This coming Sunday, the Trump White House is holding "Rededicate 250," a massive religious event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., designed to "give thanks for God's providence, reflect on our nation's story, and rededicate America as One Nation under God.
Last night I gave this talk to the Princeton Adult School about the connections between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and similar struggles in our own time, pulling together a few things I've written about in the past and packaging them for a general audience. I
The Trump administration and its allies have been busy for weeks now insisting that their war with Iran is not, technically speaking, a "war." And now that this not-a-war war is likely expanding beyond air strikes to include the deployment of troops inside the region, they are busy
This morning, Elon Musk – the world's richest man and a key ally to the president of the United States – posted the content below to the white nationalist chat room and CSAM emporium he owns There's a lot here that's laughably dumb, even for someone
Leaders of the civil rights movement called their protests "demonstrations" because they aimed to make visible the systems of political repression and physical violence that were all too often hidden from public view. Because they wanted to force the nation to confront the ugly realities of racism and
The Trump administration is, at its core, a white nationalist project. The president's personal racism, of course, has always been crystal clear, not just from the start of his political career but from the much older start of his public career. His first mention in The New York
Over the past year and, in particular, over the past month, the United States has suffered an alarming rise in the number of verbal threats, physical assaults, and even murders committed by agents of the federal government against citizens and undocumented immigrants alike. Encouraged to act irresponsibly by Acting President
Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s. There's currently a rebellion brewing in the Department
Work in Progress is a recurring feature on CAMPAIGN TRAILS, in which I share some of the more interesting materials I’ve uncovered in my book-in-progress on the work of John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s. In my last post, I talked about the Trump White
The term "revisionist history" routinely gets thrown around in popular discourse as a shorthand for "lying about the past." I've noted before that this is actually quite different from how historians use that term, as we understand that all good historical work is inherently
This week, I saw someone on social media trot out a notorious quote from Lee Atwater that's wildly misunderstood. I went back to dust off my old Twitter thread about it, but I found that a lot of the links there have decayed or been deleted. So I&
When it comes to American politicians who say little and do less, the gold standard remains former President Calvin Coolidge. As most people know, Coolidge was quiet, deeply reserved, and generally unsmiling. His nickname, after all, was "Silent Cal." In one popular story, a woman at a party