PATRICK LAWRENCE: Gaza & Confronting Power
The American state, broadly defined, is well on its way toward a form of apple-pie absolutism, forcing distorted meanings not merely on three university administrators but on all of us. The events of the past seven days are sobering no…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Media’s Fatal Compromises
It is no longer enough to tether correspondents to the perspective of the military from whose side they report. We appear to be on the way to having wars fought — huge, bloody, consequential wars — without any witnesses. The…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Banality of Propaganda
The annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II — show that it does not have to be sophisticated. The Israeli president’s display of Mein Kampf just proved that again. I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Decency Becomes Indecent
At this point, Washington’s defense of Israel becomes as baldly obscene as the apartheid state’s long record of lawless aggression toward the Palestinian population. There have been many, very many singular moments among America’s purported leaders and assorted officials and…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Tampering With History
History tells us where we are in the human story and what we, alive now, must do to advance this story. To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human cause. The first sign of trouble…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Question About Biden
In the wake of Zelensky’s wildly provocative statements, it is time to question whether the U.S. president has a personal interest in prolonging the war in Ukraine. A friend and colleague wrote in an unusually sage commentary a couple of years ago that Ukraine would prove…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Bad Faith & Blank Checks
All mainstream journalism is “embedded journalism” now, for the battlefield is everywhere, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his new book, Journalists and Their Shadows. Some years ago, as the decline of American media became evident even among those not…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Pointless Asian Summit
Let us consider the grist of the talks the U.S. president hosted at the presidential retreat in Maryland last week. This will not take long. My goodness. President Joe Biden and the press serving his regime pumped so much hot air into…
The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee
Nineteen fifty-three was a peculiar year for The Washington Post to question the C.I.A.’s drift into activist intrigues, writes Patrick Lawrence in this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Journalists and Their Shadows. On Jan. 9, 1953, The Washington Post published an editorial we can read all…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Russia’s Turn From the West
Sergei Lavrov’s recent comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s…