Featured
Jim Clyburn Is Right About What Democrats Should Do Next. By Ezra Klein / NYT (Image CNN)
President Biden faces a problem with no solution. No interview or speech will convince a doubtful public that he is still fit to serve. Perceptions of him had years to harden.
The debate didn’t change what voters believed about Biden. The debate made it impossible for the Democratic Party to continue ignoring what voters already believed about Biden. They now know it won’t. In a post-debate Data for Progress poll, voters were asked which concerned them more: Biden’s age and physical and mental health or Trump’s criminal charges and threats to democracy. By 53 percent to 42 percent, they chose Biden’s age.
In an interview on CNN, Clyburn said on Wednesday that if Biden leaves the race, the party should hold “a mini-primary.” “You can actually fashion the process that’s already in place to make it a mini-primary, and I would support that absolutely,” Clyburn said. “We can’t close that down, and we should open up everything for the general election. I think that Kamala Harris would acquit herself very well in that kind of a process, but then it would be fair to everybody.” Read more
Related: Joe Biden’s Blind Spot. By Maureen Dowd / NYT
Related: Biden Did Not Save His Presidency on ABC. By Joan Walsh / The Nation
Political / Social
It’s Time to Get Used to the Idea of President Kamala Harris. By David Rothkopf / The Daily Beast
If Kamala Harris runs, she has a very good chance of winning, given Donald Trump’s grotesque defects—and her strengths.
Democrats who believe that their party should stay the course with Biden as candidate frequently make the argument that if it became impossible for him to continue with the campaign or as president, Harris would be ready to assume the reins of power. A widely circulated Google document, entitled “Unburdened by What Has Been: The Case for Kamala,” has caused quite a stir among Democrats and on social media. The buzz around Kamala may only increase given the distinctly lukewarm-to-negative response to Biden’s ABC News interview Friday night, which, far from reassuring his supporters, has done little to silence calls for him to withdraw from the race. Read more
Trump ‘admires Hitler’ — and the media is missing it: attorney. By Matthew Chapman / Raw Story
Former President Donald Trump’s admiration for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler is well known, well documented — and the news media has somehow let it remain unknown to most voters, warned attorney and writer Daniel Miller on X Friday evening.
“Trump once reportedly had a book of Hitler speeches in his bedroom. Why? Isn’t that an issue in this race? Why was he so interested in Hitler? Can someone ask him?” he wrote Friday. “Trump seemingly admires Hitler. Has read Hitler. Uses Hitler rhetoric. This is a relevant issue for many reasons. And someone should get to the bottom of this before Trump once again controls the most powerful military in the world. The voters DESERVE answers.” Read more
Related: Trump’s New Racist Insult. By David A. Graham / The Atlantic
Related: Why the MAGA Cult Votes for Trump and Against Its Own Interest. The Daily Beast Podcast
Project 2025 led by the Heritage Foundation, explained. By Rachel Barber / USA Today
The detailed plan to dismantle and reconstruct the government laid out by conservative groups known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project has critics up in arms over its “apocalyptic” and “authoritarian” nature.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., led an effort to create the more than 900-page “Mandate for Leadership,” published in April 2023, reimagining the executive branch and presented a plan to overhaul several federal government agencies, including the FBI, for the country’s next conservative president to follow. Read more
Related: We should all be terrified of Trump’s Project 2025. By Robert Reich / The Guardian
Related: Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025 plan. By Patrick Svitek / Wash Post
The US supreme court utterly distorted the true threat to American democracy. By Lawrence Douglas / The Guardian
According to the court, a rogue prosecutor is somehow more dangerous to US rule of law than a rogue commander-in-chief
In its extraordinarily disturbing decision earlier this week granting presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution, the US supreme court dramatically mis-weighed a competing set of risks to our constitutional democracy. On the one side of the scale, the court placed the possibility that a future rogue prosecutor will seek to settle political scores by indicting a former president for “insufficiently enforcing … environmental laws”. On the other side of the scale, we can place the possibility that a former president, having previously been charged with subverting the peaceful succession of power, returns to the White House, where he demands the prosecution of all those who tried to hold him to account. Read more
Related: How dangerous is the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity? By Alexi McCammond / Wash Post
Related: Supreme Court ethics remain at center stage after hard-right rulings. By Justin Jouvenal / Wash Post
GOP recruits poll monitors from suburban areas to monitor the vote in Democratic cities. By
Election experts expressed concern that the strategy could be disruptive to the vote-counting process this fall.
The strategy has the potential to be uniquely disruptive to voters and election staff this fall, nonpartisan elections experts say, given that the volunteers would be dispatched to monitor areas with different political and demographic makeups than their own — and potentially different protocols for casting and counting ballots. “In addition to voter intimidation risks, I think that the strategy also poses the potential to be just disruptive to the election process in general,” said Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. Read more
She took on a small Mississippi town’s police. Then they arrested her. By Robert Klemko / Wash Post
How civil rights lawyer Jill Collen Jefferson convinced the Justice Department to investigate allegedly racist and abusive policing in tiny Lexington, Miss.
Handcuffed in the cramped lobby of the Lexington Police Department, standing eye-to-eye with the chief, Jill Collen Jefferson was given a choice. She had been arrested while filming a nighttime traffic stop in this county seat of roughly 1,500 people and four traffic signals. Pay a $35 processing fee, the chief said, and we’ll release you. Read more
World News
U.S. Allies Are Already Worried About Another Round of Trump. By Michael Fullilove / The Atlantic
What should America’s allies do if the leader of the free world doesn’t care about the free world or want to lead it?
Most of America’s allies would like Joe Biden to win the U.S. presidential election in November. He has been a fine president. His foreign-policy team is first-class. But what if Donald Trump should win instead? In the aftermath of Biden’s poor debate performance, the anxieties in allied capitals are spiraling. Allied leaders know that Trump views their countries not as friends but as freeloaders. As president, he threw shade on the principle of collective defense and carelessly handled the intelligence that allies provided to Washington. He threatened to withdraw U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula and Europe. Read more
Hamas Clears The Way For A Possible Cease-Fire In Gaza After Dropping Key Demand, Officials Say. By Samy Magdy and Wafaa Shurafa / HuffPost
The apparent compromise by the militant group could deliver the first pause in fighting since November. But all sides cautioned that a deal is still not guaranteed.
Hamas has given its initial approval of a U.S.-backed proposal for a phased cease-fire deal in Gaza, dropping a key demand that Israel commit up front to a complete end to the war, a Hamas official and an Egyptian official said Saturday. Read more
Related: Hamas is losing the backing of ordinary people in Gaza who are paying the human price of its war. By
Meet the Followers of Martin Luther King Jr. in the West Bank. By Nicholas Kristof / NYT
A sign at the entrance to the Nassar family farm reads: “We refuse to be enemies.” Shown is Amal Nassar
The Nassars, a Christian Palestinian family, hold children’s camps and other programs on the farm to promote understanding and nonviolence even as they struggle to save their land from confiscation by Israeli settlers. They quote Martin Luther King Jr. and provide a model of peacefulness for their Palestinian and Israeli neighbors alike. Read more
Five Takeaways From the U.K. General Election.
The Labour Party won a resounding victory over the Conservatives, but smaller parties, including the populist Reform, did better than expected.
A landslide victory for Britain’s center-left Labour Party is a seismic moment in the country’s politics, returning to power a party that just five years ago suffered its most crushing defeat since the 1930s. Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, becomes prime minister with a majority of about 170 seats, almost as large as the majority Tony Blair achieved in 1997. While Labour surged to victory, the Conservative Party crashed to the worst loss in its history, claiming only around 120 seats, lower than its previous worst result in 1906, when it won 156 seats. Read more
Related: Labour’s Historic Victory Belies Deep Fault Lines in British Politics. By Steve Howell / The Nation
Related: Don’t be fooled by Labour’s big UK win: British politics is melting down. By Andrew O’Hehir / Salon
Security Crisis in Haiti Continues, Kenya Sends Police. By Jeff Abbott / The Progressive
Haiti is experiencing crisis and displacement, but the population welcomes international peacekeeping troops warily.
Haiti has lived through one crisis after another. But the current prolonged crisis in Haiti has brought insecurity and violence, and has contributed to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Haitians. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), there has been a 60 percent increase of internally displaced people within the country since March. These people have been displaced by spiraling gang violence, the collapse of the government, and the resulting economic crisis. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Ten Commandments gone wild! The Christian right’s latest toxic distraction. By Paul Rosenberg / Salon
A tale of the evangelical right, the least religious president ever and Cecil B. DeMille’s phony list from God
I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS,” trumpeted Donald Trump on his Twitter knockoff site, in the wake of the passage of a widely-reported new law in Louisiana. Trump wasn’t exactly lying, for once, as he went on to explain: It was all about the branding. The commandments should be displayed, he wrote, “IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG? Read more
The most religious, and religiously diverse, places in America. By Adrián Blanco, Lenny Bronner and Andrew Van Dam / Wash Post
This week, we mine the U.S. Religious Census, a decennial count of America’s faithful, for insights into the geography of religious devotion. We also compare people’s claims on church attendance to their actual behavior.
As America’s single-largest religious group, Catholics show up everywhere, from the Italian alleyways of New England to the thriving Filipino churches of Hawaii, from the Polish pockets of the Rust Belt to the Cuban corners of South Florida. Then there’s Acadian Louisiana and, of course, the massive swath of the American West that used to be Mexico — which, as you may know, is pretty Catholic. Read more
Your Religious Values Are Not American Values. By Pamela Paul / NYT
Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.
Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.” For both Trump and true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to have the state impose a religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Forgotten Black Explorers Who Transformed Americans’ Understanding of the Wilderness. By Amanda Bellows / Smithsonian Magazine
Esteban, York and James Beckwourth charted the American frontier between the 16th and 19th centuries. York, the enslaved man who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their history-making expedition, appears in the rightmost canoe in this 1905 painting by Charles Marion Russell.
Who Died in the Tulsa Race Massacre?
After more than a century, researchers hope to finally identify the victims of one of the worst racial attacks in American history.
In 2020, the city began excavating a section of Oaklawn where evidence of a mass gravesite was found. It was a major step to solving a historic cold case, an ambitious mission that started with unmarked graves in what was once a potter’s field, moved forward in time to the living then traveled back in time to the dead. Researchers are working to match DNA samples extracted from the burial remains to those in two national DNA databases. Read more
The existential struggle of being Black. By Sean Illing / Vox
A conversation with author Nathalie Etoke on Black existentialism and the case for tragic optimism.
Nathalie Etoke is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of the book Black Existential Freedom. It’s an exploration of Black existence through the lens of existentialist thought, and it ultimately makes a case for something like tragic optimism. It’s both a critique of “Afro-pessimism” — more on this idea below — and an affirmation of political realism, and that makes it a distinctive contribution to the discourse. Read more
The Booty-Shaking Anthem That Still Endures, 25 Years Later.
Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” was a 1999 hit that brought twerking and New Orleans bounce into the mainstream. Here’s the story of how it became a sensation.
Kendrick Lamar drops ‘Not Like Us’ music video amid Drake feud. By Tolentino / NBC News
Lamar teased a new song in the video for his diss track against fellow rapper Drake. Kendrick Lamar during the music video shoot for “Not Like Us” on June 22 in Los Angeles.
Kendrick Lamar put a cap on his monthslong feud with Drake by releasing a music video for his hit song “Not Like Us,” which dissed the Canadian rapper. Lamar released the video on Independence Day. He previously held a concert called “The Pop Out” on Juneteenth, where he performed “Not Like Us” six times. Many fans viewed the timing of these events as digs toward Drake, whom Lamar accuses of stealing Black American culture in his diss tracks. The “Not Like Us” music video had received over 13 million views as of Friday morning. Read more
The Shade Room built a massive Black audience. Candidates want in. By Janay Kingsberry / Wash Post
CEO Angie Nwandu said she wants to grow political coverage on her site that reflects the page’s diverse Black audience: “Black people are not a monolith.”
From her cramped apartment in South L.A., Nwandu launched the page on Instagram and began serving up biting commentary on celebrity gossip spanning the Black Hollywood hierarchy: Atlanta reality TV star Phaedra Parks’s messy divorce, Chris Brown’s ongoing legal struggles, Jay-Z and Solange’s infamous elevator fight. Now, 10 years and more than 150,000 posts later, Nwandu’s last-ditch effort has exploded into a burgeoning Black media empire — drawing more than 29 million followers, reportedly generating millions in revenue, and attracting venture-capital suitors and, lately, greater access to the White House, where TSR has covered the Biden administration and the 2024 election as an official member in the presidential press pool. Read more
Sports
Black American athlete who won gold was one of the 1924 Paris Olympics’ firsts. By and
Black American athlete who won gold was one of the 1924 Paris Olympics’ firsts
A century ago, at a small stadium just outside Paris, a college track and field star from Ohio named William DeHart Hubbard took a dramatic leap forward for himself and for all African Americans back home in the segregated United States of America. By defeating the best long jumpers in the world at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Hubbard became the first Black athlete to win an individual gold medal at the Games. Read more
A Maryland city and its complicated history with Willie Mays. By Sapna Bansil / Wash Post
Mays made his affiliated professional baseball debut in Hagerstown, Md., in 1950, and his experience in the segregated city stayed with him. The Hagerstown Flying Boxcars held a moment of silence to honor Willie Mays before their Atlantic League game this week against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs.
On June 23, 1950, a 19-year-old Negro Leagues standout named Willie Mays skipped his high school prom and boarded a train for Maryland. The next day, in the former slave-trading stronghold of Hagerstown, Mays would make his debut in affiliated professional baseball. He batted sixth and played center field for the visiting Trenton Giants, the first of nearly 3,000 times he would patrol center field in a Giants uniform. Read more
The Klay Thompson-Golden State Warriors memories will outlast the sadness of separation. By David Dennis Jr. / Andscape
One day, the Golden State Warriors and free agent guard Klay Thompson, who reportedly has joined the Dallas Mavericks after a sign-and-trade with the Warriors, will be able to come together to celebrate the wins they curated together.
But for now, the split after 13 years together has felt as emotional a separation as we’ll see in an NBA full of short-term contracts and player-personnel juggling. As a result, we are in the bitter throes of a nasty divorce a year in the making, one that both parties will have to heal from before being able to celebrate their generational successes. Read more
The Tennis Podcast That Champions, and Hosts, Black Pros.
Black Spin Global found an audience with its cheeky coverage of the growing number of ranked Black tennis players. It also offered them a forum. Lucy Tezangi and Eugene Allen began hosting the Black Spin Global podcast in 2020.
Now, Eugene Allen is the center of an online community focusing exclusively on Black tennis players worldwide, at a time when there are more pros and juniors on tour than ever before. As of July 1, there were five Black men ranked in the top 50: Ben Shelton (No. 14), Felix Auger-Aliassime (No. 17), Frances Tiafoe (No. 29), Gael Monfils (No. 33) and Arthur Fils (No. 34). On the WTA Tour, there were four women: Coco Gauff (No. 2), Jasmine Paolini (No. 7), Madison Keys (No. 13) and Sloane Stephens (No. 50). Read more
Simone Biles leads most experienced U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team. By
The 27-year-old star called Paris 2024 a “redemption tour” for the Tokyo returners.
The U.S. women’s gymnastics team is well positioned to win the Olympic team gold medal not solely because of talent but also because of experience. Four of the five women suiting up this month were members of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic team. With two all-around Olympic champions and four Olympic medalists, the 2024 Paris group is the most experienced and most decorated in U.S. history. Simone Biles, with 37 Olympic and world championship medals, is the headliner. Her Olympic medal collection consists of two bronzes, one silver and four golds, including the most coveted hardware in the sport: the Olympic all-around gold medal. Read more
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