Featured

What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed. By Nikole Hannah-Jones / NYT

For those who felt denigrated by his rhetoric, the bipartisan tributes to him as a champion of free speech augured something dangerous: the mainstreaming of formerly extremist views.

The day Charlie Kirk was killed, Dominic Durant’s 11-year-old daughter came home from her middle school in Tulsa, Okla., and told her father that her friends had been very upset about his death, and that they felt she should be upset, too. “I’m sad,” she said, tears in her eyes.

Durant struggled with how to respond. He, too, had been appalled by the act of violence. But his young daughter did not know much about Kirk, and he worried she would look him up on YouTube and come across the many ugly assertions the right-wing activist had made about Black Americans like them. For instance: Read more

Turning Point’s Dangerous Echo of Fascist Youth Movements. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / Race Inquiry

Authoritarians have always understood the power of youth. Mussolini’s Balilla and Hitler’s Hitler Youth were built to mold loyalty before adulthood, using race, faith, and nation to transform politics into destiny. The United States does not face a rebirth of fascism in its old uniform, but Turning Point USA shows how those strategies can be adapted to our time. Read more

Political / Social

The Race to Save America’s Democracy. By Garry Kasparov / The Atlantic

About a month into Trump’s second term, I began warning that the Putinization of America was well under way.

Now, after a summer of National Guard deployments in American cities, crackdowns on protests, massive layoffs of federal workers, purges of anyone deemed disloyal in the FBI, immigration raids on workplaces, and unfettered self-dealing, Trump and his administration seem more erratic, unpredictable, and chaotic than ever. But, beneath the breaking-news barrage, we can trace the thread of advancing authoritarianism. Read more

The Meaning of the Comey Indictment. By Elie Honig / The Intelligencer

The Trump administration has crossed a line. The wall of independence between the Justice Department and the White House, which has long stood to protect DoJ’s fearsome power to deprive individuals of their liberty, has been reduced to rubble. Politics have invaded and infected prosecution. And the resulting indictment is confounding, at best.

I’m no fan of James Comey. I’ve publicly criticized his habitual abuse of power and process, his relentless self-aggrandizement, and his breathtaking hubris. But he does not deserve this. Nobody does. Read more

Trump’s Obsession With And Against Black Women In Power. By Stacey Patton / Newsone

The history of this country is haunted by white men hunting down Black women because their flight, their freedom, and their refusal to bow threatened the whole architecture of white power.

And now, here we are again. Donald Trump, a racist convicted felon, has made Lisa Cook his obsession. She is a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, the first Black woman ever appointed to that role, a position no white man in history has ever had to defend so fiercely just to exist in. Read more

Trump Authorizes Military to Use ‘Full Force’ in Portland. By Richard Hall / Time

President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had directed the Pentagon to send troops to “protect” Portland, Oregon, adding that he was authorizing “full force, if necessary.”

“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Saturday morning. Read more

Education

Tracking Higher Ed’s Dismantling of DEI. By Erin Gretzinger, et. al. / The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The Chronicle is tracking higher ed’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. As colleges make changes in response to anti-DEI legislation and mounting political pressure, an inconsistent and confusing landscape has emerged. The Chronicle has tracked changes at 410 college campuses in 47 states and the District of Columbia.

The pace of change ramped up in 2025, when the Trump administration targeted DEI at colleges and universities through a series of of executive actions and threatened institutions that didn’t comply with a loss of federal funding. Newest Updates. Read more

Officials Place Des Moines Schools Leader On Leave After His Arrest By Immigration Agents. By Scott Mcfetridge / HuffPost

Officials have put the leader of Iowa’s largest school district on administrative leave a day after federal immigration agents arrested him because they said he was in the country illegally.

The Des Moines school board voted unanimously to place Superintendent Ian Roberts on paid leave during a three-minute-long special meeting. The board said Roberts was not available to carry out his duties for the 30,000-student district and stated that officials would reassess his status after getting more information. Read more

School funding could take a hit in the next federal budget. By Cory Turner / NPR

The battle over next year’s federal education budget has begun.

Congress and the White House have released not one, not two, but three competing funding visions for the nation’s K-12 schools in fiscal year 2026. And education researchers warn that two of those three proposals — from the White House and House Republicans — would impose steep cuts on some of the United States’ most vulnerable students and disadvantaged school communities. Read more

World

An Ugly American berates the United Nations — and shames the rest of us. By Chauncey Devega / Salon

Trump’s angry speech before the General Assembly was “coarse absurdist theater”

Talking for nearly an hour, Trump held little back. The UN, he declared, is useless: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?…For the most part, at least for now, all they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war.” Read more

Russia-NATO conflict: Drones and jets in Europe’s airspace could mean war. By Joshua Keating / Vox

In the early months of the war in Ukraine, Gen. Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff, carried a note card in his briefcase outlining what he saw as the main priorities when it came to the US and NATO approach to the war.

As reported by the Washington Post, they were: No. 1: “Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the U.S. military and NATO with Russia.” No. 2: “Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.” No. 3: “Strengthen and maintain NATO unity.” No. 4: “Empower Ukraine and give them the means to fight.” Read more

Warning to you and your loved ones. By Robert Reich / Substack

Friends, Actions now being taken by Trump and his regime may seem far-removed from your daily life or the lives of people you care about. But they’re not.

The U.S. military has attacked three boats in the Caribbean Sea suspected of smuggling drugs, killing at least 17 people. Why should you worry? Because Trump’s claims that the Constitution gives him the right to kill anyone he believes to be transporting drugs into the United States could be used to justify murdering you or your loved ones. Read more

What does the impending expiry of the African Growth and Opportunity Act mean? By Scott Simon / NPR

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks with Reuben Brigety, a former U.S. ambassador to the African Union, about the importance of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which expires next week.

REUBEN BRIGETY: Thank you for having me. SIMON: How does AGOA work? Read more and listen here

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Grace and Disgrace. By David Remnick / The New Yorker

On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, a ninth-grade dropout with a bowl haircut named Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, home to the oldest historically Black congregation in South Carolina. Roof, twenty-one, carried a .45-calibre Glock semi-automatic and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets.

The daughter of Ethel Lance, who died at the age of seventy, told him, “You took something very precious away from me . . . but I forgive you.” Obama later said that the “decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families.” Erika Kirk, spoke of her husband’s killer in the language of absolution. “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” she said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do. President Donald Trump, who spoke next, embraced Erika Kirk, but at the microphone he all but rebuked the spirit of her forgiveness. Read more

Today’s Christian Right Is More About Vengeance Than Kindness. By Zaid Jilani / NYT

I’m starting to miss the Christian conservatives I grew up with.

Unlike the Christian right of my childhood, today’s variations — some of which see President Trump as a religious figure — seem incapable of being compassionate toward outgroups like mine. I think back to the days right after Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush — the politician most closely associated with the 21st-century Christian right — visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., to emphasize that Muslims were just as American as anyone else. Read more

The Republican Effort To Remake Schools In God’s Image. By

A movement to dismantle the existing school system and remake it in a Christian nationalist image is well on its way across America.

Before the school year started, teachers in Texas began their typical process of preparing to welcome students back to class. They hung decorations to give their rooms a personal touch, picked out which books they’d have on their shelves and stocked up on supplies. But there was one new thing they also had to do, thanks to Texas lawmakers: hang a copy of the Ten Commandments where every student in the class could see it. Read more

Historical / Cultural

Freedom and the price of the ticket. By Kelly Brown Douglas / The Christian Century

In his posthumously published collection The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin explores the cost of being Black in America by first interrogating what it means to be White in America.

He observes that early European immigrants—Irish, Italians, French, and others—soon shed their ethnic identities upon arrival and became White. “They come through Ellis Island,” Baldwin writes, “where Giorgio becomes Joe, Pappavasiliu becomes Palmer, Evangelos becomes Evans, Goldsmith becomes Smith or Gold, and Avakian becomes King. So, with a painless change of name, and in the twinkling of an eye, one becomes a white American. . . . The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white.” Read more

Lt. Col. George E. Hardy, Tuskegee Airman, dies at 100. By Chandelis Duster / NPR

Lt. Col. George E. Hardy, the last surviving member of the Tuskegee Airmen who flew combat missions during WWII in Europe, has died. He was 100 years old.

Hardy died on Thursday, a spokesperson for Tuskegee Airmen, Inc., told NPR on Saturday. The organization remembered his legacy as one of “courage, resilience, tremendous skill and dogged perseverance against racism, prejudice and other evils, in a social media post on Friday. Read more

Assata Shakur, a fugitive American activist, dies in Cuba. By AP and NPR

Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was given political asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a U.S. prison where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a police officer, has died, her daughter and the Cuban government said.

A member of Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, Shakur’s case had long been emblematic of the fraught relations between the U.S. and Cuba. American authorities, including President Trump during his first term, demanded her return from the communist nation for decades. Read more

A year before the Little Rock Nine, Bobby Cain helped integrate Southern schools. By Emmanuel Felton / Wash Post

Mr. Cain, who has died at 85, was part of the Clinton 12, who integrated an all-White Tennessee high school in 1956. Two years later, the school was destroyed with dynamite.

Mr. Cain was 16 when, in 1956, he joined 11 other Black students in enrolling at the previously all-White Clinton High School in Tennessee. Unlike the Little Rock Nine, who faced mob resistance while integrating Little Rock Central High School the next year, he and the other members of the “Clinton 12” weren’t vetted or trained before they joined the front lines in the battle over desegregation. Read more

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” Is a Film for the Ages. By Richard Brody / The New Yorker

William Greaves’s great historical documentary, centered on a 1972 reunion of Harlem Renaissance luminaries, is still awaiting completion.

I believe that, if Greaves had been able to complete the movie soon after shooting its footage, it would literally have changed the course of history, and for the better. This film would have brought the Harlem Renaissance and its luminaries to far greater prominence, during an era that was often neglectful of that movement’s heroes—and of new Black artists, too, as Greaves himself experienced. Read more

Sports

‘He was older than our fathers’: An oral history of Satchel Paige’s final game at 59. By William Weinbaum / Andscape

Paige’s last pitching performance left an impact on players, fans and family who were there in Kansas City 60 years ago

In part 1 of Andscape’s in-depth Black History Month story about 1965, when Satchel Paige became the oldest player ever to appear in a Major League Baseball game, his Kansas City Athletics teammates and others revisited the hoopla when he joined the ballclub, including owner Charlie Finley providing an on-field rocking chair for the 59-year-old legend. Read more

As athletes lose their resolve, Trump finds a safe haven in sports. By Jerry Brewer / Wash Post

The biggest sports comeback of 2025 belongs to President Donald Trump. It is an uncomfortable truth, a reflection of athletes’ social lethargy more than any presidential savvy.

And it is an unavoidable reality because Trump catches as many sporting events as a world leader can, reveling in the photo ops and handshakes and pageantry, adding Fan-in-Chief to his seeming desire for omnipresence. Read more

MAGA Is Coming for the WNBA. By Alex Keeney / Politico

The nation’s most prominent — and most politically active — women’s pro sports league is on a collision course with Donald Trump.

The WNBA has partnered with groups like Planned Parenthood and GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ youth organization. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the league dedicated its entire season to “social justice.” Players went so far as to wear “Black Lives Matter” warmups and gameday jerseys emblazoned with the name of Breonna Taylor, a victim of police violence. Read more

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