Chris Lehmann The president is making a big push to rewrite the past in favor of some of America’s top historical traitors, racists, and scumbags. The post Trump Wants to Make the Confederacy Great Again appeared first on The Nation.
The following guest post was written for Daily Kos by Bryan Fair, interim president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ten years before passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, a young Black lawyer returned to his home state of Alabama after graduating law school. His mission, as he often says, was to “tear down segregation everywhere” he found it. He was 23 years old. His name is not widely known, but it should be. Fred Gray is a civil rights giant. I first came across his story when I moved to Tuscaloosa to work as a law professor at the University of Alabama. My new home was the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, and to immerse myself in its history, I read case after case from that era. Mr. Gray had filed nearly every one. Our democracy today is at a similar inflection point as that faced by civil rights activists in the 1950s and ‘60s. Many of those who have a seat in the halls of power are hell-bent on denying Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities a voice in shaping our future. Like then, this moment requires courageous resistance by multiracial coalitions. Related | Trump launches new ‘lawless’ attack on voting rights When I look back at history, what strikes me about Mr. Gray and his contemporaries is how progress has long been driven by determined young people. Mr. Gray’s first client in 1955 was Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. After Rosa Parks made her own refusal nine months later at age 42, Mr. Gray also took up her case and went on to become the legal mind behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was just 26 at the time. The persistence of those young organizers — and legions of others fighting for freedom in the Deep South and across the nation — eventually resulted in passage of a series of civil rights laws that changed history. The most transformative was the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In Mississippi, for example, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black people were registered to vote in 1965. Within two years after its passage, that number increased to nearly 60 percent. By 1972, more than 1 million new Black voters were registered across the South, and the gap between white and Black voter registration in the region dropped from an estimated 44 percent to 11 percent. Despite its efficacy — and its reauthorization five times by broad bipartisan majorities in Congress — the VRA was severely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, and its protections have been further eroded by subsequent attacks. Without the VRA’s shield, states have been able to pass more than 100 anti-voter laws. These changes make it easier to purge voter rolls, shutter polling places, and create onerous ID requirements. Last year, Alabama even enacted a law criminalizing people for helping their friends, family, and neighbors cast a ballot. Moreover, some elected officials are peddling lies about our election system and trying to override the will of the people with their own extremist agenda. The cumulative result of these tactics is voters feeling powerless, disillusioned, and even fearful of raising their voices. Such strategies are reminiscent of those deployed 60 years ago to silence and subjugate Black people, particularly in the Deep South. But as the young foot soldiers before us knew, what we are fighting for is far more powerful than these moments of defeat. In coalition, we can, and will, move the nation ever closer to a multiracial, inclusive democracy. It is time for a new Voting Rights Act — one that meets the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. We need a modern bill that prohibits simple-minded and sophisticated voter suppression devices. It is time for all of us to rally behind the young leaders in our communities and our statehouses who are on the front lines of the fight for a better democracy. I have the great honor of witnessing the tenacity and vision of this new generation of leaders every day. My law students are hungry for justice. They are eager to study the lessons of history and use the law as a tool to ensure everyone has an equal voice and vote in our democracy. As we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act this week, we must heed the words of Mr. Gray, who said, “Let’s not assume for one moment that our work is done; the struggle for equal justice continues.” On the shoulders of the giants who risked everything for the right to vote, we march on.
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Arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents dropped nearly 20% in July—and according to Axios, the Trump administration isn’t happy about it. Data from the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse nonprofit at Syracuse University shows that ICE made an average of 990 arrests per day between July 1 and July 27. That’s down from 1,224 daily arrests in June and nowhere near the 3,000 daily goal once floated by senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller. (That benchmark, notably, hasn’t appeared in any court filings.) Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait to detain a person on Jan. 27 in Silver Spring, Maryland. The drop followed a wave of backlash after masked ICE agents carried out aggressive raids in Los Angeles, where protests erupted and spread across the country, prompting court orders that have since curtailed ICE’s tactics. Just last week, a federal appeals court upheld a ruling blocking many of the agency’s operations in Southern California. The Department of Homeland Security is trying to downplay the dip. Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told Axios that arrests were only down 10%, from 31,000 in June to 27,000 in July. “Despite a historic number of injunctions—including the [temporary restraining order] in Los Angeles—ICE continues to arrest the worst of the worst,” McLaughlin said. “From gang members and terrorists to pedophiles, every day ICE is removing these barbaric criminal illegal aliens from American communities. Secretary [Kristi] Noem has been clear: Nothing will stop us from carrying out the president and American people’s mandate to carry out the largest deportation of criminal illegal aliens in American history.” Related | Trump and his favorite white supremacist beg people to join ICE But the numbers suggest something else entirely. As of late July, TRAC reported that about 71% of those currently in ICE custody have no criminal convictions. And among those who do, many were for minor offenses like traffic violations. While the Trump administration insists that it’s targeting violent criminals, critics say that the sweeps of low-level offenders are sowing fear in immigrant communities. The backlash isn’t the only factor behind the drop. Trump’s flip-flopping—particularly over whether to pause raids of undocumented workers in the agriculture and hospitality industries—has led to internal confusion and further slowed ICE operations. A cartoon by Clay Jones. And the fallout from those June raids still looms large. Families were separated. Immigrants fled worksites, leaving behind cars, children, and pets. And U.S. citizens—many of them Latino—reported being wrongly detained in what advocates call racial profiling and overpolicing. A coalition of immigrant rights groups sued the Trump administration last month for deliberately targeting brown people in Southern California. Meanwhile, deportations have ticked upward, with July removals increasing by an average of 84 per day compared to June. NBC News previously found that more than 18,000 immigrants were deported in June alone. The number of people currently in ICE custody has dipped slightly, from 57,861 on June 29 to 56,945 as of July 27, according to TRAC. In court, the Trump administration maintains that it isn’t setting quotas, and a Justice Department lawyer told the 9th Circuit Court last week that ICE leadership hasn’t been ordered to meet any specific arrest target. Still, the increased raids that began in June have already left a mark: mass protests, legal setbacks, and mounting criticism from civil rights groups. ICE is even offering new recruits student loan forgiveness and signing bonuses in a bid to keep up operations. The Trump team may claim that ICE is focused on the “worst of the worst.” But the truth is clear: The administration is sweeping up families, workers, and innocent people—and the political blowback is only growing.
Photographs by Lynsey Addario In the weeks before they surrendered control of Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces sometimes took revenge on civilians. If their soldiers lost territory to the Sudanese Armed Forces during the day, the militia’s commanders would turn their artillery on residential neighborhoods at night. On several consecutive evenings in March, we heard these attacks from Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile from the Sudanese capital. From an apartment that would in better times have been home to a middle-class Sudanese family, we would hear one explosion. Then two more. Sometimes a response, shells or gunfire from the other side. Each loud noise meant that a child had been wounded, a grandmother killed, a house destroyed. Just a few steps away from us, grocery stores, busy in the evening because of Ramadan, were selling powdered milk, imported chocolate, bags of rice. Street vendors were frying falafel in large iron skillets, then scooping the balls into paper cones. One night someone brought out folding chairs for a street concert, and music flowed through crackly speakers. The shelling began again a few hours later, probably hitting similar streets and similar grocery stores, similar falafel stands and similar street musicians a couple dozen miles away. This wasn’t merely the sound of artillery, but the sound of nihilism and anarchy, of lives disrupted, businesses ruined, universities closed, futures curtailed. In the mornings, we drove down streets on the outskirts of Khartoum that had recently been battlegrounds, swerving to avoid remnants of furniture, chunks of concrete, potholes, bits of metal. As they retreated from Khartoum, the Rapid Support Forces—the paramilitary organization whose power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces has, since 2023, blossomed into a full-fledged civil war—had systematically looted apartments, offices, and shops. Sometimes we came across clusters of washing machines and furniture that the thieves had not had time to take with them. One day we followed a car carrying men from the Sudanese Red Crescent, dressed in white hazmat suits. We got out to watch, handkerchiefs covering our faces to block the smell, as the team pulled corpses from a well. Neighbors clustered alongside us, murmuring that they had suspected bodies might be down there. They had heard screams at night, during the two years of occupation by the RSF, and guessed what was happening. Another day we went to a crossing point, where people escaping RSF-occupied areas were arriving in Sudanese-army-controlled areas. Riding on donkey carts piled high with furniture, clothes, and kitchen pans, they described a journey through a lawless inferno. Many had been deprived of food along the way, or robbed, or worse. In a house near the front line, one woman told me that she and her teenage daughter had both been stopped by an RSF convoy and raped. We were sitting in an empty room, devoid of decoration. The girl covered her face while her mother was talking, and did not speak at all. At al-Nau Hospital, the largest still operating in the Khartoum region, we met some of the victims of the shelling, among them a small boy and a baby girl, Bashir and Mihad, a brother and sister dressed in blue and pink. The terror and screaming of the night before had subsided, and they were simply lying together, wrapped in bandages, on a cot in a crowded room. I spoke with their father, Ahmed Ali. The recording of our conversation is hard to understand because several people were gathered around us, because others were talking loudly nearby, and because Mihad had begun to cry. Ali told me that he and his family had been trying to escape an area controlled by the RSF but had been caught in shelling at 2 a.m., the same explosions we had heard from our apartment in Omdurman. The children had been wounded by shrapnel. He had nowhere else to take them except this noisy ward, and no plans except to remain at the hospital and wait to see what would happen next. Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic Medical staff at al-Nau Hospital treat children injured in shelling by RSF forces in Omdurman. Like a tsunami, the war has created wide swaths of physical wreckage. Farther out of town, at the Al-Jaili oil refinery, formerly the largest and most modern in the country—the focus of major Chinese investment—fires had burned so fiercely and for so long that giant pipelines and towering storage tanks, blackened by the inferno, lay mangled and twisted on the ground. At the studios of the Sudanese national broadcaster, the burned skeleton of what had been a television van, its satellite dish still on top, stood in a garage near an accounting office that had been used as a prison. Graffiti was scrawled on the wall of the office, the lyrics to a song; clothes, office supplies, and rubble lay strewn across the floor. We walked through radio studios, dusty and abandoned, the presenters’ chairs covered in debris. In the television studios, recently refurbished with American assistance, old tapes belonging to the Sudanese national video archive had been used to build barricades. Statistics are sometimes used to express the scale of the destruction in Sudan. About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting. Half the population, nearly 25 million people, is expected to go hungry this year. Hundreds of thousands of people are directly threatened with starvation. More than 17 million children, out of 19 million, are not in school. A cholera epidemic rages. Malaria is endemic. But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction. I felt this most strongly in the al-Ahamdda displaced-persons camp just outside Khartoum—although the
Texas state Rep. Ann Johnson spoke with CBS on Tuesday to explain why Democratic lawmakers left the Lone Star State, blocking Republican efforts to gerrymander five new GOP congressional seats ahead of the midterm elections. A woman holds a sign as she joins others during a rally to protest against redistricting hearings at the Texas Capitol on July 24 in Austin, Texas. When asked about conservative claims that Democrats are “running away,” Johnson responded by reminding viewers that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his minions are trying to pave over the GOP’s failures by degrading Texans’ voting power. “Abandoning your job is going to Cancun in the middle of a deadly freeze, right?” Johnson said, referring to Sen. Ted Cruz. “Abandoning your job is cutting health care when people need access. Abandoning your job is cutting public education when we already have one of the worst education systems in the nation. What we are doing is the fundamental protection by our founding fathers in the Texas Constitution that says the minority party has the opportunity to break quorum when you know that the majority has really gone off the rails.” Johnson also compared what’s happening in Texas to how Georgia officials resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to change the results of the 2020 election after he lost to former President Joe Biden. “They said, ‘No, sir. That’s a step too far.’ But when he called Texas Republicans and said, ‘I need you to fill me five seats,’ they said, ‘Does July work for you?’” Johnson said. “This is not just about our voters—it’s about the nation. And it’s important for people to know. They have threatened us personally. They have threatened our arrest. They have threatened our jobs. They have threatened us. The solution is, if we show up today at 3:00 and sit and be quiet, then we get to keep ours. But it kills the voice of everybody in this country. And so we won’t. We won’t sit and shut up to have them shut up the voices of voters.” YouTube Video While Republicans like Abbott genuflect to an increasingly dictatorial Trump and escalating their threats of authoritarian action, Democrats like Johnson are taking a real stand to protect voters not just in Texas, but across the country. Related | Texas governor threatens the unthinkable to force through rigged map
Months after being tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency attack on the federal government, billionaire Elon Musk has been rated by the public as one of the least-liked figures by Americans. On Tuesday, Gallup released the results of a poll taken July 7-21, and of the 14 global “newsmakers” people were asked about, Musk had an abysmal net favorable rating of -28. Of those surveyed, only 33% had a favorable opinion of the key Republican backer, while 61% viewed him unfavorably. Datawrapper Content Musk was so unpopular that his unfavorable rating outweighs Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (both at -16). Musk even performs worse than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (-23), who has been widely condemned for his actions against Hamas. The highest-rated figure in the poll is Pope Leo XIV (+46) followed by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (+18) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (+11). His time leading DOGE matches the precipitous drop in support for Musk. When the same poll was taken at the beginning of the Trump administration in January, Musk had a net favorable rating of -4, meaning he has dropped 24 points in the ensuing months. Rubio had a similar fall while Trump fell 14 points. Datawrapper Content The result of Musk’s DOGE tenure probably explains why he is so disliked. A recent report from Senate Democrats revealed that policies put in place by DOGE have cost taxpayers $21.7 billion, including over $14.8 billion spent to pay federal workers not to work. DOGE installed a group of Musk acolytes across federal agencies, giving them access to sensitive and previously protected private data. Among Musk’s flunkies were open racists and bigots given free reign to disrupt longtime federal systems and procedures. DOGE’s actions have been frequently challenged for overstepping constitutional authority and courts have ruled that the group has been in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Fueling the backlash is the fact that while at least Trump was elected to his position, Musk was not, and unlike Cabinet secretaries and other appointees, he was not vetted by Congress. Musk was given his power as a payback for bankrolling Trump and other Republicans. Trump eventually soured on Musk, who generated a torrent of negative headlines, including protests at Tesla dealerships that precipitated a drop in the carmaker’s sales. Musk and Trump had an acrimonious public breakup that the entire world was effectively forced to cringe and watch. Trump even said he would look into deporting Musk. Musk has left DOGE but despite the mess the board of directors at Tesla—which he controls—just voted to give him $26 billion in shares. He is also still bankrolling Republican campaign efforts and in spite of his disagreements with Trump, he is still in the GOP’s tent.
A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump can’t be bothered to be deposed in his own lawsuit No president has ever blurred the line so much between personal and professional. Rupert Murdoch is unleashing his racist brand of sleaze on California Because the New York Post just isn’t enough. Red-state Republican gets mercilessly jeered at town hall There’s a reason GOP leaders have advised Republicans not to hold these town halls. Trump’s spin on economy spirals during unhinged interview When in doubt just make it up. Cartoon: Everyone’s fired If there’s one thing that Trump is good at … Here’s your chance to help Melania Trump with her crappy Christmas decor We can’t wait to see if this year will be “Handmaid’s Tale” red trees or something even worse. What the f-ck is Donald Trump doing on the roof? Is he just out for a walk or plotting even more horrific White House expansions? This Texas Republican stalked Trump to get his endorsement—and flopped Maybe Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton should have shown up at the golf course bearing gold-plated gifts. Click here to see more cartoons.
The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary and a longtime vaccine critic, announced in a statement Tuesday that $500 million worth of vaccine development projects, all using mRNA technology, will be halted. The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections. The mRNA vaccines are credited with slowing the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Kennedy said in the Tuesday statement that he wants the health department to move away from mRNA vaccines, calling on the department to start “investing in better solutions.” He provided no details on what those technologies might be.
