Dear Progressive Reader,

Acolytes of Donald Trump—some hoping to be Vice Presidential material—continue to make their pilgrimages to New York City to show their support for the multiple-time indicted (and in some cases, convicted) Republican Party leader. According to USA Today, Trump has actually been named in 4,095 lawsuits during the past three decades. Several visiting Congresmembers and others have even mimicked Trump’s dress, almost like a uniform, with a dark blue jacket and red tie. But last Thursday, the visits took a new and ominous tone when U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, posed in front of the Manhattan court room and tweeted “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”

The message was an overt reference to Trump’s September 2020 comment on the debate stage when moderator Chris Wallace asked if he would condemn violent militia groups. Trump replied by saying “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” This even after FBI director Christopher Wray had, just a few days earlier, told Congress that “white supremacists and anti-government extremists have been responsible for most of the recent deadly attacks by extremist groups within the United States.” Trump’s comment was celebrated by the Proud Boys as an endorsement—they even created T-shirts with the message. The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, led by members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers would follow a little more than three months later.

Two millennia earlier, the democracy of Ancient Rome was thrown into chaos by acts of violence following an election. As Edward Watts wrote in an essay on January 8, 2021, “The violent disruption of the consular vote in 100 B.C. initiated two decades of political dysfunction that led to the first civil war in Rome’s recorded history.” Similarly, in the lead-up to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, as Rick Steves describes in “The Story of Fascism in Europe,” his 2017 television documentary, “a fringe movement—claiming to be the champion of the oppressed—dressed in intimidating brown-shirt uniforms, roamed the streets in gangs, and wanted to restore Germany's national pride.” As Mark Twain is often credited with reminding us, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

This week on our website, Stephen Zunes presents two articles on the recent campus protests calling for divestment from companies supporting Israel’s military campaign against Gaza. In the first he notes, college and university “professors across the country are being targeted by the right in order to score political points” in what appears to be a much broader attack on academic freedom. “What’s happening on campuses may only be the beginning,” Zunes concludes. In his second piece, Zunes writes that “Broadening the federal definition of antisemitism is a disingenuous attempt to quash dissent.”

Elsewhere on our website, Jeff Abbott reports on the new president of Panama who is planning to work with the Biden Administration to make migration through Central America more difficult—even for legitimate asylum seekers. Plus, Tony Vick and Brandon Arvesen write about prisoner Terrence Heard whose life may be changed by a new Tennessee law, and Jackie Ostfeld of the Sierra Club pens an op-ed on ways we can solve the “nature gap” in urban America.

Finally, this past Friday was the seventieth anniversary of the decision in Brown v Board of Education, that determined that segregation in schools by race was unconstitutional. However, as Boaz Dvir points out, “Seventy years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, school segregation persists throughout the country.” One step to remedying this, Dvir says, is the often-underfunded model of community schools. “They may provide one of our best opportunities for education equity,” he states. This is further backed up by a new study that shows “more than half of the blame [for increasing segregation in classrooms] is due to the expansion of charter schools,” as Carol Burris of the Network on Public Education points out in a new analysis for our Public Schools Advocate project.

The Brown v. Board decision has been remembered this week on many radio and television broadcasts, but a forgotten story is that of newly-minted Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren who delivered the opinion of the court. A little more than a year after the ruling, Warren would travel to Madison, Wisconsin, to deliver an address marking the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of his heroes (and founder of The Progressive), Robert M. La Follette. “[It took] Bob LaFollette, one of the last of our log cabin statesmen, to turn the searchlight upon our social problems and to grind out with mortar and pestle the answer to them,” Warren proclaimed. We reprinted that speech in August 1955, and again on our website six decades later. You can read it here.

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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