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When the Republican presidential field meets tonight at the first debate of the primaries, there’s going to be a noticeable absence — former president, current frontrunner and future defendant Donald John Trump. We’ve all become numb to the many ways in which Trump has broken with the norms of
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Sorry for the lighter posting this last week, but I’ve been busy writing the new chapter on the Trump presidency for the updated edition of FAULT LINES. All I had to share was a deep sense of despair and the academic version of PTSD. Good times, good times. But
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Earlier this week, professional podcaster and part-time US Senator Ted Cruz tried his best to boost the contrived controversy about Joe Biden being linked to his son’s foreign dealings with this imaginative line of argument: Now, leaving aside the obvious fact that anyone can pretty much “allege” anything
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The early exit of the U.S. Women’s National Team from the 2023 World Cup led to some predictable taunts from conservative critics who’ve long clashed with the outspoken athletes. Even former president Donald Trump interrupted his taunting of the judge, jury and prosecutor in his latest indictment
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With the latest installment of criminal indictments against former president and future defendant Donald J. Trump, we’ve got the latest round of hand-waving and excuse-making from his most loyal lickspittles. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — the loyal little Chester to Trump’s Spike — raced to run interference. The
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As I noted in the last one of these, I’ll be using CAMPAIGN TRAILS to share some of the research from my current book project on the civil rights era. The first installment came yesterday with the interview I did with civil rights legend Dave Dennis. (Apologies for the
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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”
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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