- New Phase
- Selling the Poor on Spending Like They’re Rich
- Undermining the CDC
- ICE is Subdued, But Civilians Fight On
- The Spectre of Byron De La Beckwith
- Solidarity Against Racist Attacks
- Election Surprises
- Save the Cohen Building New Deal Murals!
- Bari Weiss: Rising to the Top in Trumpland
- Class Revenge Fan Fiction
By Daniel Hunter
Waging Nonviolence
We’re indeed in a new phase of the struggle against authoritarianism in the U.S. — and it’s helpful to step back to track where we are and adjust our bearings accordingly. We’ve shaken off the early months of shock and the steamrolled losses. Now we’re showing we can sometimes defend and even get on the offensive.
Selling the Poor on Spending Like They’re Rich
By Emma Janssen
The Americaan Prospect
These are the economic realities for the majority of Americans: There’s one line steadily going up, and another going down. That’s why some call ours a “K-shaped” economy—two lines headed in opposite directions. Others call it a plutonomy, a portmanteau of “plutocrat” and “economy,” signaling the disproportional power of the ultra-wealthy over our entire financial system.
By Dhruv Khullar
The New Yorker
The Trump administration has fired or muzzled government scientists with disfavored views on nutrition and climate change; cancelled funding for long-running surveys on food insecurity and global health; dismissed independent committees focussed on air pollution, health-care disparities, and hospital infections; and pulled support for research into vaccines.
ICE is Subdued, But Civilians Fight On
• NYC By Richard Hall and Rebecca Schneid, Time
• Chicago By Kelly Hayes, Organizing My Thoughts
• Charlotte By Julia Conley, Common Dreams
• New Orleans By Lucy Campbell, The Guardian
The Spectre of Byron De La Beckwith
By Jerry Mitchell
Mississippi Today
When I did a 1990 interview with Byron De La Beckwith, who killed Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963, most Americans bristled at Beckwith’s beliefs. Now, 35 years later, the assassin is dead, but some of the views he promulgated are reemerging in new forms.
Solidarity Against Racist Attacks
• Black Liberation-Indigenous Sovereignty By Trevor Smith and Savannah Romero, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
• Black and Latine Collaboration By Adam Mahoney, Capital B, Los Angeles Public Press
By Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims and Judd Legum
Popular Information
Although Democratic victories in New York, Virginia, New Jersey, and California dominated the headlines, significant contests were held across the nation. In purple states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, and deep red states like Texas and Mississippi, voters rejected the MAGA agenda.
Save the Cohen Building New Deal Murals!
By John P. Murphy
Common Dreams
The Cohen Building has been called the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” for its ambitious mural cycles. It is a tragic irony that murals meant to represent the contract between the government and its citizens—the Social Security that over 70 million Americans rely on today—would be sold to the highest bidder rather than preserved for posterity.
Bari Weiss: Rising to the Top in Trumpland
By Laura Kraftowitz
Lierary Hub
Most people already know a thing or two about Weiss, like how she was hired by The New York Times during Trump 1.0 as a gesture to “ideological DEI,” then left in a huff with a dramatic goodbye note to start an anti-woke university mired in controversy and resignations. More recently, many believe her tweets put a target on Refaat Alareer and helped get him killed. Now she has been appointed Editor-in-Chief at CBS News.
By Tish Turl
Spectre
Fanfiction, at its core, is an act of narrative rebellion—a form of storytelling born from dissatisfaction, from the refusal to accept the endings and limitations handed down by dominant culture. It is a mode of narrative revenge. When fans write alternative endings, insert new characters, remix timelines, or imagine crossover worlds, they are responding to an absence—a failure of the original text to represent their desires, identities, politics, or truths.
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