Author: Common Dreams

As people nationwide marked the first anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack amid rising concerns about American democracy, District of Columbia residents and advocates for full representation renewed calls for congressional action on DC statehood. January 6, 2021 “began with Black joy and ended with white hate, and the 700,000 of us who call D.C. home were forced to bear the brunt of that hatred,” declared Jamal Holtz, lead organizer of 51 for 51, a coalition of pro-statehood groups. “A year after that violent day, DC’s residents — the majority of whom are Black and Brown—are still denied voting...

One year since then-President Donald Trump and his Republican accomplices’ lies about voter fraud led to a failed coup on January 6, 2021, progressives are warning that the GOP’s ongoing, nationwide assault on the franchise will continue as long as Senate Democrats fail to pass pro-democracy legislation. “In America, voters decide the outcome of elections,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Yet 365 days after the attacks on the 2020 election culminated in the Capitol calamity, we still haven’t enacted meaningful reforms to prevent another January 6. If the Senate doesn’t act now,...

Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election had absurd elements, and it culminated in the deadly chaos of the Capitol insurrection. Now, the more we learn, the more we realize there was a concerted plan to steal the election and upend the results. Next time it will not be so amateurish. In fact, Trump’s allies are systematically removing obstacles to stealing elections in states across the country. The Brennan Center published a report recently documenting the campaign, The Election Sabotage Scheme and How Congress Can Stop It by Will Wilder, Derek Tisler, and Wendy Weiser. Two state legislatures have bestowed...

It is well known that no one is teaching critical race theory in the K-12 system. The current discussions of Critical Race Theory (CRT) are the result of a tried-and-true right-wing strategy to create weird forms of cathexis where they link the name of something obscure with things that bother people at their core, to create lightning rods by which to channel toxic energy through the bodies of their followers, in ways that bond people to their to their death cult. But in our rush to expose the dishonesty behind the vilification of CRT we might be passing up...

Earlier in the week, a friend texted me this prediction about the outcome of Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial: “Kyle Rittenhouse walks or only [gets convicted] of minor charges and gets probation.” Though my response was glib, I thought it was realistic at the time: “He’ll be convicted. He won’t walk. He may not get as much time as he deserves, but he’s going to jail.” My logic was based on the fact that all of Rittenhouse’s victims were white and that you can’t kill white men in America, even if you’re white yourself, and not face severe consequences. That...