Featured

Elon Musk Is Preoccupied With Something He Doesn’t Understand. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT

There is no particular mystery to unravel around the political views of Elon Musk, the billionaire technology and social media executive. He is — and for some time, has been — on the far right wing of American politics. He is an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, using his platform on the website X to spread a worldview that is as extreme as it is untethered from reality.

Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting and profit-seeking at the company. Read more

At the Heritage Foundation, the Anti-DEI Crusade Is Part of a Bigger War. By Isabela Dias / Mother Jones

What I learned at an event for “seizing the moment” to end Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Kevin Roberts (right), president of The Heritage Foundation Mother Jones illustration; Drew Angerer/Getty

Last week, I attended an event at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, focused on “seizing the moment to defeat DEI.” I have written before about the right’s use of the acronym as a codeword to attack social progress generally and the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 specifically. The panel at Heritage—a think tank that in recent years has taken a turn from Reagnite conservatism to Viktor Orbán-loving, Trumpian populism—was a particular strain of this provocation. Read more

Scholars Come Together to Present Evidence-Based Discourse on DEI. By Lois Elfman / Diverse Issues In Higher Ed

On March 7, Dr. Shaun Harper, university professor, provost professor of education, business and public policy, and the founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center, was watching a livestream from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, titled “Divisive, Excessive, Ineffective: The Real Impact of DEI on College Campuses.” Image IID

Committee member U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah quipped: “Today’s hearing addresses a long growing cancer that resides in the hearts of American academic institutions.” Owens called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives “demeaning and racist.” Read more

Political / Social

Biden steps up efforts to reach voters of color. By Julia Mueller / The Hill

President Biden’s campaign is stepping up efforts to reach voters of color ahead of a November showdown with former President Trump and amid signs that some Black and Latino voters are turning away from the Democratic Party.

President Biden’s campaign last week launched ads speaking directly to Black voters in battleground states, arguing another Trump term would be a “disaster” for the demographic. A day later, the campaign announced a program to engage Latino voters — and Biden said during a campaign stop in Arizona that they’re “the reason why, in large part, I beat Donald Trump.” Read more

Who brought the crime, the drugs and the rape? It was him. By Kirk Swearingen / Salon

Trump’s infamous 2015 speech claimed immigrants were “bringing crime” and were “rapists.” Talk about projection

When Donald Trump came down that tacky golden escalator in his grotesque Fifth Avenue building on June 16, 2015, to the half-hearted applause of a group of paid actors, he had a lot of incoherent, half-baked things to say in announcing his seemingly unlikely campaign for president. But his most quoted utterance of that day, ostensibly about Mexican immigrants, turned out to be a fair and accurate preview about what he would offer America as Republican candidate and then president: Read more

Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump: Four Things to Know. By Kim Wehle / The Bulwark

It’s the one criminal case against Trump likely to conclude before Election Day.

NEXT MONDAY, THE NEW YORK JUDGE overseeing the criminal hush money case against Donald Trump, Justice Juan M. Merchan, will hold a hearing to determine whether to further delay the trial. Monday was supposed to mark the start of the trial itself, but Merchan pushed it back it last week until at least mid-April. The indictment in this case, brought a year ago by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, was the first of the four criminal cases lodged against Trump since he left office, and probably the weakest. Read more

Republicans Who Do Not Regularly Watch Fox Are Less Likely to Back Trump. By Ruth Igielnik / NYT

Researchers have long wondered what comes first for many voters, the conservatism or the conservative media?Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Republicans who get their news from nonconservative mainstream media outlets are less likely to support Donald J. Trump than those who follow conservative outlets. And sizable numbers from the first group say they think Mr. Trump acted criminally, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. Read more

The Supreme Court Is Playing a Dangerous Game. By Jamelle Bouie / NYT

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time.

Does the court know about its precipitous decline with much of the public? It’s hard to say. It’s easier to answer a related question: Does it care? If the recent actions of the conservative majority are any indication, the answer is no. Read more

World News

If Trump and His Heroes Ruled the World. By Jordan Michael Smith / TNR

So long, Sunak, Macron, Trudeau. Hello, Vlad, Viktor, and Kim. What would happen to the United States, and the world, if Donald Trump made it back to the Oval Office? The “leader of the free world” would become a fanboy follower in the unfree one.

Donald Trump would be disastrous for the cause of freedom in the United States and in the world. For one thing, the country’s ability to model itself as a functioning, just democracy, always its best and most underrated asset in foreign affairs, would be weakened beyond its already dismal state. Second, Trump appeals to authoritarian populists, corrupt kleptocrats, and white nationalists in ways unlike any other American leader, and his return to the presidency would energize these villains, giving them free rein to crush dissidents, defiance, and democracy. Read more

Haiti’s crisis is at a tipping point. The world needs to help. By David Vanderpool / RNS

The international community has a moral obligation to support Haiti during this crisis.

For nearly three years, since the assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, in 2021, the country has been run by lawless gangs, whose haphazard rule has exacerbated the poverty left by an earthquake in 2010. Recently, a surge in violence among these gangs has thrown crucial sectors into chaos, particularly impacting the health care system, educational system and child nutritional status. Read more

UN Chief Calls Starvation In Gaza ‘Moral Outrage’, Calls For ‘Flood’ Of Aid. By Samy Magdy, Amr Nabil and Sam Metz / AP and HuffPost

“Any further onslaught will make things even worse — worse for Palestinian civilians, worse for hostages and worse for all people in the region,” Guterres said.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres stood near a long line of waiting trucks Saturday and declared it was time to “truly flood Gaza with lifesaving aid,” calling the starvation inside the enclave a “moral outrage.” He urged an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Guterres spoke on the Egyptian side of the border not far from the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where Israel plans to launch a ground assault despite widespread warnings of a potential catastrophe. More than half of Gaza’s population has taken refuge there. Read more

Post falsely claims South Africa arrested US ambassador. By Joedy McCreary / USA Today

A March 19 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a TikTok video of a man speaking about the supposed breakdown of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and South Africa. He claims all Americans have been asked to leave the African country.

“The United States ambassador to South Africa has also been arrested by the South African security personnels (sic),” the man says at one point. The post received more than 200 likes in two days. The original TikTok video was shared hundreds of times. The claim is baseless, according to multiple experts and U.S. government spokespeople. U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Reuben Brigety was photographed with the Mayor of Jacksonville, Florida after his supposed arrest abroad. Read more

Watch: UN Ambassador concerned about conflicts in Africa. By April Ryan / The Grio

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield tells theGrio some of the issues impacting the continent keep her up at night.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield tells theGrio’s “The Hill with April Ryan” that the United Nations Security Council is working on the various African conflicts destabilizing some countries. Meanwhile, Thomas-Greenfield, who has an extensive portfolio of work on the continent before her current post as ambassador, says some of the issues impacting the continent keep her up at night. Read more and watch here

Ethics / Morality / Religion

Mar-A-Lago prayer event labels Trump voters’ ‘only Catholic option’. By Brian Fraga / NCR

At the March 19 “Catholic Prayer for Trump” at Mar-a-Lago, a man identified as “Father Dennis” prayed for attendees and the Trump family, and blessed the meal.

Featuring apocalyptic rhetoric tinged with Christian nationalism and grievances popular in far-right circles, the March 19 “Catholic Prayer for Trump” event at the former president’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida, presented a bleak portrait of life in the United States. Read more

The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life. By Peter Beinart / NYT

For the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.

They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. Read more

Biden’s Muslim American judicial nominee threatened by smear campaign. By Yonat Shimron / RNS

Muslim Americans are significantly underrepresented as a proportion of the population in the nation’s federal judiciary. Circuit Court Judge Nominee Adeel Abdullah Mangi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 13, 2023.

Late last year, President Biden nominated the first Muslim American to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals. But in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza, that nomination may now be in jeopardy. Biden’s pick, Adeel Abdullah Mangi, has a distinguished two-decade career as a corporate litigator based in New Jersey. Born in Pakistan and educated at Oxford and Harvard, he has also done pro bono legal work focused on fighting for religious liberty. Read more

Historical / Cultural

When it Raines, it pours: Civil War scholarship and Alabama Unionists. By Jim Vickrey / Montgomery Advertiser

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Birmingham who worked for Southern newspapers, after he was graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in the early ’60s, Raines learned early in life that he was “descended from [Southern] soldiers who fought to preserve the Union rather than to defend slavery”

The book is about how he came to such a realization and what he has done to lift the First Alabama Cavalry from the “lost” pages of history and thereby to recall in detail the story of the North Alabamians who “seceded” from the fourth state to join the CSA and fought at great personal sacrifice for the Union during the War that generated three amendments to the U.S. Constitution, effecting a second American Revolution. Read more

A Florida Community Faces Erasure. Residents Are Honoring Its History. By Aallyah Wright / Capital B

Following the Civil War, freedmen founded the unincorporated community of Royal, formerly known as Picketsville to signify the white picket fences around the 40-acre homesteads. The first Black families owned land in 1870, despite oral history referencing it much earlier. By 1891, the community established its first post office. By then, it became Royal.

The area is known for its prominence in agriculture, which helped bolster Sumter County as “one of the leading vegetable producing counties in the U.S.” before the Great Depression. Today, remnants of the industry are still visible: acres of farmland, an old tobacco barn, and vegetable crops. Descendants of those families who inherited the land after the Civil War still live in Royal today. Read more

When Segregation Prevailed in the US, Boys Town May Have Been Nation’s First Integrated Community. By Henry Cordes / Omaha World-Herald

When Harry S. Truman’s motorcade rolled up to Boys Town in June 1948, the president was leading a deeply segregated nation.

Even the U.S. military he presided over as commander in chief had historically kept Black and White servicemen in separate units. That makes the scene he encountered that day in Nebraska all the more remarkable. Truman was greeted by a welcome banner held by boys who were White, Black, Hispanic and Native American. And as the president stood for photos amid the Boys Town choir, the boys surrounding him represented a true spectrum of skin colors. . Read more

Daring to Be Bold: Examining Shirley Chisholm’s Everlasting Impact. By Brandon Tensley / Capital B

The former U.S. representative from New York “highlighted the possibilities that exist,” one woman says, “but there’s still more work to be done.”

“We’re closing gaps. The state of Black women in American politics is stronger than it’s ever been,” Peeler-Allen said. “But there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done — and that’s achievable.” To further discuss Chisholm’s impact and Black women’s political representation in 2024, Capital B spoke with Peeler-Allen, who co-founded Higher Heights. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Read more

Beyoncé says an experience where she ‘did not feel welcomed’ spurred her to make ‘Cowboy Carter’ country album. By Alli Rosenbloom / CNN

Beyoncé is taking bets and raising them in hopes that her highly anticipated upcoming country album will render any race-related stigma in that music genre and beyond as “irrelevant.”

The “Texas Hold ‘Em” singer on Tuesday unveiled a new image for “Cowboy Carter,” which she has dubbed as the “act ii” album to her hit 2022 record “Renaissance,” writing in the caption that her latest project “was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t.” Read more

Is Kevin Hart funny? By Travis M. Andrews / Wash Post

Kevin Hart insists he’s never written a joke. Which is odd, because he’s this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Hart is one the most famous comedians alive, but comedy is a mere sliver of his portfolio. He’s a restaurateur, a rapper, an actor, a businessman, a brand wholly unto himself. He has built an empire from fast-casual restaurants, a tequila brand, a protein-shake line, a production company, more than $4 billion at the box office and sold-out arena shows — ostensibly by telling jokes. Other comics crave comedic legacies. He craves generational wealth. He hopes to be a billionaire by the time he turns 45. That’s in July. Read more

Sports

For Black college athletes, this is the bus boycott of our era. By Derrick Johnson / CNN

College sports fans across America are gathering in arenas and around television sets this week for the start of March Madness, the highpoint of the NCAA basketball season and a national sports obsession. Members of the Houston Cougars

At this moment in our history, for Black college players on these teams — and in college sports more broadly — this championship season also affords a moment to pause and reflect. There’s another measure of success that these student athletes should weigh, and it has to do with how they leverage their influence as valued members of their campus communities for a much bigger cause. It’s hard to overlook the fact that some colleges and universities that boast some of the most impressive records in sports — including in the marquee sports basketball and football, along with athletics — are located in some states that have been most aggressive in dismantling initiatives intended to reverse decades of racial bias and discrimination. Read more

Players from first all-Black All-American women’s basketball team reflect on making history in 1984. By Branson Wright / Andscape

1984 was packed with many firsts in women’s basketball. It was a year with a glimpse into the future of the game’s evolution, a year filled with special recognition.

But the face — or faces — of women’s college basketball also changed 40 years ago, when the Kodak All-America team was announced. For the first time since the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association started selections in 1975, all 10 players on the 1984 squad were Black. An all-Black All-America team would not happen again for 22 years. It has only happened four times (1984, 2006, 2007, 2008). Read more

Tennis phenom Coco Gauff strives for a medal and a second Grand Slam title while giving back to her community. By Sam Brock and Carmen Gonzalez / NBC News

Days ago, and fresh off her 20th birthday, Coco became the first American tennis player to mathematically clinch a spot on the Paris 2024 Olympic team.

But on a windy, sun-splashed day, she’s returning to her roots in Delray Beach, a small city on Florida’s southeast coast known for its lively downtown, colorful homes and sweeping beaches — and as the locale of Gauff’s turning into a tennis sensation. “I want to pour into the communities that poured into me,” Gauff told NBC News. Gauff is doing more than just that on this trip home, where she’s teaming up with the U.S. Tennis Association as part of its U.S. Open Legacy Initiative to make tennis courts more inviting and accessible to young players all over the country. Read more

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