curated news excerpts & citations

NY Times: The Transformative Power of the White ‘Race Traitor’

From Schwerner and Goodman to Good and Pretti, white people putting themselves in harm’s way has helped galvanize Americans for justice.
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The first person to be executed for treason in the United States was not a spy or someone who sold secrets to a foreign government. It was not a Confederate general who took up arms against his government. It was an abolitionist named John Brown.

A religious man, Brown had long opposed slavery on moral grounds, becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and training Black communities in free states how to arm themselves against slave catchers. But as slavery continued to expand across the West and with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Brown came to believe that the only way to end slavery was to overthrow it by force.

In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what was then Virginia, intending to arm enslaved people to rise up against their enslavers. Brown’s group killed several people before he was captured and charged with murder and conspiracy to incite the revolt. The Commonwealth of Virginia considered a white man’s taking up arms to liberate Black people an act of treason, punishable by death.
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Borowitz: Mark Kelly Records Video Telling Bartenders They Are Allowed to Refuse Hegseth’s Orders

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senator Mark Kelly released a new online video on Thursday reminding the nation’s bartenders that they are allowed to refuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders.

Staring stonily into the camera, the former astronaut warned that, if Hegseth appears to be above the legal blood-alcohol limit, any additional drink request would constitute an illegal order.
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Rev. Mel West: America needs to find its way back to compassion

A well-known ball player said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

It seems that my beloved USA took the fork in the road marked compassion as the country developed, and we did not stray from that lane until lately. Three words that well describe our country were embodied in statues that I call “The Three Sisters.”

In 1886, a statue named “Liberty” was placed on Liberty Island, New York City, and since then has stood with her torch held high to welcome “the teeming mass.” …

The second sister is named “Justice” and appears blindfolded with a balance scale in her right hand. …

The younger is named “Responsibility” aka “The Madonna of the Trail.” As a statue she is seen as a pioneer woman with a baby in her arms and a child at her feet and facing West. …

We have gone well down the trail led by the three Sisters, lost at times along the way, but finding our way back. But now there are those who say we took the wrong trail years ago, and must go back to the fork and take the other trail. We must, they claim, take the trail marked by power, strength, wealth, force and domination. Compassion, we are told, is no longer a mark of good leadership, but of weakness. Our country should be feared more than loved and respected. Truth is what is told by those in power. Loyalty, no matter what, is the mark of citizenship. Wealth is for the taker.
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Paul Waldman: The death of the CIA Factbook and Trump’s war on usefulness

Wherever government does something helpful, the regime wants to kill it.

When the Trump administration closes down public access to yet another worthwhile resource, it doesn’t always make news. But the decision last week to shutter the CIA World Factbook stands out for what it reveals.

This administration has been fighting a sweeping information war meant to distort and suppress facts, ideas, and history that doesn’t “align with the president’s agenda,” in the phrase they so often use. But at the same time, they’re also waging a war on usefulness.

The CIA produced the Factbook, a concise roundup of facts and figures about every country in the world, since the 1960s; it started as an internal resource and then was made public so anyone could access it. If you wanted to know how many square miles Argentina is, or see a list of political parties in Belgium, or find out what the GDP of Cameroon was last year, the Factbook was a handy resource. But not anymore. Not only will the CIA stop producing new iterations, all previous versions have been removed from the web (though they can still be found at the Internet Archive).

It’s the latter part that gives away their intentions. What would the cost be of keeping the old versions of the Factbook online? Essentially zero. So what’s the point of deleting them?
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Andy Borowitz: Trump’s Racism Isn’t News

Donald Trump’s racist meme featuring Barack and Michelle Obama is shocking but utterly unsurprising. Trump has been a racist for decades—following in his father’s footsteps.

In 1971, Trump joined the real estate company founded by daddy Fred, and, in a move that every nepo baby would applaud, assumed the entry-level position of president.

His career as his father’s junior partner got off to an inauspicious but telling start.

In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management for discriminating against prospective Black tenants, naming both Trumps as codefendants. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times.

Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn advanced the Trumps’ claim that they were discriminating not against Blacks but against undesirable “welfare recipients.” A judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit. (The tradition of judges tossing baseless Trump lawsuits continues to this day.)
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Bulwark: Why Trump’s Attack on Refugees Could Hurt Grandma

Miami, Florida
MARYSE, 56, HAS BEEN A HOME CARE WORKER in the United States ever since she moved here from Haiti sixteen years ago. Over the years, she estimates, she’s cared for more than two dozen people. Most have been seniors in physical or cognitive decline—among them, a Purple Heart recipient who had served in the Army and a former pilot who had flown missions over France and Africa during World War II. She has also cared for younger people with physical disabilities, including one who had cerebral palsy and another who had suffered severe head trauma in a car accident.

It was not the career Maryse once imagined for herself, she told me last week. …

Maryse’s priority at that point was providing for her kids, and her English wasn’t good enough for media work in the states. At her sister’s urging, she says, she enrolled in classes to become a certified nursing assistant, following a well-worn path for Haitian immigrants who knew the high demand for caregivers meant it would lead to reliable employment—and who frequently saw caring for others as a calling, not just a paycheck.
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This is not a case of immigrants taking jobs from Americans, most economists say. It’s a case of immigrants taking jobs Americans don’t want, because there are easier ways to make a living. “There are these other jobs—even fast food sometimes—where you can have more predictability and stable hours, and make similar money,” …
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NY Times: Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.

Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Ms. Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have departed, leaving the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office in turmoil.
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Cindy Burnham, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Minnesota, declined to comment for this article, as did Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Emily Covington, a Justice Department spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.
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Steward Beckham: A Presidency of Racist Memes

This morning, I woke up to the news that the president had posted a social media video depicting the former and first Black head of state and his wife as chimpanzees. It was grotesque. It was also tragically unsurprising. We’ve had roughly a decade of this kind of political rot: a carnival barker’s politics of enrichment for the wealthiest, paired with racist shiny objects tossed to a sizable, influential slice of the working public like bait.

A few Republicans pushed back. Senator Tim Scott suggested it was racist, but also may have been a “mistake” by the president or his communications team. Congressman Mike Lawler also framed it as a possible mistake while admitting, plainly, that this wasn’t borderline anything, just raw racism. It was overt.

I grew up on a saying my mother repeated often: what happens in the dark comes to light. American politics has its own version of that law. Think of Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 general-election campaign with a “states’ rights” speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, only sixteen years after the murders of civil rights workers there. On paper, “states’ rights” can sound like a tidy argument about federalism. In historical practice, especially in the post–Civil Rights era, it functioned as coded reassurance: desegregation went too far; the old order should reassert itself; separate but equal (that peculiar institution’s afterlife) deserved a second wind.
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Same with Reagan’s “welfare queen” trope.
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So when the president posts something like last night’s video, he’s not merely being tasteless or provocative. He’s reaffirming the bargain at the center of his rise: political power built on the destabilization of the country through racial grievance through the insistence that a Black president disproving racist stereotypes was not progress but an existential theft. …
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WSJ – Karl Rove: Republicans Have an Economy Problem

President Trump’s triumphal tone isn’t helping matters for everyday Americans.

It’s bad news for Republicans that recent coverage of President Trump has been dominated by topics ranging from invading Greenland and Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings in Minneapolis to trashing the Grammys and ordering a giant Jeffrey Epstein document dump. These aren’t as important to Americans as the economy.

To correct this problem, the president came to Iowa last month for an economic speech. His team hoped his appearance in a Des Moines suburb would recenter the discussion.

It didn’t. Mr. Trump made two mistakes.

The first was straying from the subject for almost half his speech. Victories and stolen elections. Immigration. Introducing politicians on the stage. Attacking his predecessor for multiple sins. Lots of different foreign issues. He went everywhere—and therefore nowhere.

The second problem was Mr. Trump’s triumphal tone. He congratulated himself on “the greatest first year of any administration in American history.” The “economy is booming,” he said. It’s been “the best first year of any president ever maybe.”
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Capitol News Illinois: ‘My own government attempted to execute me,’ Chicago woman shot by Border Patrol testifies

• Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by immigration agents last year, testified at a public forum on immigration agents’ use of force in D.C. on Tuesday, Feb. 3.
• Panelists and members of Congress called for immigration enforcement reform and civil liability of federal agents.
• This is the second forum hosted by two congressmen who opened an inquiry in October to investigate reports of immigration agents detaining U.S. citizens.
• Two other citizens who accused immigration agents of assault testified at the forum.

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