-Nazi militias, which targeted veterans for recruitment precisely because they might be skillful in a coup (a concept hardly new to U.S. history). Matt Kennard, who warned about open Nazism in the read more

I’ve been reading Truth and Consequence: Reflections on Catastrophe, Civil Resistance, and Hope. It’s a collections of things Daniel Ellsberg wrote and didn’t publish. I come to it having read what he did publish, having spoken with him about some of it, having debated him — publicly and privately — on some of it, and generally and extremely admiring what he had to offer and wishing the whole world would catch up to him. But, apart from some aspects of his read more

Should it bother us how much our official comment-on-aliens guy does to normalize war? Is it overly nostalgic to suggest that I wouldn’t have so much minded aliens encountering Carl Sagan when he was that guy?

The latest from Neil deGrasse Tyson in the New York Times, suggests that aliens might show up on Earth without having observed it, choosing as their point of arrival of course the capital read more

By CrossTalk, May 6, 2026

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Can You please oppose the war on Iran for one of the following 47 reasons? By oppose I do not mean that you claim you oppose it, as if you were a Democrat in Congress hoping to drive down Trump’s approval ratings by keeping the war going while claiming to supposedly oppose it. By oppose I mean try to stop: pressure the media and Congress, educate the public, hold a rally, make a phone call, join a flotilla, sign a petition, start an organization, create a work of art, hand out flyers or read more

My name is David Swanson. I’m recording this at the request of the Association for Defending Victims of Terrorism, an Iranian NGO.

The word terrorism in the corporate media where I live in the United States means violence by someone against whom violence should be used. In other words the very concept of terrorism is an appeal to the use of terrorism while deluding oneself that one is opposing terrorism. Another word for terrorism is war, something most governments prepare for, threaten, read more

David Swanson on the Terry Lee Show discussing War Is Still A Racket.

This is excerpted and adapted from Swanson’s new book, War Is Still A Racket.

In the peace movement in the United States—or at least in any antiwar circles that involve Veterans For Peace or other veterans groups, or that take an interest in the financial corruption that surrounds wars—Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940) is a mythical and heroic figure and has been for almost a century. He is best known for the text contained in Part I of my new book, a passionate rejection read more

According to The Hill, in an article typical of U.S. media, Trump’s war on Iran is totally legal for 60 days read more