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The Red Scare Is American Past and Present

Benjamin Balthaser Jacobin
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.

Trumpism, It Was Ever Thus

Van Gosse Substack
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 Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors

Eric Foner The New York Review of Books
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.

Colonize Then, Deport Now

Jonathan Ort Africa is a Country
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.

How Bad Slavery Was

Robert Kuttner The American Prospect
Donald Trump joins a long line of apologists for America’s peculiar institution, falsifying history in the interest of whitewashing slavery.
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