This American Carnage

Columns

Who’s Afraid of the Russian Soul?

Hannah Gais

August 31, 2017

To speak of the character or “soul” of an entire country—one that spans two continents—is to give up on understanding out of preference for feelings.

White Nationalism’s New Clothes

Hannah Gais

June 01, 2017

White nationalists are donning the garb of intellectual legitimacy. It's time to dress them down.

Dilbert’s Revenge

Hannah Gais

April 14, 2017

The gospel of Scott Adams is one of mediocrity untroubled by humility, which means that now is the perfect time for him to make a comeback; the dangling toes of the zeitgeist are once again within his grasp. We’ve heard more about him lately than we have since CD-ROMs. Adams ...

From a Darling of White Supremacists, a Shrug and a “Who, Me?”

Hannah Gais

March 28, 2017

When Charles Murray took the podium at Columbia University last week, one thing became clear: here was a man used to denying his bedfellows. You would think that the author responsible for The Bell Curve—the shoddiest piece of pseudoscience to appear in the ...

Trump’s Willing Scholars

Hannah Gais

March 09, 2017

Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump. Trump’s rise has been described as “anti-intellectual” in nature, but that hasn’t stopped a new intellectual movement from feeding off his momentum. Enter American Affairs, a ...

Outcast No More

Hannah Gais

February 23, 2017

If his speech managed to enrage—or, to quote him quoting campus jargon, “trigger”—a room riddled with skeptics, it didn’t show. On a day when angry constituents were confronting their congresspeople at town halls across the country, the mood in this small lecture hall ...

Pax Trumplandia

Hannah Gais

February 15, 2017

Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump. Another February, another Munich Security Conference, a.k.a. the “world’s most prestigious geopolitical gathering.” This time, though, the conference will take place as a ...

Freedom for Me, Not Thee

Hannah Gais

February 08, 2017

Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump. Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office may be a disaster for the country, but for that pocket of conservative Christians worried about the ease of religiously motivated discrimination, ...

Fog Over Foggy Bottom

Hannah Gais

February 01, 2017

Welcome to This American Carnage, your weekly slice of life from the country of Trump On Monday, news broke of a fresh bureaucratic uprising—this time through a memo posted to the State Department’s Dissent Channel expressing the dissatisfaction of nearly 1000 ...