Dear Progressive Reader,

Public hearings of the January 6 committee began this week. Hearings will continue for a total of six sessions - three days next week, another on June 21, with the final day currently scheduled for June 23. As Bill Blum writes this week, “Once the hearings are completed, the committee will prepare a report summarizing its findings, recommend legislation to prevent future insurrections, and make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.”

Meanwhile Trump-loyalists are already trying to call the work of the committee into question. As cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates, the playbook for denial and deflection is well established. Fox News is the only major network to choose not to air Thursday’s open session live. It is perhaps noteworthy that June 8, according to our Hidden History calendar, was the seventy-third anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s book 1984. The Republican response this week to the hearings reminded me of that book’s classic quote, “Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Meanwhile, Anis Shivani reports on the consolidation of the “America First” agenda. “Recent primaries,” he says, “reveal that Trumpism can win without Trump. . . . It is a mistake to continue focusing on Trump’s quirky personality; political reality has moved well beyond it.” And Jemar Tisby pens on op-ed this week for our Progressive Perspectives project on the ways in which this ideology is fueled by a dangerous strain of white Christian nationalism.

In the wake of the tragic mass shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, along with dozens of others in the past few weeks, the student-led national movement March for Our Lives is holding a series of nationwide marches and rallies under the slogan “It’s time to march for our lives, again.” A group of journalists from India visited our offices at The Progressive this past week to learn about journalism and press freedom practices in the United States. After our presentation, they asked questions. One of the first questions to be posed, was “What is it about guns in the United States?” It is a hard question to answer when gun deaths in this country are simply off the charts compared to other nations around the world.

Gun culture also remains a major recruiting tool for the U.S. military, as Thacher Scmid shows in his review of the new film Top Gun: Maverick. But, as Griffin Dix writes this week, “The mass murders in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, were the culmination of decades of lobbying and deceptive marketing perpetrated by the gun industry. Because of their lies, more Americans have died from gun violence—including suicides and accidents—since 1975 than in all of the wars in U.S. history.”

In other stories this week, Velislava Hillman and Molly Esquivel report on the rise of “surveillance capitalism” in schools through the use of various “ed-tech” products. (Coincidentally, this week was also the ninth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the massive gathering of personal data by intelligence agencies.) Also, Jeff Abbott describes the controversies around this week’s “Summitt of the Americas” in Los Angeles; Edward Hunt looks at the threats by Turkey against northeastern Syria’s autonomous region; and Frances Madeson chronicles threats by an ultra-nationalist group against Dominican author Ana Belique and her illustrator and publisher Michelle Ricardo, for simply producing a bi-lingual children’s story.

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

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – The Progressive will be holding one of our op-ed writing workshops at this year’s thirty-first annual Energy Fair in Custer, Wisconsin. The fair takes place June 24-26, 2022 and our workshop will be at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. Organized by the Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA), the Energy Fair brings people together to learn about sustainability and clean energy, connect with others, and take action toward a sustainable future with educational programs, clean energy and sustainable living exhibitors, and events for the whole family. Tickets and information are available at: TheEnergyFair.org.

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