Bits & Pieces
Articles with unfiltered opinions
Is the War on Drugs Finally Over?
The district attorney of Philadelphia, Larry Krasner, made a radical proposal in May: Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating those caught for the possession of drugs as criminals, they would be sent to treatment centers. “Possession is different than dealing. It’s different than carrying a bunch of drugs you intend to sell or deliver later,”...
Women’s Rights
Publisher’s Statement, June ’80 “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” That’s the exact wording of the Equal Rights Amendment, better known as the ERA. It’s a simple statement of equality for the majority of American citizens—women....
Fuck You If You Can’t Take A Joke
Publisher’s Statement, July ’88 When I started HUSTLER Magazine, I intended to bring readers something they couldn’t get from magazines, but that still reflected real life: women as naked as you see them in bed, jokes told with the same language you hear at work or in bars, and information unaffected by sacred cows...
Not In My Name
Publisher’s Statement, March ’03 As of this writing, it looks like we will be going to war with Iraq. According to President-select Bush, we are doing this because Saddam Hussein is evil, because he harbors weapons of mass destruction and because he supports terrorism. While I agree that Hussein is a bad guy, there...
It’s Not Just Guns
Publisher’s Statement, May ’13 As traumatic as they are, rampage shootings are now a regular occurrence in our country. Many factors have led to that reality: availability of guns, lack of mental-health treatment, abusive environments, violence in popular culture, the list goes on. There’s no specific reason and no specific solution. As President Obama...
The Innocent Behind Bars
The United States under our current leadership continues to set new records in the worst way. We lead the world in school shootings, prisoners per capita and deaths from drug overdoses. In 2018 another record was broken: the total time that wrongly convicted prisoners have lost served behind bars. According to the National Registry...
Will Socialism Save Us?
For most of our history, socialism has been a dirty word and an almost un-American concept. But a recent Gallup poll shows that for a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds, socialism is viewed more positively than capitalism. This is a sea change, with candidates like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing for Medicare for...
The Propaganda Machine
Now that Democrats control the House and members of the Democratic Socialist camp have gained a prominent voice in Congress, the conservative oligarchs who control America are terrified, launching an all-out preemptive assault on initiatives like the Green New Deal. If you watch Fox News, it’s almost impossible to get through a show without...
Beware the Speech Police
These are dangerous times for free speech in America. Tech giants now control the news feeds for millions of citizens, and they have begun a coordinated campaign of unregulated censorship. The campaign began in an effort to suppress “fake news” and alleged Russian interference in our elections, but a lot of babies have been...
The Magic Wall Will Never Happen
Trump made the Great Border Wall the signature rally cry of his campaign. Aides encouraged it as a short, simple sound bite that he could remember and repeat. When the crowds roared after “And Mexico will pay for it!” it became a promise he couldn’t escape. Sensing that his hardcore base was drifting away,...
Can Trumpism Survive Without Trump?
Pundits and prognosticators are now saying that even if Trump is defeated in 2020—or impeached before then—it won’t necessarily be the end of Trumpism. While dog-whistling racism and pandering to the lowest common denominator certainly helped get him elected, that’s not the whole story. The steady decline in the standard of living for working-class...
Hell-Bent on Nuclear War
Three months ago Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Trump and his chickenhawk sidekick, John Bolton, alleged that the Russians had violated the treaty by testing a new cruise missile. The Russians countered that Americans had cheated...
America’s Shameful Criminal Justice System
There are many reasons to be proud of the United States, but our criminal justice system is not one of them. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.2 million citizens in federal, state and county jails—a 500% increase since the mid-’70s. And the system is rife with gross disparities and...
Crippling the First Amendment
The First Amendment is the single most important keystone of our Constitution. Without the absolute guarantee of free speech, the Founding Fathers understood that no democracy could survive for long. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I...
Trump’s Obama Vendetta
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to reverse all of Obama’s “unconstitutional” executive orders. The right-wing labeled them abuses of power, but the truth is that Obama issued fewer average executive orders annually (35) than any President since Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s. (FDR holds the record at 307 per year, with Herbert...
