COURAGE, TRUTH & BOOTY:

  The American Exception: Why Mass Shootings Persist in the Land of Guns By Apirate Monk On a crisp October evening in 2017, the neon pulse of Las Vegas was shattered by gunfire. From a high-rise hotel room, a lone gunman unleashed a torrent of bullets on a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers, killing 60 and wounding over 400 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The nation reeled, as it had before and would again, grappling with a question that echoes across borders and generations: Why does the United States, a beacon of democracy and innovation, endure so many mass shootings? The answer, distilled through decades of research, is stark and singular: guns. The United States is an outlier not because its people are uniquely violent, its mental health care uniquely deficient, or its society uniquely fractured, but because it possesses an unparalleled arsenal of firearms—393 million civilian-owned guns, according to a 2023 estimate, enough for every man, woman, and chil...

The Betrayal in the People’s Department Inside the battle that redefined the Republican party’s relationship with corporate power, and a secretive struggle at the Department of Justice that one insider called a “coup.” It began, as so many stories do in Washington, with a deal. A very big deal. But the real story wasn’t about the mega-merger itself, a transaction that would reshape an industry and test the very definition of monopoly power. The real story was about a promise. It was a promise made by a new, disruptive political force that had ridden into town on a wave of populist anger, vowing to challenge the cozy consensus that had governed Washington for decades—the one that always seemed to benefit the powerful at the expense of the ordinary citizen. This new force had a name—Trumpism—and it had found an unlikely home in, of all places, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. For years, the division had been the domain of a specific breed of conservative: market-purist, li...