If we want to understand how we arrived in this authoritarian moment in 2025, we need to understand one of the central pathways that brought us here: McCarthyism.
Trump's brand of thoroughly vulgar and outlandish demagogy, his politics of racism, cruelty, vindictiveness, and gleeful resentment is not new, it has deep roots and is deeply, fundamentally American.
The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.
Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.
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