The Devil Finds Work
“The ‘civilized’ have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.”
— James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
I often wonder what it is that drives some human beings to cruelty and destruction.
Is it that they have been raised under conditions that forced them to take on heartlessness as a means of survival, and now they can only deal with other people and the world itself on those terms? Were they abused by the people who were supposed to love and protect them such that they conflate love with violence and, therefore, believe that their harmful actions are harmless and perhaps necessary? Could it be a particular arrangement of genomes and cruelty is, in some people, as natural and normal as breathing? Does it spring out of the human experience that for many people, being cruel helps them to exorcise some pent-up something: some boredom, some discomfort, some frustration, some pain, some demon? Does being cruel simply feel good to some people?
My question then is: Is it possible to live safely in a world where the cruel are innumerable? The only answer I’ve yet to discover is: No, it isn’t possible. Which raises another question: What should we do with the cruel?
Currently, we venerate them. We place them on high and put them in charge of governments and militaries and corporations and schools and societies and homes because we believe that they are, of all of us, best suited for the wars we wage against nature, each other, and ourselves.
The cruel are incredibly crafty, too. And there is a peculiar American kind. Americans believe any action that is our own is always righteous. Unable to deal with either dissonance or accountability, we get lost in the stories of our own innocence, hoping that power and distance fortify our deception, yes, but our self-deception above all. We have forged ways to make our vicious acts appear ordinary, popular, sensible, honorable, spectacular; essential even. In modern times, we have figured out just how important a strategy it is to hide under the cover of “victimhood” as a way to shield ourselves against the growing number of pointing fingers and manage the public perception of who and what we truly are. Americans, it turns out though, are simply the most showy with our duplicities. Anywhere there is a nation-state, there is this.
For the cruel, there’s always an excuse; always a justification for why they had to do what they did and why who they did it to deserved it.
It can be supremacist: “My identity grants me the right to oppress and call it ‘fair.’”
It can be capitalist: “Don’t hate the player; hate the game.”
It can be patriarchal: “I have more power than you. So I can harm you and not face any consequences for my actions.”
Former president Donald Trump exemplifies this pathology. Of all of the crimes he is accused and convicted of, some of the most egregious are the accusations of rape and sexual assault. No less than 26 women have said that Trump sexually harassed, assaulted, or raped them; one was a child. Trump has said, with his own filthy mouth, that he routinely grabs women by their genitals without their consent. Even after hearing that, 62,984,828 Americans voted for him anyway. In the next election, after all the horrors he committed while in office—including telling people to inject bleach or ingest fish tank cleaner to cure COVID-19—even more people, 74,223,975 to be exact, voted for him. What this tells me that there are at least 74,223,975 plum fools living in the United States of America; fools who are a danger to themselves and others.
Trump is a misogynist, but women vote for him. Trump is racist, but Black/Brown/Asian/Indigenous people vote for him. Trump is anti-LGBTQIA+, but LGBTQIA+ people vote for him. Trump benefits from poverty, but poor people vote for him. I blame much of this pathology, this praising of one’s own destroyer, on religious practices that make enemies of critical thinking and education, and prioritize “faith”—that is, belief without evidence or belief in spite of evidence—over fact. Because this is what, at base, primes us to be led astray and run amok—and, more, want to be led astray and run amok: because we think our adherence to folly in the face of reason will result in some reward in the here or the hereafter. These practices also make us susceptible to specific distractions so that, for instance, with the help of billionaire-owned corporate media, baby oil and homosexuality become our takeaways from Sean Combs’s reign of terror. And we can never be serious about rape culture and sex trafficking because we’re too busy giggling at the term “freak-off.”
As it turns out, and this is a jagged little pill to swallow, voting in American elections can never really be “harm reduction.” Because of what America is and how it came to be, voting can only ever be harm selection—a decision about how, what, where, and which harm is going to be committed and against whom. “The lesser of two evils” simply means: “Which candidate is less likely to harm me even if that comes at someone else’s expense.” Beyond America, that is the nature of the nation-state, quite frankly.
But the gag is—and despite whatever fictions we assure ourselves of to feel morally superior and to escape, soothe, dodge, and avoid blame: Not voting leads to precisely the same outcomes. Opting out is the opposite of a flex and absolves us of absolutely nothing. It’s the civic equivalent of throwing the rock and then hiding our hand. If we are a part of modern civilization (and civilization is not what we think it is) and we are; and if we benefit from it, indulge in it (even in the most marginal and miniscule ways), which we do—then we are implicated. We are both in the empire and of the empire; and that is irrefutable. To be American, then, is to be complicit (to be American is also to devise strategies and modes of thinking designed to distance and escape culpability). And there are “no ifs, no ands, no buts, or suppose; no coke up your nose, no dope in your vein.”
Some believe that a second Trump win will inspire a sorrow so great that it might activate a mass rebellion, the one transformational revolution against evil that we’ve all been waiting for. But since the defining American feature is gutlessness (and Christopher Dorner was an aberration), what’s most likely to happen is that the vast majority of Americans will be given free reign to unleash their most debased impulses (which we saw happen the first time), while the rest will buckle and bow before the might of tyranny. The only revolution that would actually occur is the one that finally returns the country, full force, to its cannibalistic origins—and take a wild guess at who the first ones eaten will be.
There’s ample reason to conclude that voting doesn’t matter. But if that’s true, then why—oh, why—do the conservatives/GOP/MAGA/right engage in so much strategy, violence, and subterfuge; exert so much time, energy, and money trying to prevent marginalized people—especially Black people—from doing it? Because it does matter. And to me, that’s utterly obvious.
I submit that we have to vote because the goal in this election is to defeat Trump in order to maintain some semblance of—I want to say “democracy,” but I know this country has never been one; so I’ll say “a slow-step movement toward something that isn’t total global annihilation”—in order to elect someone who we have a chance in hell of persuading to do “less harm” or, honestly, redirect it to at least give the people now being pummeled a breather. And I don’t want to distract from that imperative. Because yes, America is an abattoir and is the chief architect of genocides locally and globally. But a Trump-led America? As the truism goes: Sequels are always worse than the original.
Some people have said that they didn’t detect any significant negative material changes in their lives under Trump’s presidency and more importantly, no significant positive material changes in their lives under the Obama presidency. Aside from needing to talk to more people, what they haven’t considered in either case is how both presidents, especially Obama, were hindered by uncooperative Congresses. There’s a terrible assumption in America that all you have to do is vote for the president and then everything after that will get immediately magically better or instantly horribly worse. But presidential elections traffic in long-term effects. We might not feel the impact of our choice of president for several years, so we might not even realize that an event in our lives is the result of a previous presidential choice. For example, maybe Trump’s presidential decisions didn’t have an immediate negative material effect on some of us, but we can now see that through his Supreme Court and national judicial implants, his presidency is having long-term negative effects on the rights of many and he left the economy in worse shape than he found it.
The elections that have the most immediate impact on our day-to-day lives are local ones—house of representatives, senators, governors, mayors, city councils, judges, etc. And these are the elections Americans vote in the least. And because we vote in them the least, diabolical politicians like Trump use our apathy, exhaustion, and negligence to set, unimpeded, the table for their nefarious goals.
Last time, Trump was voted out, kicking and screaming, before he could take full advantage of all of the pieces he put into play. A second Trump presidency, which will be the final presidential election in the United States, is one where Trump no longer has any constraints. Everything he set out to accomplish in his attempt to take us back “300 years” will be achieved. I don’t need to remind you where in society Black people and women in general were 300 years ago and I don’t need to tell you how whatever nightmares the U.S. unleashes abroad now, will be exponentially magnified under Trump.
It strikes me as arrogant, convenient, easy, trendy, and privileged to say: “It can’t get any worse.” But I have learned that it’s never a good idea to tempt fate. And Trump, his puppet masters, and his cult are all rubbing their hands together and saying:
“Oh, it can’t? Watch us work.”
The appeal of someone like a Trump is as obvious as it is historical: He’s the prototypical patriarch in a country that believes “The Outlaw” represents “The Ideal Man.” And he’s perceived as rich in a country that tells us from the womb that being rich—at any cost, at everyone else’s expense—is all that matters; and that the pursuit of money justifies any action. So everybody either wants to be Trump or be with him; and vicariously is enough. Whether you’re a celebrity in Hollywood, an activist from the Get Down, or a parishioner from Bible Belt, Trump appeals to the most gutter American urge for exploitation and profit, which is the American sexuality. Correction: One of America’s (and Americans’) greatest tragedies is that it has no sexuality: It has transactions; it has violence—both of which it mistakes for sexuality.
Patriarchy is male rule, yes; but that’s not all it is. It’s also the belief that men should rule; that men should be the presidents, priests, police, physicians; the pioneers, providers, protectors, and performers; that all decisions and resources should be hoarded in the hands of men; that characteristics (arbitrarily) deemed male are the only characteristics that matter; that male people matter more than all others (and the specifics of this varies by region and by what other states of being might be tied to the maleness in question); that we should all aspire to be, in varying ways, more male-like; that masculinity is, by its nature, superior to femininity; and anyone or anything deemed inferior is subject to its whims.
What I’m finding is that, irrespective of identity, and no matter the danger, most people seem to truly desire patriarchy (even the people who claim to want it abolished) because it represents power and for most people, power is arousing. Of course, we wish that we could customize the patriarchy so that it’s a weapon we can aim toward others and away from ourselves. But patriarchy isn’t a gun; it’s a landmine. It shatters the entirety of anybody who touches it.
This is a lesson that is difficult for sadists and cowards to learn.
All suffering is interconnected.
Demons do stunts and shows.
God must be a co-conspirator.
The Devil finds work.
And chile:
He been busy.
Confronting the Weight of Our Deaths
The execution of Marcellus Williams in Missouri this week, despite the millions of voices that rose up like a storm to save him, made me sit with just how much death I am holding. We are holding. I had to reflect on the weight of it all—quiet but insistent, like a bruise that never fades. Wondering where the limits are, how much more we can carry. I thought of the protests, the petitions, the speeches, and yet Mr. Williams’ body fell, another name tossed into the long river of Black death we’re asked to wade through daily.
Marcellus Williams was accused of killing Felicia Gayle, a former reporter, but the DNA found on the murder weapon didn’t match his. Appeals were filed, cries for justice rang out from across the country, and even the victim’s family members spoke out, urging for a stay of execution, questioning why new evidence was being ignored. But the system, which is so skilled at swallowing Black lives, did what it always does. It denied him a future.
I spent the morning after his execution thinking about his last meal. Chicken wings and tater tots. Something so simple, yet so beautifully authentic. I imagined him eating slowly, savoring each bite, knowing it was the last taste he would ever have of this world. Then I read a poem over and over by my brother, Joél Leon, honoring Mr. Williams. The poem was titled after that last meal—CHICKEN WINGS, TATER TOTS—and I cried. And I continued to cry. I cried for the ordinariness of it, for the tenderness, for the fact that any life can be reduced to a final meal. Then I lifted weights.
Gripping the cold iron, I pulled against gravity like I could build a fortress around my bones. Maybe, if I get stronger, if my muscles grow, less things can kill me. But halfway through the last set, I stopped, dropped the bar, and cried again. Because I know—deep down—no amount of strength could stop it either way. When it’s time for them to kill me, they’ll just use the muscles as an excuse. If not, they’ll use my writing, or my past, or my posts about Gaza, or my sorrow, or my posts about Assata Shakur, or my future, or my anger, or my niggas, or the fact that I still say nigga, or my music, or my dog, or my hoodie, or no excuse at all.
“Because we can, nigger.”
Amber Thurman was killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. There will be others
There are other names, but this is the one we know: Amber Thurman has become the first woman whose death was preventable in relation to an abortion ban since Dobbs. Her name and story have become public as reporting by ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana details how Thurman, a Black 28-year-old mother to a young son who had dreams of becoming a nurse, died a painful, preventable death in Georgia after doctors at a hospital there refused to perform a simple procedure that could have saved her life – because the law did not allow them.
The story highlights the reality of abortion bans, which – even in states like Georgia, with putative exceptions for maternal health – in practice impose death sentences on women who seek to end their pregnancies, or who experience severe complications. They force doctors to choose between medical best practices and their own legal protection – and in the process, the lives of women are treated as alarmingly disposable.
Thurman, who lived in Georgia, died just weeks after her state’s abortion ban went into effect. She had just established a new degree of stability for herself and her young son when she discovered that she was pregnant with twins in 2022. As her pregnancy had already progressed beyond her state’s gestational limit, she took a road trip to North Carolina with her best friend, where a clinic gave her abortion pills. Abortion pills have very low rates of complications but rare problems do occur. In Thurman’s case, not all of the pregnancy tissue had been expelled from her uterus, and she arrived in a Georgia ER with bleeding, pain and falling blood pressure – the telltale signs of an infection.
Thurman could have been cured with a D&C, or dilation and curettage, a procedure in which the cervix is dilated to create an opening through which instruments can be inserted to empty out the contents of a uterus. The procedure is a popular form of abortion, but it is also a routine part of miscarriage and other gynecological care. If the tissue was promptly removed, she probably would have been fine: a D&C requires no special equipment and takes only about 15 minutes.
But Georgia’s abortion ban outlawed the D&C procedure, making it a felony to perform except in cases of managing a “spontaneous” or “naturally occurring” miscarriage. Because Thurman had taken abortion pills, her miscarriage was illegal to treat. She suffered in a hospital bed for 20 hours, developing sepsis and beginning to experience organ failure. By the time the Georgia doctors were finally willing to treat her, it was too late.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, total abortion bans went into effect in 14 states. Nine of these have no exceptions for rape. Now researchers have attempted to quantify the number of pregnancies that have resulted from rapes in states with a total ban—and the numbers they came up with are staggering.
A new study estimates that more than 64,000 pregnancies resulted from rape between July 1, 2022, and January 1, 2024, in states where abortion has been banned throughout pregnancy in all or most cases. Of these, just more than 5,500 are estimated to have occurred in states with rape exceptions—and nearly 59,000 are estimated for states without exceptions. The authors calculate that more than 26,000 rape-caused pregnancies may have taken place in Texas alone. The findings were published on Wednesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
“Highly stigmatized life events are hard to measure. And many survivors of sexual violence do not want to disclose that they went through this incredibly stigmatizing traumatic life event,” says Samuel Dickman, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Montana, who led the study. “We will never know the true number of survivors of rape and sexual assault in the U.S.”
Louisiana is the blueprint for further fascist repression
Louisiana is on a concerning spiral toward a repressive regime that intends to harm and violate its citizens. On a more alarming scale, with the rise of many of Louisiana's far-right politicians into positions of federal power, the rights and freedoms of every American are now at risk as well.
On April 15, the United States Supreme Court decided to uphold the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision to hold Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson liable for injuries sustained at a 2016 protest. A Louisiana police officer was injured while attempting to break up the action organized by Mckesson following the state murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge. SCOTUS's decision to not hear the case has set a new precedent in the state's ongoing quest to repress dissent, as it facilitated the banning of mass protest and peaceful assembly rights for American citizens in three southern states, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
At issue in this Louisiana-based case is whether the First Amendment and the 1982 landmark decision NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware Company protects Mckesson against Louisiana state law. As a lifelong Louisiana resident who was both present at the uprising in Baton Rouge and a witness to the police arrest of Mckesson from a few feet away, I know firsthand the implications of the court's lack of action: my fellow community members and I must now contend with a new level of repression at a time when our state, along with the rest of the South, continues to struggle against an increasingly fascist political climate that warrants nothing less than endless uprisings.
A clear First Amendment battleground for the rights of all Americans to protest their government, the Mckesson v. Doe case put a national spotlight on both Louisiana's descent into right-wing extremism and the far-reaching national consequences implied by the bills that have been passed and proposed by its legislature. The gubernatorial inauguration of Jeff Landry—Louisiana's former attorney general and an ardent Trump ally—and the 2024 state legislative session have produced some of the most blatantly bigoted and unconstitutional laws in the nation. Mckesson v. Doe is one SCOTUS case at the center of this trend of Louisiana's legislative decisions and political influence deciding the fates of the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly for every American.
Marked by a unique bipartisan effort to usurp the longstanding rights of its residents, Louisiana's political landscape has swiftly devolved into what some residents are saying resembles a fascist government in the last four years. Following the Dobbs decision in 2022, the state witnessed this bipartisan coalition of state legislators enact a near-total outlawing of abortion. The abortion ban was supported by every female Louisiana senator, led by Democratic Senator Katrina Jackson, who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation—which was signed into law by outgoing Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards, following the Dobbs decision's activating the state's trigger law. Republican Louisiana legislator Danny McCormick put the state in the national spotlight after he introduced legislation that would classify abortion as homicide, making both people who obtain abortions and their healthcare providers eligible for the death penalty in Louisiana. After a national outcry, the bill was voluntarily pulled. In response to one Louisiana resident making national headlines for being forced to flee to New York to obtain an abortion following a fetal acrania diagnosis, then-Attorney General Jeff Landry informed the press that anyone in the state who does not like the new anti-abortion decree should "move."
The 2024 regular legislative session has been making national headlines every week, as it has swiftly advanced multiple anti-civil and human rights bills through its committees and into law. Winning the "culture wars" has taken center stage over the many pressing issues voters feel are more relevant to the state of Louisiana. HB608, formally "The Women's Safety and Protection Act," has been dubbed "the Louisiana transgender bathroom bill" by media outlets. It was signed into law in early June 2024 and will outlaw any Louisiana resident using a public restroom that does not align with their "biological sex." In addition to this, the bill strips away millions of dollars of funding from the few remaining domestic violence shelters left in Louisiana, a move that would all but close their doors entirely.
More overt anti-LGBTQ+ bills have passed through both congressional houses and await the governor's signature, like Louisiana's own "Don't Say Gay" bill, which will bar teachers from discussing gender or sexual orientation in classrooms. Another bill, HB121, will allow teachers to refuse to acknowledge the preferred pronouns of students in their classrooms. These bills have been defended by Republican legislators as essential for the protection of Louisiana's children, and extend beyond restrooms and classrooms into the libraries that have long served as safe spaces for adolescents. HB777, sponsored by Representative Kellee Dickerson, permits sentencing librarians in Louisiana to up to two years of hard labor if they do not sever ties with the American Library Association, which is being accused of exposing children to "pornographic materials."
I Just Went to Darfur. Here Is What Shattered Me.
When an Arab militia rampaged through Maryam Suleiman’s village in the Darfur region of Sudan last year and lined up men and boys to massacre, the gunmen were blunt about their purpose.
“We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said, adding mockingly: “We don’t even want to see black trash bags.” To make his point, Maryam recalled, he shot a donkey because it was black.
Then the militia members executed men and boys who belonged to Black African ethnic groups, she said. “They shot my five brothers, one after the other,” Maryam told me, describing how her youngest brother survived the first bullet and called out to her. Then a militia member shot him in the head and sneeringly asked her what she thought of that.
The militia tried to systematically kill all the males over 10, Maryam said, and also killed some younger ones. A 1-day-old boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and one male infant was thrown into a pond to drown, she said.
The gunmen then rounded up the women and girls in a corral to rape, she added. “They raped many, many girls,” she recalled. One man tried to rape Maryam, she said, and when he failed he beat her. She was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.
“You’re slaves,” Maryam quoted the militia members as saying. “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.” So Maryam fled to neighboring Chad and is one of more than 10 million Sudanese who have been forcibly displaced since a civil war began last year in the country and ignited pogroms against Black African ethnic groups like hers.
The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent. So the impunity is allowing violence to go unchecked, which, in turn, is producing what may become the worst famine in half a century or more.
“It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” Cindy McCain, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “It’s catastrophic.”
‘We’ve lost everything’: inside a Sudanese town where children die of hunger every day
In the small town of Tawila, in Sudan’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children are dying of hunger every day.
In recent months, tens of thousands of people fleeing North Darfur’s capital, the besieged and war-torn El Fasher, about 45 miles (70km) to the east, have sought refuge in the town, overwhelming Tawila’s one functioning health clinic.
“We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” said Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the woman responsible for health in the civilian administration that runs Tawila. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”
Hunger is not the only killer. Malaria, measles and whooping cough have also been spreading like wildfire.
Hussien said she knew of 19 women who died during labour in the first two weeks of July alone. Still more have died from untreated injuries sustained amid fighting in the vicinity of El Fasher’s two refugee camps, Abu Shouk and Zamzam.
The city has been under a months-long siege by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group engaged alongside allied militia in a brutal civil war against the Sudanese army and its allies. Tawila, itself the scene of fierce fighting last year, is the nearest place of relative safety for refugees who have managed to escape through El Fasher’s western gate, the city’s only open exit route.
Home is where the hurt is.
Private, hidden, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. And it is men they know, love or once loved, men they are related to, who most endanger women–not stranger danger but men they know.
Home is where Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei was set on fire by her partner (some news reports describe him as an ex-partner) Dickson Ndiema, during a disagreement on Sunday. He bought a can of gasoline, poured it all over her and set her ablaze. She was taken to hospital with 80 percent burns. She died there on Thursday. Her murder began at home on Sunday—three weeks to the day after she finished 44th at the Paris Summer Olympics.
Some call it “domestic violence.” But “domestic” is important only when it hurts men and the State--as in Domestic Terrorism.
Otherwise “domestic”--as in domestic violence--is not taken seriously. It is private, it is hidden, it happens in the realm of the home, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. Home is where the hurt is.
So we call it Intimate Partner Violence instead to shake off the air of privacy and denial, but even that is not enough to convey the horror.
So let’s call it what it is: terrorism. It is femicide: the killing of a woman or a girl by a man because of her gender, a killing which would not happen, but for her gender
Global Roundup: Afghan Women Sing in Protest
Late last month the Taliban published new restrictions aimed, it said, at combating vice and promoting virtue. The 35-article document, which includes a raft of draconian laws, deems women’s voices to be potential instruments of vice and stipulates that women must not sing or read aloud in public, nor let their voices carry beyond the walls of their homes.
Since taking power again in 2021, the Taliban have created the worst women’s rights crisis in the world. Their latest decrees have horrified rights organizations, triggered widespread condemnation and accusations that the Taliban are erasing women from public life and granting broad powers to enforcers from the Vice and Virtue Ministry. The decrees have galvanized Afghan women to fight back by posting videos of themselves singing, some in public inside Afghanistan.
A woman who posted a video of herself singing outdoors in Afghanistan to protest the Taliban’s morality laws told the Associated Press on Thursday she won’t be silenced.
As Taliban starts restricting men, too, some regret not speaking up sooner
As the Taliban starts enforcing draconian new rules on women in Afghanistan, it has also begun to target a group that didn’t see tight restrictions on them coming: Afghan men.
Women have faced an onslaught of increasingly severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago. But men in urban areas could, for the most part, carry on freely.
The past four weeks, however, have brought significant changes for them, too. New laws promulgated in late August mandate that men wear a fist-long beard, bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior, widely interpreted as a prohibition against jeans, and ban haircuts that are against Islamic law, which essentially means short or Western styles. Men are now also prohibited from looking at women other than their wives or relatives.
As a result, more are growing beards, carrying prayer rugs and leaving their jeans at home.
These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.
Dozens killed from an Israeli strike in a Gaza humanitarian zone, Palestinians say
An Israeli strike on a crowded tent camp housing Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza killed at least 40 people and wounded 60 others early Tuesday, Palestinian officials said. Israel said it targeted “significant” Hamas militants and disputed the death toll.
It was among the deadliest strikes yet in Muwasi, a sprawl of crowded tent camps along the Gaza coast that Israel designated as a humanitarian zone for hundreds of thousands of civilians to seek shelter from the Israel-Hamas war.
Gaza's Civil Defense said its first responders recovered 40 bodies from the strike and were still looking for people. It said entire families were killed in their tents.
A Palestinian family mourns the death of their daughter, who was killed in an Israeli attack as she was heading to play while wearing her roller skates, in Gaza City, Gaza, on Sept. 4.
An Associated Press camera operator saw three large craters at the scene, where first responders and displaced people were sifting through the sand and rubble with garden tools and their bare hands by the light of mobile phones. They pulled body parts from the sand, including what appeared to be a human leg.
Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, one of three hospitals to receive casualties, said around two dozen bodies were brought in from the strike. An Associated Press cameraman saw 10 bodies in the hospital's morgue, including two children and three women.
Israel Admits It Killed 3 More Israeli Hostages
The Israeli military now admits its indiscriminate bombing killed three Israeli hostages last November. The lack of media access has prevented this information from coming to light earlier, or from holding accountable those responsible for these crimes. With so many unanswered questions, I have three that we need answered immediately if we hope to uphold peace, security, and justice. Let’s Address This.
The AP reported this week that:
The Israeli military said there was a “high probability” that three hostages found dead months ago were killed in an Israeli airstrike. The army announced the conclusions of its investigation into the deaths of Cpl. Nik Beizer, Sgt. Ron Sherman and Elia Toledano.
This isn’t the first time the Israeli military has killed Israeli hostages. On December 15, 2023, the Israeli military killed hostages Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samer Talalka, while they attempted to escape and send SOS signals. And because Netanyahu has banned all western journalists from Gaza, and additionally killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza, it is impossible to know the extent of hostages killed by the Israeli military’s incessant bombing and bombardment.
The Message — a return to nonfiction after years of writing comics, screenplays, and a novel — begins with an epigraph from Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” Our own age of strife takes Coates to three places: Dakar, Senegal, where he makes a pilgrimage to Gorée Island and the Door of No Return; Chapin, South Carolina, where a teacher has been pressured to stop teaching Between the World and Me because it made some students feel “ashamed to be Caucasian”; and the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is in the last of these long, interconnected essays that Coates aims for the sort of paradigm shift that first earned him renown when he published “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic in 2014, in which he staked a claim for what is owed the American descendants of enslaved Africans. This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.”
Coates traveled to the region on a ten-day trip in the summer of 2023. “It was so emotional,” he told me. “I would dream about being back there for weeks.” He had known, of course, in an abstract sense, that Palestinians lived under occupation. But he had been told, by journalists he trusted and respected, that Israel was a democracy — “the only democracy in the Middle East.” He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other. For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a “world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy.” And this world was made possible by his own country: “The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur.”
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
How could he have been so wrong before? The fault lay partly with the profession he loved. In journalism, he had found his voice, his platform, his purpose in life. And yet, as he sees it, it was journalistic institutions that had not only failed to tell the truth about Israel and Palestine but had worked to conceal it. As a result, a fog had settled over the region, over its history and present, obscuring what anyone at closer range could apprehend easily with their own two eyes.
Another White Man-Boy Shot Up the School
A white student named Colt Gray murdered two other students and two teachers in a rampage at high school and in a rush to implicate somebody Black, WSB-TV falsely identified one of the murdered victims, Mason Schermerhorn, who was Black and was diagnosed with autism, as the shooter. They blamed it on the technology (which is also racist, by the way). But you should have seen how anxious, and relieved, people were to share that libelous misinformation. “A Black man did it!” is one of America’s longest running mistruths.
This is the actual murderer, along with his father, who was also charged:
On social media, a bullied teen found fame among child predators worldwide
The idyllic image of Bradley Cadenhead’s close-knit family began to unravel when he was 10.
His mother moved out that year, in 2016. She began “drinking a lot and partying,” she later told authorities. Then in middle school, Cadenhead faced constant bullying. One former classmate said he was viewed as “an easy target.”
The boy whose family was once known in this small town dotted with churches and surrounded by dairy farms for never missing a Sunday service was, by his early teens, isolated and suffering breakdowns.
“I stopped caring about everything,” Bradley Cadenhead later told probation officers. At 15, he dropped out of school and retreated to his room.
It was from his bedroom in a cramped apartment that the once God-fearing boy from Stephenville underwent an extraordinary transformation — from a lonely, isolated teenager into what authorities describe as a notorious predator of the social media age.
Sitting at his computer, Cadenhead harnessed the social media platform Discord to cultivate a domineering online persona, one that soon built a global following among sadists who prey on vulnerable children. Cadenhead and his followers, authorities say, convinced victims to share explicit images and then blackmailed them into harming themselves or committing degrading acts on video. The FBI has said the group, named “764” after the partial Zip code of Cadenhead’s hometown, meets the definition of domestic terrorism.
Today, at 19, Cadenhead is in his second year of an 80-year prison sentence — an unusually harsh punishment for a young offender but one that authorities say matches the gravity of his crimes.
8-year-old’s death roils South Georgia community
Demetrice Bush grew increasingly worried as the hours passed without her 8-year-old son returning home from playing outside. Night turned to day, and Noah Bush’s body was discovered the next morning in a water-filled construction pit not far from his house in South Georgia.
Four months later, the rural community of Jesup is still reeling after two boys — ages 10 and 11 — pleaded guilty in his drowning. At his sentencing last month, the older child admitted to pushing Noah into the county-owned “borrow pit” on May 15 and holding his head underwater, according to attorneys for the Bush family.
The case touched off protests, accusations of racism and criticism of local law enforcement who at first believed the drowning was accidental. Now some are calling for harsher sentences for children convicted of violent crimes.
“We all just want to assume that in small-town Georgia, kids are safe,” said Jodi Martin, a Jesup native who regularly attended protests urging law enforcement to look further into Noah’s death. “It was absolutely atrocious what occurred to that sweet little boy.”
Noah’s mother knew there was no way her son drowned accidentally. He didn’t even like swimming at pools or water parks, she said, and wouldn’t have ventured into the water voluntarily.
Noah’s shoes were found near the pit, and authorities initially believed he had taken them off before wandering into the water barefoot.
“He was afraid of water,” Demetrice Bush told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We knew right away that something wasn’t right.”
Gettysburg College student who allegedly carved racial slur on teammate no longer enrolled: School
A Gettysburg College swimmer is no longer enrolled at the school after allegedly carving a racial slur on his teammate's chest at an on-campus residence during an informal social gathering, according to school officials.
The student, who has not been named by the college or authorities, allegedly used a box cutter to scratch the n-word on another Gettysburg College swimmer, according to a statement from the victim's family published in the school's newspaper. The family said it decided to come forward to "add clarity, not stir controversy as we struggle to comprehend the nightmare that haunts our son and our family."
"For the sake of our son's well-being, we are attempting to address the recent challenges by mirroring our son's spirit of humility and courage," the family said in the statement. "Our son did not choose to have a hateful racial slur scrawled across his chest, but he has chosen not to return the hate. He did not choose the color of his skin tone, but has chosen to embrace the strength and diversity it represents. Our son did not choose to be shunned and isolated at the behest of some who pay lip service to inclusion and diversity."
The two students allegedly involved were initially removed from swim team activities while the college investigated the incident, according to Jamie Yates, Chief Communications and Marketing Officer at Gettysburg College.
"The student who did the scratching is no longer enrolled at the College," Yates told ABC News in a statement. "The college is working with the other student and his family about how to most constructively move forward."
Kyle Rittenhouse texts pledging to ‘murder’ shoplifters disillusion his ex-spokesperson
A former spokesperson for Kyle Rittenhouse says he became disillusioned with his ex-client after learning that he had sent text messages pledging to “fucking murder” shoplifters outside a pharmacy before later shooting two people to death during racial justice protests in Wisconsin in 2020.
Dave Hancock made that remark about Rittenhouse – for whom he also worked as a security guard – on a Law & Crime documentary that premiered on Friday. The show explored the unsuccessful criminal prosecution of Rittenhouse, who killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
As Hancock told it on The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 90-minute film’s main subject had “a history of things he was doing prior to [the double slaying], specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a fight”.
Hancock nonetheless said he initially believed Rittenhouse’s claims of self-defense when he first relayed his story about fatally shooting Rosenbaum and Huber. Yet that changed when he later became aware of text messages that surfaced as part of a civil lawsuit filed by the family of one of the men slain in Kenosha demanding wrongful death damages from Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse sent the texts from the phone he had the night of the 25 August double slaying in Kenosha, according to what Hancock says in the new film. The texts were in response to seeing shoplifters at a CVS pharmacy on 10 August, a little more than two weeks before the deadly shooting in Kenosha.
“The world is disgusting,” read one of the texts, as shown in a preview of The Trials of Kyle Rittenhouse provided to the Guardian. Another said: “It makes me [fucking] sick.
Others read: “I wish they would come into my house.”
“I will fucking murder them.”
Commenting on the texts while speaking to Law & Crime’s chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, Hancock said: “This is where his head’s at – you know what I mean?”
He also said: “My first impression was a scared kid, arrogant, oblivious to the world around him. When he was telling me about the story, I believed he was being sincere.
“I believed things he told me that I now understand to be one of his many lies. And that hurts. That sucks.”
Journalist withheld information about Emmett Till’s murder, documents show
A journalist whose 1956 article was billed as the “true account” of Emmett Till’s murder withheld credible information about people involved in the crime, according to newly discovered documents.
William Bradford Huie’s article in Look magazine helped shape the country’s understanding of 14-year-old Till’s abduction, torture and slaying in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. The article detailed the confessions of two White men who previously had been acquitted by an all-White jury in the murder. The men told Huie they had no accomplices.
Yet Huie’s own research notes, recently released by the descendants of a lawyer in the case, indicate his reporting showed that others were involved and suggest he chose to leave that out when it threatened the sale of his story. He also was seeking a movie deal about the murder and had agreed to pay the two acquitted men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, part of the proceeds.
If Huie had fully reported what he’d learned, it could have led to charges against additional participants in the murder, three historians say.
“Horrendous”: Black Men Tortured by White Mississippi Police “Goon Squad” React to Guilty Pleas
A warning to our audience: This next segment contains descriptions and images of police violence.
We turn now to Mississippi, where six white former police officers, who called themselves the “Goon Squad,” have pleaded guilty to raiding a home and torturing two Black men earlier this year, after first trying to cover up their actions. Some of the officers face life in prison.
On January 24th, court records show the deputies raided a home in Braxton, Mississippi, after a white neighbor of one of the officers called in to complain there were Black men staying there. The officer texted the others, quote, “Are y’all available for a mission?”
That night, without a warrant, the officers burst into the home, handcuffed, beat, tasered the two men, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, also sexually abused them with a sex toy while shouting racial slurs. One of the officers put a gun in Jenkins’ mouth for a “mock execution” and pulled the trigger. The bullet lacerated Jenkins’ tongue, broke his jaw, exited through his neck.
This is U.S. Attorney Darren LaMarca last week announcing federal charges against the former officers for the attack.
DARREN LAMARCA: But not only did they brazenly commit these acts, but after inflicting serious bodily injury by firing a shot through one of the victims’ mouths, they left him lying in a pool of blood, gathered on the porch of the house to discuss how to cover it up. What indifference. What disregard for life.
AMY GOODMAN: After the attack, Michael Corey Jenkins was actually charged with a felony, based on methamphetamine the officers said they found in the raid. But records show that was a lie, and the charge was dropped. In fact, the deputies planted drugs to devise an excuse for the raid and also stole surveillance video from the house. Their body cameras were off.
Court documents said the officers used the name Goon Squad, quote, “because of their willingness to use excessive force and not to report it.” The Associated Press found the deputies were linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019 — two of the men died.
The Police Called. He Checked the News, and His ‘Heart Dropped.’
On Sunday night Leighton Lee received a strange call from a police officer asking him cryptic questions about his best friend: What was he like? Where would he be going on the subway on a Sunday afternoon?
Mr. Lee wanted to know why he was being asked so many questions about his friend, Gregory Delpeche. The officer told him Mr. Delpeche was part of “an ongoing investigation,” he said.
Worried, Mr. Lee checked the news and saw there had been a shooting in Brooklyn, on the subway line Mr. Delpeche took to his job at Woodhull Hospital. As videos of the scene poured in on social media, Mr. Lee recognized his friend of decades lying on the ground, wounded.
“I knew that was him, and my heart dropped,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “He was the one that got shot in the head.”
Mr. Delpeche, 49, was one of two bystanders shot by police officers on Sunday afternoon during a confrontation at the Sutter Avenue subway station between officers and a knife-wielding man who they believed had not paid his fare.
The man who the police said threatened them with a knife, later identified as Derell Mickles, 37, was shot in the stomach. A 26-year-old female bystander was grazed by a bullet and was in stable condition as of Monday. One of the officers was struck by a bullet under his armpit and has been released from the hospital.
Now, Mr. Lee said his friend is barely responsive in Kings County Hospital, where he is in critical condition. Doctors told him that a bullet went through Mr. Delpeche’s head and that fragments were removed. “I’m not sure he can hear me; he did put his thumbs up once,” Mr. Lee said.
The police should not have fired, he said. “It was very reckless of them to be shooting in a crowded train station,” when “they knew a stray bullet could hit someone,” Mr. Lee said. “It happened to be my childhood friend of 30 or 40 years.”
At a news conference on Tuesday, [NYC Mayor Eric] Adams pushed back, saying that Mr. Mickles was “not shot for fare evasion” and that “he was shot because he had a knife.”
Mr. Adams also said the officers “should be commended for how they really showed a great level of restraint.”
“And it’s just unfortunate that innocent people were shot because of that,” he said.
N.Y.P.D. Understated Woman’s Wound in Subway Shooting, Lawyer Says
A 26-year-old woman who was wounded when New York City police officers shot a knife-wielding man at a Brooklyn subway station was not “grazed” by gunfire as officials have said, according to a lawyer for her family. Instead, the lawyer said on Saturday, she has a bullet lodged in her leg and is unable to walk.
The woman, Kerry Gahalal, was one of two bystanders to be struck when the officers shot the man, Derrell Mickles, during a confrontation last Sunday at the Sutter Avenue L train station in the Brownsville neighborhood. The other bystander, Gregory Delpeche, was in critical condition on Friday.
The contention that police officials had minimized the severity of Ms. Gahalal’s injury came a day after the Police Department released video footage of the episode that appeared unlikely to end questions about whether the officers had acted appropriately under the circumstances.
The shooting is being examined by the department’s Force Investigation Division and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Police leaders and Mayor Eric Adams have said that the use of force was justified because Mr. Mickles had threatened officers with a weapon. Critics say it was a dangerous escalation of what had begun as an effort to enforce the minor offense of fare evasion.
Ms. Gahalal turned 26 the day before the shooting and was taking the subway to Manhattan with her husband for a celebratory dinner when the L train they were on stopped at the Sutter Avenue station, the lawyer for her family, Joel Levine, said.
Discussing the shooting, in which Mr. Mickles and an officer were also wounded, Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said at a police news conference last Sunday that a male bystander (Mr. Delpeche) had been struck in the head and that a female bystander (Ms. Gahalal) had been “grazed.”
Mr. Levine disputed that description of Ms. Gahalal’s injury. He said she was unable to walk and was at a rehabilitation facility on Saturday as she worked to regain her health.
“They say she left the hospital, but she’s still in rehab,” he said. “She has a long road ahead of her both physically and mentally. She will have a bullet in her leg the rest of her life.”
The Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his assertion.
CNN Poll: Harris and Trump locked in exceedingly close presidential race
The gender divide in the poll is also more concentrated among White voters (White men break 58% Trump to 35% Harris, while White women split 50% Trump to 47% Harris), with very little gender divide among Black or Latino voters. Harris is well ahead among likely voters younger than 30 (55% support her to 38% who favor Trump), and among Black (79% Harris to 16% Trump) and Latino (59% Harris to 40% Trump) likely voters.
A scant 2% of likely voters say they haven’t yet chosen a candidate to support, and another 12% have chosen one but say they could change their minds.
The poll suggests that overall, Harris has begun to build a more positive public image, outpacing Trump across several measures of how the public views her personally.
Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris’ favorability rating has climbed to its highest level in CNN polling since just before her and Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 (currently 46% favorable to 48% unfavorable among likely voters), while Trump’s has held steady (currently 42% favorable to 55% unfavorable among likely voters).
Although many voters are still forming opinions of the major candidates for vice president, Harris’ choice for a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has a notably more positive favorability rating (36% favorable to 32% unfavorable) than Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance (30% favorable to 42% unfavorable).
How Republicans Are Working to Steal the 2024 Election
Last week I wrote how the SAVE Act is the MAGA Republican attempt to revive Jim Crow voter suppression in America. This Project 2025 priority is already being enacted now in 2024 to help Donald Trump win. I share below the first hand alternate reality in which MAGA Republicans live, in this case, as it relates to voting rights in America. If we have any hope of saving our republic, we cannot just vote this November—we must vote in such overwhelming numbers that we overcome the MAGA attempts to deny voting rights to millions of Americans. Let’s Address This.
Mark Robinson is a Trump problem of Trump’s own making
For years, Donald Trump has directly and indirectly foisted damaging candidates on the GOP, in ways that have obviously cost his party dearly — up to and likely including control of the Senate.
It’s not just his endorsements of several flawed statewide candidates who went on to badly underperform and lose key races; it’s also the ethos he’s created in the party. He’s placed a premium on owning the libs and devotion to Trump, and he’s devalued political bona fides. He has effectively encouraged his party to overlook a Trump-loyal candidate’s very obvious baggage, by dismissing it as lies from the liberal media or even viewing it as an asset.
It’s all worked out a lot better for Trump than for his party, thanks to his unique ability to stay viable despite his own litany of controversies and mounds of baggage. Other candidates have demonstrated far less talent for that.
But for once, the pattern could be creating a real problem for Trump personally.
The big news Thursday was a CNN report that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R), the GOP’s nominee for governor, whom Trump helped dominate in his primary, posted a series of problematic things on a pornographic message board more than a decade ago.
Among the comments: calling himself a “black NAZI,” voicing support for bringing back slavery, and expressing a proclivity for transgender pornography.
Robinson denies he posted these things and said he’s staying in the race. “Let me reassure you: The things that you will see in that story, those are not the words of Mark Robinson,” Robinson said in a video posted Thursday afternoon before CNN’s story dropped.
But Republicans who were already worried about Robinson hurting the GOP ticket in a vital swing state — one of three especially key ones for Trump — must now be pulling their hair out. And there aren’t many good answers for the party at this point.
Republicans Boost Jill Stein as Potential Harris Spoiler
Some Republicans are supporting Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s long-shot bid for the presidency, attempting to bolster a campaign that could siphon liberal voters from Vice President Kamala Harris.
The support, including from allies of former President Donald Trump, has Democrats worried Stein will be a spoiler for Harris in places such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Stein is very unlikely to win any of them or reach the White House, but the Democrat’s path to victory is greatly diminished if Harris loses any of the three, where she is locked in a tight race with Trump. The prospect of Stein taking some of Harris’s support in those states causes heartburn for Democrats still smarting over Hillary Clinton’s loss there in 2016, when Stein was also on the ballot.
All that is beside the point, according to Stein. She says her candidacy represents a legitimate moral challenge to America’s two-party system, and she pitches herself as the change agent sought by millions of voters—not just liberals. She rejects the notion that her presence in the race could help Trump.
Polls indicate that Jill Stein is drawing support from 1% of the electorate and slightly more in some battleground states. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Zuma Press
“It is a propaganda campaign intended to tell the voters that resistance is futile, that you just need to accept being thrown under the bus,” Stein said in an interview. “There is no lesser evil in this race.”
Federal Election Commission records show Stein paid $100,000 in July to a consulting outfit that has worked with Republican campaigns, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid. The firm, Accelevate, is operated by Trent Pool. The Intercept reported that he appeared to be part of the mob that breached the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6., 2021. The Journal hasn’t independently verified the reporting.
Pool and his lawyer didn’t return a request for comment.
The White Supremacist In Trump's Ear
“They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.”
These were the words Donald Trump uttered during the presidential debate against Kamala Harris, accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating pets. The claim was shocking, grotesque, and completely false. Local authorities had already debunked the story, which started as a baseless rumor on Facebook. Despite this, the lie spread rapidly, with prominent figures like Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, amplifying it for political purposes. What began as a local piece of disinformation quickly spiraled into a dangerous myth, stoking fear and hatred toward an already vulnerable community.
As absurd as this claim is, it didn't just fizzle out after the debunking. Instead, it became a viral sound on TikTok, where users mimicked Trump’s words, often in a comedic tone. Something so harmful has been turned into entertainment, but there’s nothing funny about it. For Haitian immigrants and others in Springfield, the consequences are real. Since the false claims by Donald Trump, the community has been gripped by harassment and bomb threats that have forced evacuations of schools, government buildings, and other local sites.
Even Republican leaders in Springfield have urged both Donald Trump and Senator JD Vance to stop spreading the false claims, recognizing the harm it has caused their community. Despite these pleas, Trump and Vance have refused to retract their statements, continuing to use the baseless rumor for political gain.
These kinds of lies sink deep into the skin, sowing a fear that reshapes how we see each other. It’s not just the words that carry weight but the way they carve people into caricatures—flattening their humanity until they’re seen only as threats. This is how xenophobia festers, in the sharp edges of these stories, where truth is swallowed by what we’re willing to believe. And so, a rumor becomes an excuse to hate, and hate becomes the architecture of the world.
One might ask, where Trump originally heard such a thing? How does a lie so absurd make its way to the podium of a presidential debate? Well—many believe the answer to that question rests on the shoulders of Laura Loomer.
Craig Mack Was Bad Boy’s First Star. What Led Him to a Doomsday Community?
A few months before his death, Craig Mack was finally ready to talk.
On the outskirts of Walterboro, South Carolina, where he had been living since 2007, the former rapper made himself comfortable in an armchair inside a well-lit hotel room. Prepping for his first interview in years, he stashed some Vaseline behind a vase, took sips of cranberry juice, and absent-mindedly fiddled with a gold-handled cane.
Mack was sick, although he did his best to hide it. A chunky knit sweater added bulk to his diminishing frame. An ornate cane that might’ve been a distinguished prop for a rapper in the Nineties was used as a crutch. While Mack was still able to command a room, rattling off stories and cracking jokes, deep wrinkles had set in, making him look far older than his 47 years. The interview, with a documentary crew he had invited to capture his story in his own words, would be his last.
“It’s hard to watch,” his daughter Amanda tells Rolling Stone of viewing the footage. “I could tell something was very wrong.”
This subdued Mack was far from the loud and rambunctious 24-year-old who radiated confidence in the summer of 1994. Back then, “Flava in Ya Ear,” Mack’s first and biggest hit, dominated New York City’s airwaves, clubs, and block parties. The single’s smash success was propelled by a monster-size remix featuring the Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, and Rampage. Mack, with his neatly cropped Afro and signature “Ha!” ad-lib, was a defining voice of hip-hop in the 1990s and helped pave the way for the immediate success of Bad Boy Records and its founder, Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Despite being one of the label’s first stars, Mack’s contribution is often glossed over in favor of labelmate Biggie Smalls. He was the first artist of many who limped away from Combs demoralized, destitute, and feeling duped. Some left the music industry altogether. A few, like Shyne, Loon, and Mase, turned to politics or religion. For Mack, his departure from Bad Boy was the first in a series of painful events that would lead him on a perplexing path. Not long after, he shunned the “wickedness” of his past and devoted his life to a fire-and-brimstone, self-proclaimed “last-day prophet” who believed barcodes bore the mark of the beast and warned about an imminent third world war. Mack died in March 2018 — the words “Praise the Lord!” are inscribed on his headstone.
And when the devil finds work, and God is the accomplice, we must get down to our own work and go our own way…
Princeton, Yale See Dip in Share of Asian-American Freshmen
Princeton University and Yale University reported declines in the percentage of Asian-American students in their freshman class, the first students selected by the schools after the US Supreme Court said race could no longer be used in making admissions decisions.
At Yale, the share of freshman Asian-American students dropped to 24% from 30% a year ago, while at Princeton it posted a smaller decline, dipping 2 percentage points to about 24%. The share of first-year Black students held steady at both Ivy League schools, accounting for 14% of Yale’s incoming class and 9% of Princeton’s.
The share of White students in Yale’s first-year class increased to 46% from 42%, while Hispanic and Latino students rose slightly to 19%. At Princeton, the share of Hispanic or Latino students dipped to 9% from 10%.
Students for Fair Admissions, the group that brought the Supreme Court case against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that led to the ruling against affirmative action, had argued that the schools penalized Asian-Americans during the admissions process.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which brought testing back sooner than other universities, said last month that the share of Asian-American students rose to 47% from 41%, while Black students plummeted to 5% from an average of 13% in recent years.
Why Applications To Historically Black Colleges Are Surging
Howard received 37,000 applications, a 12% increase for the incoming class of 2,500 freshmen. Florida A&M University (FAMU), considered the nation’s top public HBCU, has seen applications nearly double over the last two years. As of mid-June, it had gotten 21,939 applications for the incoming freshman class and admitted 3,877–an admissions rate of 18%, which means it's letting in a lower percentage of applicants than the University of Florida, which Forbes recently named to its list of 20 New Ivies.
And it’s not only big, high profile HBCUs seeing impressive application and enrollment gains. Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Florida, an African Methodist Episcopal Church-affiliated HBCU with a current enrollment of just 1,175, received 10,457 applications for the incoming freshman class, up 161% since 2019. Its enrollment climbed during the pandemic to its highest level in 15 years. Jennifer Price, vice president of enrollment management at the school, describes Edward Waters as having entered a cycle where a growing student body helps it “reputation and influence to grow, creating a positive feedback loop that attracts even more high-quality applicants in the future.”
Edward Waters isn’t the only HBCU coming back from an enrollment slump. The share of Black college and university students attending HBCUs fell dramatically from 18% in 1976 to a low of 8% in 2014. During that period, overall Black enrollment in higher education more than doubled, while the student count at HBCUs slowly shrank. (As of 2022, 76% of the nearly 290,00 students enrolled at HCBUs identified as Black.)
But applications to HBCUs spiked after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Now, the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision barring race-conscious admissions to colleges and the rapid dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies at state universities in 23 states appear to be giving HBCUs a further boost.
Clark Atlanta sees record number of freshman applications, higher than UGA
Clark Atlanta University has set a new benchmark for freshman applications, surpassing one of its neighboring schools.
Yesterday, University President Dr. George French announced the remarkable achievement, stating, “To see 46,000 applications for just 1,200 seats is nothing less than phenomenal.” This year, Clark Atlanta University surpassed even the University of Georgia in application numbers.
Dr. French emphasized that while the university has faced challenges in the past, it is now marking a new era. He pointed out that CAU is now one of only eleven HBCUs with an endowment exceeding $100 million, and enrollment has reached 4,200 students. “The average GPA of incoming students is 3.71. Five years ago it was 2.8. The brand is strong. Our retention and graduation rates are increasing,” French added.
“Clark Atlanta is on the rise. It continues to grow,” said CAU Athletic Director Dr. Jerel Drew. Earlier this month, the university unveiled a new red football field at Panther Stadium, replacing the green turf. This upgrade was made possible by a generous donation from the Arthur Blank Family Foundation.
Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons, has donated significantly to three HBCUs, including Clark Atlanta University, to empower the next generation of Black leaders.
The fundamental problem with American policing is not that the uniform turns people bad. Instead, there’s a self-selection problem. Power attracts corruptible people more generally, and power centers with a history of abusive, militaristic, and racist violence disproportionately attract people who want to abuse minorities, or use lethal force. Those are the exact people who shouldn’t be in uniform, because they see that kind of culture as an attractive profession. But that’s too often who applies. People who should never be in uniform self-select into it.
Yes, many police officers are true public servants. But there are a disproportionate number of officers who aren’t. And that’s where the violence comes from. That is part of the reason why American cops commit domestic abuse at a rate that is estimated to be between two and four times the national average.
Oversight can’t prevent such tragedies. Body cameras may sometimes help get justice after a police murder, but it’s a band-aid solution to a more widespread, deeper wound.
You have to fix the system. And it turns out it’s much easier to get good people into uniform than it is to turn bad people good.
Gaza, the Democrats, and How to Fix Our Wretched Politics
Power is created by building transformative solidarity and engaging as many people as possible — like the unlikely coalition that came together to push President Biden to pass the torch, based on little more than a shared desire to have marginally better odds of staving off Trumpism. To pose the kind of challenge that can restructure society on a more profound level, we will need to build movements that are both disciplined and diverse. In the United States, few if any social groups have the numbers to single-handedly overcome the forces invested in our oppression, which means we need one another to win. The multiracial working class toils day after day, but to exercise collective power over the economy, it has to be brought into consciousness, each individual transformed when they come to the realization that they are valued and needed and can be part of something bigger than themselves. That’s what organizing is all about.
We organize by meeting people where they are, even when they are somewhere that initially disappoints or even offends us. In a 2020 interview, historian Robin D. G. Kelley, recounts a trip to Palestine he took as part of a delegation for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He recalls his dismay upon returning home when some people he met expressed reservations about being in solidarity with Palestinians on the grounds that some harbored anti-Black sentiments. He responded that the Black community was hardly free of Islamophobia — should Palestinians withhold solidarity from them? In Kelley’s words, “solidarity is not a market exchange.” It’s not transactional, a kind of down payment on future reciprocity or a campaign donation that can buy Mondaire Jones’s vote. It’s transformational.
Of course, making space for difference and disagreement is easier said than done, especially at high-tension moments like the present, when we’re encouraged to denounce people who fall short and to see all conflicts as zero-sum. This patient ethos can be tough on those of us who prioritize conceptual clarity and consistency. “We think that the world will collapse as the result of a logical contradiction: this is the illusion of the intellectual — that ideology must be coherent, every bit of it fitting together, like a philosophical investigation,” observed the late great sociologist Stuart Hall. “When, in fact, the whole purpose of what Gramsci called an organic (i.e. historically effective) ideology is that it articulates into a configuration different subjects, different identities, different projects, different aspirations. It does not reflect, it constructs a ‘unity’ out of difference.”
May all the devils be removed from your path—by any means necessary.
Blessings upon blessings,
Robert
Recommended Listening
There’s a Riot Going On by Sly and the Family Stone
Recommended Reading
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Recommended Viewing
Animal Farm (1954)