it describes the everyday experiences of people far from areas traditionally associated with America’s Long Wars—thereby implicating our own anodyne lives in the steady militarization of our common world

the vacuous major-media hermeneutic of both-sides-ism

equivocation slowly but ineluctably begins to take root

The resulting discursive squalor—a welter of confusion in which objective fact competes against galaxy-brained and perennially unalterable “perceptions” for equal footing

meliorist apostles of peaceful order such as Steven Pinker

the inchoate study of unsanctioned chaos bred by intrastate violence

the sunny fables of irenic global uplift featured in Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

overcome cultural narcissism and reckon with the anomie of civil war

the triumphal liberal history of modern conflict, which consecrates itself by touting its defeat of totalitarianism, and elides anti-fascism in all of its guises by presenting it as, in one way or another, unitary with fascism

he New Yorker—the apotheosis of culture industry liberalism