Featured
NBA Finals: Celtics vs. Mavericks key to title? Dueling backcourts. By Jeff Zillgitt / USA Today
Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving are what one analyst calls ‘the most talented backcourt in NBA history’. The Mavericks’ duo will take on Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and the Celtics starting Thursday.
Stan Van Gundy selected his words with thought. He called Dallas Mavericks star guards Kyrie Irving and Luka Doncic “the most talented backcourt in NBA history.” The TNT analyst was careful. He didn’t say “best” backcourt in history. He said talented. It’s a distinction. Doncic and Irving have prompted a discussion about their place among the all-time great backcourts. Read more
Related: The Boston Celtics and What Greatness Looks Like. By Louisa Thomas / The New Yorker
Related: The NBA Finals are Kyrie Irving’s Lazarus moment. By William C. Rhoden / Andscape
Political / Social
“White collar crook”: Biden says Trump is not just a “convicted felon” but a “diminished man.” By Nandika Chatterjee / Salon
“Folks, the campaign entered uncharted territory last week,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, according to a White House pool reporter. “For the first time in American history, a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency.”
Biden added: “But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice.” He is not wrong. Trump confirmed during a Fox News interview Sunday that his “revenge will be success.” Read more
The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler? By David Smith / The Guardian
Comparisons between the ex-president and the 20th-century Nazi leader are controversial but a new book says they resemble each other as political performance artists
Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair. Read more
Trump’s conviction and a course correction for the GOP. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
“This high-profile moment of accountability was critically important”
Trump’s propagandists, which include senior leaders of the Republican Party, have rallied around him in the aftermath of his felony conviction and are attacking the United States justice system, the legitimacy of the courts, and the rule of law. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Trump MAGA supplicant, is openly pressuring the right-wing extremists on the United States Supreme Court to somehow find a way to void the New York hush-money election interference conviction. Republicans in Congress are also promising to launch (more) retaliatory false investigations into leading Democrats (and Manhattan District Attorney Bragg and presumably other law enforcement involved in Trump’s hush-money election interference trial). Read more
Why is a group of billionaires working to re-elect Trump? By Robert Reich / The Guardian
Oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t just hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself
Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary. Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns. But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are leading a movement against democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Read more
The Verdict Is In on the Supreme Court. / NYT
I don’t need a black robe to hand down a judgment on the Supreme Court. It’s corrupt, rotten and hurting America.
The once august court, which the public held in highest esteem, is now hopelessly corroded: It is in the hands of a cabal of religious and far-right zealots, including a couple of ethical scofflaws with MAGA wives. Chief Justice John Roberts, who dreamed of being remembered as a great unifier of the court, is refusing to rein in Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas, who are thumbing their noses at the public and their own oaths to dispense fair and impartial justice. Read more
‘Racial resentment’ a factor in violence of 6 January 2021, study says. By Alice Herman / The Guardian
Political observers are quick to blame hyperpartisanship and political polarization for leading more than 2,000 supporters of Donald Trump to riot at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. But according to a recently published study, “racial resentment” – not just partisanship – explains the violence that broke out after the 2020 election.
Angered over the claim, promoted by Trump and his closest allies, that heavily Black cities had rigged the 2020 election in favor of Democrats, white voters – some affiliated with white-nationalist groups and militias, and others acting alone – stormed the US capitol in an attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 election. Read more
Related: Ron DeSantis’s Voter Suppression Machine Is Working. By Meaghan Winter / TNR
Trump’s Appeal To Have Fani Willis Disqualified Gets Hearing Date. By Sharelle Burt / Black Enterprise
Oral arguments to have Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis removed from former President Donald Trump’s election interference case have been tentatively set for October 2024.
The Georgia Court of Appeals set the possible date for Oct. 4, potentially pushing the final ruling well past Election Day. Both Willis and Trump’s legal team were alerted of the decision on June 3, with defense attorney briefs due in late June 2024. Read more
Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman runs as an outsider as he fights for a third term. By Scott Wong / NBC News
Bowman, 48, a member of “The Squad,” is seeking to portray George Latimer, 70, as the real political insider ahead of a contentious Democratic primary that’s attracting millions in spending.
“I’m for taxing the rich, he’s not. I’m for taxing large corporations, he’s not. I’m for reparations for Black people, he’s not. He’s completely funded by right-wing, MAGA Republican billionaires. And all of my funding comes from the grassroots of working-class people,” he told a voter as hip-hop and Caribbean music blared. Read more
NAACP warns American Airlines over discrimination incidents. By Jonathan Franklin / NPR
Following the news of a recent lawsuit filed by three Black men accusing American Airlines of racial discrimination, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is calling on the airline to make some serious changes.
In a statement Tuesday from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) President and CEO Derrick Johnson, the organization is calling on American Airlines to provide an update on the open investigation into a slew of incidents involving customers and airline staff that have surfaced over the last few months. Read more
Harvard’s Largest Faculty Division Will No Longer Require Diversity Statements. Alan Blinder and
Instead, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will require applicants to describe their “efforts to strengthen academic communities,” a senior university leader said in an email.
The decision represents a sharp break from Harvard’s recent practices and comes less than six months after Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, resigned amid accusations of plagiarism and complaints that Harvard was doing too little to combat antisemitism. The chaos surrounding Dr. Gay intensified debates about the sway of diversity initiatives in academia. Read more
Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own. By Rachel Poser / NYT
In 2020, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist” galvanized Americans with his ideas. The past four years have tested them — and him.
Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Read more
World News
In the Former Eastern Bloc, They’re Terrified of a Trump Presidency. By David Rothkopf / TNR
For Americans, authoritarian rule is theoretical. But in Eastern Europe, reminders of it are everywhere, as is dread of a partial return to those days.
As I sat across a table from a minister in the Bulgarian government in his office in Sofia, he shook his head and then held it in his hands. “I can’t believe it. It is impossible,” he said. “It would be a disaster. How can Americans not see that?” Read more
Race still divides South Africa: Study shows little transformation in new suburbs in country’s economic hub. By Christian Hamann / Phys Org
As South Africa reflects on 30 years of democracy, it’s important to ask whether its cities have changed for the better when it comes to racial mixing.
During apartheid, South Africa’s residential development was segregated in law along racial lines. Black African residents were consigned to townships on the outskirts of cities while white residents lived in suburbs close to facilities and employment. This established negative spatial, economic and social outcomes among race groups. In a recent study I explore whether South Africa is achieving spatial transformation now that different race groups can legally mix in neighborhoods. Read more
Biden Suggests Netanyahu Is Prolonging War to Stay in Power. By NYT
President Biden, asked whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was prolonging the war in Gaza in an effort to hold on to office, said that he believed “there is every reason for people to draw that conclusion,” lending his voice to something many in his administration have been saying privately for months.
His statement came in an interview with Time magazine published Tuesday that was conducted May 28, three days before Mr. Biden gave a speech revealing the details of what he called an “Israeli plan” to bring about an exchange of hostages and a permanent cease-fire. Read more
Related: How Israel’s Illiberal Democracy Became a Model for the Right. By Suzanne Schneider / Dissent
The Enigma of Frantz Fanon. By Ken Chen / The Nation
Frantz Fanon in his time—and in ours.
Perhaps the most infamous postwar anti-colonial intellectual, Fanon had fled his Caribbean homeland of Martinique and the heady cultural ferment of postwar France and joined the Algerian war for independence. As I read his descriptions of a violent revolt by Arab insurgents against the settlers occupying their country, his words struck me with temporal vertigo. Scarcely had I lifted my eyes from his description of settlers reducing the natives to “zoological terms” than I read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman characterizing Arabs and Iranians as an infestation of wasps, spiders, and insect eggs ready to hatch. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Why Samuel Alito’s Christian Nationalist Flag Matters. By Rachel Laser / The Progressive
The viral flag is a symbol of the ideology that pervades his judicial opinions. If we want to protect our democracy and freedoms, we must fight to separate church and state.
Americans should be shocked that the “Appeal to Heaven” flag was displayed at the vacation home of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. This flag is associated with the Christian nationalism movement, which calls for a Christian theocratic nation to replace our democracy, and the flag is a visual confirmation of this agenda pervading Alito’s judicial opinions. Read more
Alarming Report Warns Of ‘Greatest Threat To American Democracy You’ve Never Heard Of. By
An annual report from the Southern Poverty Law Center describes a burgeoning new form of Christian supremacy sweeping the country
A growing Christian supremacist movement that labels its perceived enemies as “demonic” and enjoys close ties to major Republican figures is “the greatest threat to American democracy you’ve never heard of,” according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Read more
Billions in taxpayer dollars now go to religious schools via vouchers. By Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein / Wash Post
The rapid expansion of state voucher programs follows court decisions that have eroded the separation between church and state. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) signs a measure creating a school voucher program last year in Little Rock. (Andrew Demillo/AP)
The Confederacy was Racist Christian Nationalists. By Jim Messner Jr. / Patheos
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson and all the hallowed heroes of the Confederacy were racist, white supremacist, Christian nationalists.
The Confederacy was established by and for racist Christian nationalists to support and maintain a racist system, while invoking the will of God. The racist members of the Confederacy passed their racism from generation to generation like family recipes. As a result, their descendants rioted in Charlottesville and again on Jan. 6. Read more
Black World War II medic awarded posthumous Distinguished Service Cross. By
Cpl. Waverly Woodson Jr. saved dozens of Allied troops on D-Day. Courtesy of the Woodson family/AP
A Black medic credited with treating many wounded soldiers on D-Day has been posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland announced Monday. Army medic Cpl. Waverly Woodson, Jr., was part of the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, an all-Black unit tasked with deploying balloons to protect troops along the beaches of Normandy from German fighter planes during D-Day nearly 80 years ago, CNN previously reported. Read more
Black Achievement, White Flight, and Brown’s Legacy. By David J. Armor / Education Next
Students stand in line in an integrated classroom at the Barnard School in Washington, D.C., in May 1955, exactly one year after the Brown decision
We believe R. Shep Melnick’s The Crucible of Desegregation is the most comprehensive and evenhanded discussion of school desegregation research and policy issues in America. Yet some of the topics that make the book evenhanded were absent from his recent article in Education Next reflecting on the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. We would like to comment on these missing topics. Read more
Sports
Stephen A. Smith Left Speechless About His WNBA Coverage. By Jeroslyn JoVonn / Black Enterprise
It’s not often that someone can leave Stephen A. Smith speechless. However, basketball analyst Monica McNutt did just that when she recently called out Smith’s WNBA coverage.
Smith was joined by McNutt and Shannon Sharpe during an opening segment on ESPN’s First Take on Monday, June 3rd. They spent 40 minutes discussing backlash over the controversial flagrant foul Chicago Sky’s Chennedy Carter committed against Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark on Saturday, June 1. Toward the end of the segment, Smith wanted more credit for his coverage of the WNBA than other sports shows after McNutt accused him of making a big deal out of the hard fouls on Clark. Read more
Related: Who are we protecting Caitlin Clark from exactly? By David Dennis Jr. / Andscape
Simone Biles wins ninth national all-around title, sweeps event titles at U.S. Gymnastics Championships. By Tess DeMeyer / The Athletic
What do you get for the nine-time national all-around champion who has everything? An engraved silver belt buckle, apparently.
Simone Biles earned the Texas token as a trophy Sunday night after clinching the top spot at the U.S. Gymnastics Championships with a total score of 119.750 (60.450 on Day 1, 59.300 on Day 2). She also swept every individual event title. Read more
The Fight Over Jackie Robinson. By Jerry Brewer / Wash Post
The trailblazer’s story symbolizes the pain and resilience of America. Can the reality outlast the myth?
The progress we’ve made is neither adequate nor permanent. Robinson had an acute understanding of the struggle. He was the son of sharecroppers, born on the James Madison Sasser plantation near Cairo, Ga. His grandparents were enslaved. Yet 28 years into his life, he ended six decades of racial segregation in baseball on April 15, 1947. Today, we sanitize the moment and reference it mostly as compelling evidence of diminishing racism. It is seen as a conclusion. To Robinson, it was merely one inning in the longest game ever. Read more
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