Featured
Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy? Kim Lane Scheppele and
Since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have witnessed striking accommodations to his narrow win and mandate, what has been called “anticipatory obedience.” Are we sleepwalking into an autocracy? We hope not, and would be glad if the threat does not materialize.
But as close observers of people and places where democracy has come under pressure and occasionally buckled, we see creeping autocracy as a distinct and under-discussed possibility. We know well other nations, including Hungary and Poland, where leaders have steered policies that lead to a backsliding of democracy. Read more
Related: In Farewell Address, Biden Warns of an ‘Oligarchy’ Taking Shape in America. By Erica L. Green / NYT
Political / Social
Special counsel says evidence against Trump was enough to convict him. By Carrie Johnson / NPR
The Department of Justice’s long-awaited election interference report against Donald Trump, released early Tuesday, said the evidence against the president-elect would have led to his conviction at trial — if not for his election victory that led to charges being dropped.
Prosecutors wound down the two federal criminal cases against Trump after he won the 2024 election, following longstanding department precedent, and the final report by special counsel Jack Smith is their last chance to explain their decisions. Read more
Trump’s Cabinet Picks Threaten Black Americans’ Rights and Safety. By Brandon Tensley / Capital One
His selections for the next administration have a long history of opposition to policies that support marginalized communities.
The weeks ahead will likely be heated, as Trump’s picks testify before the Senate, where Republicans enjoy a 53-47 majority. If all Democratic senators oppose a particular nominee, at least four GOP senators would need to defect to sink that person’s bid. Here’s an overview of where some of Trump’s more high-profile picks stand on issues of race and identity that will have a major impact on Black life over the next four years — and possibly longer. Read more
Related: Pete Hegseth: Restore Confederate Military Base Names ‘Honors.’ By Zack Linly / NewsOne
MSNBC President Rashida Jones steps down after four-year tenure. By Daniel Arkin / NBC News
Rashida Jones, the president of MSNBC, announced Tuesday that she is stepping down after four years of steering the cable news network.
Jones, who made history as the first Black executive to lead a major U.S. television news network, made the announcement to top MSNBC anchors, leaders and network staff on Tuesday morning. (MSNBC and NBC News are both units of NBCUniversal.) Read more
We should be very worried about the decline of DEI. By Perry Bacon Jr. / Wash Post
It’s another indication that the United States is going backward, only four years after the George Floyd protests.
Diversity initiatives, particularly the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that proliferated in corporate America over the past decade, have some shortcomings. But the rapid retrenchment of DEI is another indication that the United States is going backward only a few years after the widespread protests of George Floyd’s killing seemed to signal that the country was finally ready to truly address its long history of discrimination and inequality. Read more
Related: Meta drops its DEI program. By Fast Company and AP
Related: Three DEI Legal Issues Employers Should Keep Tabs on in 2025. By Khorri Atkinson / Bloomberg News
Byron Allen’s $10B lawsuit against McDonald’s will go to trial. By Gerren Keith Gaynor / The Grio
A judge has ruled in favor of media mogul and owner of theGrio, Byron Allen, allowing his $10 billion racial discrimination lawsuit against McDonald’s to proceed in California federal court, theGrio reports.
The lawsuit alleges that the fast food chain blocked Allen and his media properties, including his TV networks and streaming assets, from McDonald’s general market ad agency responsible for dispersing the vast majority of McDonald’s massive ad budget. According to court filings, McDonald’s spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to advertise its products in national media. Read more
Related: McDonald’s faces legal challenge over decades-old scholarship program. By Nate Raymond / USA Today
The Science of Racism by Keon West review – evidence that speaks for itself. By Farrah Jarral / The Guardian
Think prejudice is overblown? A social psychologist provides the receipts in this densely informative but highly readable account
In his succinct and bingeable book The Science of Racism, professor of social psychology Keon West begins by acknowledging that society doesn’t agree on even the most basic aspects of racism, let alone its finer points. Indeed, roughly half of Britons don’t believe minorities face more discrimination than white people in various areas of life. Yet far from being a set of hazy, unanswerable philosophical questions, many of the unknowns about racism are empirically testable, especially if researchers design clever studies. Read more
Related: The Far Right’s Plan to Force Teachers to Lie About Race. By Jesse Hagopian / The Nation
World News
Trump’s 2nd presidency presents major challenge to South Africa. By Peter Fabricus / Daily Maverick and MSN
Can Pretoria persuade a free-trade-phobic president to keep South Africa’s preferential access to the US market?
For a US president who is publicly threatening to take Greenland and Panama by military force – and also to annex Canada through crippling economic pressure – kicking South Africa out of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), or even trashing the whole programme, would clearly be small change. Read more
Gaza Death Toll Is At Least 40% Higher Than Reported, New Study Estimates. By Sanjana Karanth / HuffPost
The study, published in The Lancet, reflects the reality that Gaza has been unable to count the dead due to Israel destroying the health care infrastructure.
A new independent study published in The Lancet medical journal estimates that Gaza’s death toll in Israel’s ongoing military offensive has been severely underreported — a finding that aligns with the very real challenges local officials continue to face in counting the Palestinian territory’s dead without the proper health care infrastructure. The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that 37,877 Palestinians were killed by violence in the first nine months of the military offensive. Read more
Related: Israel and Hamas Reach Cease-Fire Deal, Biden Says. By Adam Rasgon et. al. / NYT
Biden removes Cuba from list of sponsors of terrorism, lifts sanctions on Cuban military. By Nora Gámez Torres / Miami Herald
In a last-minute move before he leaves office next week, President Joe Biden removed Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, lifted sanctions on companies run by Cuba’s military and again suspended a provision in a law that allows Cuban Americans to seek compensation for confiscated property on the island.
The three measures announced Tuesday were described as “unilateral” actions taken by President Biden as a “gesture of good will” to facilitate a deal mediated by the Catholic Church that would lead to the release of Cuban political prisoners, including people who took part in the island-wide July 11, 2021, demonstrations, a senior administration official told reporters. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows. By Stephanie McCrummen / The Atlantic
Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.
At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Read more
The Catholic Church Must Challenge Trump on Deportations. Reilly / NYT
Among Donald Trump’s most alarming, repeated and ambitious commitments as a candidate was to arrest and deport up to 12 million undocumented immigrants. Many are Mexican and have been in the United States for more than 10 years.
Now he is laying the groundwork to remove those immigrants from their homes, jobs and communities. It would be a “bloody story,” he said. One voice that has been largely absent in loudly criticizing this extreme and un-Christian plan, I am sorry to say as a Catholic, is the American Catholic Church’s. Read more
The legacy of Black activist teachers: A review of Teaching to Live. By Susan Willhauck / Christian Century
Almeda Wright’s impeccably researched profiles explore the connections between religion, education, and social action.
It is not overly dramatic to say that teaching can be a matter of life and death when it is done in the face of endangerment and affliction to thwart debilitating injustice. The Black activist-educators profiled in Teaching to Live lived to teach as a way toward freedom. A book about them is warranted not simply as a tribute to their accomplishments but as a formative text for educators of all backgrounds—one that teaches how urgent it is to follow in the footsteps of these venerable leaders. Read more
Historical / Cultural
What Were The Slave Narratives? Why They Were So Important. By Bilal G. Morris / NewsOne
“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” – Frederick Douglass.
According to Britannica, the slave narratives were accounts of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally. These narratives comprised influential stories from American history that many folks would rather forget. They helped paint pictures of defiance, survival, and truth that reshaped many Americans’ perceptions of slavery. They also influenced the minds of some of the most important Black writers in American Literature history. Read more
Pondering Martin Luther King on Inauguration Day. By Bruce Epperly / Patheos
Longevity is good, as King said the night before his death. But, more than that is our vision of the Promised Land, and our quest for justice.
Many of us share Martin Luther King’s fears for the America of his time as we face the prospect of the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. For us the contrast of Martin Luther King and Trump is breathtaking. Trump has called for unity, but nothing has changed in his message of divisiveness, dishonesty, intimidation, and bullying of his fellow Americans and the United States’ closest allies. Read more
Related: Archive of civil rights icon Myrlie Evers-Williams to go on display. By Sally H. Jacobs / Wash Post
Story Of Clennon King: Black Scholar Sent To Mental Asylum For Applying To College. By Bilal G. Morris / NewsOne
Since he wasn’t teaching anymore, King decided to continue his pursuit of higher education, and in the summer of 1958, he tried to enter the graduate program in history at the University of Mississippi. He was the first Black person to ever apply and racism quickly became more important than a human trying to better themself.
When Clennon King arrived at the campus to register, Gov. J. P. Coleman, members of the state highway patrol, and several plainclothes officers were there to introduce him to the white power structures of hatred and bigotry. They didn’t allow King to register, visibly forcing him from the area, arresting the Black man, then taking him to jail. According to the Mississippi Encyclopedia, two physicians from the jail declared King insane, forcing him to spend nearly two weeks in a state asylum. King stayed in the state asylum until his brother, civil rights lawyer C. B. King, fought and got him released. Read more
The Legacy of Robert Guillaume, One of Hollywood’s Most Underrated Black Men. By Mark Anthony Neal / Level
Though Guillaume’s name evokes origins in some far off French Caribbean island, he was born Robert Williams on November 30, 1927, and by his own definition was “a bastard, a Catholic, the son of a prostitute, and a product of the poorest slums of St. Louis.”
Robert Guillaume died at age 89 on October 24, 2017. He was survived by his wife of thirty-plus years Donna Brown Guillaume, three daughters, Patricia, Melissa and Rachel, and one son, Kevin. His son Jacques preceded him in death in 1990. Read more
Jazz Off the Record. By Ethan Iverson / The Nation
In the late 1960s, the recording industry lost interest in America’s greatest art form. But in a small, dark club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard. Tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson and pianist McCoy Tyner. (Francis Wolff / Blue Note)
Those who insist that jazz is “America’s classical music” have a strong argument: The music of that continuum is just as serious as Bach or Beethoven. But there’s also a counterargument, which is simply that the most serious jazz often happened in a small club smelling of bourbon, perhaps with sawdust on the floor, played on a piano overdue for a tuning, before a group of committed listeners mixing with the unpretentious flow of street life. Read more
Sports
Deion Sanders and Jerry Jones, two master marketers, might be a match. By Jason La Canfora / Wash Post
If Jerry Jones cares about branding and buzz, bringing one of the greatest showmen and talkers in pro sports history to Dallas would check plenty of boxes.
Where does Jones go now? When you consider that the billionaire’s superpower has always been the ability to market that star logo, sell his star players and keep people talking about a franchise that has been decidedly middling for a generation, well, it’s not hard to imagine Cowboys legend “Prime Time” Sanders riding in on a white horse to save the day. Read more
LeBron James: A sense of where he is. By Kevin Merida / Wash Post
The first in a series of essays examining the past, present and future of a basketball superstar and cultural force.
Whether LeBron James is the greatest basketball player in history is not a subject we have to settle today — and maybe not ever. What we should be able to agree on is that LeBron (he earned first-name status long ago) has put together 21-plus seasons of sustained excellence in one of the most competitive job markets in the world: the National Basketball Association. Read more
Philadelphia 76ers forward Paul George has his heart, mind on communities impacted by wildfires. By Marc J. Spears / Andscape
Nine-time NBA All-Star has a home in the wildfire-affected Pacific Palisades area
George is a native of Palmdale, California, who played for the Los Angeles Clippers from 2019 to 2024. The nine-time NBA All-Star said he purchased a home in Pacific Palisades in 2019. The wealthy West Los Angeles neighborhood is known for its expensive homes, beautiful green landscaping, boutiques, restaurants, cafes, elite schools and its close-knit family friendly community. Read more
The Book So Helpful That the Eagles’ A.J. Brown Read It During a Game. By Victor Mather / NYT
What made the N.F.L. star open “Inner Excellence” by Jim Murphy as the action continued? “I like to read.”
After the game on Sunday, which the Eagles won over the Green Bay Packers, 22-10, Brown expounded on his reading matter, the self-help book “Inner Excellence,” by Jim Murphy. He summed up the book’s message as: “Have a clear mind, and remember that nothing else matters, negative or positive.” Read more
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