Dear Mitch, Lindsey, Jim, Marco, Rand, and Co., Today, you’ve finally completed the transition you’ve been making for the last several years. No matter your intentions or plans, you’re not valiant defenders of the American way of life, you are repulsive, spineless minions. You’ve sold out American ideals for a demagogue who, if you could ever be honest with yourselves (let alone the rest of us), you know is unfit to hold the Presidency.  So fuck you.  The only thing you really love is power, supremacy, and privilege.  But that shit isn’t going to last.  We’re going to make damn [...]

Dear Ivanka, You are the daughter of a billionaire whose sole credential is being born into wealth. So when you decry anything about the "elite," objective, rational human beings can't help but roll our eyes. You've been playing both sides of that fence for years, and it's played very well for your father's "disaffected" (read: white) base. Even those of us repulsed by his antics wanted to give you a chance to live up to your billing as a modern, centrist woman who would keep his worst instincts in check. But when you chastise the "elite" for "smug ridicule," despite [...]

President Trump, I must admit, I’m enjoying watching you sweat. For a man so fond of walls, it’s delicious irony watching your own closing in on you so fast. The impeachment hearings have already confirmed so much about you that we already knew. You haven’t got the vaguest grasp of diplomacy, the rule of law, or the Constitution. And, of course, your recent attempt to intimidate Ambassador Yavanovitch while she testified underlined your blatant misogyny. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1195356198347956224   But the impeachment hearings are showing the wider public that your general lack of understanding is what REALLY exposes you. When the Ukraine 'quid [...]

To Donald J. Trump, In 1993, when very few knew who Osama Bin Laden was or the threat his group would pose, I was a young terrorism analyst working for the Intelligence Community. It was a confusing time in the early post-Cold War world. No one wanted to believe a single individual without the massive resources of a nation state could be a significant threat to the United States. So to help explain the tremendous power of influence that one person could yield, I compared Bin Laden to someone everyone did know at the time: a public figure whose charisma [...]

Dear Conversion Therapists, When will you eventually give up the charade that people are able to change their sexuality?  In the past your ‘profession’ has used castration, ice pick lobotomies, and psychiatric institutions. It has conducted electric shock therapy sessions, induced vomiting, and physically beaten any mannerism it deemed not ‘masculine’ out of young gay men in an attempt to turn them straight. Some have even tried to put the "fear of God" into them. Did any of it work? No. These young men who come to you for help are in a crisis. After years of society feeding them [...]

Dear Mr Trump, You’re an asshole. Most of us think so, but sometimes it just needs to be said out loud. You aren’t our “favorite President,” as you frequently claim on Twitter. You’re not our favorite anything. And you won’t be until you become our favorite “former president currently serving a lengthy prison sentence.” You became president by riding the movement and momentum of the very worst parts of American society – our fears, our latent (and not-so-latent) racism, and our xenophobic, isolationist impulses. But no movement has carried you aloft more than the Evangelicals. Given their constant moral outrage, [...]

To the spineless, complicit, irredeemable GOP Trump enablers: You did this. You have fomented the chaos, division, and discord that Trump sows. You’ve enabled his every foible, you’ve excused his destruction, and you’ve attacked anyone challenging Trump’s cult of personality. And now that the walls are closing in, you’re silent. Or worse, you’re continuing to defend or excuse the behavior that everyone outside the Fox News bubble can see is destroying the institutions that underpin our democracy. But we know how this story goes. As more and more comes out and even the most ardent Trumpers have to acknowledge [...]

Dear President Obama, I’m not the nostalgic type, it just isn’t in my nature. It’s ridiculous to think of 2008-2016 as “the good ol’ days.” That kind of wistfulness is reserved for my parents’ generation. But I truly miss having you as the leader of our country. I miss who we were when you were President. I miss having an eloquent president who draws on his actual knowledge, answering questions thoughtfully and rationally. Now we have a village idiot, stringing together superfluous long words to mimic intelligence. I miss having a president who so clearly loves and is devoted [...]

Dear Mark, On September 11th, 2001, you and your fellow passengers on United Flight 93 overpowered the hijackers and forced the plane to crash into a field in Pennsylvania, thwarting further attacks on Washington DC and saving countless lives. But you were more than a group of people standing up to terror, you were Americans whose legacies deserve individual recognition. And yours includes acknowledgement of the fact that you were gay.  Mark Bingham   On the day you sacrificed your life, gays could not serve openly in the military, our relationships were disdained and ignored by the federal government, and [...]