Featured
The MAGA principle tested: Trump grows “more and more radical with each passing day.” By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Donald Trump, the Führer principle, and America’s worsening democracy crisis
The American people and the world know a great deal about Donald Trump. Even though he is an expert and compulsive liar, he is candid and transparent in his behavior and thinking in many ways. If he takes over in 2025 and becomes the country’s first dictator, the American people and their elites cannot say that they were surprised. When the authoritarian speaks always be sure to believe him or her. It is essential for your survival.
Perhaps most troubling (and too little discussed by the mainstream news media and political class for reasons of denial and fear) is Donald Trump’s repeated channeling of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Trump has almost literally quoted Adolf Hitler and “Mein Kampf” with his threats and promises to purify the blood of the country by removing the “human vermin” from within its borders. Like Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Donald Trump repeatedly threatens to get revenge and retribution against his enemies. Trump has also threatened to censor if not outright ban freedom of the press and freedom of speech because he views the news media as “the enemy of the people.” The Nazis used the slur “lugenpresse.” Read more
Political / Social
Kamala Harris is the worst nightmare of America’s far right. By Robert Reich / The Guardian (Image The Hill)
Trump, JD Vance, and their Maga allies are misogynists who want to control women. Harris could not be more of a threat
When Joe Biden stepped down in support of Kamala Harris, he didn’t just pass the torch to another generation. He passed it from old white men to America’s future. Consider that women now compose a remarkable 60% of college undergraduates. And that by 2050, it’s estimated that America will consist mostly of people of color – 30% more Black people than today, 60% more Latinos and twice the number of Asian Americans. The power shift has already started. Read more
Related: Pro-Wrestling Explains Why Trump Is Scared of Kamala. By Jonathan V. Last / The Bulwark
Related: Autoworkers Union Endorses Kamala Harris for President. Nicholas Nehamas and Noam Scheiber / NYT
Who is Kamala Harris’ acclaimed academic father, Donald J. Harris? By Bethamy Gemmell / WGTC
Donald Jasper Harris (born 1938) is a Jamaican-American economist and academic, who has served as a professor of economics at Stanford University from 1972 to 1998, before his retirement and honoring with the title of professor emeritus. Born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, Harris earned his B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) at the University College of the West Indies in 1960, before progressing to a Ph.D. at (Doctorate of Philosophy) University of California, Berkeley in 1966.
Outside of Stanford, Harris has served as an economic consultant for the government in his home nation of Jamaica. He met Shyamala Gopalan, a then-graduate student of Indian descent and future acclaimed biomedical expert on breast cancer, at a meeting of the Berkley Afro-American Association, marrying Gopalan in 1963. They had two daughters, Kamala (born 1964) and Maya (born 1967) before divorcing in 1972. Gopalan died of colon cancer in 2009. Read more
Related: Willie Brown on Kamala Harris: ‘She’ll Deport My Ass.’ By Jonathan Martin / Politico
Trump and Vance seem ready to offend as many women voters as possible. By Jennifer Ruben / Wash Post
If you wanted to design a presidential ticket most likely to offend women voters, you would pick as the presidential nominee an adjudicated rapist, someone caught bragging about sexually assaulting women and who comes with a history of demeaning and insulting women. You would make it someone who mused about punishing women for having an abortion and who boasts about taking away women’s bodily integrity.
Then, for vice president, you would find someone who has implied women should stay in abusive relationships (he denies that’s what he meant but listen for yourself), wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest, favors a “federal response” to prevent women from traveling to states where abortion is legal, accuses single women (“childless cat ladies”) of lacking a stake in America’s future, votes against protection for in vitro fertilization and wants higher taxes for childless people. (He later said he had not meant to offend cats.) Read more
Related: As Trump Runs From Project 2025, JD Vance Links Its Architects Directly To Him. By
Related: The Never Trumpers are clear on their goal. By Charles Sykes / The Atlantic
Trump Questions Harris’s Racial Identity, Saying She Only ‘Became Black’ Recently. Jonathan Weisman, Maya King and Zolan Kanno-Youngs / NYT
In an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Donald Trump also said his choice of Senator JD Vance as vice president will not matter to voters.
Former President Donald J. Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s identity as a Black woman on Wednesday in front of an audience of Black journalists, suggesting his opponent for the presidency had adopted her racial profile as a way to gain a political advantage. Read more
Biden Unveils Plan For Supreme Court Changes, Including Term Limits. By Aamer Madhani / HuffPost
President Joe Biden has unveiled a long-awaited proposal for changes at the U.S. Supreme Court, calling on Congress to establish term limits and an enforceable ethics code for the court’s nine justices. He’s also pressing lawmakers to ratify a constitutional amendment limiting presidential immunity.
The White House on Monday detailed the contours of Biden’s court proposal, one that appears to have little chance of being approved by a closely divided Congress with just 99 days to go before Election Day. Read more
Opponents of DEI want to stifle America’s progress. We can’t let that happen. By Stacey Abrams and Margaret Huang / USA Today
Our country’s progress, catalyzed by historic movements that pushed our nation to live up to its highest ideals, is undeniable – yet far from complete.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen repeatedly in our nation’s history, movements for justice, recognition and inclusion often spark a backlash from those who wrongly believe that the expansion of the American dream comes at their own expense. Today, we find ourselves fighting back against a powerful, multipronged assault on diversity, equity and inclusion. Opponents of DEI seek to repeal the centuries of progress we have made to ensure equitable opportunity for all Americans. Read more
Income gap between Black and white US residents shrank between Gen Xers and millennials, study says. By AP and The Grio
The income gap between white and Black young adults was narrower for millennials than for Generation X, according to a new study that also found the chasm between white people born to wealthy and poor parents widened between the generations. In this February 2021 photo, activists appeal for a $15 minimum wage near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C
By age 27, Black Americans born in 1978 to poor parents ended up earning almost $13,000 a year less than white Americans born to poor parents. That gap had narrowed to about $9,500 for those born in 1992, according to the study released last week by researchers at Harvard University and the U.S. Census Bureau. Read more
Related: Racial Homogeneity and the American Social Safety Net. By Derrick Day / Patheos
Belle Wheelan to retire as head of Southern accreditor. By Doug Lederman / Inside Higher Ed.
Belle S. Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, will retire next June after what will have been 20 years in the role, the accrediting agency announced Monday.
Wheelan, who served as Virginia’s education secretary and as president of two community colleges in Virginia before taking the reins at SACS in 2005, has been an influential, outspoken—and sometimes controversial—figure in accreditation and federal policy circles. She broke numerous racial and gender barriers in her career and in her role as an accreditor advocated for diversity as well as for student learning. Read more
World News
Will Hezbollah and Israel Go to War? By Dexter Filkins / The New Yorker
Months of fighting at the border threaten to ignite an all-out conflict that could devastate the region.
Hezbollah has been in conflict with Israel since the group was founded, in the nineteen-eighties, but in the past year the fighting has grown dangerously intense. On October 7th, Hamas militants surged across Israel’s southwestern border and killed more than eleven hundred people. The next day, Hezbollah fired into Israel from the north, launching a volley of rockets that provoked a retaliatory strike. Since then, the shelling and bombing by each side have intensified, stoking fears of an all-out war that would devastate the region. Read more
Netanyahu Smeared the Pro-Palestine Protest Movement. Congress Clapped. By Jonah Valdez / The Intercept
As thousands of protesters gathered outside the Capitol, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress — and spent a significant portion of his hourlong speech attacking the U.S. pro-Palestinian protest movement with insults and misinformation.
More broadly, Netanyahu claimed that movements for Palestine liberation were choosing “to stand with evil … to stand with Hamas.” The prime minister also claimed that the pro-Palestinian movement is funded by the Iranian government, labeling protesters “Iran’s useful idiots,” without offering any evidence to substantiate his claim. Read more
Global Black Thought: An Interview with Keisha N. Blain & Robert Greene II. By Jocelyn Dawson / AAIHS
In today’s feature, Jocelyn Dawson, the Director of Journals at the University of Pennsylvania Press, interviews Drs. Keisha N. Blain and Robert Greene II about the new journal, Global Black Thought.
Published by Penn Press, Global Black Thought is the official journal of the African American Intellectual History (AAIHS) devoted to the study of the Black intellectual tradition. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Most Revealing Moment of a Trump Rally. By McKay Coppins / The Atlantic
A close reading of the prayers delivered before the former president speaks
For all the exhaustive coverage of Trump’s campaign rallies, even before the assassination attempt at one of them in July, relatively little attention has been paid to the prayers that start each one. These invocations aren’t broadcast live on cable news, nor do they typically attract the interest of journalists, who gravitate toward the more impious utterances of the candidate himself. But the prayers offered before Trump speaks illuminate this perilous moment in American politics just as well as anything he says from the podium. And they help explain how the stakes of this year’s election have come to feel so apocalyptically high. Read more
Project 2025: A blueprint for the Christian nationalist vision for America. By Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes / Salon
As Project 2025’s official website explains (and doesn’t this sound like it could come directly from the mouth of vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance?): “It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.
The wholesale capture of the state is the ultimate goal of its Christian nationalist architects. Project 2025 simply clarifies just how they plan to implement their drive for power. Each of its sections — from “taking the reins of government” by centralizing executive authority in the office of the President to securing “the common defense” by expanding every branch of the military — is worth reviewing. Read more
How Christian Fundamentalism Was Born Again. By Michael Luo / The New Yorker
Nearly a century ago, a single trial seemed to shatter the movement’s place in America. It’s returned in a new form—but for old reasons
The Butler Act, as it came to be known, was less than two hundred words long. It forbade educators to teach “any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” A deputy sheriff arrested Scopes on a misdemeanor charge of violating the Butler Act. His trial was set for the summer of 1925. A deputy sheriff arrested Scopes on a misdemeanor charge of violating the Butler Act. His trial was set for the summer of 1925. As it would be again in our time: teachers being told what or how to teach; science regarded as an out-of-control, godless shibboleth; books tossed out of schools and libraries; loyalty oaths; and white supremacists promising that a revitalized white Protestant America would lead its citizens out of the slough of moral and spiritual decay to rise again, regardless of what or whose rights and freedoms might be trampled.” Read more
“The savior of Israel”: Antisemitism expert on what Trump’s “good Jew and bad Jew sorting” signals. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
“Trump has found a way to put his finger on the Achilles heel of a Jewish community,” notes Sharon Nazarian
In an attempt to further sound the alarm about the role of antisemitism and white supremacy in the Age of Trump and the American and global antidemocracy crisis, and specifically how his authoritarian regime will further unleash such antidemocratic values and forces if Donald Trump were to take power in the 2025 Election, I recently spoke with Sharon Nazarian, a distinguished leader in the fight against antisemitism and hate worldwide. Read more
How Martin Luther King Jr. foresaw Mississippi’s new Episcopal Black bishop.
King contrasted Mississippi’s past with his optimistic vision of the state as an ‘oasis of freedom and justice.’ The Rev. Dorothy Sanders Wells, a native of Mobile, Ala., explains the different sections of the flag of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi in Ridgeland, Miss., July 19, 2024
It’s a testament to King’s vision that on this past July 20, the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi consecrated the Rt. Rev. Dorothy Sanders Wells the first Black and the first female Episcopal bishop in the Diocese of Mississippi. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The Black Ballot: Unraveling The Legacy Of Civil Rights And Political Shifts In America. By Brianna Sharpe / Newsone
NewsOne is back with Episode 3 of The Black Ballot, an exclusive new multi-episodic docuseries exploring the history of African Americans voting.
Each episode takes a deep dive into how American presidents’ decisions and policies have impacted the short and long-term trajectory of the conditions for African Americans, particularly as it pertains to voting. Episode 3 focuses on the intersection of the civil rights movement and the evolving political landscape in America. Read more
Robert L. Allen, Who Recounted a Naval Mutiny Trial, Dies at 82. Richard Sandomir / NYT
He wrote of how 50 Black sailors were court-martialed for refusing to keep loading munitions onto cargo ships in 1944 after explosions had killed hundreds. They were exonerated this month.
Robert L. Allen, who definitively told the story of 50 Black sailors who were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny for refusing to continue to load munitions onto cargo ships after explosions had blown apart two ships at a California port during World War II, killing hundreds, died on July 10 at his home in Benicia, in Northern California. He was 82. Mr. Allen, a writer, activist and academic, died a week before the Navy exonerated the men. Read more
More than 900 Native American children died at U.S. boarding schools. By Dana Hedgpeth and Sari Horwitz / Wash Post
The U.S. government should apologize for policies that traumatized generations of children and their families, a new federal report urges.
More than 900 Native American children died while being forced to attend Indian boarding schools, according to a new federal report that urges the U.S. government to formally apologize for the enduring trauma inflicted by its systematic effort to assimilate the children and destroy their culture. Many of the children were buried in at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 former schools across the country, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior report released Tuesday. Read more
15 Black authors whose books you need to read. By the Grio
The works of these writers span multiple genres, from historical fiction to memoirs to sci-fi. US Author and Nobel Prize in literature winner Toni Morrison receives the Honor Medal of The City of Paris (Grand Vermeil) at Mairie de Paris on November 4, 2010 in Paris, France
When Black authors write what they know, the result is a collection of writings — novels, short stories, essays, poems and articles — that resonate with, inspire and create dialogues among present and future readers. The 15 Black authors recommended below are proof. They all famously wrote about the Black experience, and their work, spanning multiple genres, influences people of all ages. It also makes each of them a respected figure in the literary world. Read more
Sports
Simone Biles and U.S. win Olympic gymnastics team all-around gold. By Becky Sullivan / NPR
When Simone Biles stepped up to perform on the vault at Tuesday’s team all-around final at the Olympic Games, her teammate Jordan Chiles was watching closely.
It had been this exact moment back in 2021, at the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where it had all unraveled for Biles. Amid the intense pressure of the world’s expectations, she had found herself in arena suddenly unable to perform her own high-flying routines, beset by the “twisties,” mysteriously incapable of twisting in midair despite having done so thousands of times in her life. Read more
Related: US gymnast Fred Richard is out to make history at the Olympics. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Track Icon Edwin Moses Is Taking on a New Challenge: Keeping His Sport Clean. By Jon Wertheim / SI
The hurdling hero has channeled the dedication and dominance from his days on the track into a crusade against doping. Moses graduated from Morehouse College.
Moses lives in Atlanta. He maintains, as ever, that “it’s cool to be a nerd.” Even though he is more than 36 years removed from the domination of competition, you wouldn’t know it, given his insight into the current state of play in track and field, and international sports in general. Read more
Stephen Curry, Kamala Harris and the reentry of political activism into the stadium. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Upcoming presidential election is a potential tsunami that could activate a dormant athletic community
I decided to ask Curry a question that I knew was near and dear to his heart – and to his body politic. I asked about his friendship with Vice President Kamala Harris. “It’s a big, big, deal to say the least,” Curry said. “She represents the Bay Area. She’s been a big supporter of us and so want to get that energy right back to her.” Curry said that he was just excited, “knowing obviously we’re representing our country here and this is a very monumental next couple of months for our country and the direction that we’re headed. So just excited for the journey ahead for her.” What I find promising about Curry’s unflinching support is that his words — or perhaps the presidential campaign — will reactivate a pro athlete community that largely and lately has been dormant. Read more
Russell Wilson, ‘rejuvenated’ and ‘grateful,’ gets fresh start with Steelers. By Mark Maske / Wash Post
The former Super Bowl winner for the Seahawks is in training camp with his third NFL team after two turbulent seasons in Denver.
Russell Wilson’s 13th NFL season is nearly at hand, and his 36th birthday is four months away. The glory of his 10 seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, with his nine Pro Bowl selections and two Super Bowl appearances, gave way to two seasons of tumult with the Denver Broncos. Now, in the early days of his first training camp with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the tempting narrative is that Wilson is vying to reestablish himself among the league’s quarterbacking royalty. Read more
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