Featured
Don’t Fall for Trump’s D.E.I. Dodge. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT
If he cared about merit, then Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News host who has been accused of having a history of alcohol abuse and professional malfeasance — would not be secretary of defense. If he cared about merit, then JD Vance — with even less experience than one of his least experienced predecessors, Dan Quayle — would not be vice president of the United States. And if he cared about merit, then neither Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nor Kash Patel would be a hair’s breadth away from serving as secretary of health and human services or director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Trump does not care about merit, but he talks about merit all the time. It is the key term in his war on diversity, equity and inclusion policies, or D.E.I. But if Trump does not care about actual merit then what, exactly, is he going on about? What is “merit” and what is an anti-meritocratic D.E.I. policy? Read more
Related: Is There Anything Trump Won’t Blame on DEI? By Jonathan Chait / The Atlantic
Related: Trump Is Trying To Make The Federal Workforce Whiter. By
Political / Social
Don’t Believe Him. By Ezra Klein / NYT Podcast
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over. Read more and listen here
Related: Trump’s first week: “Designed to destroy the United States from within.” By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Related: This Trump presidency is deeper in the right-wing bubble than the first. By Philip Bump / Wash Post
Trump is reversing the Justice Department’s civil rights policies. By and
Sweeping changes on major legal issues, including voting rights, abortion rights and DEI initiatives, are underway in the Civil Rights Division.
Former Justice Department officials and advocates told NBC News they expect the new administration to swiftly carry out sweeping reversals of most major Biden administration civil rights policies. Already, the Trump-run department has issued a memo freezing all action in civil rights cases, including filings and settlements, and withdrawn from multiple cases filed during the Biden administration. Read more
Major players in the anti-DEI movement: Here’s who’s attacking Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, IBM, and other Fortune 500 companies. By Lila MaClellan / Forbes
Within hours of taking office, Donald Trump became the face of the anti-DEI movement in the U.S. But his executive orders and actions outlawing DEI from all federal operations and taking aim at the private sector, landed on fertile ground.
For years, key individuals and groups have worked relentlessly to advance a point of view that argues programs meant to improve racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ representation inside companies are in fact their own form of prejudice against white employees and men. Read more
The Conservative Threat to Race-Based Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions. Katherine Mangan and J. Brian Charles / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Conservative activists are urging Congress to slash the more than $1 billion it sends each year to colleges for serving students of color, and to spend that money instead on programs that help all disadvantaged students, regardless of race.
The federal grants set aside for minority-serving institutions are unconstitutional, discriminate against white students, and serve as a perverse incentive for colleges to recruit and admit students based on their race, several conservative scholars argue. The American Civil Rights Project, a conservative think tank, has drafted legislation to eliminate the minority-serving institution (MSI) designation that about 830 colleges have. Read more
RFK Jr.’s Stunning Claim About Black People And Vaccines Sparks Concern From Medical Experts. By Jillian Wilson / HuffPost
While his history of anti-vaccine remarks was a major talking point throughout the hearings, his beliefs were also front and center during a heated exchange in which Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) brought up a comment that Kennedy once made about vaccinations and the Black community.
In 2021, Kennedy had said, “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.” Below, experts like Bervell share their concerns about Kennedy’s statement and how it reflects a larger problematic picture: Read more
Rep. Thompson led the Jan. 6 committee. Now he fears more violence. By Deborah Barfield Berry / USA Today
Rep. Bennie Thompson, who led a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, said there’s been an “uptick” in threating calls against members of Congress since President Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged with attacking the U.S. Capitol four years ago.
“I think members of Congress are less safe because of the pardons that Donald Trump made,” Thompson, who led a House select committee that investigated the riot, told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview. Read more
Black Voters Helped Elect Eric Adams Mayor. Now They May Back Cuomo. Maya King / NYT
Mr. Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo have both been popular with Black voters, setting up a potential showdown that could decide the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City.
As he made his return this week from a brief public hiatus, Mayor Eric Adams used his first speech to convey a message: He is being treated unfairly because of his background. He has delivered on his campaign promises. And he is not resigning. “Every day they burn candles, they light incense, they say prayers, they do everything they can: Is he gone yet?” Mr. Adams said at an interfaith breakfast his office hosted. “No. He’s not.” Read more
Related: Justice Dept. Is Said to Discuss Dropping Case Against Eric Adams. By Maggie Haberman et al. NYT
A Troubling Spike in Sleep-Related Infant Deaths. Catherine Pearson / NYT
A new study found that U.S. infant mortality rates overall are dropping, but that rates of sudden unexpected infant death may have increased in recent years.
Though the study offered some good news — overall infant mortality rates dropped by 24 percent from 1999 to 2022 — it also raised questions about why more babies appear to be dying during sleep, and why rates of sleep-related death remain notably higher among Black, Native American and Pacific Islander babies than among white and Asian infants. Read more
World News
Isolationist? Nationalist? No, Trump Is Something Else Entirely.
When President Trump started talking about regaining control of the Panama Canal, colleagues and friends barraged me with questions. Where did this seemingly out-of-the-blue interest in a long-since-yielded area of control come from? How did a fit of pique about tolls and China grow into a threat to force Panama to cede its territory to the United States? Was there some kind of larger rationale that might explain it?
They asked me because for more than seven years, I have been studying conservative activists and their views of 20th-century foreign policy. Read more
Related: Will Trump End the Most Successful Foreign-Aid Program in US History? By By James North / The Nation
Something Extraordinary Is Happening All Over the World. By Lydia Polgreen / NYT
The surge of people trying to reach Europe, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia has set off a broad panic, reshaping the political landscape. All across the rich world, citizens have concluded — with no small prompting by right-wing populists — that there is too much immigration.
Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills. But these vituperative responses reveal a paradox at the heart of our era: The countries that malign migrants are, whether they recognize it or not, in quite serious need of new people. Read more
Related: Migration Is Remaking Our World — and We Don’t Yet Understand It. By Lydia Polgareen / NYT
Netanyahu to Meet Trump in D.C. as Israel Escalates War on West Bank Amid Gaza Ceasefire. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
We’re joined right now by Muhammad Shehada, writer and analyst from Gaza. He’s chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, joining us from Copenhagen.
Muhammad, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about what unfolded today in Gaza and, as of the time of this broadcast, what is expected to unfold when it comes to the prisoners released by Israel, Palestinian prisoners? Read more and listen here
The Morning: A fight for Congo’s minerals. By Ruth Maclean / NYT
Why are the rebels, known as M23, grabbing parts of eastern Congo?
In their telling, they’re protecting ethnic Tutsis, the minority group massacred in a 1994 genocide, some of whom also live in Congo. But experts say the real reason is Congo’s rare minerals, which power our phones and devices. Congo’s mines are making the rebels — and their patrons in Rwanda — rich. The United States and China are competing for such minerals, and the rebels could make access uncertain. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what’s at stake in the rebels’ advance — and why they may be hard to stop. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Anti-Trump Resistance Is Alive at This Historic Black DC Church. By Garrison Hayes / Mother Jones
The congregation at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington DC celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day—and voiced unified resistance to the incoming Trump administration.
Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event, which coincided with the inauguration, and used it as an opportunity to challenge Trump and embolden attendees. “We shed too much blood. We spent too many nights in jail to think that Trump can turn us around,” he said. “We are right here. We are not going back.” Read more
A Conversation with Tim Alberta. The Russell Moore Show / Christianity Today
In December of 2023, journalist and author Tim Alberta joined Russell Moore to discuss the ways that politics have invaded the white evangelical church in recent years. He returns to talk about the election and inauguration of President Donald Trump that have happened since—and to consider what those events mean about the state of American culture.
Alberta and Moore talk about numbness, hopelessness, and the lack of persuadability in many Americans. They discuss the effect of social media on righteous indignation and judgmentalism as well as the political exhaustion among wide swaths of Americans. They talk about President Trump’s executive orders, cabinet members, and the possibility of mass deportations. Listen here
A new Supreme Court case seeks to end separation of church and state in public schools. By Ian Millhiser / Vox
The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two cases that are likely to revolutionize the relationship between church and state, at least in the context of public schools.
Both cases, known as Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, seek to force state governments to pay for religious public schools. They involve a planned public charter school in Oklahoma, which will be run by two Catholic dioceses. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Federal agencies bar Black History Month and other ‘special observances.’ By
A number of federal agencies have banned celebrations related to MLK Jr. Day, Women’s History Month and other such observances to comply with Trump’s executive orders.
This week, the Defense Intelligence Agency ordered a pause of all activities and events related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other “special observances” to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order, according to a memo obtained by NBC News. Read more
Related: Amid Trump’s Anti-Diversity Effort, Black History Month Takes on New Meaning. Clyde McGrady / NYT
The brief but shining life of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet who gave dignity to the Black experience. By Minnita Daniel-Cox / The Conversation
Paul Laurence Dunbar was only 33 years old when he died in 1906.
In his short yet prolific life, Dunbar used folk dialect to give voice and dignity to the experience of Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He was the first Black American to make a living as a writer and was seminal in the start of the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance. Read more
Overlooked No More: Annie Easley, Who Helped Take Spaceflight to New Heights. Dylan Loeb McClain / NYT
She broke barriers at NASA and contributed to its earliest space missions as a rocket scientist, mathematician and computer programmer.
Annie Easley was a member of the team at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now the Glenn Research Center) given the critical task of fixing the Centaur’s design. Unlike most people working on the project, she was not an engineer. She hadn’t even finished college. But she was an excellent mathematician and computer programmer who was adept at solving problems. Read more
Fighting school segregation didn’t take place just in the South. By Ashley Farmer / The Conversation
Whether it’s black-and-white photos of Arkansas’ Little Rock Nine or Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of New Orleans schoolgirl Ruby Bridges, images of school desegregation often make it seem as though it was an issue for Black children primarily in the South.
But the struggle to desegregate America’s schools in the 1950s and ‘60s did not take place solely in the South. Black students and their parents also boldly challenged segregated schooling in the North. Read more
D.L. Hughley Responds To Snoop Dogg’s Performance At Pro-Trump Crypto Ball. By
Hughley challenged Snoop to have a “talk with the man in the mirror” and reflect on what has shifted.
In the Jan. 28 episode of “The D.L. Hughley Show” podcast, the comedian and actor began his segment by critiquing Snoop Dogg’s decision to perform for Trump and, according to Hughley, deflect personal responsibility for his choice. In a video posted to Instagram on Sunday, the California rapper seemingly addressed those who criticized his involvement in the pro-Trump event. Read more and listen here
Related: Why Some Black Folks Still Entertain Racists And Their Friends. By Tory Russell / NewsOne
Sports
Dwyane Wade reveals he was diagnosed with cancer at 41. By Alex Portee / Today
Dwyane Wade is recalling how a routine checkup turned into a life-changing cancer diagnosis that forced him to confront his own mortality and ultimately led to the removal of 40% of his kidney.
The 43-year-old basketball player opened up about his health on the Jan. 30 episode of his podcast, “The Why With Dwyane Wade,” sharing that what started as a desire to check on minor health concerns — including stomach discomfort and a weaker urine stream — led doctors to a tumor on his right kidney. Read more
‘Crazy’: NBA stars and pundits shocked by Luka Doncic trade. By
Deion Sanders creating more intrigue amongst Browns fans. By Browns Alchemy / USA Today
Deion Sanders has not stopped any links connecting his son, Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, to the Cleveland Browns.
Sanders has no interest in stopping the Browns from drafting quarterback Shedeur Sanders. Deion Sanders liked an Instagram post featuring general manager Andrew Berry’s statements at the Senior Bowl. Berry told the media the Browns don’t anticipate Deion Sanders to block the team from drafting his son. As previously reported, the post also included information that the Browns did not request Sanders to withdraw from the East-West Shrine Bowl practices. Read more
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