Featured
How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months. Nikole Hannah-Jones / NYT
An assault on federal protections may bring about a new era of unchecked discrimination.
In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed an executive order strengthening the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned racial discrimination by employers. The O.F.C.C.P. specifically enforced the law among businesses and institutions that contracted with the government or received federal funds. The landmark law also banned segregation and discrimination in all public places, including schools, libraries, restaurants and buses.
On his second day in office, President Donald Trump labeled O.F.C.C.P.’s efforts to enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act illegal and discriminatory — presumably against white people. He signed his own executive order revoking Johnson’s on behalf of, as he put it, “hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American dream.” Read more
Political / Social
7 Trump-Era Court Cases That Threaten Civil Rights Protections. By Jonathan Forney / Capital B
Issues before the high court range from health care access and citizenship to workplace discrimination and redistricting.
“In America, for Black people, we’ve had a long season where our rights were generally respected,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU, who has been closely following the Trump administration’s legal moves. “We have Black elected officials … Black leaders in corporate America, we have extreme poverty, but we also have thriving middle class communities. We have many areas where we have lots of highly educated black people. All of those things rest on a legal framework that allows those rights to be protected.” Take a look at seven cases that could have a large impact on Black Americans. Read more
Related: The Supreme Court Just Weakened a Key Civil Rights Law. By Pema Levy / Mother Jones
How Awful Is the Republican Megabill? Here Are Four of the Worst Parts. Jacob S. Hacker and
The Trump-era Republican Party, we’re told, is a working-class party standing up for ordinary citizens against powerful elites. One section of the Republicans’ major policy bill is even titled “Working Families Over Elites.”
But that bill — the one and only major legislative effort of Trump 2.0 — is the most regressive, least populist policy package in memory. With its distinctive mix of tax cuts laser-focused on the rich and spending cuts that most hurt middle- and low-income Americans. The bill is awful for most Americans in many ways. Here are four of the worst. Read more
On a Quiet Southern Border, Empty Farms and Frightened Workers. Edgar Sandoval / NYT
As federal immigration sweeps have prompted protests across the nation, the border is eerily quiet, as would-be migrants stay away and undocumented workers hide at home. “Right now, I have zero workers,” said Nick Billman, who owns Red River Farms in the border town of Donna, Texas.
President Trump’s conflicting orders to exempt, then target, then again exempt farm workers from his aggressive immigration sweeps of work sites have caused havoc in agricultural industries across the country, where about 42 percent of farm workers are undocumented, according to the Agriculture Department. Read more
Related: Black Immigrant Families Left in the Dark as ICE Moves Loved Ones Across States. By
Top Dem Vows to Investigate ‘Piece of S**t’ Stephen Miller. By Tom Sanders / The Daily Beast
“One thing I’ve told people is that you can rest assured that if you are right now causing the level of harm that the Stephen Millers of the world are, that these ICE agents are, you are going to be held accountable,” the congressman added. “We’re not going to forget the harm that you’re causing to people and our government, and these folks are going to be held accountable.”
Garcia claimed the American Dream was being “ripped away” from immigrants by mass deportation raids conducted by ICE agents, who Favreau accused of “terrorizing communities” throughout the country. Read more
Education
We can still save education — and that’s the key to saving democracy. By Henry A Giroux / Salon
Higher education nurtures critical thinking and democratic action. That’s why the right wants to destroy it. Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University, Oct. 14, 2023.
Schools and universities, long viewed as spaces for critical thought, a culture of questioning, and civic development, are being transformed into ideological battlegrounds, reduced to mere appendages of corporate and state power, and subject to state violence. Journalists increasingly describe this as a war, a campaign of annihilation. In such times, the question is no longer whether education matters, but whether it can survive as a democratic force. Read more
University of Virginia president to resign amid Trump administration DEI probe. By Margaret Brennan / CBS News
On Friday, the fight with U.S. higher education started by America’s 47th president, Donald Trump, landed at the university founded by its third president, Thomas Jefferson.
The University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, submitted his resignation Friday in an effort to resolve Trump administration demands related to a federal investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to sources familiar with the matter. Read more
Related: UC immediately closing DEI offices, campus centers for minority students. By Zack Carreon / WVXU
Related: Alabama SB 129: Professors ‘walking on eggshells’ due to anti-DEI law. By Williesha Morris / AL
Florida and other Southern public universities form new accreditation panel. By Elizabeth Crisp / The Hill
Public universities in Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee are eschewing long-standing accrediting bodies like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) to create their own certification panel, officials announced Thursday.
The formation of the new Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE) follows Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s battle with SACSCOC over its standards as he pushed his state’s colleges to adopt more conservative approaches to education. Read more
The GOP megabill takes aim at universities. But Hillsdale College gets a carveout. By Caitlin Oprysko / Politico
President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress are angling to use their megabill to turn the screws on elite liberal colleges that take millions in taxpayer funds while sitting on endowments worth tens of billions of dollars. But a single college that’s a paragon of conservative higher education has managed to secure a carveout after finding itself in the crossfire.
Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts school of fewer than 2,000 students located in southern Michigan, is one of a slew of smaller institutions that had been working to avoid being swept up in the GOP effort to raise taxes on the seemingly bottomless endowments of household names like Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Read more
4 HBCUs Come Together To Launch Groundbreaking Digital Learning Platform. By Shannon Dawson / Newsone
The innovative HBCU platform offers a flexible and inclusive online learning experience, providing over 33 degree and certificate programs designed to support diverse learners.
The HBCU community is celebrating a major milestone with the launch of the eHBCU Consortium Portal, a groundbreaking digital learning initiative led by Delaware State University, Southern University and A&M College, Alabama State University, and Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design (PLC) in Detroit, the first design-focused HBCU in the U.S. Read more
World
The Judgment of History Won’t Save Gaza. By David Wallace-Wells / NYT
For those who have been following the conflict closely, few of these facts — or even those many more outlined in Hansen’s 10,000-word account — will seem unfamiliar, either in particular or in kind. But “familiar” is one thing we say when what we mean is simply that we’ve become inured.
Not that long ago, Americans would often invoke the judgment of history when considering domestic disputes and global conflict, as though in the fullness of time the world’s perspective would invariably converge on justice. But things don’t always become clearer as time passes. Just as often, the memory fades and the particularities blur, with those marking their objections in the heat of the moment growing eventually hoarse as everyone else simply marches on. Read more
Who’s the Real Bully of the Middle East? The Intercept Briefing
Iranian American author Hooman Majd on the Israel–Iran ceasefire, Trump’s role in escalating the conflict, and whether diplomacy can survive.
A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran announced Monday appears to be holding. President Donald Trump made the announcement after unilaterally dragging the U.S. into the conflict and authorizing strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites using 30,000-pound bunker busters. “ You don’t have to be anti-war to understand that diplomacy in this case would’ve been better,” said Hooman Majd, an Iranian American writer and the author of three books on Iran. Majd is a contributor to NBC News and covered the 2015 Iran deal for the network. Read more
In Sudan, where children clung to life, doctors say USAID cuts have been fatal. By Katharine Houreld and Hafiz Haroun / Wash Post
The Trump administration’s cuts to USAID had an immediate and deadly impact in war-ravaged Sudan, according to civilians, doctors and aid officials.
Disease and famine are spreading unchecked. More than half the population, some 30 million people, need aid. More than 12 million have fled their homes. For so many families barely hanging on, programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) were a lifeline — providing food to the hungry and medical care for the sick. Read more
‘Kiss of death’: South Florida reacts to end of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status. By Syra Ortiz Blanes and Churchill Ndonwie / Miami Herald
Nadine Mallebranche was only five years old when her family fled the political upheaval of Francois “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Haiti in the late 1980s.
Everything changed for Mallebranche when Haitians were granted deportation protections and work permits under Temporary Protected Status. For the last 15 years, she has not had to fear being sent back to a country she doesn’t remember. She could legally work as a store supervisor. But on Friday, Mallebranche, now 45, learned that the Trump administration is ending TPS for over half-a-million Haitians living in the United States. Come this fall, she could be forced to return to a gang-ridden Caribbean country struggling with record hunger and political instability. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Catholic Bishops Try to Rally Opposition to Trump’s Immigration Agenda. Elizabeth Dias / NYT
Leading prelates are expressing outrage at the drive toward mass deportation.
They are increasingly invoking Pope Leo XIV’s leadership and Pope Francis’s legacy against Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, and prioritizing humane treatment of immigrants as a top public issue. They are protesting the president’s current domestic policy bill in Congress, showing up at court hearings to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to put compassion for humans ahead of political allegiances. Read more
Traitors to the Earth: Fascism, Christian Nationalism, and the Tech Elite. By
They understand that what they’re doing is devastating, and they’re doing it anyway,” says Astra Taylor.
In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Taylor joins host Kelly Hayes to unpack the apocalyptic politics of the right — and why we need “a movement that is attuned to the fact that the people we’re up against are traitors to this planet, and its people, and the other species who we share the earth with.” Read more and listen here
Zohran Mamdani: NYC Mayor Hopeful With Interfaith Roots. By Dilip Amin Patheos
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, is the son of Hindu mother Mira Nair and Muslim father Mahmood Mamdani. Mira is an acclaimed Indian-American filmmaker, and Mahmood is a Ugandan political scientist of Indian origin, with ancestral roots in Gujarat, India. In early 2025, Zohran had an Islamic nikah with Brooklyn-based Syrian-American artist Rama Duwaji.
Zohran Mamdani is a progressive American politician currently serving as a member of the New York State Assembly from the 36th district in Queens, a position he has held since 2021. He is affiliated with both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. Read more
Texas 10 Commandments law is about baiting Supreme Court. By Chris Brennan / USA Today
The creeping Christian nationalist plot to force religion into public schools ‒ calculated to provoke legal challenges that could allow the conservative U.S. Supreme Court supermajority to obliterate part of our First Amendment ‒ took one step forward and one step backward in the same week recently.
Rachel Laser, who leads Americans United for Separation of Church and State, told me these Ten Commandments mandates are “an effort to turn America into a country that prefers European Christians over a country that’s dedicated to a pluralistic democracy and equality for all.” Read more
Historical / Cultural
We’re Raising a Generation of Black Kids Who Don’t Understand Blackness. Here’s How it Happened. By Lawrence Ware / The Root
There is a tragedy happening in the Black community — like watching a car crash in slow motion. This generation of Black kids neither understand nor appreciate what it means to be Black. And it didn’t just happen overnight: a quick history lesson to show us how we got here.
We moved out of the Black communities we had formed and started moving to the suburbs. Our houses got bigger and our cars more expensive. Because of where we now lived, our kids started attending predominantly white schools. We thought we’d made it…then we saw that there was an underside to this success. Read more
Beyoncé Makes Major Donation to HBCU Band. By Wali Pitt / HBCU Gameday
When Beyoncé steps onto a stage, the world watches. But the impact runs even deeper when she steps up for her community.
The Houston native and global music icon has again shown her commitment to uplifting Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). The BeyGOOD Foundation’s philanthropic arm has gifted $100,000 to Texas Southern University’s world-renowned Ocean of Soul Marching Band. Read more
R&B Legend Walter Scott of The Whispers Dies at 81. By Fisher Jack / Eurweb
Soul music pioneer and co-founder of The Whispers leaves behind a lasting legacy after decades of chart-topping hits
*Sadly, another great one has been called home. Legendary R&B vocalist Walter Scott, co-founder of the beloved soul group The Whispers, has passed away at age 81. His death follows a brief illness that had recently kept him from performing. News of his passing has left fans and fellow artists in mourning worldwide. Read more
Sports
A father’s greatest gift: How Corey Gauff built the foundation for his superstar daughter. By Mitch Michals / Baseline
Coco Gauff’s dad joined Tennis Channel 2’s ‘Second Serve’ to discuss her dream Roland Garros title and a never-ending quest for excellence.
Coco Gauff is a superstar in every sense of the word, and she has taken tennis to new heights with her play and off-court endeavors. The American has lived up to the enormous expectations placed on her as a teenager and continues to conduct herself with class and elegance in every setting. It all started with family, as her parents Corey and Candi Gauff instilled the key ingredients to becoming a good person in their daughter long before she picked up a tennis racquet. Read more
America needs a vacation from Stephen A. Smith. By Matt Yoder / AwfulAnnouncing
Stephen A. Smith has been a ubiquitous presence for a long time, but it has reached overdrive in 2025. The man is everywhere, and his presence is only growing. He now has a hand in ESPN’s daytime programming, SiriusXM radio, podcasting, politics, and acting.
However, it seems that SAS is especially empowered now that he is ESPN’s $100 million man, and he simultaneously has the freedom and power to pursue any other venture he wants. And that’s a compliment to his work ethic. No man in sports, media, politics, entertainment, or any other industry probably works longer hours than Stephen A. The man just doesn’t stop. And that’s part of the problem. Read more
The King reigns on: LeBron James opts into $52.6m Lakers contract for 23rd NBA season. Reuters
LeBron James will become the first player in NBA history to play in 23 seasons when he returns to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2025-26.
James, the NBA’s career leading scorer, is exercising his $52.6m player option for the upcoming season, Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul told ESPN on Sunday. It is unclear if James, who turns 41 in December, intends to play past the upcoming season. Read more
Dave Parker, Hall of Famer and 7-time All-Star, dies at 74. By C. Trent Rosecrans and Rob Biertempfel / The Athletic
Dave Parker left an indelible imprint on Pittsburgh Pirates history by swatting titanic home runs and making fantastic throws from right field. Yet, in the earliest stages of his career, it was Parker’s speed that caught everyone’s attention.
Pirates relief pitcher Kent Tekulve saw Parker for the first time during minor-league spring training in 1971. “He hit a ground ball two steps to the backhand of the shortstop, and beat it easy,” Tekulve said. “Before he got big and they changed his swing, probably the closest player I could compare him to, as far as flat-out speed, was Omar Moreno.” Read more
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