Dispatches From the Culture Wars – May 20, 2025
- From Conservatism to Resistance
- Library of Congress Staff 86 DOJ
- Post-Roe Witch Hunt
- Sports Break
- Buying American is a Sucker’s Game
- What is an Asian-American?
- Big Law Takes a Dive
- Copaganda
- Cancel Culture and Politics
- Hands Across Chicagoland
From Conservatism to Resistance
By Everett Rudolph
Waging Nonviolence
Within the first few months after the inauguration, I became aware of the rapidly developing uncertainty facing not only my life, but the lives of everyone in this country. I knew that stricter immigration laws would mean increased deportations, but I didn’t understand what that would look like until being told by a teacher that her students’ parents were too afraid to set foot on the school property.
Library of Congress Staff 86 DOJ
By Yasmeen Hamadeh
The Daily Beast
Two Justice Department officials were denied access to the Library of Congress, causing a brief standoff on Capitol Hill. Paul Perkins, an associate deputy attorney general, and Brian Nieves, a deputy chief of staff, brought a letter from the White House declaring that they would be serving in two top positions at the library. They were turned away by General Counsel Meg Williams.
By Jessica Valenti
Abortion, Every Day
Conservative lawmakers and prosecutors lie about abortion easily and often. Consider what happened when Dr. Maggie Carpenter was targeted in a civil suit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton claimed a Texas woman suffered “serious complications” after taking abortion pills sent by Carpenter. The truth? His suit showed no such thing.
By Robert Lipsyte
Common Dreams
Here are eight topics currently lost in the sauce to take our minds and emotions off the Trump-backed whale. Then it’s time to get back in the game and face down the bullies.
Buying American is a Sucker’s Game
By Dana Frank
Boston Review
Promises to reinvigorate American manufacturing and bring back American jobs have featured in nearly every presidential campaign in recent memory, but Donald Trump, with his first election in 2017, twisted those ideas into a dark, resentful fusion of economic nationalism and unqualified hostility toward immigrants.
By Jennifer Ho
The Conversation
There are nearly 25 million people of Asian descent who live in the United States, but the term Asian American remains shrouded by cultural misunderstanding and contested as a term among Asians themselves.
By John Teufel
The Indypendent
Perceiving my common reaction to the Democrats and Big Law opened my eyes. Both of them, under Trump, abandoned the one last thing that was supposed to make them different: that, on some level, they were going to be a counterweight to fascism. It was all branding. In the highest firmaments of society, there really is only bad, a big dark cloud of menace; Trump is just one molecule.
By Alec Karakatsanis
Common Dreams
Copaganda is a specific type of propaganda in which the punishment bureaucracy and the powerful interests behind it influence how we think about crime and safety. “Punishment bureaucracy” is a more accurate and less deceptive way than “criminal justice system”, to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law.
NYU’s decision to withhold Logan Rozos’s degree for denouncing genocide in Gaza in his graduation speech is the latest example of right-wing cancel culture. After criticizing it on the Left, conservatives have learned to rally “woke” mobs of their own.
By Michelle Gallardo
ABC7 Eyewitness News
People protested new policies from President Donald Trump on Sunday in a rally called “Hands Across Chicagoland.” The protestors lined streets while wearing black. From the Chicago to Aurora and everywhere in between, the protest was billed as a 30-mile long human chain that began in Aurora and ended in Chicago’s Little Village.