Dear Progressive Reader,

On Friday, former Trump aide Peter Navarro was arrested as he tried to board an airplane in Nashville, Tennessee. Navarro was arraigned in court later that day on charges of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack on the United States Capitol. Navarro emerged from the courthouse and immediately took the opportunity to urge everyone in America to buy his book “on Amazon” because those sales would be his “legal defense fund.” The book, scheduled for release in September, lays out a plan for “how to take back Trump’s America.” Navarro’s earlier book, released last year, detailed to plot to overturn the 2020 election, calling it “the Green Bay Sweep,” named after a football play developed in the 1950s and 60s by famed coach Vince Lombardi, also known as the Packers’ “Power Sweep.” It is about this plot that the January 6 committee wants to question Navarro. Nationally televised hearings of the January 6 committee are scheduled to begin at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, June 9 (coincidentally almost exactly one week before the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in – which also led to the formation of a select committee investigation and nationally televised hearings).

According to the “Gun Violence Archive,” there have been twenty-one mass shootings in the United States since the murder of nineteen students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, last week. The numbers are truly shocking with now more than 233 shootings involving four or more victims in this year alone. Politicians seem unable to enact any meaningful legislation but, as cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, many do have suggestions for “hardening” schools. However, as eighteen-year-old student Uma Menon says, “I won’t claim that ending this epidemic [of gun violence] is going to be easy, but it shouldn’t be nearly so difficult when we have the science and the data ready to deliver a cure.”

Ashana Bigard writes this week from New Orleans for our Public Schools Advocate project that what schools really need is not moats and guard dogs, but mental health resources for all students. Sarah Lahm reports this week on the work of two national researchers on mass shootings who note that all of these shootings “fit an identifiable pattern.” As Lahm explains, “Dismissing mass shooters as individual bad actors allows us to avoid our collective responsibility for these deaths of despair. We cannot continue to accept this.” And media literacy scholar Nolan Higdon points out, “The massacre [on May 14 in Buffalo, New York] reminds us that corporations’ profits are rooted in racism, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. . . . Allowing society to be guided by the economic whims of a handful of oligarchs in Big Tech has proven corrosive.”

The problem of gun violence in the United States is also impacting other countries in our hemisphere. Author Miriam Davidson pens an op-ed this week for our Progressive Perspectives project detailing these impacts. “Around 200,000 weapons are smuggled south each year, and between 70% and 90% of firearms recovered from crime scenes are trafficked from the United States,” she writes. The rising murder rate that this weaponry accelerates is also fueling a rise in authoritarian response by new rightwing political leaders such as El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele. Jeff Abbott reports this week that “after three years in power, the Bukele administration is furthering its authoritarian leanings as it takes on gangs,” and, as a human rights investigator tells him, “[Bukele] has dedicated himself to dismantling—destroying democratic institutions and checks and balances.”

June is designated as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Pride Month—established to coincide with the anniversary month of the June 28, 1969, Stonewall Uprising. President Joe Biden, in a proclamation from the White House noted, “This month, we celebrate generations of LGBTQI+ people who have fought to make the possibilities of our nation real for every American.” The Progressive continues our long history of writing about the struggles and victories of individuals and movements for LGBTQI+ rights. In our most recent issue, Kendra Love writes, “We have learned that working collectively can be a successful strategy to bring about the change we seek. And that there is power in numbers.”

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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