Dear Progressive Reader,

Donald Trump is no stranger to committing “firsts” in American politics. The four-time-indicted former President has now become the first-ever President or ex-President to have his mugshot taken. Film reviewer Ed Rampell pointed out to me in an email on Friday that the image (pretty clearly heavily rehearsed in front of a mirror) looks uncannily like a stern photo of Adolph Hitler used as the cover image for an edition of Mein Kampf, a book Hitler wrote while he was serving time in prison for a failed coup in 1923. The photo, according to Getty Images, was taken in 1934, the same year in which Hitler, on August 19, abolished Germany’s presidency and made himself “Führer.” As I noted in a piece for a local Wisconsin newspaper in March 2016, when “Trump visits Janesville, a look at history is in order.”

Trump, of course, did not come to Wisconsin this past week for the Republican candidates’ debate, choosing instead to speak with former Fox host Tucker Carlson. “The public knows who I am,” he stated on his personal platform Truth Social.

The Milwaukee debate was difficult to watch and harder to understand since all of the contenders kept shouting over each other. The event’s winners may actually have been the two Fox moderators, Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, who seemed, well, “moderate” compared to the politicians on stage. The candidate who seemed to garner the most attention was the outspoken Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Safa Ahmed covered earlier this week on our website for his views that “[Indian Prime Minister] Narendra Modi’s authoritarianism [could be] a model for the United States.” Ahmed goes on to state that “the fact that he remains a relevant GOP candidate is troubling, not just as a sign of the right’s increasing extremism, but of how he could continue to give legitimacy to Hindu nationalism.”

The city of Milwaukee was bracing itself not only for Wednesday’s debates but also for the upcoming 2024 Republican National Convention to be held in that city. As Isiah Holmes reported this week, “It’s an unnerving time for much of Milwaukee’s left-leaning activist community, with some groups concerned about who else the debate may draw to the city.” And Corey Schmidt, giving a wrap-up on Thursday of the debate antics, predicted: “Republicans won’t win over Wisconsin—the decision to begin and end their primary in Milwaukee is already backfiring.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Jeff Abbott brings news from Guatemala of the electoral victory of a progressive-leaning candidate; Tim Brinkhof examines the use of digital technology in monitoring and policing migrants at various borders; and cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates the cynical behavior of Meta (Facebook) in banning local news on its platform in Canada—just as people need the information to evacuate from approaching wildfires! Plus Matt Rothschild, former editor and publisher of The Progressive, and an avid birdwatcher, reviews a recent book on a Senate colleague of “Fighting Bob” La Follette who sponsored legislation crucial to protecting migratory birds; and Jake Whitney reviews the new book by David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection.

August 23 marked the ninety-fifth anniversary of the execution in Massachusetts of labor activists (and immigrants) Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In 2019, at the height of some of the Trump Administration’s anti-alien hysteria, I wrote about The Progressive’s years of coverage between 1921-1928 (when our magazine still bore the name La Follette’s) of their arrest and subsequent trial, conviction, and execution. In 1977, for the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths, folksinger Charlie King told the story of Sacco and Vanzetti in the wonderful song Two Good Arms.

Another writer who told the story of Sacco and Vanzetti was people’s historian Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922-January 27, 2010) whose one-hundred-and-first birthday would have been this week. As Eleanor J. Bader writes in her tribute to Zinn and the numerous people’s historians who have followed his example, “Zinn’s influence continues to motivate resistance and serves as an example to other writers.” Zinn, who regularly wrote for The Progressive, said in his column in 1998: “Just to tell untold truths has a powerful effect, for people with ordinary common sense may then ask themselves and others: ‘What shall we do?’ ”

One of those untold truths was the tragedy of the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955. In November of that year, Murray Kempton, who covered the killers' trial in Mississippi, wrote in the pages of The Progressive, “Emmett Till was an average schoolboy who seems to have had most of the ambitions of the new Negro: he planned to go to college and learn a skilled trade.” Instead he was brutally murdered and thrown in a river. The federal Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act would not be signed until March 29, 2022, after more than a century of repeated efforts to get such a law passed.

August 28 will also be the sixtieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Set on that day in 1963 in part to honor the eighth anniversary of Till’s death which had helped galvanize the modern civil rights movement, the event was about much more than its most-remembered speech by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As Yohuru Williams writes in this month’s issue of The Progressive, “It brought together a diverse coalition of activists and leaders who passionately advocated for civil rights and equality in a way that transcended the eloquent but limited confines of a singular dream.” Michael G. Long echoes these comments this week in an op-ed for our Progressive Perspectives project. “The demonstration was so much more than a dream; it was also a socialist-inspired demand for economic justice,” he says. Long and Williams together have produced a new book on the radical history of this sixty-year-old event. More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will be released on August 29, and will be available in local bookstores and through online retailers.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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