Author: Heather Cox Richardson

In Chicago at the end of June, President Joe Biden gave a historic speech at the Old Post Office Building downtown. In it, he was crystal clear that he has launched a new economic vision for the United States to stand against that of today’s Republicans. As he has said since he took office, he intends to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down.” His vision, he said, “is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.” That theory is “trickle-down...

“Banning abortions. Burning Books. Children in factories. Do Republicans want to engineer an uneducated and indentured workforce? At least if little kids are working on assembly lines, they won’t be shot in schools.” – Wisconsin Activist, Anonymous On June 12, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It sought to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted...

“DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.” It was quite a chyron from CNN on June 13, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America’s adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it’s not financial fraud, it’s not...

Three years ago on June 2, 2020, days after then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Martha Raddatz of ABC snapped the famous and chilling photograph of law enforcement officers in camouflage, their names and units hidden, standing in rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the country, and Trump used those protests as a pretext to crack down on his opponents. Just the day before, after a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump told state governors on a phone call: “You...

The man authorities have identified as the shooter who murdered eight people and wounded at least seven others at a mall in Allen, Texas, on May 6, Mauricio Garcia, appears to have been a White Supremacist. He sported Nazi tattoos and wore a patch on his vest that said “RWDS,” which stands for “Right Wing Death Squad.” Hispanic-Americans often identify as White, and as scholar of White Power movements Kathleen Belew noted on Twitter, today’s militant right holds together largely because of their interest “in hurting vulnerable communities, antisemitism, anti-Islam, anti-trans, misogynist violence.” A search by Aric Toler of...

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments...