Émile Torres

1 week ago | truthdig.com | Émile Torres

Last month, a young man named Guy Edward Bartkus drove to a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, and detonated a homemade bomb that ripped apart the clinic and shattered the windows of buildings in the vicinity. The powerful blast killed Bartkus instantly; four others were injured but are expected to recover.

1 month ago | truthdig.com | Émile Torres

The MAGA movement is not a monolith but a constellation of competing factions. It includes foreign policy hawks and non-interventionists, free-traders and protectionists. Another divide, which has received too little attention from the media, is between what could be called the traditionalists and the transhumanists. MAGA traditionalists typically identify as religious. Some are evangelical Christians, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, while others like JD Vance and Steve Bannon claim to be Catholic.

2 months ago | truthdig.com | Émile Torres

Much of human history only makes sense in light of the persistent influence of eschatology — a word of Greek origin that means “the study of last things.” This is because many of the most significant historical movements and events have been driven, in one way or another, by eschatological beliefs.

Sep 28, 2024 | news.yahoo.com | Émile Torres

Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I contacted Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the two NYU political scientists who, several years before that, co-authored a book entitled "The Dictator's Handbook," which outlines a novel theory of how political leaders — whether they are democratically elected politicians, unelected autocrats, or somewhere in between — acquire and hold onto power.

Aug 8, 2024 | truthdig.com | Émile Torres

The latest Democratic line of attack targeting Trump, his running mate JD Vance and the MAGA movement is to call them “weird.” Not the good “weird,” in the mold of David Bowie or Albert Einstein, but bad weird, in a way most Americans find profoundly creepy. Trump saying that he would be dating Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter, or Vance talking about a conspiracy of “childless cat ladies” — that kind of weird.