John Feffer

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

A federal officer tells the crowd to move while dispersing a protest in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse on July 21, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. (Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images) 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...
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While Trump may be expendable, Trumpism—which lies at the intersections of racial and sexual anxiety, hatred of government and the expert class, and opposition to cosmopolitan internationalism—is not so easily rooted out. (Photo by Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images) 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...
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The G7 nations don’t have the guts to stand up to the United States. (Photo: Shutterstock) 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...
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The coronavirus crisis has thrown the global economy into cardiac arrest, and now you are acutely aware of the very markets that you had previously just assumed would function as normal. (Photo: Shutterstock) 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...
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America, too, will live on. But it will have lost some further measure of its greatness thanks in no small part to the man who, however cynically, wanted to make it great again. 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...
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We are now in the early stages of another world war, call it World War III, this time against the common enemy of pandemic. 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...
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It wasn’t supposed to be this way. There was supposed to have been greater uniformity in response. (Photo: Shutterstock) 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,...
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Trump believes that he already owns the island, that he’s now the survivor-in-chief. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) 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...
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President Donald Trump looks on next to Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 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...
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Trumpism is what happens when a compromised immune system meets an unusual pathogen. (Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty Images) 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...
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