Rebecca Gordon
Rebecca Gordon is the author of the new book American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and previously, Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States. She teaches in the philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is a member of the War Times/Tiempo de Guerras collective. You can contact her through the Mainstreaming Torture website.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, June 30, 2020 Failed State: The Sudden Descent of the United States You know that feeling when you trip on the street and instantly sense that you’re about to crash hard and there’s no way to prevent it? As gravity has its way with you, all you can do is watch yourself going down. Yeah, that feeling. I had it the other day on my way to a Black Lives Matter... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, June 02, 2020 How the Credibility Gap Became a Chasm in the Age of Trump These days, teaching graduating college seniors has me, as the Brits would say in the London Underground, “ minding the gap .” In my case, however, it’s not the gap between the platform and the train I’m thinking of, but a couple of others: those between U.S. citizens and our government, as well as... Read more |
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Views Monday, April 20, 2020 Strange Attractors: On Being Addicted to Trump and His Press Conferences My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War. I was convinced that the U.S. never should have gotten involved... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 31, 2020 The Future May Be Female, But the Pandemic Is Patriarchal Before I found myself “sheltering in place,” this article was to be about women’s actions around the world to mark March 8th, International Women’s Day. From Pakistan to Chile , women in their millions filled the streets, demanding that we be able to control our bodies and our lives. Women came out... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 18, 2020 Impunity Guaranteed for Torturers (and Presidents) On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump's pre-election boast that he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters" proved something more than high-flown... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, January 14, 2020 The 'Deep State' Does Not Mean What Trump Thinks It Means This seems like a strange moment to be writing about "the deep state" with the country entering a new phase of open and obvious aboveground chaos and instability. Just as we had gotten used to the fact that the president is, in effect, under congressional indictment , just as we had settled into a... Read more |
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Views Thursday, December 05, 2019 What’s Wrong With the Republicans? On the Thursday of the second week of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had a special guest on his weekly podcast , Carl Bernstein . It was Bernstein, with fellow Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, whose reporting broke open the story... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, October 15, 2019 The True High Crimes and Misdemeanors of Donald J. Trump Recently a friend who follows the news a bit less obsessively than I do said, “I thought George W. Bush was bad, but it seems like Donald Trump is even worse. What do you think?” “Well,” I replied, “in terms of causing death and destruction, I suspect Bush still has the edge .” In fact, the U.S.-... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 15, 2019 How the U.S. Created the Central American Immigration Crisis It's hard to believe that more than four years have passed since the police shot Amílcar Pérez-López a few blocks from my house in San Francisco's Mission District. He was an immigrant, 20 years old, and his remittances were the sole support for his mother and siblings in Guatemala. On February 26... Read more |
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Views Monday, July 15, 2019 I Had an Abortion and Now I'm Not Ashamed I have never said this publicly before, but in December 1974 I had an abortion. I was 22 years old, living in a cold, dark house in Portland, Oregon, spending my days huddled in front of a wood stove trying to finish my undergraduate senior thesis. I did not want to have a baby. I didn’t know what... Read more |