Stephan Salisbury

Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a TomDispatch regular. His most recent book is Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland.
Articles by this author
Views Monday, July 30, 2012 Life in the American Slaughterhouse: Beyond Aurora, Guns Are Going Off Everywhere Welcome to the abattoir -- a nation where a man can walk into a store and buy an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of Glocks; where in the comfort of his darkened living room, windows blocked from the sunlight, he can rig a series of bombs unperturbed and buy thousands of rounds of ammo on the Internet; where a movie theater can turn into a killing floor at the midnight hour. Read more |
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Views Monday, March 05, 2012 How to Fund an American Police State At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried , as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. Read more |
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Views Monday, July 18, 2011 How Muslim-Bashing Loses Elections During the 2010 midterm election campaign, virtually every hard-charging candidate on the far right took a moment to trash a Muslim, a mosque, or Islamic pieties. In the wake of those elections, with 85 new Republican House members and a surging Tea Party movement, the political virtues of anti-Muslim rhetoric as a means of rousing voters and alarming the general electorate have gone largely unchallenged. Read more |
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Views Monday, January 17, 2011 Extremist Killing Is as American as Apple Pie The landscape of America is littered with bodies. Read more |
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Views Monday, October 04, 2010 Surveillance, America’s Pastime The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet. It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now? Read more |