Dear Progressive Reader,

Friday June 24, shortly after 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its much-anticipated ruling to overturn nearly fifty years of legal precedent in Roe v. Wade, stating that the right to have an abortion was no longer protected under the U.S. Constitution. Unlike the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016, which was not generally apparent until a few hours after the polls closed, this decision was predicted nearly two months ago in leaked draft opinion, published on May 2 by Politico. The final ruling by the court, according to legal scholar Jeffrey Toobin, is almost identical to the leaked draft.

As our editorial assistant Nora-Kathleen Berryhill writes, following the announcement, “The Progressive has long been a staunch advocate for gender equity and abortion rights. Since the SCOTUS draft opinion was leaked in May, we’ve been covering what the end of Roe could mean for abortion rights and how people can fight back.” The article goes on to catalog a number of our recent pieces on this important topic. All of these articles can be found on our website by clicking here.

Also in the news this week, the January 6 committee announced that it would continue hearings into July due to a large quantity of additional evidence coming in since the public testimony began. The series of televised sessions over the past week brought many new revelations, including that Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson had sought to deliver the votes of fake electors to Vice President Mike Pence on the morning of January 6. Pence’s staff testified to the committee that they refused to accept the false votes. Johnson initially denied, but later admitted that he had indeed participated in this anti-democratic activity. Writing in the April 2021 issue of The Progressive, John Nichols referred to Johnson as the “heir to Joe McCarthy.” McCarthy, also a Wisconsin Senator, was taken to task by The Progressive in a series of articles in the early 1950s, culminating in a special issue of the magazine in April 1954 titled: “McCarthy: a documented record.” It was one of our most sought after issues, going into several reprints.

Speaking of McCarthyism, Bill Lueders this week writes about a school board that rejected a book which discussed the World War II-era internment of Japanese Americans, saying that the book “lacked ‘balance’ regarding the internment.” This in spite of the fact that even the U.S. Supreme Court has repudiated the internment saying, “The forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.” Coincidentally, this week also marked the fortieth anniversary of the killing of Chinese American Vincent Chin in Detroit, Michigan, in an attack clearly based on race. Joe George reviews the re-release of a powerful documentary on the murder, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, and Brad Jenkins and Linh Nguyen pen an op-ed reminding us that, after forty years since Chin’s death on June 23, 1982, “there has not only been continued violence against Asian Americans but new, record-high levels of anti-Asian hate crimes.”

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 hosting a webinar entitled “What’s Really Going On With the War in Ukraine?” on Tuesday, June 28 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. CDT. The webinar will be available via live stream at www.youtube.com/theprogressive and www.facebook.com/. Panelists will be Zoltán Grossman, of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. It will be moderated by Norman Stockwell, publisher of The Progressive. Viewers can submit questions via the chat feature.

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