Tag: Civil Rights
The John Birch Society’s Return to CPAC
Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.
Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.
He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic
What the DeSantis and Newsom Debate Revealed
The best way to understand last week’s unusual debate between Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida is to think of them less as representatives of different political parties than as ambassadors from different countries.
Thursday night’s debate on Fox News probably won’t much change the arc of either man’s career. DeSantis is still losing altitude in the 2024 GOP presidential race, and Newsom still faces years of auditioning before Democratic leaders and voters for a possible
How Financial Strength Weakened American Feminism
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, many Americans had already opened their wallets to protest. In the approximately 24 hours after the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked early, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue raised $12 million, and Reproductive Freedom for All’s donations increased by 1,400 percent. According to one researcher, more than 300 crowdfunded GoFundMe campaigns drew in nearly $3.2 million in the seven months between the
Red States Are Rolling Back the Rights Revolution
The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.
Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of
The Magazine That Was a Window on America
I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.
But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for
Israel’s Judicial Reform and Protests
Israel in the past six months has felt like a madhouse, a political protest the size of New Jersey, an unending traffic jam, a lab for bad ideas, a glimpse of the future of Western democracy in the social-media age. It has also been a classroom, even for those of us who think we’re experts. I’ve lived and written here for nearly 30 years. But as I stood among thousands of other protesters outside the Knesset on Monday, the midday
The Forgotten Best Sellers That Revealed America to Itself
In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance. “Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, meaning victory over Hitler abroad and over Jim Crow at
The Tennessee Expulsions Are Just the Beginning of Offenses on Democratic Norms
The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.
In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of
The Forgotten Ron DeSantis Book
History works for Ron DeSantis as an argument. It would be a mistake, though, to think he doesn’t care about it deeply or hasn’t devoted serious deliberation to his own understanding of the American past. In fact, his biography indicates a great respect for the discipline. DeSantis reportedly received special praise for his performance in an Advanced Placement U.S. history course at Florida’s Dunedin High School before he graduated in 1997. He majored in history at Yale during some
The Family-Separation Files – The Atlantic
The Atlantic is publishing a collection of key internal government documents related to the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, known as Zero Tolerance. The records informed the reporting of my cover story on how it came to be and who was responsible. Our hope is to introduce greater transparency around a policy that gravely harmed thousands of families and whose development and intent were concealed from the public for years. During the Trump administration, more than 5,000 migrant children were taken
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