Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Andrea Mazzarino: How MAGA Uses Violence to Consolidate Power

Cruelty is the point.

August 28, 2025 · 6 Comments

Andrea Mazzarino: Children of War

Armed violence has percolated into just about every aspect of this country’s being — from violent video games to still-spiking mass shootings to local police forces armed with weapons of war.

March 7, 2023 · 3 Comments

Frida Berrigan: A Christmas Confession

I’m Taking an Eco-Holiday From It All (and So Are My Kids)

December 21, 2021 · 2 Comments

Karen J. Greenberg: Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

Accountability for the mistakes, miscalculations, and lawless policies of the war on terror has proven not just elusive, but inconceivable.

October 8, 2021 · 1 Comment

Frida Berrigan: Meatball Subs, Not Nuclear Subs

Or How to Deliver 16,128 Hiroshimas

June 25, 2021 · Leave a comment

Rebecca Gordon: Social Security Versus National Security

The U.S. “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.

June 17, 2021 · 2 Comments

Tom Engelhardt: Slaughter Central

The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine

April 14, 2021 · 2 Comments

William Astore: Back to the Future at the Pentagon

‘It hardly occurs to us to question how the Pentagon’s mad military scenarios about near-peer wars could indeed end in nuclear annihilation.’

April 12, 2021 · 3 Comments

Tom Engelhardt: The Sports Pages of Death

Life in a Wounded and Wounding Land

March 29, 2021 · Leave a comment

William Astore: A Ten-Point Plan to Make Joe Biden a Peace-Time President

“What could be more exceptional, more laudable, than seeking a lasting global peace?”

February 4, 2021 · 2 Comments

Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies: Will Biden End America’s Global War on Children?

Nothing in Biden’s long record in public life suggests that he will, unless the American public and the rest of the world act collectively and effectively to insist that America must end its war on children and finally become a responsible, law-abiding member of the human family.

February 2, 2021 · 5 Comments

Andrew Bacevich: Reflections on Vietnam and Iraq

Virtually all Democrats and many in the media ascribe to Donald Trump full blame for the mess in which this country finds itself. Yet Americans would do well to temper their expectations of what supplanting Trumpism with Bidenism is likely to produce.

December 28, 2020 · 1 Comment

Rebecca Gordon: It’s Almost Twenty Years Since 9/11

Perhaps the horrors of 2020—the fires and hurricanes, Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy, the death, sickness, and economic dislocation caused by Covid-19—can force a real conversation about national security in 2021. Maybe this time we can finally ask whether trying to prop up a dying empire actually makes us—or indeed the world—any safer.

December 18, 2020 · 1 Comment

William D. Hartung & Mandy Smithberger: Shrinking the Pentagon

Will the Biden administration dare cut military spending?

December 1, 2020 · Leave a comment

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