Author: Heather Cox Richardson

A haunting precedent: The punishment of abolitionist John Brown in 1859 still reverberates today

On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows. Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon,...

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GOP silent as Trump grabs headlines by advocating his dictatorship with overthrow of Constitution

One of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral on December 3. In the message, Trump again falsely insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by massive and widespread fraud and deception. So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the...

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A political sea change: Gen Z comes of age with voting power as record number of women elected to office

Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) won Alaska’s House seat on November 25 for a full term after taking it this summer in a special election to replace Representative Don Young (R-AK), who died in office in March after 49 years in Congress. Peltola is the first woman to represent Alaska and, as Yup’ik, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. Peltola was endorsed by Alaskans of both parties, including Republicans like Senator Lisa Murkowski. Peltola promised to protect abortion and the salmon fisheries and was elected thanks to Alaska’s recent adoption of ranked choice voting, in which votes...

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Pelosi steps down from House leadership as GOP plans congressional investigations to smear Democrats

Midterm results gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives after a campaign in which they emphasized inflation. On November 17, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has received his party’s nomination to become speaker of the House, along with other Republican leadership, outlined for reporters their plans for the session. “We must be relentless in our oversight of this administration,” the number 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, told his colleagues. They plan to begin a raft of investigations: into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, the origins of Covid-19, the FBI, the withdrawal from Afghanistan,...

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The real American carnage: How the ousted autocrat who led an insurrection can run again for president

Photo by Gage Skidmore and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 After filing the paperwork on November 15, former president Donald Trump announced a run for the 2024 presidency tonight in a speech from Mar-a-Lago. The audience included a number of far-right social media influencers, his wife Melania, and family members Eric, Lara, and Barron Trump and Jared Kushner, but, so far as I can tell, no members of the Republican Party leadership. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who was a key advisor in the Trump White House, was not there, and said tonight she does “not plan to be involved in...

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People are tired of chaos: Autocrats like Putin lost the midterm elections along with the Republican Party

The contours of the midterm election on November 8 continue to come into focus. They are good, indeed, for the Democrats and Democratic president Joe Biden. Foremost is that the Democrats have not lost a Senate seat and could well pick one up after the December 6 runoff election between Georgia senator Rafael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. Those results are strong. According to Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar, only in 1934, under Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1962, under Democratic president John F. Kennedy; and 2002, under Republican president George W. Bush and just after the...

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