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As I noted recently, I’m going to use CAMPAIGN TRAILS to highlight some of the research I’m doing for my current project on John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s, with special “Work in Progress” features for paid subscribers. This morning I had the extreme
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Today marks the 75th anniversary of President Harry Truman’s order banning segregation and discrimination in the American military. Though he had grown up, in many ways, as a southerner and even used racial slurs, Truman was deeply shaken by the wave of violence and discrimination that greeted many black
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With everyone talking about the Florida Department of Education’s new standards on African American history — focusing on its bizarre and inaccurate claims on slavery — I thought I’d take a look at the full document to see how representative that part is of the larger quality. Some of the
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A few days ago, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene warned the right-wing crowd at the Turning Point USA conference that President Joe Biden “is actually finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on,” singling out “programs to address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, labor unions” and
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There’s a recurring complaint from centrists that, yes, yes, of course, racism is bad, but if you make too big a fuss about it, it’s only going to spark resentment from whites and undermine the cause. (See a recent version of this here.) This was a common refrain
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Today marks the anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s deeply unpopular “Malaise speech,” which actually was not deeply unpopular and actually never used the word “malaise.” In the late 1970s, the United States was reeling from crises on several fronts, ranging from economic “stagflation” (a new term coined to describe the
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Last night on CNN, Sen. Tommy Tuberville once again refused to denounce white nationalism, insisting that white nationalists are not, in fact, racist and that such a characterization is merely “some people’s opinion.” This is a line that Republicans in the Trump era have made themselves walk. They agree,
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As we hit the one-month mark for Campaign Trails, I wanted to send along a quick celebratory update (and, as promised, some Sarge pictures too). First and foremost, thanks to everyone who’s subscribed to the newsletter so far. We’ve gotten off to a great start, as you can
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For the last two days, Senator Josh Hawley has been busy stepping on one rake after another, trying to find some quotation from the founding generation that supports a Christian nationalist vision of America. First, he tweeted out a completely fake quote from Patrick Henry, which as Seth Cotlar noted,
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One of the things I like about Substack is I actually get to write my own headlines. This title is what I wanted to call this piece I did for Washington Post a while back, but I was tragically overruled. In that piece, I talk briefly about Nixon’s campaign
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Today is the anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means we’re guaranteed to see plenty of social media posts about how A Higher Percentage of Republicans Voted for the Civil Rights Act.™ Consider this post a handy pre-buttal for your convenient use if
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After yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action programs, conservative politicians and pundits predictably resorted to trotting out The Only Martin Luther King Jr Quote They Know.™ And as you might expect, the trollier corners of the right were especially trolly: All right, let’s dig in. Despite