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Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

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The Rehearsal State: When Governance Becomes Performance

There is a scene in every disaster movie where the official steps to the podium, adjusts the microphone, and assures the public that resources are being mobilized, plans are being activated, and the full weight of the institution is being brought to bear. The audience in the theater knows the official is lying or incompetent or both. The audience at home, watching the real version of the same press conference after the real hurricane or the real chemical spill, has no such certainty. They take the performance at face value. They go to bed believing the plan exists.

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Real ID: Federal Mandate, National Card, or Something Worse?

The Real ID is now the law of the land, but it is not the law most Americans think it is, and the story of how it arrived at your local DMV is a twenty-year saga of congressional sleight-of-hand, serial postponement, and a quiet transformation of the American driver’s license into something it was never designed to be. The question everyone should be asking is not whether they need one. The question is what the Real ID actually represents in the architecture of American civic life, and whether the reassurances offered by the Department of Homeland Security hold up under any meaningful scrutiny.

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The Precarious Republic: Understanding the Fascist Threat to Modern Democracies

What if it doesn’t take years, or even months, for a democracy to collapse—but only a few short weeks? The idea that a stable republic could fall in ninety days may seem exaggerated, until you look at the historical record. Then it becomes a haunting possibility. Fascism doesn’t always arrive with fanfare or fire. Sometimes, it walks in through the front door, wearing a suit and a smile, welcomed by the very institutions it plans to dismantle.

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Task Failed Successfully: The Cracked Columbia Takeover and Expulsion

The sputtering 18-hour barricade-aided takeover of Columbia University by Hamas supporters ended last night faster than Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall; of course, the occupier’s task failed successfully only after being rightly pushed from the second story ledge of Hamilton Hall by NYPD riot officers. As a graduate of Columbia University, I was chagrined for the students who occupied Hamilton, and who are now about to learn the hard way why — the university does not not belong to the student — and those failed occupiers can now successfully weep into their expulsion letters.

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YouTube Age-Restricts the News

After yesterday’s Boles.tv live stream I received a curious email from YouTube informing me I had violated some sort of community guideline, and they were “Age-Restricting” my entire VOD upload. That meant no viewers under the age of 18, and my video would not be shown to anyone not logged into YouTube. I wasn’t sure if they were dinging my previous live stream, and video podcast episode, about William Hurt Raping Marlee Matlin or not, but I quickly learned discussing rape is okay for kids, but showing the aftermath of a blood stain on a train platform from the New York City subway shooting yesterday is verboten. I wondered aloud if YouTube ever really checks the strange, and awful, videos that appear on their service that include nudity, and violence, and are not restricted.

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The Inescapable Return of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a disgrace to America and a verified liar in the specific; and yet, I cannot get over this obligation of wonder that he has never left the consciousness of America. He is resurrected. He will return. Vengeance against us will be his. Trump still rules us from afar. He decides us. His hold over the feeble-minded, and the uneducated, is as strong as ever after his election loss and yet, for some reason, he is immaculately venerated by those he reviles. Does any reasonable person paying attention to abortion rights, the evisceration of voting rights, and the incongruous dismantling of OSHA worker protections not believe the game is already set and staged for a victorious Trump return in 2024? It appears to be all but inevitable now. The one chance we had to stop him — by standing up to the GOP in the Senate — failed miserably and miraculously. The Democrats are a proud, but unwily, gang of magnificent losers.

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Rise of the Divine White

The Covid Pandemic released a vicious wave of cordoned hatred that has been brewing in America since the Civil War: The Divine White. That invented birthright has been vigorously defended, and consumed with contempt for the foreign, and hatred for the unsimilar, and that bile has bubbled beneath the veneer of civility, decorum, and democracy — always dangerous, but evidently nascent in daily public purgings — that is until, 150 years later, when an American president came to glory on the heels, and the cruel deficits of, a rabid, and deadly, gang of sycophants who placed personality, and ego, above the law, and beneath contempt.

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Three Wednesdays in January

In 2021, on three consecutive Wednesdays in January, in a trium of blood-bound events, we survived a catastrophe, we served a correction, and we held a celebration. Democracy is, at times, a gory and brutal mess — an angry boil in need of lancing — and sometimes in need of a realignment of values based on the witnessing of a live horror, in real time, as we are confronted by the monsters some of us have become in the lighted dark of day.

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Toss Aways

There have always always been disposable people in a limited-use society, but it’s worse now. We, as a nation of lonesome people found alone in a decaying world, have become much more than merely disposable. We have become the toss aways. We have lost our value. We have forfeited the way forward. We find ourselves teetering on the precipice between the living, and the dismayed, and the balance of the affair solely belongs to us — the us of us.

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