Dear Progressive Reader,

On March 27, President Donald Trump issued yet another Executive Order, this one targeting the nation’s museums and art galleries. The White House claims that the President is restoring “truth and sanity to American history” by “reversing the spread of divisive ideology.” Meanwhile, on our website this week, Dave Kaufman writes about the removal from government websites of the stories of African Americans and others whose lives and legacies are being literally erased from our national memory.

Among other things, Trump’s new Executive Order requires the Secretary of the Interior to “reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers.” This cryptic sentence is pretty clearly referring to, among other things, the Confederate monuments that have been taken down since summer of 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The movement to remove these relics of an inaccurate history of a cruel past reached well beyond our shores, as art historian Eddie Chambers explained in June 2020, “One of the most unexpected and remarkable aspects of the nationwide protests is how these demonstrations have spread to other parts of the world, including continental Europe and the United Kingdom.” But even as the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was taken down in New Orleans, Louisiana, Ashana Bigard noted, “Monuments to the Confederacy are coming down, but structural racism continues to create barriers for students of color in New Orleans schools.”

Trump, it seems, is very clear in his understanding of what it means to take down Confederate monuments and other memorials to a society built on racism and slavery. In his Executive Order he refers to ending a “a false reconstruction of American history.” Reconstruction was a post-Civil War attempt to redress the wrongs of the previous two-and-one-half centuries of slavery on this continent.

The National Park Service says on its website (at least as of today): “The Reconstruction era [was] the historic period in which the United States grappled with the question of how to integrate millions of newly freed African Americans into social, political, and labor systems, [it] was a time of significant transformation within the United States.” It is this transformation that the Trump Administration and its supporters seek to undo. It is the late-nineteenth century overturning of Reconstruction that they seek to emulate in their effort to “make America great again.” But as Yohuru Williams wrote on our website in 2017, “Maintaining an idealized representation of the past does nothing to lift up the values at the core of our democracy.”

As the poet Langston Hughes penned in 1935: “[L]et America be America again—The land that never has been yet—And yet must be—” and, the poem concludes, “Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,/The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,/ We, the people, must redeem . . . And make America again!”

Much of the news cycle this week has been dominated by outrage (or denial) over the use of Signal, a cellphone app, to discuss the launch of an attack on Yemen. Some commentators have noted that this breach is probably something that is going on often in the new administration, it is just this time a journalist found out about it. It also occurs in a landscape of security lapses, the reassignment of FBI investigators, cuts in the Nuclear Security Agency, and other cuts and changes that literally “make America less safe again” (MALSA?). The Republican response to the “Signalgate” scandal has been mostly denial and diversion—bringing up the old stories of Hillary Clinton’s emails and Joe Biden’s documents in a garage and seemingly forgetting that after his first term, Trump himself had held numerous classified documents in insecure storage at Mar-a-Lago, or that other Republicans, like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker had operated illegal private computer networks in their offices. 

But the real scandal in the Signal chat group is that these bombings of Yemen are disproportionately killing or injuring civilians! As Kathy Kelly points out this weekend, “Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University.” Kelly calls out the Democrats’ focus on the issue of the “security leak” when in reality, “a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House . . . don’t seem to care.”

Elsewhere on our website this week, journalist Sam Stein chronicles his frightening detention by Israeli soldiers for filming; Rachel Ida Buff tells the stories of new mothers being deported under the cruel Title 42 regulations; David Helvarg looks at the frightening implications of the recent court ruling against Greenpeace; and Lital Khaikin raises concerns over the future for landmine removal in Colombia. Plus, Ed Rampell reviews the new PBS documentary Change Not Charity on the Americans with Disabilities Act; Mike Ervin sounds the alarm on Elon Musk’s use of “the r-word;” and Sarah Bruhn pens an op-ed on the importance of sanctuary. Also, Michaela Brandt reviews the new post-humous memoir by Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis; Jabob Goodwin extols the importance of democracy in labor unions; and Wenonah Hauter of Food & Water Watch opines on the importance of laws to make corporations pay for the climate impacts of their actions.

And we sadly note the passing of Robert W. McChesney who died on March 25. Bob was a great friend and supporter of The Progressive and a nationwide leader in the media reform movement. McChesney authored numerous books on media and capitalism (including several with co-author John Nichols). In a 2010 speech in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he taught journalism and hosted a Public Radio program for many years, McChesney expressed his predictions for the media landscape of today: “What we’ll have . . . is not a lack of news—We’re still going to have twenty-four-hour-cable news cycles. We’ll still have some semblance of newspapers. We’ll certainly have lots of what’s called news online. But we’ll have very precious little journalism. What we’ll have instead is a golden age of spin and propaganda.” Bob and his contributions to our understanding of the importance of a true people’s media will be sorely missed.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – If you like this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you know someone who would like to subscribe to this free weekly email, please share this link: http://tiny.cc/ProgressiveNewsletter.

P.P.S. – If you don’t already subscribe to The Progressive in print or digital form, please consider doing so today. Also, if you have a friend or relative who you feel should hear from the many voices for progressive change within our pages, please consider giving a gift subscription.

P.P.P.S. – Thank you so much to everyone who has already donated to support The Progressive! We need you now more than ever. If you have not done so already, please take a moment to support hard-hitting, independent reporting on issues that matter to you. Your donation today will keep us on solid ground and will help us continue to grow in the coming years. You can use the wallet envelope in the current issue of the magazine, or click on the “Donate” button below to join your fellow progressives in sustaining The Progressive as a voice for peace, social justice, and the common good.