Dear Progressive Reader,
It has been a week of high-profile pardons, science denial, and the sidelining of the people who know how to deal with pandemics. As the President’s press spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany said, “the science should not stand in the way” of fully re-opening schools.
Kelly D. Holstine, 2018/2019 Minnesota State Teacher of the Year, has a very different opinion, writing this week for our website, “Our teachers are the ones who work on the front lines and know our youth better than anyone else, and our students are the ones who have the most to gain or lose. Students and educators must be included in this decision . . . They are, after all, the ones being asked to put their lives on the line.”
Rann Miller explains this week why “saying Black Lives Matter isn’t enough.” Edward Hunt reports on the longtime climate of bias and racism in the U.S. Department of State. And Sarah Jaffe chronicles the movements of tenants fighting back against evictions across the United States. “Stopping evictions, by any means necessary,” one activist tells her, “is a matter of life or death.”
Ed Rampell brings us a review of the new book by presidential niece Mary Trump. “Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all,” Trump warns in her harshly critical history of the warped “family values” that shaped the life of the current occupant of the White House. Rampell tells us, “Mary says she’s speaking out before November’s election because her uncle’s bungling has reached epic proportions.” The book is a cautionary tale that Rampell calls “a devastatingly perceptive page-turner with the power and potential to expose the tragically flawed delusional man who would be king.”
Perhaps most critical in the next 100 days is the guarantee of safe and secure elections in the midst of a national pandemic. Harvey Wasserman pens an op-ed this week noting, “Trump is doing everything he can to scuttle all that. His GOP is working overtime to strip the voter rolls, undermine vote-by-mail, and discard the electronic ballot images that are key to a rapid, reliable vote count.” This potential theft of the 2020 election is the topic of a new book by investigative journalist Greg Palast called How Trump Stole 2020. Palast has donated a number of copies of this just-released book to The Progressive to use as a fundraiser, and we are able to offer them to donors for a limited time. Details can be found here.
Finally, we acknowledge the passing, in the past two days, of three important icons. Renowned international journalist Christopher Dickey died Thursday of congestive heart failure in his adopted home of Paris, France. Dickey covered wars from Central America to Iraq, and was working as foreign editor for The Daily Beast at the time of his death. “The theme of useless wars is one I have come back to many times over the years,” Dickey told me in 2017 as we discussed Manuel Noriega and the U.S. invasion of Panama – which he had called “one of the costliest drug busts in U.S. history.”
The Reverend C. T. Vivian, civil rights leader and close colleague of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., died Friday in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of ninety-five. On the same day, in the same city, the legendary activist and member of Congress, John Lewis died after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Both Vivian and Lewis were on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, and again for the fiftieth anniversary commemoration pictured above in an image by White House photographer Pete Souza. They were marching for the right to vote, and both men kept defending that right to their final days.
“John Lewis was a great man who made his life’s goal one of equality and justice. He was a role model to many, and he was one of the kindest people I knew,” fellow Congressmember and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Mark Pocan told The Progressive this morning. “We will miss him immensely.” Writing in the magazine in March 2017, Pocan reminded readers of how “the President-elect degraded the accomplishments of U.S. Representative John Lewis, a civil rights hero.” Pocan went on, “I had hoped for better. Those hopes faded fast. But they’ve been replaced with new hope in what I am seeing every day—in your acts of resistance, both great and small.” Today we dedicate those acts of resistance, great and small, to a lifelong resister, John Lewis.
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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