Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

While Trump campaigns for a Nobel Peace Prize, his war on humanity’s only home continues unabated.

Twenty-five years ago — as the U.S. prepared to invade Afghanistan — Tom Engelhardt launched this publication as a form of pushback. TomDispatch began as an informal listserv offering commentary and collected articles from the global media to a select group of Tom’s friends and colleagues. A year later, it gained its signature moniker and has been providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media” ever since.

As TomDispatch evolved into a proper publication, it became a stalwart of the independent media ecosphere and a clearinghouse for critical voices, from Barbara Ehrenreich and Chalmers Johnson to Andrew Bacevich and Ann Jones. It served as a syndication service for the left side of the internet, providing thousands of articles to sites like Alternet, AntiWar.com, Common Dreams, The Nation, Salon, and many others.

Devoted to well-crafted, longform writing and typified by tough-but-measured commentary and hard-hitting essays, TomDispatch was a throwback to an earlier era of old-fashioned American muckraking journalism and iconic publications like I.F. Stone’s Weekly. It succeeded because Tom understood something fundamental about writers, about readers, and about the world after 9/11 and what people needed to navigate it.

A longtime book editor with a preternatural skill to slip, like a ghost, inside a good manuscript and turn it to gold, Tom used those same skills to publish three polished essays a week for more than two decades. He made good writers great and great writers better. His most astonishing feat may have been turning the ramblings of a grad student with a penchant for run-on rants into something readable. That was me, and because of Tom, I’m writing this intro today. Tom turned over the reins of TomDispatch to me back in June, but you can still read excellent commentary from him, twice weekly, at his Substack.

Tom has been fighting the good fight for his entire adult life, employing the written word — as a reporter, an essayist, an editor — in the service of making a better world. He deployed those skills against a criminal war in Vietnam when he was still a student. He did so as an editor and the author of a fantastic history of the Cold War, “The End of Victory Culture.” He did the same against the forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many other conflicts, at TomDispatch. And he continues doing so today, against the criminal conflict in Iran and the war on the planet itself. You don’t hear the term public intellectual very much anymore. Nor national treasure. Tom is both. It’s deeply gratifying to have him back at TomDispatch today.

– Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch.   

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A Winner on a Losing Planet

Do I even faintly believe the times I’m living in?  The simple answer is: no.

Every now and then, I try to imagine going back in time to tell my long-dead parents about the world of President Donald Trump, which just happens to still be mine as well. Of course, they simply wouldn’t have believed it, not for a single second.

To put it in the context of their time on this planet, the only equivalent I can imagine would be if Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that anticommunist nightmare-and-a-half of........

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