John Feffer

John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands" (2016) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His new novel, "Frostlands" (2018) is book two of his Splinterlands trilogy. Splinterlands book three "Songlands" will be published in 2021. His podcast is available here.
Articles by this author
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Views Saturday, July 25, 2020 Trump's Use of Federal Paramilitaries Is a Classic Tactic of Autocrats to Test How Far They Can Push Their Authority Federal agents poured into Portland, Oregon this month to crack down on anti-racism protests. They beat up peaceful protesters and fired impact munitions at demonstrators, seriously injuring one of them. They drove around the city in unmarked vans pulling people off the street. Trump is... Read more |
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Views Friday, June 26, 2020 What Will It Take to Defeat Trumpism? Let’s assume that Donald Trump loses the election in November. Yes, that’s a mighty big assumption, despite all the polls currently favoring the Democrats. If the economy begins to recover and the first wave of Covid-19 subsides (without a second wave striking), Donald Trump’s reelection prospects... Read more |
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Views Thursday, May 28, 2020 Is It Time to Boycott the United States? In his infinite ignorance, Donald Trump has invited world leaders to the White House for a face-to-face meeting at the end of June. Unlike the other countries in the G7, the United States has yet to get the coronavirus pandemic under control. One of the hotspots that the White House itself has... Read more |
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Views Friday, May 01, 2020 The Black Death Killed Feudalism. What Does COVID-19 Mean for Capitalism? You pay little attention to the systems of your body—circulatory, digestive, pulmonary—unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 17, 2020 Living in Dystopia In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity . However, novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 02, 2020 We Need a Coronavirus Truce During World War I, soldiers all along the Western front held a series of informal truces in December 1914 to commemorate Christmas. It was early in the war, and opposition had not yet hardened into implacable enmity. The military command, caught by surprise, could not impose complete battlefield... Read more |
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Views Friday, March 20, 2020 What the Coronavirus Says about Us A crisis, according to self-help and leadership books, reveals much about a person’s character. The same can be said of a nation’s character. Since the latest pandemic began to spread out of China in 2020, countries responded in very different ways to the challenge. There was ingenuity,... Read more |
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Views Monday, March 09, 2020 President Trump as a Political Hit Man Donald Trump filed his paperwork to run for reelection only hours after his inauguration in January 2017, setting a presidential record, the first of his many dubious achievements. For a man who relished the adulation and bombast of campaigning, it should have surprised no one that he charged out... Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 07, 2020 Will the Coronavirus Kill Globalization? At a dinner party in mid-February, an architect told me that he was having a problem finishing his building projects. It was the carpets. It might seem ridiculous to expect that a pathogen, even one that spreads at the rate of a pandemic, could reverse an economic trajectory that's more than a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, January 30, 2020 America’s Coronavirus: Containing the Outbreak of Trumpism The epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak is widely thought to be a wet market in Wuhan. At such markets, seafood, chicken, and other conventional foodstuffs are on sale alongside live animals. You can buy more than just dogs and cats there. Local epicures also shop for more exotic fare like... Read more |