Dear Progressive Reader,

On Friday, Steve Bannon became the first former Trump Administration aide to be convicted in relation to the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigations. As Bill Blum wrote last week, “[A]part from Trump himself, there might not be any other person more deserving of a stint in the pokey than Bannon, the loud-mouthed propagandist and podcaster who led Trump’s 2016 political campaign to victory, and subsequently served as the disgraced ex-President’s chief strategist and senior counselor for nearly eight months in 2017.” The actual sentencing will not take place until October 21, but it seems likely, as Blum postulates, that Bannon will soon find himself serving time in “an orange jumpsuit” for his contempt of the U.S. Congress.

As the world faces record heat waves and raging fires, one U.S. Senator continues to block efforts at positive legislation to combat the climate crisis. Cartoonist Mark Fiore illustrates this week that “It’s high time President Joe Biden and the Democrats give up on winning over Manchin, move on and leave this fossil fuel relic to the Republicans.” Fiore continues, “It appears that our climate future is directly tied to the whims of a West Virginia Democrat who is also the number one congressional recipient of oil, gas and mining campaign contributions.”

There is a joke going around the Internet that states that while Koch Industries owns a lot of real estate around the country, their best investment may have been the “Manchin” they bought in West Virginia. As journalist Dan Kaufman reports in The New Yorker, “Documents disclosed as part of a series of legal settlements with the tobacco industry show that Manchin, as a West Virginia state senator in the nineties, was deeply involved with ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council, of which billionaire Charles Koch is a key funder]. . . . ALEC still lists Manchin on its alumni page, where he’s the only Democrat among thirteen senators.” Researcher Nancy MacLean told me in 2021, “They [the Koch-funded right] understand their agenda is terribly unpopular, that nobody wants the extreme, libertarian agenda. So the only way that they can win is by weaponizing prejudices of different kinds to drive [their] voters to the polls and suppressing the vote [of others]. This has been a focus of groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, an intrinsically antidemocratic project.” MacLean went on to note that “the Republican politicians who encouraged the January 6 insurrection are longtime beneficiaries of Koch network money. It’s really important that journalists begin to connect these stories, because if we’re ever going to get out of the situation we’re in now, we have to go back and recognize the dark money donors that are behind all this mayhem.”

Two important new books are reviewed on our website this week. Jake Whitney writes about Mark Leibovich’s Thank You for Your Servitude, which skewers the numerous Republicans who have given up their principles, and perhaps ultimately their party, in exchange for blind fealty to Donald Trump. And Susie Day speaks with author and activist Michael Yates about his latest book, Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle. “I want people to think about their work and their lives. Maybe they’ll be inspired to take some action,” Yates tells her.

This past Thursday was the anniversary of the 1925 conviction of John Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee. It is clear that these struggles continue nearly a century later, as Bill Lueders points out in a recent article on a Wisconsin school district that did not want to allow students to be exposed to a book that tells the story of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Lueders notes, “PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, tracked 1,585 instances of books being banned from schools between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022.” As Indiana educator Edward O. Frantz wrote last February for our Public Schools Advocate project, “Across the United States, from Texas and Tennessee to Washington and Virginia, an ugly era of backlash in educational freedom and fairness is gaining reckless speed.”

Meanwhile, there are efforts counter this trend of denying students access to the true history of our country. One example is the public television documentary Manzanar, Diverted, which premiered this week. As reviewer Ed Rampell explains, the film “tells the stories of Indigenous and Japanese American communities in the region of the internment camp of Manzanar in California, the environmental disaster that unites them, and their ongoing resistance against human rights abuses and environmental racism.” In addition, Eleanor J. Bader provides a review of the new young readers adaptation of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, by Jeanne Theoharis. Bader says the fact that “mainstream media typically equate Parks exclusively with the bus boycott reflects a profound ‘lack of interest in her focus on fighting northern racism’ [in Detroit]. . . . The Rebellious Life aims to change this and presents her six decades of activism realistically and movingly.”

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 and A Room of One’s Own bookstore hosted a live in-person book release event for Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, by Ruth Conniff, editor-at-large for The Progressive. If you missed it on July 19, the event is archived on our YouTube channel for later viewing. Donors of $50 or more to The Progressive can also receive a signed copy of the book by mail.

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