Charlestown Town Council votes to examine costs and benefits of joining Portsmouth's lawsuit against new state laws on development

Charlestown Council Studies Standing in Portsmouth Suit, Advances Bikeway Review

Adriana Vossari, RI & Local Government, is NOT an actual person but rather is an AI-bot used by UpriseRI to review and summarize public records. Click here for their explanation for how this is done: How we report meeting stories →

Summary: Charlestown has not committed money to Portsmouth's development-law lawsuit; the council first wants information on whether the town has standing. Instead, the town planner and planning solicitor will research whether the town has standing. A field meeting with state officials on Old Post Road bike markings is also being arranged. Beverage license renewals go to a Nov. 9 public hearing.

The Charlestown Town Council voted 5-0 at Tuesday night's meeting to have the town planner and the planning solicitor research whether Charlestown has legal standing to join Portsmouth's Superior Court lawsuit over state development laws, before any town money is committed. That is according to the Charlestown Town Council's published meeting recording.

The council also voted to set up a field meeting with state transportation officials about bicycle markings on Old Post Road. It ordered the beverage license applications, which the clerk said are all renewals, advertised for a Nov. 9 public hearing and announced three openings on a regional school building committee.

Portsmouth lawsuit: research first, money later

Councilor Van Slyke said that, from her understanding, Charlestown's share would be a flat fee of $4,106.95, which would get the group through the briefing at the preliminary injunction hearing.

Town Administrator Jeffrey Allen said he contacted Joe Larisa, an attorney involved in the case, and received an email from him. Allen relayed that Larisa said the effort seeks one flat fee based on population, that no town is obligated for more without a vote, and that Portsmouth has already obligated $20,000. Allen said Hopkinton is currently the only town that has joined, and that other towns have the matter on their dockets.

EDITOR's NOTE: Attorney Joe Larisa is a controversial figure known for representing rightwing anti-government causes. He is Charlestown's lawyer for "Indian Affairs" and his constant attacks against the Narragansett Indian Tribe have drawn accusations of racism from tribal leaders. - Will Collette

Councilor Van Slyke said the planner and Planning Commission have proposed specific changes in the past without result. "Hope is not a plan," she said, adding that working with legislators and joining the suit is not an either-or.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Councilor Van Slyke is the only council member aligned with the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA). Nearly everything she says is scripted for her by de facto CCA leader Ruth Platner. Van Slyke is well known for her untrue statements and nonsense speech. For examples, read my series of "Slyke of Hand" columns. One that is tightly related to this article covers Van Slyke's defense of the botched Charlestown Comprehensive Plan written by Van Slyke's master, Ruth Platner.- Will Collette 

Other members favored waiting. One council member said the better course was to have the town planner propose changes to the laws and bring them to Charlestown's senators and representatives in the new legislative session. Councilor Peter Slom asked what would happen if too few towns contributed. A council member noted that Portsmouth also has an election next month. Slom said he would like to hear directly from the attorneys before committing money.

Can America Recover From Trump-World?

If we actually survive it, recovery will be long and hard

Stephen Eric Bronner in Common Dreams

Much can be said about Donald Trump, but it is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts, institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. 

Whether the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.

Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and demagogic ruler of the Republican Party. MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,” McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils. 

Whatever the president’s decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched. A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic socialists. 

Republicans collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially “center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist, “Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these words actually mean.

For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four crucial points in each domain.

Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026 alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under attack through legislative and often coercive means. 

Public lands have been privatized, coal has been promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;” indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than 150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education, environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence. 

The press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth in American history. 

Unions have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associated with the “New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is hanging by a thread. 

With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly admired by the whole world.

US foreign policy has changed for the worse as multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own. 

His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be given. 

The United States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus contradicting his previous warnings. 

His on-again, off-again imperialist threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia, constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s zigzag approach with a certain logic.

Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department, which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get his way. None of this has worked. 

Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter tariff war. America’s squandering of military sources and diplomatic setbacks have left Taiwan and South Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the background.

Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled, policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased, and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes. 

Trump’s attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering, and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and authoritarian enemies.

“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult, and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their responses. 

MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from its decade-long trauma—and even then...

Stephen Eric Bronner is Board of Governors distinguished professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University and executive director of the “Independent Experts’ Peace Initiatives.”

Columbus’ own writings reveal how tightly religion and conquest (and slavery) were intertwined from the start

His writings also show his delusions of grandeur

Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

A manuscript with the text of the letter Cristopher
Columbus wrote in February 1493, giving his account
of the first voyage to the Americas.
Archivo General de Simancas/Spanish Ministry of
Culture via Wikimedia Commons

Few historic figures are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. For some, in both Spain and the United States, he remains a great hero, an explorer who found a “new world.” 

He is reviled by others who see him as an arrogant conqueror: the first European to enslave Indigenous Americans, and the man who launched ecological destruction in the Western Hemisphere.

As a historian who writes about early encounters between Europeans, Indigenous Americans and Africans in North America, I believe it is important to recapture this period as much as we can from existing documents – including Columbus’ own writings. Those texts reveal the enormous importance the push to spread Christianity played in Europeans’ colonial plans from the start.

In my 2026 book, “Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680,” I describe how Europeans’ religious desires shaped the creation of American colonies that benefited conquerors, at a high cost to those they displaced or enslaved. In the Americas, the linkage of religious purpose and the eager pursuit of glory and wealth began in 1492.

Would love to see Jim Mageau's explanation

In addition to the five-star general uniform, that's a Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck

Then there's this post from Trump's former Press Secretary:

What comes next for the 1 million people who have lost – or will soon lose – Temporary Protected Status

Trump tells Haitians, Somalians to get out

Jean Lantz Reisz, University of Southern California

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, 1.3 million individuals from 17 countries were living and working in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

TPS is a humanitarian form of protection from deportation for people who cannot return to their home countries because of an armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary circumstances.

In 2025, the Trump administration began terminating or not renewing TPS for those countries, making its way through 13 of them. As the administration turns its attention to the few remaining nations, most TPS holders have lost or will soon lose their protection from deportation and their authorization to work. Many will be separated from their families and the communities they have lived in for decades. Some will be forced to return to countries like Afghanistan, Haiti and Syria, all of which are on the U.S. State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list due to war, terrorism or other extreme violence.

As a law scholar who studies immigration detention, I can say that most people with TPS never had a path to anything more permanent, which means, as they face deportation, they have little recourse.

Stephen Miller Embodies the Dark Fascist Heart of Trump’s White House

Trump's Goebbels

Arnold R. Isaacs for Common Dreams   

The video is not long, just 16 minutes and 25 seconds. But in that short time it provides a remarkable capsule of the Trump administration’s ongoing crusade against its critics. In one chilling moment after another, it captures the mentality of that campaign; its content, tone, and style; and its complete disregard for factual accuracy.

The video, taped on July 16, records the words of Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser, addressing a multinational audience assembled at the State Department for the opening session of meeting convened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio under the title “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In his welcoming address, Rubio defined the meeting’s focus: “far-left political terrorism” that he declared has been a “blind spot” in US counterterrorism doctrine, but would now be directly in the government’s sights.

Following Rubio to the podium, Miller delivered various—and sometimes unsettling—amplifications on that theme. 

After an opening passage declaring that under President Trump’s leadership, “We have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government,” Miller went on to proclaim that “for the first time in American history,” all US law enforcement and intelligence agencies are working together “to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.” 

Then, in one of many questionable passages, he went on with an implied suggestion that the authorities should reject suspected terrorists’ claims of their legal rights. Miller put it this way:

One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist, who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.

Homeland Security tells Haitians to get out. NOW.

MAGA means

Catholic immigrant rights group wins major court battle against Trump ban on people from 75 countries

No discrimination based on national origin

Jon Queally for Common Dreams

Federal Judge Jeannette Vargas has struck down the Trump administration's suspension of immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, ruling the State Department policy violates federal immigration law and exceeds Secretary Marco Rubio's authority. Judge Vargas ruled federal law expressly prohibits nationality discrimination in issuing immigrant visas.

A federal judge in New York has ruled that Donald Trump and the US State Department overstepped their authority when they suspended the processing of visa applications for people from 75 nations earlier this year, a move that critics at the time called a “travesty,” cruel, and counter to the rule of law.

US District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee, ruled Friday that the pause in visa applications—which Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed was necessary to prevent immigrant visitors from freeloading on US taxpayer dollars—was “contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority.”

What Is the Trump Administration Doing With Foreign Aid Money?

Instead of fighting famine and disease, Trump wants to investigate imaginary crimes against white South Africans

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Sharon Lerner for ProPublica

No longer a Trump priority. Photo: Doctors Without Borders

Since he returned to office, Donald Trump’s administration has upended foreign aid. It’s labeled well-established, long-running programs as “not aligned with American interests” and slashed their budgets. 

Still, the billions of taxpayer dollars Congress has allocated for foreign aid programs must be spent; lawmakers have insisted the government continue to fund humanitarian aid, global health and pro-democracy causes around the world. With most of the old programs now gone, however, we wanted to know: What is the Trump administration doing with that money now?

Trump's present priority for foreign aid to Africa

Recently, we published our investigation that found one answer to that question in a little-known bureau of the State Department that has dramatically transformed under Trump. 

For decades, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, known as DRL, has supported human rights in some of the most oppressive countries in the world. Now, our reporting found, it’s planning to direct funds to controversial groups supporting right-wing causes in Europe and elsewhere. 

Our full story lays out some of the groups the government has considered funding, which include a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and a British American think tank created this year to focus on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilization.” (Administration officials dropped that grant after significant pushback from Congress.) 

One proposed grant particularly caught our attention: Trump administration officials suggested funding research on crime against minority populations in South Africa. 

Marco Rubio uses AI to make the US look stupid

US State Department map used at international AIDS conference mislabeled every African nations

Isn't geography something the State Department should know?

Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams

“AI use gone wrong.” “Utter embarrassment.” “Stupid empire.” “Idiot Reich.”

Those were just some of the responses to Thursday reporting on a US Department of State map presented at a global conference in Brazil that mislabeled every African country it included.

“Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements,” the news agency reported.

“A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools,” the outlet noted. “The company said it was investigating the report.”

ICE Killings Are Acts of Terrorism

ICE’s indiscriminate violence conveys that nonwhite immigrants, lawful or otherwise, have no place in Trump’s America.

Mitchell Zimmerman

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Slain by ICE in Houston,
Texas on July 7, 2026.

In less than one week, ICE agents killed twice.

Neither victim was the man they were looking for. And each time their excuses made no sense. But the killings served a purpose: terrorizing immigrant communities, in pursuit of Trump’s white nationalist agenda.

On July 7 in Houston, masked ICE agents who did not identify themselves stopped and shot to death Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52 year old Mexican national and father of three. Araujo had lived in the United States for 35 years and had applied to obtain legal status. He was on his way to work in construction.

Using its by-now familiar excuse, Homeland Security officials claimed that Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and tried to run down ICE agents by “weaponizing” his van. The claim was disputed by witnesses, is inconsistent with the video evidence, and makes no sense.

Araujo had no criminal record. Why would this law-abiding, middle-aged family man ram an ICE vehicle and try to kill ICE agents?

Johan Sebastian Guerrero

Six days later, in Biddeford, Maine, ICE killed again. This time they killed Johan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the United States.

Again, ICE claimed that Guerrero tried to run down the ICE agent. Again, no evidence supported the excuse. Twelve hours later Homeland Security abandoned the “weaponized” vehicle claim and tried another story: The ICE agent, “fearing for public safety,” shot Guerrero because he “attempted to flee the scene.”

Under Homeland Security’s account, an unmarked ICE vehicle driven by an unknown masked man attempts to stop a vehicle, the driver (who was not their intended target) tries to escape, and the agent fires. They claim, essentially, that failing to stop (if that actually even happened) amounts to “fleeing the scene” — and requires deadly force.

Johan Sebastian Guerrero was working legally at two jobs, as a cleaner and a food delivery driver. He had a wife and a three-year-old daughter. Who can claim he was so dangerous he had to be killed?

Since Trump returned to the White House, ICE agents have killed at least 10 times, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, as of this writing.

ICE agents routinely shoot at people in vehicles, even though official U.S. government policy warns against the practice and says law enforcement officers should “move out of the path of the vehicle” rather than shoot. In addition, at least 49 people have died in ICE custody so far in Trump’s second term — a number that will only climb.

Brutality and violence are routine features of ICE operations, yet no ICE agent has been held responsible. In Trump’s war against immigrants, ICE agents know they may slay with impunity.

Donald Trump’s campaign of demonization and vilification sets the stage. Trump calls immigrants “animals” and “not human,” likening them to criminals or escaped mental patients. He calls them “vermin” who “infest our country,” and he embraces the Nazi theme that a despised group is “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The unrestrained brutality of ICE is a reign of terror. Killing without cause is not a problem for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a feature. ICE’s indiscriminate violence conveys that nonwhite immigrants, lawful or otherwise, have no place in Trump’s America.

There is little point in considering DHS’s pretexts for killing on a case-by-case basis. ICE’s abuse of immigrants is not the result of individual misdeeds — it is policy. ICE cannot be reformed because its purpose is not enforcing the law. It is terrorism for a white supremacist vision of America.

Those who reject Trump’s vision, who insist on the humanity of our neighbors, who still believe we must welcome to America’s shores those yearning to breathe free, must stand up and say No.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

Subscriptions to Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman are free at this time. If you find my writing of value, please like, subscribe and recommend Reasoning Together to your friends. Thank you.

You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.

There’s No Doubt: The Supreme Court Is Part of Trump’s Anti-Democracy Movement

They don't even try to hide it anymore

Robert Reich in Inequality Media

The real way to read the immigration decisions the Supreme Court issued on Thursday is not to see them solely as losses for immigrants to the United States or the rights of immigrants. They are much larger losses. 

They are losses for the authority of Congress to have its laws fully executed by a president who doesn’t agree with them.

Markwayne Mullin vs. Al Otro Lado concerns a 1917 law that requires immigration officers to inspect noncitizens who arrive at ports of entry to determine whether they may enter the United States. Congress amended the law in the Refugee Act of 1980 to allow noncitizens fleeing persecution in their home country to apply for asylum as part of this inspection process.

The act lays out a required set of procedures to guide this process. It says that a noncitizen who seeks admission to the United States “may apply for asylum.” If the noncitizen lacks valid travel documents, the officer “shall order [her] removed” unless she conveys an intention to apply for asylum or a fear of persecution, which in turn requires the officer to “refer” her for further processing of her asylum application.

This system is designed to ensure that the US government considers the application of each person seeking to come into the United States to determine who should be let in, who should be turned away, and who should be allowed to apply for asylum.

This must be seen for what it really is—a systemic effort by the six Republican appointees on the court to shrink congressional authority and enlarge the authority of the executive branch.

Whodunnit?

The Age of the Super A*sholes

Trump and Musk dominate our economy and our politics

Robert Reich

Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.

To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.

Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.

Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.

Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.

Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.

While the country suffers,
Trump posts images like this

Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)

Musk has stated that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy” — arguing that a society can only afford to practice broad empathy if it operates from a position of systemic strength.

Both regard themselves as omnipotent and invincible. Both lash out verbally or physically at anyone who crosses them, often getting into raging disputes and fights.

And this

To the extent they have any belief beyond their own omnipotence, it’s white male nationalism. “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk wrote his 240 million followers in a January post on X. In a February post, he declared that “there has been unrelenting hate and poisonous propaganda in the West against anyone White, straight or male over the past decade or more,” adding, “No more guilt trips. ENOUGH.”

Musk has suggested that race plays a detrimental role in hiring. He’s touted the role of white people in eliminating slavery. He’s accused public figures of racism against white and Asian people.

In recent months, Musk has increased his online posts about perceived threats to whiteness, or what he views as calls for a “genocide” against white people. Over the past seven months, he has posted 850 times about race, nearly daily and triple the rate for the previous two years.

Trump also has a well-documented history of white supremacist actions and rhetoric, including the 1973 lawsuit brought against Trump management for allegedly discriminating against Black renters; his full-page ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty for the five Black and Latino teenagers eventually exonerated in the Central Park jogger case; his leading role in the debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine people on both sides” of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville; his view of Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole” countries; his determination to erase Black history from America’s classrooms; and his campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Both Musk and Trump have pushed the conspiracy theory that Democrats are seeking to import undocumented immigrants so they can take over the U.S. government forever.

Both have fomented white nationalism abroad. Trump was an enthusiastic ally of Viktor Orbán, who saw Western civilization threatened by Muslim immigration into Europe. Many people in Trump’s circle continue to support and encourage leaders of the European far-right.

Musk, too, encourages white nationalism abroad. During the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots in the United Kingdom—particularly in Belfast and London—Musk posted that “civil war is inevitable” and urged British protesters to “fight back or die” (prompting British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn Musk’s comments as “dangerous.”) In response to the recent killing in Belfast, Musk blamed “murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town.” He shared an image of the stabbing suspect, who is Black, alongside the caption declaring “millions must go.” And he reposted messages claiming that Starmer “hates white people.”

Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate report that “Musk’s amplification” of anti-migrant narratives to his hundreds of millions of followers was “instrumental” in provoking the violence in Belfast: “No individual played a bigger role in spreading [hateful] content on X than Musk himself.”

‘Alarm’ at White House After Vance and Miller Pushed Insurrection Act, Habeas Corpus Suspension During Anti-ICE Protests

Close call for democracy

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

A June 15 report in The New York Times revealed what it described as the “alarm” felt by some White House lawyers at proposals made earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance and Trump adviser Stephen Miller as the administration was forced to contend with widespread anger over its anti-immigration agenda.

Among other things, the Times reported that Vance pushed for Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the US military to be deployed on American streets, in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota against federal immigration enforcement operations in the state.

A few days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers fatally shot demonstrator Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the Times reported that Vance—who had also elevated a baseless claim by Miller that Pretti had been a “would-be assassin”—said invoking the Insurrection Act was necessary “to crush the unrest in Minnesota.”

Vance also believed invoking the law would send a “message” that “paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations”—even though, as the Times noted, there is no evidence that Pretti; demonstrator Renee Good, who was also killed by federal agents; or any other organizers in Minnesota or elsewhere received any money in exchange for protesting.

However, right-wing attorney Will Scharf quickly shot down Vance’s suggestion, noting that the Insurrection Act is an instrument aimed at putting down armed rebellions rather than groups of citizens blowing whistles at ICE officers.

Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair then made the political case against invoking the Insurrection Act.

They walk among us

Can't imagine

The Supreme Court’s Whites-First Reasoning on Gerrymandering

It’s Always Been About Race

Mitchell Zimmerman

Will the Supreme Court’s evident desire to assist the G.O.P. before the midterms override a decision by three Republican-appointed judges to spare Black majority districts in Alabama from being gerrymandered out of existence?

This is the question posed by possible Supreme Court review of the finding by an Alabama judicial panel that Alabama could not use a congressional district map that deliberately discriminated against Black voters.

Two of the three judges on the panel which found race-based discrimination had been appointed to the bench by President Trump; one, by President Reagan. The issue now is whether the conservative justices of the Supreme Court will upend the panel’s racial discrimination finding, notwithstanding that the Alabama judges had followed legal standards set in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

If they allow the Alabama decision stand, it will be a rare exception to the flood of Supreme-Court-encouraged gerrymandering prompted by the Callais decision. Those Republican gerrymanders are likely to purge one-third of African -Americans representatives from Congress by destroying the Black majority districts that elected them.

Nonetheless, the six justices of the Supreme Court who caused this political bloodbath along racial lines claim that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the voting rights of African-Americans. The purge is lawful under the Voting Rights Act, say the justices, because the G.O.P. has partisan reasons to eliminate the Black districts that cannot be “disentangled” from racial motives.

With Miller, it could always be worse