Steward Beckham: The Unhealed Nation

Why Immigration Couldn’t Save America’s Conscience

Immigrants in America, no matter how they came, are one of those beautiful traits of our nation that you can reflect on—like a cool spring in the desert—and let cleanse your heart from the hypocrisies and outright lies studying American history often reveals.

Yet even this instinct, sincere and vital as it is, can be manipulated. It can become another way we shield ourselves from reckoning with the full story of America, and from building a political imagination that refuses to revert to comfort and false innocence.

One of my enduring hopes for America was that the recent waves of immigration could help the nation come to terms with—not erase—the systemic destruction faced by Americans of color: Black descendants of slavery, Native peoples confined to reservations, and Mexican Americans displaced after the Mexican War. So many brutal histories get retrofitted into the worn binary of White skin and Black skin, as if the ability—or inability—to “become” White determines one’s destiny. Recent immigration from the Global South offered a path out of that trap. A new pattern could emerge.
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Mary Geddry: Theater of Cruelty: The White House as Public Stocks for a Kakistocracy

Today, the White House lawn has become a public stocks of medieval times. Signs lined Pennsylvania Avenue and the front lawn of the people’s house, each featuring the image of an alleged criminal stamped with the word “ARRESTED” and labeled simply “Illegal Alien.” No names, no convictions, no due process, just accusations and allegations. A literal drive-by smear campaign conducted with all the subtlety of a discount EV commercial

Ken Klippenstein: Faceless Feds at War With America

When federal authorities arrested Wisconsin circuit court judge Hannah Dugan this week, they publicized photos of police escorting her into an unmarked vehicle, their faces blurred out so they couldn’t be identified.
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Closer to the Edge: Momodou Taal

Momodou Taal — British-Gambian PhD student at Cornell — had a mind built like a fortress: precise, principled, unbreakable. He studied power. Opposed empire. Quoted Fanon. Protested genocide. For that, America decided he was a threat.
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MEDIAite: Newsmax Legal Analyst Andrew Napolitano Calls Out Trump Admin for Arresting Wisconsin Judge: They’re On a ‘Bit of a Jihad’

RNS: Rev. William Barber arrested in Capitol Rotunda after praying against Republican-led budget

National Review: As a Trump DOJ Should Know, Judge Dugan Has a Defense

Snopes: Hitler quote about removing judges credited to Trump was a prank. Here’s the history of the passage

Popular Information: Fortune 500 company abruptly fires lawyer who helped immigrant family

Sarah Jones: Note to Trump: Founding Father John Adams Was Passionate about Due Process

A future president of the United States, John Adams, was so passionate about due process that he defended British soldiers who were accused in the Boston Massacre.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration and dissenters on university campuses is egregious and anti-American for many reasons, but one of the most fundamental is the way they conflate an (often unfounded!) accusation of criminality with being found guilty.

• Gil Duran: How Tech Authoritarianism Becomes Reality

  In this short documentary (25 minutes), Al Jazeera’s Listening Post examines the historical roots of tech authoritarianism. It looks back at the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which sought to merge the United States, Canada, Greenland and Mexico while imposing a new system of rule by tech elites. Sound familiar?

  Spoiler alert: Elon Musk’s grandfather was a supporter of the Technocracy movement (before moving to South Africa). As the saying goes: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
  

  
  
  
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• KFOR: ‘We’re citizens!’: Oklahoma City family traumatized after ICE raids home, but they weren’t suspects

  A woman says her family’s fresh start in Oklahoma turned into a nightmare after federal immigration agents raided their home, taking their phones, laptops, and life savings – even though they were not the suspects the agents were looking for.
  …
  She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.

  “They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”

  Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.
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• Wired: As Measles Cases Surge, Mexico Issues a US Travel Alert

  The border state of Chihuahua has recorded 713 confirmed cases, with its outbreak linked to the ongoing cluster of cases north of the border in Texas.

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• Jay Kuo: The “No Plan”-demic

  Trump’s unpredictable tariff announcements have triggered a supply shock wave heading straight toward us.
  

  
  
  
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  Dean Blundell: NO, Amazon is NOT Including Trump Tariff Pricing on Orders: That Didn’t Stop Him From Threatening Jeff Bezos in a Press Briefing Because The Trump Regime is Actually THAT Stupid

  Register: Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

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• FPWellman: 100 Days of stupid

  Hegseth and Trump so underwater in the polls they could tour a submarine and still not go this deep
  

  
  
  
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  TNR: U.S. Navy Loses $60 Million Jet as Pressure Increases on Hegseth

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  The F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, currently stationed in the area part of the U.S.’s military campaign against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

  Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – April 28, 2025

  There has been a change afoot in the Democratic Party for a while now as its leaders shift from trying to find common ground with Republicans to standing firmly against MAGAs and articulating their own vision for the United States.

  That shift burst dramatically into the open last night when Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire. After walking out to the American Authors song “Go Big or Go Home,” Pritzker urged Democrats to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding urgent action, and to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.”
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  Daily: Hakeem Jeffries Ties The Trump Anchor Around The GOP’s Neck And Lets Them Sink

  
  
  

  Robert Reich: Gore on Trump

  
  
  

  WSJ: At 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Is in Trouble

  Wired: Trump’s Tariffs Will Widen the Digital Divide

  Tariffs will raise prices on essential tech and lead to inflation. Experts say that people who depend on cheap stuff to survive are going to suffer the most.
  

  
  
  
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• Atlantic: Trump Interview

  
  
  
  ‘I Run the Country and the World’
  Donald Trump believes he’s invincible. But the cracks are beginning to show.

  By Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer
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• Jeff Tiedrich: American president loses Canadian election

  
  
  
  

  “Good luck to the Great people of Canada. Elect the man who has the strength and wisdom to cut your taxes in half, increase your military power, for free, to the highest level in the World, have your Car, Steel, Aluminum, Lumber, Energy, and all other businesses, QUADRUPLE in size, WITH ZERO TARIFFS OR TAXES, if Canada becomes the cherished 51st. State of the United States of America. No more artificially drawn line from many years ago. Look how beautiful this land mass would be. Free access with NO BORDER. ALL POSITIVES WITH NO NEGATIVES. IT WAS MEANT TO BE! America can no longer subsidize Canada with the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year that we have been spending in the past. It makes no sense unless Canada is a State!”

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• LAWdork: The education of Judge Gregory Katsas

  For Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee from the president’s first term, a month on the motions panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit appears to have taught him an important lesson about President Donald Trump’s second term.
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