Dear Progressive Reader,

The threat of an expanding war in Iran continues to dominate the news. As Stephen Zunes writes on our website this week, “The unprovoked attack by Israel against Iran and the tragic war that has resulted could have been avoided back in 2017 had President Donald Trump not broken off the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’—and if President Joe Biden hadn’t refused to return to it.” But really we need to look back even further. In 2019, I spoke with Andrew Bacevich, author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East, who explained, “I think there are two singular events, one of which determines where Iranians preferred to start the story of U.S.-Iran relations down to the present moment, and there is another such event that defines when the United States wants to start telling that story. For the Iranians, the start point is the [1953] CIA-engineered coup that overthrew [Iranian Prime Minister] Mohammad Mosaddegh. . . . For us, we want to begin the story with the Iranian revolution and the [1979-1980] hostage crisis, a great humiliation done to the United States, and one which we really have not gotten over.”

Trump is no stranger to humiliation, and is known to be very sensitive to perceived weakness and defeats. According to an “insider” who spoke to The Washington Post, Pete Hegseth has been sidelined from meetings as the Iran crisis has grown. Why? Some speculate the reason is that he did not deliver a “scary” parade for Trump last week in Washington, D.C. Trump, who reportedly wanted the soldiers in the parade to be more “menacing,” may now be looking to reclaim his soiled honor with a terrifying military action on July 4—the date the President has specified for his decision on whether or not to drop “bunker buster bombs” on one of Iran’s nuclear facilities. On Thursday, Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he plans to make his final decision “one second before it is due.”

Thursday was Juneteenth, which commemorates the date when news of the end of slavery reached people in Galveston, Texas. The day is commemorated in some way in all fifty states, but not until 2021 was it recognized as a federal holiday. Now Trump wants to cancel it. As Terrance Sullivan writes this week on our website, “The holiday’s public recognition has fallen victim to‘anti-woke’ backlash, leading to a quiet retreat from public memory.” And, he concludes, “Five years ago, our country seemed ready to reckon with a little bit of the truth. Today, it seems desperate to forget. But the story of Juneteenth, as with many stories in our history, is still being written. Whether we choose to celebrate it—or cancel it—will say more about our nation than any parade ever could.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, Ed Rampell describes the history of Red Channels, a publication used during the 1950s blacklist which turns seventy-five tomorrow; Eleanor J. Bader looks at the “Take It Down Act,” meant to protect victims of online attacks that may now be used against political artists critiquing the powerful; San Stein chronicles the trail of an Israeli activist refusing to cooperate with the courts; and Isabel Rodriguez reports from the protests in Los Angeles, California, against ICE detentions. Plus, Matt Watkins looks into the threats inherent in the upcoming case in the U.S. Supreme Court over “birthright citizenship;” Matt Minton reviews the new film Heightened Security which tells the story of another Supreme Court case just decided this week; and Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies examine the shifting world opinion around the war in Gaza and Israel’s new war against Iran. Also, Anthony Pahnke pens an op-ed on the way farmers feel about Trump’s unjust immigration policies; and Elizabeth Jacobs and James Alwine opine on the public heath dangers of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policies on vaccines.

Finally, our thoughts go out to the friends and families of the Minnesota lawmakers targeted last week by a political assassin. The accused killer had a list of many other names of elected officials and Planned Parenthood clinics, al of whom he intended to “kill, injure, harass, and intimidate.” But he was not a lone actor. Investigations show that Vance Boelter had deep connections to a rightwing Christian dominionist group now called the New Apostolic Reformation. For more on this group, see the book review in the February/March 2024 issue of The Progressive.

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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