Featured
Why Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department. By Michael C. Bender / NYT
Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down. Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.
Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it. The Education Department’s primary role has been sending federal money to public schools, administering college financial aid and managing federal student loans. The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and supports programs for students with disabilities. Read more
Related: The Anti-D.E.I. Crusader Who Wants to Dismantle the Department of Education. By Ross Douthat / NYT
Related: GOP voucher plan would divert billions in taxes to private schools. By Laura Meckler / Wash Post
Related: Asked if U.S. Needs Education Department, Its Head Says ‘No.’ By Michael C. Bender / NYT
Political / Social
In just five days, Trump has set the country back nearly 100 years. By Dana Milbank / Wash Post
With a modesty we have come to expect of him, President Donald Trump informed Congress on Tuesday night that he had already ushered in “the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.” He told the assembled lawmakers that he “accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four or eight years.”
Armed with a portfolio of fabricated statistics, Trump judged that “the first month of our presidency is the most successful in the history of our nation — and what makes it even more impressive is that you know who No. 2 is? George Washington.” Republican lawmakers laughed, whooped and cheered. Read more
Related: Trump is fast dismantling the free press. We all have to stop him. By Dana Milbank / Wash Post
Related: Donald Trump Is a Fake Populist. By Alex Shephard / TNR
Trump’s War on DEI Is Dismantling Civil Rights Protections. By Brandon Tensley / Capital B
The administration claims that it’s targeting DEI. It’s really chipping away at civil rights protections.
“It’s a kind of misinformation. It’s a kind of racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ, ableist misinformation that allows [conservative actors] to target folks who have historically been marginalized in the U.S.,” said Victor Ray, a sociology professor at the University of Iowa. Read more
Related: War heroes are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge. By AP and NPR
Related: US attorney cries ‘DEI!’ Georgetown dean justly shuts him up. By Rex Huppke / USA Today
Bishop William Barber: GOP Tax Cuts “Mathematically Impossible” Without Gutting Medicaid and More. By Amy Goodman / Democracy Now
Republicans in Congress are pushing forward budget plans that would cut trillions in federal spending and give trillions more in tax cuts that disproportionately benefit corporations and the ultra-rich.
There’s no way you can do the kinds of cuts they’re talking about — it’s mathematically impossible — without touching Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” says Bishop William Barber, one of the participants. Barber also reflects on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were brutalized in Selma, Alabama, and stresses that economic justice was always at the heart of the movement alongside ending segregation and winning voting rights. Read more
Racism Isn’t the Only Cause of the Racial Wealth Gap. By Eric Herschthal / TNR
Between emancipation and 1920, Black families across the country had acquired 15 million acres of land; by 2000, they had lost 14 million of those acres. This land loss points to a much larger national problem: the racial wealth gap.
The average Black household today has 15 cents in total wealth for every one dollar held by the average white household. Though Black Americans are better off than their ancestors, the racial wealth gap remains stubbornly high and has only widened in the past four decades. In 2022, the average Black family had $211,596 in total wealth, a 150 percent increase from 40 years ago. But the average white family had $1,361,806, an increase of 237 percent. As of 2023, 18 percent of Black Americans lived in poverty, more than twice the poverty rate for non-Hispanic white Americans. Read more
Joy Reid’s Ratings Were Going Up When She Was Fired by MSNBC. By Corbin Bolies / Daily Beast
The Beast has obtained the audience ratings compiled by Nielsen which are used by news networks to assess the success of their shows and the people appearing on them—and they show no signs that Reid was experiencing an audience plunge out of line with her MSNBC co-stars. In fact she and all the other primetime line-up were on an upswing in February.
Ratings for every MSNBC primetime host declined in the period after the election, but Reid’s drops do not appear substantially more than her peers. Reid, who in 2020 became the first Black woman to host a primetime cable news show, often walked a different path than her primetime peers on the network. Read more
Spineless OU betrayal of Black alumni hurts. We don’t deserve this. By Amelia Robinson / The Columbus Dispatch
Ohio University — my alma mater — effectively disinvited thousands of Black alumni from our own party when it “placed on hold on” the Black Alumni Reunion this week in an ill-conceived and poorly executed press release.
Administrators said they “postponed” the reunion — an occurrence held every three years — to “assess the impacts of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ “Dear Colleague” letter as well as proposed State of Ohio legislation.” The Dolores Umbridge-esque and factually inaccurate Dear Colleague letter from the U.S. Department of Education said schools must eliminate “race-based decision-making” from campuses by the end of February or forfeit federal funding. Read more
World News
A Europe in Emotional Shock Grapples With a New Era. By Roger Cohen / NYT
It remains to be seen how far President Trump’s embrace of Russia and abandonment of traditional allies will go. But “the West” may be gone.
For decades a core objective of the Soviet Union was to “decouple” the United States from Europe. Decoupling, as it was called, would break the Western alliance that kept Soviet tanks from rolling across the Prussian plains. Now, in weeks, President Trump has handed Moscow the gift that eluded it during the Cold War and since. Read more
Related: Death and Destruction in Ukraine After Trump Betrayal. By Tim Miller / The Bulwark
The historical reality of land ownership in South Africa amid Trump’s criticisms. By Ali Rogin / PBS
There’s an escalating dispute between President Trump and South Africa over a new land policy that he says discriminates against the country’s white minority.
On Truth Social Friday, Trump criticized what he called the “terrible” treatment of farmers and offered them a “rapid pathway” to U.S. citizenship. Ali Rogin spoke with John Eligon, Johannesburg bureau chief for The New York Times, for more. Listen here
Haitian immigrants grapple with uncertainty as TPS end date looms. By
The decision to end temporary protected status for 500,000 Haitians living in the U.S. may force most of them to return to a country in crisis.
“The community is worried,” said the Rev. Samuel Nicolas, the church’s senior pastor. “For over 15 years, these individuals have built their lives here, believing TPS would eventually lead to permanent residency. Now, they are watching that hope slip away.”
Many fled the country after a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, killing more than 200,000 people and leaving an estimated 1.3 million people homeless. In the aftermath, people arrived in the U.S. and gained TPS protection, seeking stability that allowed them to rebuild their lives. But the program was never meant to be a permanent solution. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
As White House considers abandoning foreign aid, faith groups say they can’t do it alone. By Jack Jenkins / RNS
Responding to reports that President Donald Trump’s administration has touted “zeroing out” foreign aid, faith-based groups that receive government funding to offer assistance abroad and their religious allies are sounding the alarm that they cannot replace the agency’s crucial relief efforts on their own.
Despite their reluctance to speak to the press, some of the religious groups are prepping to publicly voice their frustrations Tuesday (March 11), when Carey and leaders from other religious groups such as World Relief, Bread for the World, Compassion International and ADRA, the global humanitarian arm of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, plan on convening a “Prayer Vigil for Foreign Aid” on Capitol Hill. Read more
The D C church that beat the Proud Boys in court now owns their name: An interview with Metropolitan AME pastor Bill Lamar. By Jasmin Pittman / The Christian Century
“There was no disagreement as to whether we should engage,” says Metropolitan AME pastor Bill Lamar, “but there was definitely a risk calculation.”
William H. Lamar IV is pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. In February, a judge granted the historic Black church the rights to the name Proud Boys, which the church sued for after the far-right group didn’t make payment on an earlier suit over members’ vandalism of the church. Read more
Trump’s Vision for America: I Am God. The Intercept Briefing
On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Lavin and Intercept reporter Jessica Washington examine the Christian right’s growing influence, its long-term strategy, and what, if anything, can be done to curb their vision for the country.
Washington warns that many liberals dismiss Trump’s alliance to the Christian right as fringe, missing its deep political impact. “While it’s this convenient political organizing tool, it is also a deeply held belief,” she says — one that rejects the idea that Black people and queer people have a rightful place in American leadership. Read more
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Historical / Cultural
How D.C. first lost its right to self-govern, and the long road to home rule. By Petula Dvorak / Wash Post
In 1871, Congress took over the capital city, blaming the District’s financial mess on Black voters.
Over the past century, plenty of presidents have criticized the state of affairs in their temporary hometown, including complaints about infrastructure, overcrowding and crime. Most recently, President Donald Trump has painted the District as a “dirty, crime-ridden death trap that must be taken over and properly run.” Read more
The US has pardoned insurrectionists twice before – and both times, years of violent racism followed. By Joseph Patrick Kelly and David Carson / The Conversation
Donald Trump is the third U.S. president to pardon a large group of insurrectionists. His clemency toward those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – including seditious conspiracy and assaults on police officers – was different in key ways from the two previous efforts, by Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1873.
But they share the apparent hope that their pardons would herald periods of national harmony. As historians of the period after the Civil War, we know that for Johnson and Grant, that’s not what happened. Read more
60 years after Bloody Sunday in Selma, elusive racial progress. By Debbie Elliott and Marisa Penaloza / NPR
People make the pilgrimage annually to walk across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, where on March 7, 1965, law officers attacked civil rights activists in an incident that became known as Bloody Sunday.
The late Georgia Congressman John Lewis was one of the leaders of what was supposed to be a march from Selma to Montgomery, motivated by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black man shot by a state trooper after a civil rights demonstration in nearby Marion, Ala. “We got to the highest point on this bridge,” Lewis said in an interview with NPR, standing on the bridge ten years ago. “Down below we saw a sea of blue – Alabama state troopers.” Read more
Related: Newly restored photos show ruin of the Selma march on its 60th anniversary. By Ayana Archie / NPR
The women who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and sustained a movement for social change. By Vicki Crawford / The Conversation
Historian Vicki Crawford was one of the first scholars to focus on women’s roles in the civil rights movement. Her 1993 book, “Trailblazers and Torchbearers,” dives into the stories of female leaders whose legacies have often been overshadowed.
Today she is the director of the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection, where she oversees the archive of his sermons, speeches, writings and other materials. Here, she explains the contributions of women who influenced King and helped to fuel some of the most significant campaigns of the civil rights era, but whose contributions are not nearly as well known. Read more
A Look at the Villain era of Soul Singer Bobby Womack. By Angela Johnson / The Root
In honor of what would have been his 81st birthday, we look back at the life and career of a talented singer and musician with a troubled backstory.
Singer-songwriter-musician Bobby Womack grew up in Cleveland, Ohio singing with his five brothers. Starting as the gospel group the Womack Brothers, they eventually changed their name to the Valentinos and their sound to R&B. Under the mentorship of soul singer Sam Cooke, Womack and his brothers landed a record deal and produced a string of hits, one of which became the first hit single for The Rolling Stones. Read more
Where To Watch ‘No Other Land,’ The Best Documentary Oscar Winner. By Dan Aulbach / Today
The documentary follows activist Basel Adra and journalist Yuval Abraham and their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Official trailer
Currently, the film is unavailable to stream in the US. NBC News reported that the film did not secure theatrical distribution in the United States due to political sensitivities around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the movie is available to view in select independent theaters. In a statement sent to TODAY.com, the film’s producers said, “The theatrical self release is still going strong, the film will be playing in 80+ theaters across the US this weekend and has crossed the $600k mark in box office.” Read more
Sports
Stephen A. Smith, star of ESPN and beyond, lands $100 million deal. By Ben Strauss / Wash Post
Smith will continue to star on “First Take” while continuing to host his YouTube show — and flirt with politics.
For more than a year, Stephen A. Smith has told anyone who would listen that he should be ESPN’s highest-paid employee. The case, he said, was simple: “Over the course of the last 12 years, I have been the champion in this industry, and all I’m asking folks to do is pay homage to the champion.” Read more
Related: Why LeBron James confronted Stephen A. Smith about Bronny James. By mark Giannotto / USA Today
Olympic Legend Carl Lewis, 63, Reveals He’s Never Had a Long-Term Relationship: ‘Thought It Would Hurt My Career.’ By Justine Fisher / People
The ’80s and ’90s track and field star talks about his life and career in the new documentary ‘I’m Carl Lewis’
The 10-time Olympic medal winner, 63, reveals in I’m Carl Lewis that he’s never been in a long-term relationship because he feared it would affect his professional aspirations. The documentary, premiering at SXSW and screening at the festival March 7, 9 and 12, was directed by Julie Anderson and Chris Hay. Read more
Trump Golf Weekends’ Cost To Taxpayers Hits $18.2 million. By S.V. Date / HuffPost
Donald Trump has played golf at his own courses in Florida on six of the seven weekends since his second term began.
Donald Trump’s insistence on playing golf at his Florida courses has now cost American taxpayers more than $18 million since he regained the presidency, setting him on a pace to exceed the $151.5 million he spent in his first term, according to a HuffPost analysis. Trump and his entourage fly down on Air Force One while the military brings down the vehicles for his motorcade on C-17 transports. Because Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, straddles the width of the barrier island, police boats with machine guns mounted on the bows patrol the Intracoastal while a Coast Guard vessel is stationed off the beach in the Atlantic. Additional costs include law enforcement and explosive-sniffing dogs. Read more
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