curated news excerpts & citations

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 11, 2026

In a brief call with Barak Ravid of Axios today, President Donald J. Trump said “The war is going great. …

In fact, according to Patrick Wintour of The Guardian, Iranian officials have rejected two messages from Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff calling for a ceasefire. Wintour writes that Iran’s leaders “sense it is not losing the war and the US president is at the minimum feeling the political pressure.” Iranian officials intend to make the economic, political, and military costs of the war so high that Trump will not attack Iran again.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Independent: Iran-US war latest: Multiple ships attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Tehran threatens to send price of oil soaring

Iran threatened to launch its most “intense strikes” of the conflict so far overnight, after the US promised the same on Tuesday
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Tehran’s feared Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility for an attack on a Thai-flagged vessel, after unknown projectiles hit a Japan-flagged container ship and a Marshall Islands-flagged bulk carrier in the narrow channel early this morning.
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Judd Legum: Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor: what we know and what’s still being hidden

President Trump allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein, according to documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday. …
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Since the initial release of the documents, two important developments have bolstered the credibility of the alleged victim. This new information has received little national media attention.

First, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, the nation’s premier journalist on the Epstein scandal, has revealed new information about how the FBI assessed the victim. …

Second, the Post and Courier, a media outlet based in Charleston, South Carolina, verified key aspects of the victim’s story around the time of the alleged Trump assault. …

Smaller details also checked out. …

Three key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor were withheld
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Other key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor continue to be withheld
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Steven Beschloss: The Threat of Retaliation in America

The Trump regime’s actions are making America less safe. They are exploiting fear to seize more power. We should not be intimidated.

So many of the Trump regime’s actions can break your brain. Launch a war against Iran …

… this massive military assault comes in the wake of FBI Director Kash Patel firing a dozen counterintelligence agents and staff whose responsibilities included monitoring possible threats from Iran on American soil.

CNN reported that this gutting was motivated by “a simple reason”: Trump wanted the removal of agents investigating him for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the story by reporter Hannah Rabinowitz also noted that these firings “have added to concern inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations in the wake of the military operation in Iran could be hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” removing “decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear” because of the Iran attack.

How foolish is that? Well, extremely foolish if you think that the Trump regime should be committed to keeping America safe.

According to Miles Taylor, former counterterrorism operations lead at the Department of Homeland Security, his old department wasn’t in the room when the bombing started and doesn’t appear to have been involved in the defensive planning. Taylor, who now write the valuable Defiance newsletter, notes that “thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts and officials have been moved to ‘immigration’ enforcement.”
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I think it’s important to hear from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder, who just published a Substack piece entitled “The Desire for Terror.” He talks about “self-terrorism,” which involves “allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.” Snyder explicitly states:“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States.” …
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Joyce Vance: Bloody Sunday

Today marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. The Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march for voting rights was halted by Alabama state troopers and sheriffs who tear-gassed and beat the marchers. A trooper beat Future Georgia Congressman John Lewis in the head with a nightstick.
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Brutality no longer outrages some Americans. They watch immigrants rounded up, zip-tied, frog marched into El Salvadoran prisons, and assaulted by federal agents in the process of detaining them. They read about people herded into facilities where there are bugs in the food and they sleep on concrete floors. They watch footage of American citizens being shot on the streets of Minneapolis and learn that an agency covered up the shooting death of a Texas man for a year. And they are unmoved.
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Earlier this week, we attacked a girls’ school. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “U.S. military investigators think American forces likely were responsible for a strike that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, a U.S. official said. …

Today, Trump was asked about the attack and who was responsible. He answered with a lie. He said Iran was responsible. Even Pete Hegseth couldn’t back that up. Standing next to the president, he said the attack was still “under investigation.”
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Root: Selma Was Not Just History, It Was a Warning

Opinion: Sixty-one years after “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, we are once again watching the machinery of state violence turn toward Black and Brown communities.

Sixty-one years ago, on March 7, 1965, 600 people stepped onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. They marched for the simple promise of democracy: the right to vote. What met them was not dialogue but violence — billy clubs, tear gas, mounted troopers. “Bloody Sunday” forced the nation to confront two truths: the brutality of racial discrimination and the power of coordinated Black organizing.
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WSJ: U.S. Loses 92,000 Jobs in Widespread and Unexpected Downturn

The U.S. lost 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the job market continues to struggle across a broad range of sectors.

The hiring numbers, reported Friday by the Labor Department, fell far short of January’s gain of 126,000 jobs. They were worse than the gain of 50,000 jobs that economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had expected to see.

The unemployment rate ticked slightly higher to 4.4%.
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Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims: Hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in a war zone

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Due to the intensity of combat in the Middle East, other countries not directly involved in the conflict quickly began evacuating their citizens from the region. The Italian government has facilitated the evacuation of 2,500 Italians on commercial flights. The Czech Republic sent multiple flights to evacuate people stranded in the area. Several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Greece, had organized flights scheduled for Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Americans in the area are in danger of being targeted, but the State Department did not advise citizens to leave the region before the strikes began. Before the 2003 Iraq War, in contrast, the State Department advised citizens to prepare to evacuate weeks in advance and ordered a final evacuation days before fighting began.

This year, Americans in 14 countries were not advised to evacuate until three days after the Trump administration began major combat operations in Iran. By that time, much of the region’s airspace and most airports had closed.
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Miles Taylor: Five reasons Trump has left America vulnerable to a terrorist attack by Iran.

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Here are the first five reasons that came to mind last night (as I woke up stress-cycling through the foolish mistakes the Trump team has made) that could get Americans killed:

1. DHS doesn’t appear to have done any defensive planning for war.
2. Thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts, and officials have been moved to “immigration” enforcement.
3. The administration says the number-one terror threat to America is… “Antifa.”
4. The FBI has been firing agents who monitor Iranian threats.
5. The president took America to war before getting DHS funded.

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Thom Hartmann: Is Deporting a Journalist the Ultimate Form of Cancel Culture?

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains rightwing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim.
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Atlanta Black Star: Trump’s Department of Education Tries to Send a Message—and Ends Up Exposing the Administration Instead

It seems there’s no end to the racism underpinning the Trump administration under President Donald Trump, which regularly trumpets its efforts at remaking the federal government in the image of a Jim Crow, 1950s-era America.
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The department posted a photo from National Geographic showing a classroom full of white children from 1959 reciting the pledge of allegiance with the caption, “MAKE EDUCATION GREAT AGAIN.”

The implication and message the department is sending out with the post is clear, and it didn’t take long for social media to erupt in anger and disbelief.
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