There is an excitement in the air about what is possible. Suddenly the prospects of winning seats in Texas, Mississippi, and South Carolina, in Georgia, Iowa, and Kansas makes it feel like the country is finally turning a corner. For whatever reason, high prices at the pump and the grocery store, the cruelty of immigration policies or the corruption that engulfs Washington, D.C., Americans seem to have had enough.

Perhaps it is a revelation that their hatreds have brought harm to their doorsteps.

No matter the reason, Tuesday must be an historic day.

Now there are rumblings that signal a storm isn’t too far off: the DOJ deploying election monitors across all fifty states, filing lawsuits in California, election deniers strategically positioned in states throughout the country, the mess in Alaska, etc. Some Democrats wringing their hands over progressives and the criticisms of Israel; in Michigan, Haley Stevens declaring that she will vote for Mike Rogers over El-Sayed because of it all; James Carville imagining what he takes to be nightmare scenarios where Democratic Socialists hold the House of Representatives hostage.

And then there are the polls. They can be wrong about the state of play – especially when it comes to the Senate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/31/4-ways-polls-could-be-wrong-or-right-about-who-will-win-senate/

But I am reminded of something that the late Bob Moses, the famed SNCC organizer and mastermind of Freedom Summer, once told me. It was a lesson about the promise and defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and about the pitfalls of elections as the aim of movements. In his quiet way, he said, “Eddie, movements mustn’t place too much faith in elections. If you win, your success demobilizes the movement. If you lose, the defeat deflates and demobilizes the movement.”

This was a hard lesson learned, given what happened after the betrayals in Atlantic City in 1968.

Why am I bringing up that lesson now? Whether there is a blue wave or not, we still have much work to do in this country. If the Democrats win the House and the Senate, many will have much to celebrate, but winning an election will not solve the problems unleashed over the last ten years. We must tap the root and confront the source of our current troubles, if we are to get off this damn hamster wheel.

That will entail holding Democrats to the fire, too.

And if the midterms offer a different result, and these madmen and women hold on to the House and/or Senate, we cannot fall into despair and resign ourselves to a kind of helplessness. We still have work to do!

Bob Moses imparted that lesson quietly as we walked among Princeton’s buttonwoods and white ash trees. Perhaps a memory deepened the sadness in his eyes as he spoke. Elections are critically important, but they can easily disappoint.

Let’s do what we need to do on Tuesday. But let’s not believe that all will be saved or go to hell because of an election. That fate rests in what we do in the days, months, and years to come.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie first looks at Israel’s unresolved election in light of a UN human rights finding of genocidal acts in Gaza, and at Sen. Chris Murphy’s warning that the Pentagon’s post-midterm war plans for Iran risk devastating escalation. Turning to the midterms, he examines the converging threats of voter suppression, record corporate and billionaire spending in the wake of Citizens United, and a Republican politics of resentment, seen in the Islamophobic attacks on Abdul El-Sayed and the vilification of Angie Nixon, that hides the human costs of dismantling the federal workforce, costs Black workers have borne disproportionately. Eddie calls on voters to turn out in force and to hold the Democratic Party to a transformative agenda that goes beyond simply opposing Donald Trump.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict

• UN Human Rights Panel Report on Israel and Palestinians – The New York Times

U.S. Military and Foreign Affairs

• Sen. Chris Murphy on Iran War Plan – Common Dreams

U.S. Campaigns and Elections

• Corporate Spending on Elections Has Skyrocketed Since 2010 – Common Dreams

• Trump Comments on Black Voters and Abdul El-Sayed – TheGrio

• Moreno, El-Sayed, and Religion in the Michigan and Ohio Senate Midterms – MSNow

U.S. Government and Administration

• 1 in 5 Federal Government Workers Have Left Since Trump Took Office – The Washington Post

Mississippi has shaped, even when I’ve failed to recognize it, so much of who I am and how I experience this country. Beauty and horror characterize the state. Saints and monsters populate its history. But those descriptions keep you on the surface of things. Mississippi is an American tragedy.

Something deeper is going on here. Something more than melodrama. Something that takes us to the heart of the darkness in this place, where choices have corrupted the soul and we sing the blues about it all.

Whenever I teach James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, I am struck by this passage:

The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that…

This reads to me like common sense. How could I believe anything like this about Mississippi? Even when I played with my white friends, enjoyed a good laugh, trusted one of them with my secrets, the reality of race kept us apart. It would take a willful act of blindness to accept such an idealized view of the state or the country when the history of both screamed, LIES!

And, to my mind, it would be a sin against the Holy Ghost to deny the blood spilt because of it all.

I feel this in my gut these days. The Attorney General of Mississippi, Lynn Fitch, issued a brief statement four months after Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old boy in Senatobia, Mississippi, was shot and killed by Hunter Foster, a police officer. Kohen’s mother and her friend were accused of stealing diapers and baby clothes from the local Walmart. Officers followed them to their car, demanded that she stop her vehicle, and as she attempted to drive away, Foster, who stood in front of the car, shot and killed Kohen.

Over diapers and baby clothes.

The Attorney General said that the use of force was justified. Doesn’t matter that Kohen’s mom was accused of a misdemeanor. Doesn’t matter that the video footage shows that the officers put themselves in danger. Fitch said the police were justified in killing that baby.

Officer Foster has resigned, but one can easily imagine that he will end up, with his happy trigger, on some other police force in some other small town. Police have been given a license in this country to act with impunity, and that license takes on particular meaning when it comes to Black people whose lives aren’t valued as much as others—especially in Mississippi.

I survived Mississippi. Nolan and Kohen didn’t. But, if we are honest, Mississippi shouldn’t be made to bear the burden of the nation’s sins. It only reveals them in sepia tones.

Being from this place, I can put aside the abstractions and see the country for what it is: a nation that can witness a 16-year-old child kill 5-, 8-, and 11-year-old children and move on to talk about political horse races. A country overrun by greed, selfishness, and hatred (rotting from the inside out), governed by calloused hearted men and women, and praying that an election will save its soul.

A place that can accept a cop killing a one-year-old Black child over some damn diapers and baby clothes.

Yeah, being from Mississippi, I know far too much about this country to believe the myths to which it clings.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie opens by denouncing international crises, highlighting Israel’s ongoing strikes in Gaza alongside the administration’s plans for renewed attacks on Iran and cruel energy blockades against Cuba. Turning to the domestic front, he condemns unchecked federal overreach after ICE severely injured a U.S. citizen in California, and he calls out the politically timed indictment of Virginia Senator Lucas as blatant retaliation before the midterms. Eddie then points out local systemic failures, specifically criticizing Mississippi’s Attorney General for justifying the fatal police shooting of a one-year-old child. He concludes by urging listeners to counteract these “moral monsters” by organizing and voting in historic numbers to reclaim American democracy.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict

• Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill Four, Including a Young Girl – Al Jazeera

• Israel Closes West Bank City – CNN

U.S. Military and Foreign Affairs

• U.S. and Israel Renew Iran Strikes – The New York Times

• Top Cuban Diplomat Accuses U.S. of Threatening Countries That Vote With Cuba at UN – Reuters

U.S. Campaigns and Elections

• Midterm Campaign Finance Updates – The New York Times

• Midterm Ad Spending Has Surpassed $10B: Where Is the Money Coming From? – TIME

Immigration and ICE

• ICE Hospitalization of U.S. Citizen – The New York Times

• Video Shows ICE Detaining U.S. Citizen Ricardo Gonzalez in California – The New York Times

Justice Department and Political Investigations

• Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas Charged in Public Corruption Case – NBC News

• Louise Lucas Faces Marijuana Charges – The New York Times

• Rep. Ilhan Omar Describes Search of Her Home – NBC News

Justice and Legal Cases

• Mississippi AG Says Police Shooting That Killed 1-Year-Old Was Justified – NBC News

• Video: Senatobia, Mississippi Police Shooting of Kohen Wiley – Mississippi Today

• Mississippi Police Shooting of Kohen Wiley – AP News

• Mississippi Officer in Harm’s Way in Shooting of Kohen Wiley – Verite News

Read more

Come November

We live in some difficult days. People are struggling. The country drowns in greed, selfishness, and hatred. These are indeed difficult days. But we’ve gathered here to claim the power of the people, to reclaim our democracy from the hands of those who would have us bent and bowed. You are what they are afraid of. This is what they fear: the organizing and mobilizing of people, from every walk of life, on behalf of genuine freedom.

There is no doubt that we face in this moment an existential threat. And the horse races of this political season ought not blind us to that fact. There are those among us who have used the democratic process for undemocratic ends. They govern for the billionaire class and feed their people the red meat of hatred. They reject the idea of a multiracial democracy and insist that this country belongs only to them. They rob the public coffers, fill their pockets with cash, dismantle the mechanisms of accountability, disregard norms and law, while everyday people struggle to make ends meet. They sell it all with brazen lies.

And they have tried to overwhelm us with it all, to make us feel powerless in the face of their destruction.

But we gather today to demonstrate our power. We reject their vision of this country. These midterm elections will mark the beginning of our ongoing effort to reimagine America as we show them the power of our vote and our voices. We must overwhelm the polls. Turn out in record numbers. Disrupt the math that shaped redistricting. Overrun their efforts to cheat by showing up in numbers this country has never seen before.

Organize your neighborhoods. Organize your family. Organize your workplace. Vote and vote early.

You are what they are afraid of!

History calls us now. Ours isn’t the challenge of the Jim Crow South, with its vicious racists and the heroism of unsung sharecroppers. This isn’t the call to beat back Nazism in the context of World War II. Ours isn’t a moment where we struggle to organize workers against Henry Ford or to demand the right of women to vote. Those generations answered the call of their time. We must answer ours. With courage and with the fullness of our imaginations, we must decide to release this nation from the ghosts that have it by the throat. Each generation must find its feet and understand its charge – not to imitate the days of old, but to bring the fullness of its experience to bear as we fight for a better world.

We have our mission. Come November the moral monsters will see it clearly.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes ongoing international atrocities in Gaza and the hidden human toll of the war with Iran, while mourning a horrific elementary school shooting in Oregon that reflects a broader national epidemic of selfishness and moral un-wellness. Domestically, he condemns the weaponization of the Department of Homeland Security following a norm-shattering raid on Representative Ilhan Omar’s home, framing it alongside aggressive lawsuits against California’s voter rolls as blatant pre-midterm voter intimidation. Eddie also exposes rampant second-Gilded-Age corruption—from corporate megadonors funding Trump’s White House ballroom to Elon Musk financing Ken Paxton—even as Federal Reserve data shows Black household net worth has plummeted by 25 percent. With the midterms rapidly approaching, he urges viewers to mobilize, participate in the upcoming “No Kings” early-voting marches, and cast their ballots to protect American democracy.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict

• Gaza Child Watches Mother Burn Alive – Common Dreams

• Palestinians, Washington Post Photographer Attacked in West Bank – The Washington Post

U.S. Military and Foreign Affairs

• Special Report: Iran Crisis and Infrastructure Attacks – Reuters

• Pentagon Raises Official Toll of Troops Killed During War With Iran to 21 – The Washington Post

Gun Violence and Domestic News

• Two People Hospitalized After Elementary School Shooting in Oregon – The Washington Post

• Bend, Oregon Shooting: Details on Victims and Suspect – The New York Times

Justice Department and Investigations

• How Pre-Election Search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Home Breaks Justice Dept. Norms – The Washington Post

• Ilhan Omar Investigation Aims to Build Case for Stripping Her Citizenship – The Wall Street Journal

Campaigns, Elections, and Voting Rights

• Trump’s Attacks on Voting Ahead of Midterms – The New York Times

• Trump Administration Targets California Voter Rolls – The New York Times

• Statement from Attorney General Todd Blanche – X

• Secret Documents Reveal Donors Behind $330 Million at Trump’s Ballroom – The Washington Post

• Elon Musk and Ken Paxton Weigh In on Texas Senate Race – The New York Times

• What We Know About ‘No Kings, Vote Early’ Campaign – The New York Times

Economy and Inequality

• Black Wealth Drops 25%: Trump’s Agenda is Making the Squeeze Worse – TheGrio

But as we focus on him and the policies of his administration, we can lose sight of the expansive ideological agenda of those around him. MAGA seeks to remake this country. And the architects of that mission often draw on resources from a past rife with claims about the survival of the fittest, the superiority of Anglo-Saxons, and the rightness of empire.

These people want to pull up, from the root, any remnant of Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society. They reject the value of a multicultural, multiracial society. And they long for the days when people knew their place in the hierarchical structure of matter and life.

Nostalgia is one of their most cherished currencies. Not so much as a sentiment of loss or as a lament that the virtuous days of white rule are no longer available to us, but as a romance with fantasy. These people weave stories to justify their cruelties and their vision of the world, and they claim them as historical truths.

I was struck by this in Secretary Marco Rubio’s speech in Athens on October 7, 2026. He reveled in the grandeur of ancient Greece, the so-called fount of western civilization. As he put it,

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

One could take issue with Rubio’s claim here. The history of the construction of the West is much more complicated. But the point is not about accuracy or the truth. Rubio, in a way reminiscent of 19^th century forms of nationalism, is engaged in mythmaking.

The power of ancient Greece rests with its culture of contest, he declared. “The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.”

As I read those words, I prepared myself for an adolescent reading of Fredrich Nietzsche to follow, with its criticism of slave morality and an invocation of the will to power. Cue up Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

Rubio did not disappoint. The world of ancient Greece sounds odd to our “postmodern” ears, he said, because “the ideal of many ideologies in our time has become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards.”

The West has become shameful of the fire and passion, the strength and courage that is at the heart of great civilization. Without this fire (thumos), “nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.”

Rubio, as “the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain,” (I guess that makes Europe his possession, too) offers here a mythological account of the vision of the world that animates the Trump administration.

A nationalism reborn.

He tells us, in no uncertain terms, who they are, and we must take him at his word. The war with Iran, the threats against Greenland and Canada, the starvation of Cuba (the place his ancestors triumphantly “settled”) provide the evidence. As with the imperialism they romanticize, cruelty has no borders. And Donald Trump is the ringmaster.

Trump is the P.T. Barnum of our political days, an old showman who tragically believes he still has the magic in his hands. Cue up Sarah Vaughn’s “Bring in the Clowns.” Even with his addled mind and corrupted soul, Trump plays his part in diverting our attention from the real dangers to this democracy and to the world.

We have much more to confront than Donald Trump, whose days in the bright sun are dwindling. We also have to contend with the likes of Marco Rubio, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller. What will be the substance of the new humanism that will serve as a counter to their dark view of the world?

How we answer that question, it seems to me, is critical to whether, and how, we survive these difficult days.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie reflects on the devastating third anniversary of October 7th and the profound global consequences of the administration’s foreign policy, including the escalating U.S.-Iran conflict and energy blockades against Cuba. Domestically, he warns of coordinated midterm election interference, condemning an upcoming ICE sweep in California as a blatant voter intimidation tactic and calling out the influx of dark money in competitive congressional races. Glaude concludes by highlighting the grassroots campaign of Angie Nixon in Florida, urging listeners to overcome fear, mobilize their communities, and actively defend American democracy at the ballot box this November.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict

• Israelis Demand State Probe in Nationwide Protests, Three Years After October 7 – The Jerusalem Post

• BBC News Video Report – BBC News

U.S. Defense & Foreign Policy

• Murphy Questions Pentagon on Qatar’s Role in Potential Iran War – The Hill

• U.S. Seizes Cuba Fuel Shipment Over Sanctions – The New York Times

• Cubana Denuncia Pésimas Condiciones en Hospital – CiberCuba

U.S. Campaigns & Elections

• Half-Billion Dollars in GOP Spending Does Little to Move Polls – The Washington Post

• Republicans Fight Red-State Midterm Chaos With Hundreds of Millions in Late Money – NBC News

• Senate Majority PAC Bolsters Democrats – The New York Times

• Angie Nixon Official Website – Angie Nixon

Economy & Domestic Issues

• Truckers Face Rising Diesel Costs – The New York Times

• Local News Report: ICE Operations – The Sacramento Bee

As SNCC organizer, Mary King, put it: “We had a stern insistence that our conceptualization, our thinking, our framework, should grow from engagement with the people that we were working with rather than from doctrine or any ready-made philosophy.” Or, as Barbara Jones recalled, “There was no room for talking down to anyone. There was never the expressed attitude that a person who was illiterate had something less to offer.”

Baker understood that democracy is more than a body of procedures. It carries with it the radical notion that every person, no matter their station in life, can exercise responsibility. Democracy is an ethical ideal bound up with the idea of self-cultivation and rooted in an abiding faith in the capacities of human beings.

I remember a conversation I had with the late Bob Moses during his year-long stay at Princeton that illustrates this faith. He insisted that the revolutionary work of SNCC resided not only in its efforts to dismantle Jim Crow, but primarily in who they brought into the political process. He told me the story of SNCC field secretaries in a federal courtroom in Greenwood, Mississippi, “packed with black sharecroppers …hushed along its walls, packed onto its benches, and [attending] to the question put by Federal District Judge Clayton: ‘Why is SNCC taking illiterates down to register to vote?’” Those illiterate, black sharecroppers brought to that courthouse and to the ballot box a wealth of experiences that shaped their demands of the state, informed their embrace of democratic ideals, and expanded, if only for a moment, our very understanding of who we take ourselves to be as a nation.

Moses, like Baker, understood that genuine, creative democracy called not only for the pursuit of worthwhile ends, but for the pursuit of ends in ways that enlisted people often pushed to the margins and who lived in the cracks and crevices of our society. Enlisted them not to be led by some “national leader,” but by themselves in solidarity with others.

Democracy requires a richly textured democratic culture close to the ground, where the habits and dispositions necessary for its flourishing are alive in the experiences of ordinary people. Much of American life, especially under economic conditions that value selfishness and greed and a politics captured by oligarchs, frustrates these ends. What is needed – required even – under such conditions are innovative and creative ways of revitalizing local communities and fostering the means and mechanisms by which they can do the hard work on behalf of democracy itself.

Baker’s radical democratic philosophy entailed what I call “networked democratic localism.” The phrase is a bit awkward, but I think it captures an approach to democratic politics that can help us in these perilous times. It shifts the center of gravity of our politics from Washington, D.C. to local communities. For Baker, this shift involved critical, local participation in challenging Jim Crow and the cultivation of democratic dispositions and habits among those who struggled together.

But this view should not be read as conceding the national political terrain to others: the invocation of localism does not deny the relevance of the national scene. Instead, local practices enter a network of local practices elsewhere that, together, has national implications.

Just as Ella Baker’s NAACP organizing took her all over the South, establishing pathways, connections, and conduits that connected her practice across geographies, a more generalized understanding of democratic localism presumes the circulation of local practices and effects along a network of efforts to address the existential threat to our democracy in light of specific situations.

Collectively, such efforts constituted loosely a national thrust. Separately, the substance of the practice is felt in the orientation close to the ground, in the “readying of the self,” right where you live, to engage in transformative action.

This is why I love Bishop William J. Barber’s and Repairers of the Breach’s call for 1,000 marches in 100 days. The idea is for local people to organize their communities to march to the polls – to use the march as a means of education that can activate the community for more direct action come early voting, in November, and afterwards.

Of course, the aim is to overwhelm the math informing redistricting efforts with a historic turnout of voters. But what’s important, at least for my purposes, is that the approach shifts from the standard practice of organizing a massive march in Washington, D.C., which would require enormous resources, to a focus on the local level, where people in their communities organize together. “Power is in the state, the local governments,” Bishop Barber has said. “We need to march to the polls. What would it look like if we had a thousand different marches during early voting?”

There have been 602 marches so far! With each march belonging to the people (the communities) who organized them. This kind of labor not only will help turn out voters for the upcoming elections. Ideally, it can help set the stage for the hard work of reimagining American democracy that is to come.

Here are a few links, if you are interested in organizing a march in your community.

March Leader Toolkit:
https://breachrepairers.org/march-leader-toolkit/

Register a March:
https://bit.ly/1000MarchesRegistration

Count Your March:
https://bit.ly/GetCounted1000Marches

Join the Nonpartisan Canvassing Effort:
https://bit.ly/NonPartisanCanvassing

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie examines the catastrophic visual evidence of Gaza’s destruction alongside the Trump administration’s military escalation with Iran, which includes deploying 10,000 additional troops and dispatching a third aircraft carrier to the region. Domestically, he breaks down a deteriorating economic landscape marked by rising Black unemployment, crushing fuel costs, and the administrations overt attempts at dismantling our democracy. Concluding with a call to action, Eddie highlights grassroots voter mobilization led by Bishop Barber and Repairers of the Breach, urging citizens to turn out in massive numbers this November to hold power accountable and reshape American democracy.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict

• New Google Maps Images Reveal Massive Scale of Devastation in Gaza – The Guardian

• IDF Says It Killed Commander of Hamas’s Northern Gaza Brigade in Tuesday Airstrike – The Times of Israel

U.S. Military and Foreign Affairs

• Trump Sending 10,000 More Troops, Another Aircraft Carrier Toward Iran – Mediaite

• Trump Prepares to Send More Troops to Iran – Common Dreams

Economy and Employment

• Live Updates: Jobs Report and the Economy – The New York Times

• US Economy Added 29,000 Jobs in September, Missing Estimates – The Washington Post

• Employment Situation Summary – U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Donald Trump Campaign and Policy

• Trump Meme Coin Dinner – Common Dreams

• Trump Obamacare $500 ACA Refund Checks and Letters – USA Today

• Instagram Reel Updates – Instagram

U.S. Politics and Government

• Johnson Pitch to Voters: GOP Will “Keep Doing What We Have Been Doing” – Truthout

• Takeaways From Pete Hegseth’s Command of Warfare Base – The Hill

• Hegseth Addresses Troops – The New York Times

• Senator Eric Schmitt’s Comments on Jack Smith – NBC News

• Schmitt “Regrets Nothing” Over Comments – Politico

• ‘It’s Almost Too Easy To Make Fun Of Her’: JD Vance Goes Scorched Earth On Angie Nixon – Forbes Breaking News

Justice and Legal Cases

• Christa Pike Survives Botched Execution Attempt – AP News

• Letitia James Investigates Cornell Gang Rape Allegations – The Guardian

• Renee Good Lawsuit Details – AP News

Activism and Organizing

• March Leader Toolkit – Repairers of the Breach

• Action Sign-Up Form – Google Forms

• Volunteer Interest Form – Google Forms

• Get your POWER out of your Pocket! – Repairers of the Breach (YouTube)

Read more

The last time I was here the August sun brutally beat us down. Leaving some in ambulances. Others thirsting for some form of relief. Air conditioning was simply not enough, it never is, to defeat the Mississippi heat in August, the devil’s weather.

Walking around the state capitol brings back memories. When I was 14 years old, I served as a page for Representative Pat Presley who helped me find funding to attend the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And every year, from middle school to the moment I left for Morehouse College, I participated in the YMCA youth legislature (organized by the late Tony Lay). The bus would make the trip from the coast and for three days we would join students from all over the state to take over the Capitol and serve as representatives and senators. We ran campaigns for leadership. In fact, I was elected the first Black youth governor of the state. Ironically, my opponent all those years ago was Robert P. Jones, my fellow panelist at this year’s festival. History and time can be funny like that.

Of the book festivals, this is one of my favorites. (The New Orleans Book Festival is my favorite. I am from the water after all). I love the feeling of landing at Medgar Evers airport. I get to return to my home state, see old friends like Pamela Junior and Reena Evers-Everett, the daughter of Medgar Evers, and have wonderful conversations with interesting people who love books and ideas.

This year I was on a panel about “The Soul of America” with W. Ralph Eubanks, author of the wonderful book, When It’s Darkness on the Delta: How America’s Richest Soil It’s Poorest Land, and Robert P. Jones who wrote the prophetic book, Backsliding: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn Against American Democracy. The conversation was brilliantly moderated by Traci Thomas of the Stacks podcast. The Supreme Court room was packed and people were visibly engaged.

But there was a moment that struck me. Traci asked us about the role of compromise in our democracy, and I wondered aloud what that might mean. What does it look like to compromise with slaveholders, or with people committed to Jim Crow, or with those who want the world that MAGA wants? Who bears the burden of those compromises? History is replete with answers to those questions. So is the present, I believe.

I cannot remember how I transitioned to the point, but I mentioned the conversation with Sad Gaad, author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, scheduled for later in the day. This was to be a conversation about how progressive elites weaponize empathy to turn people against their self-interest. His is a book about the limits of kindness. I tried not to do it, but I know my face betrayed my disdain. My brow furled. I think I growled the words.

It was time for me to leave and make my way to the airport for the dreaded connection to Atlanta back to Philly. I dread all connections in Atlanta. I wanted to find Reena to give her a hug and say goodbye. She told me she was in room 113. I rushed to meet her. A line gathered outside the door for the next session. Police and security stood at the door as the audience from the previous panel flooded into the hallway. (There were no police or security outside the doors of our panel).

I caught a glimpse of Reena, walking close to the ground but smiling that infectious smile. I hugged her and Pamela. They wanted me to meet John Jennings, the brilliant graphic novelist and curator. The kind of encounter that makes this event so special. I walked to the door. An older white-haired white man in a white polo shirt and a gun holstered on his side, or not quite on his side, more towards the front. Wherever it was, I saw it. He spoke to me with a stern Mississippi drawl, “No sir. You can’t go into the room. We are not letting anyone in yet.”

I looked at the line. I looked up at the room number and remembered: this was the space for the conversation with Gaad. This was the line for a conversation about the limits of kindness. My blood boiled. Plus that particular sound of Mississippi in the voice of the white-haired man with the gun attached to his hip annoyed the shit out of me.

A man in line shouted my name and said, “I expected you to be in line. I am only here because you mentioned him. This is the kind of conversation that needs to happen in places like this.”

I disagreed. Some conversations are not meant for me. Life is too short. And that got me to thinking. Why was the festival platforming Gaad? I know he is a scholar at Ole Miss’s Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom (typing that made me snicker), but his rant against empathy is part of an all-out assault on our democracy. Books like Gaad’s and The Sin of Empathy aim to corrode our sensibilities and urge us to turn a blind eye to the cruelties in our midst—to make us a nation of calloused hearts.

I am not suggesting that we cancel Gaad. That is a red herring. I just don’t think these people should be welcomed in polite circles. If you want a conservative voice in the conversation, and we do, then find a truly conservative voice. Not these people who are attacking the very foundations of the Republic. It gives them an air of respectability. It assumes they argue in good faith. It empowers them instead of shaming them.

People like Gaad can write and bluster all they want. No one ought to deny them that right. It is theirs to do with what they will. Nor should we ignore the implications of what they are saying for our democracy. In fact, we must take seriously the danger they represent. But we don’t have to sit and listen to this nonsense, and we damn sure don’t have to platform it.

All of this takes me back to Traci’s question about compromise. We compromise all the time. With our spouses. With our children. With co-workers. In politics. It is part of what it means to negotiate life as we live it.

But certain compromises sully the soul. They corrupt the heart. You can end up being complicit with evil. And it is damn near impossible to remove that stain. It’s like spilt red wine on white shag carpet.

I keep thinking about something Robert Jones asked as we sat in the airport waiting for that dreaded connection. “Why do we need a theology against empathy? Why are they attacking it?” He asked the questions with the smile that is his father’s smile. With a slight glint in his eyes, he said, “They know what the images of Emmett Till did. How they moved us. Of the images of Medgar Evers, shot down in front of his children.” I thought of Reena.

They don’t want us to see suffering. They don’t want us to feel it. They don’t want our blood to be moved by the horrors of our day. I have little interest in being complicit with that. And I don’t believe people committed to democracy should platform it.

Life is too short, and too damn precious.

~

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes a tumultuous week at the United Nations, condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerent address and President Donald Trump’s reckless threat to “annihilate” Iran as clear markers of a collapsing post-World War II international order. He decries the expanding authoritarianism at home, pointing to private state dinners aligning tech oligarchs with foreign powers alongside Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to ban news outlets including CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House press pool. Turning to unchecked domestic cruelty, Eddie brings more attention to the severe ICE abuses occurring across the country—including the shooting of Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez and rising detention fatalities—while voicing righteous fury over a Mississippi grand jury’s refusal to indict in the suspicious death of Nolan Wells despite blatant forensic contradictions. Eddie concludes by urging us all to resist manufactured panics, demanding justice for the vulnerable, and calling for direct support for detained families through organizations like Each Step Home.

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UN General Assembly

• Netanyahu Addresses UN General Assembly on Gaza and Iran War – NBC News

• Watch: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Addresses 2026 UN General Assembly – PBS NewsHour

• Protests Over Netanyahu’s UN Visit – Common Dreams

• Trump’s UN Speech: Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland – The New York Times

• Trump UN Speech Faces Silence and Walkouts – The New Republic

• Fact Check: Trump’s United Nations Speech – AP News

Press Freedom & White House Access

• TV Networks React to Trump Pool Disruption and White House Ban – The Hill

• Live Updates: Trump Bans CNN, Politico, and MSNow from White House – The New York Times

• Judge Rules on Trump Media Ban for CNN, MSNow, and Politico – AP News

ICE Incidents & Custody Investigations

• Report on Austin ICE Incident – BBC News

• Wilber Rafael Garces-Perez ICE Shooting in Austin – CBS News

• ICE Officer Who Shot Man in Austin Wasn’t Wearing Body Camera – NBC News

• US Citizen Injured in ICE Mistaken Fugitive Arrest – The Guardian

• Video: Evanston ICE Incident Involving US Citizen – The New York Times

• ICE Detainee Death at Winn Linked to Diabetes – AP News

• Mourning Those Who Have Died in ICE Custody – National Immigration Project

• Interactive: Miscarriages and Pregnancy in ICE Detention – The Guardian

Nolan Wells

• Nolan Wells Investigation and Grand Jury Updates – NPR

• Jackson County DA Statement on Grand Jury Decision – WLOX

• Nolan Wells Grand Jury Decision Details – AP News

• Nolan Wells Autopsy and Cellphone Investigation – Mississippi Today

Tech & Diplomacy

• Trump and Xi Dinner with Tech CEOs – Common Dreams

Authors & Recommended Resources

• Anne Applebaum Articles & Author Page – The Atlantic

• Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field

• Each Step Home – Official Organization Website

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But right now, I am waiting in a small airport (in the shadow of the chaos of O’Hare and its massive delays). I sit in a corner, watching people watching pre-game football shows and highlights of last night’s baseball games. Some pace impatiently, laugh with friends, and drink beer as if it is not too early to drink beer. The flight has been delayed four times, and I have been here since 5:15am—reading, watching, and thinking.

Flight delays are not unusual—especially when the weather is bad. Bad communication by the airlines about the delays isn’t unusual, either. We are captured consumers in airports. It’s like bad food on a cruise ship. You have to deal with the hand that’s dealt to you.

But for some reason this experience, in this moment, got me thinking. Some might even say catastrophizing. Or, maybe, it’s this damn plane. It just feels like everything is coming apart at the seams. And Americans try to act like it is not when we know that it is. The man sitting at the bar across the room laughs with his friends but his foot shakes nervously on the barstool. He’s waiting, too.

When I think about our politics—Trump banning MSNOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House Press corp, the 28,000 stock and securities trades he has made in a 17-month period, the price of gas and diesel, the war with Iran, the trade war with Canada, and all the other shit this administration has done and is doing—I cannot help but believe that there is a concerted effort to destroy the country as we know it. That there are people among us who believe the only way to save America from the galloping herd of barbarians within its gates, is to destroy it.

I have read about the defenders of the so-called “dark enlightenment.” These are people who hold the view, among other things, that the values of humanism and aspirations for greater equality are the root causes of the decline of Western civilization. They are the bastard offspring of Friedrich Nietzsche. They long for strong men and autocratic control to restore order over the democratic mob. Some are tech bros who have more faith in algorithms than in men and women. And they are allied with a wide-ranging group of others who are equally skeptical of any pretense to embrace a world where all are accorded equal standing and dignity. All obsessed with the will to power.

Reading Laura K. Field’s book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right, will give you a sense of the intellectual scaffolding of what we are experiencing and the scale and depth of those who have, in effect, seized the federal government to destroy it. In other words, what we are seeing is not just the absurdity of Donald Trump. The sense of being overwhelmed by the chaos is the point. These people, with their dangerous ideas, are setting off bombs across the supporting beams of our democracy all at once with the goal of bringing down the country in a controlled fashion.

So many Americans are letting this happen openly, or they are too busy living their lives to care. For me, the problem is not only the active efforts by anti-democratic forces in the country. It is the silence in the face of those efforts that scares the living daylights out of me—the complicity of people with those who despise them or, at best, view them as cattle chewing cud. As if, they no longer want the responsibility of freedom or that their hatreds are so intense they care about nothing else.

I shudder to think about what is happening in silence, about the scale of what these people are doing behind the blackout curtain.

Well, I have been sitting in this corner for hours now. Delayed flights from Chicago arrive. People march through the terminal. A bit haggard. Shoulders slumped. Body language murmurs relief. The bar no longer bustles with laughter. One lone man sits with a beer and talks on his phone. I write a bit. I look up. He’s gone too. Only a glass remains.

My flight is delayed again. I can’t help but think about the little things that are not working, how hard life has become for so many Americans, and how something cracks daily. Hints of a controlled demolition.

It is noon. The airport is quiet like it was when I first arrived some six hours ago. I need to walk a bit. Get out of my head. Find something to distract myself for the next three hours. Sounds like their plan.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie contrasts the inspiring energy of Pittsburgh’s grassroots organizers with ongoing systemic cruelty, condemning a new $2.8 billion U.S. arms sale to Israel and domestic efforts to silence pro-Palestinian speech. He highlights the domestic toll of an unchecked executive branch and the endless U.S.-Iran war, pointing to surging diesel prices and Alabama’s rushed execution of Jeffery Lee as evidence of a metastasizing national selfishness. Despite these crises, Eddie finds hope in recent conservative pushback against MAGA’s white Christian nationalism, urging a multiracial coalition that forges a new democratic social contract.

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Middle East Conflict & Gaza Policy

• AP News: Updates on Gaza, Israel, and Hamas Ceasefire at Shifa

• AP News: Trump Administration’s Proposed Weapons Sales to Israel

• The New York Times: State Department Extends Visa Ban on Mahmoud Abbas

• The Washington Post: Ed Sheeran Tour Controversy Involving Macklemore and Robert Kraft

U.S.-Iran Escalation & Global Trade

• ABC News: Photos Show Extensive Damage to U.S. Middle East Bases

• AP News: Yemen’s Houthis, Saudi Arabia, and Shipping Oil Disruption

• CNBC: U.S.-Iran War and Trump’s Stance on the Strait of Hormuz

• Common Dreams: Trump Issues New Trade Threats to Canada and the EU

The Economy & Technology

• CNBC: Diesel and Gas Prices Surge Impacting the U.S. Economy

• PBS NewsHour: What the Federal Reserve Rate Hike Likely Means for You

• The Guardian: Could AI Really Wipe Out Humanity and Hijack the Internet?

Executive Overreach & Domestic Projects

• The Washington Post: Photo Shows Trump with Printout Referring to Kennedy Center Demolition

• Common Dreams: Concerns Rise Over Trump’s Threat to Demolish Kennedy Center

• People: Trump Reportedly Threw Tantrum Over Vote to Close Kennedy Center

• The Washington Post: Trump Officials Warn Planned Arch Will Harm Historic Sites

Civil Rights, Justice & Party Divisions

• The New York Times: Alabama Proceeds with Lethal Injection Execution

• The New York Times: Opinion on Diversity, Bo French, and the University of Texas Longhorns

• X (Twitter): Erick Erickson Commentary on White Nationalism in the Conservative Movement

Babies had been beaten. Dogs sicced on innocents. Firehoses, with enough pressure to rip the bark off trees, were directed at children. Ours, in his view, was a nation full of “moral monsters.”

This moral apathy – this death of the heart – strikes me as a particularly apt description of our current days. Cruelty, selfishness, greed, and hatred have overrun our politics and policies. Children are thrown in detention centers. People disappeared. And politicians post photographs of men in chains with the caption, “Next Stop, Haiti.”

We talk about an epidemic of loneliness and what it portends for our democracy: that people are isolated and lack meaningful social connections. But what of the epidemic of selfishness, the death of the heart, that makes men and women so cruel?

Over the last forty years or so, this country has been guided by a political and economic philosophy that has centered selfishness as the key to well-being. We have been transformed from people in community with others into self-interested persons in competition and rivalry with each other. The sole measure of value has been material gain. The role of government reduced to ensuring the efficient workings of the economy and national defense (often in the service of American corporations). Social safety nets shredded as the most vulnerable among us have been demonized. We have seen the massive transfer of wealth from working people to the richest of the rich. And we now confront the monstrous consequences of it all.

Liberty stands as a synonym for selfishness. Empathy considered a sin.

Much of this has been motivated by the ongoing effort to undo the gains of the freedom movements of the mid-20^th century. The inheritors of the people Baldwin described in 1963 as moral monsters now seek to rip apart the very idea of the state that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

That hatefulness joined with a view of political economy gave birth to this “zombie democracy.” A nation full of the walking dead (no wonder “wokeness” presents such a threat).

Appeals to charity and philanthropy as an indication of the goodness of American character won’t hide the reality of this deep malaise. These are often sentimental gestures. Virtue performances mostly. A gift masquerading as justice. Sentimentality buries the harsh reality underneath what Wallace Stevens called “a failure of feeling.” It masks cruelty.

But in our days people don’t even hide behind sentimentality. They are simply mean-spirited and cruel.

Something more is required to address this epidemic of selfishness. We must attack the root causes: the idea that the country belongs only to white people, an economic system that assumes that some people are disposable, that material gain is our primary source of value, and that government’s responsibility is limited to economics and defense.

We have to imagine a robust idea of the public good that assumes that every human being has dignity and standing. We need a revival in this country that gives voice to a social contract that states our basic obligations to one another. Not to retrieve some idea of an Edenic past. The fantasy of American goodness will only seal our fate. But a revival of our moral and political imaginations to make real, once and for all, the Beloved Community. A new politics for a new America.

That will require an antidote to the selfishness – the death of the heart – that has covered the land in the darkness and made moral monsters of so many.

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie connects the 25th anniversary of 9/11 to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the economic strain of the U.S.-Iran war. Domestically, he warns of blatant midterm election interference—highlighting postal service disruptions and Trump’s promise of a $5,000 voter dividend—while condemning the administration’s cruel, dehumanizing treatment of immigrants - like the Haitian community in Ohio. Eddie echoes demands for a federal investigation into a disturbing string of Black hanging deaths before concluding with a tribute to retiring Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch.

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9/11 Anniversary & Middle East Conflict

• Watson Institute Costs of War: Human Costs

• NPR: 9/11 Memorial Events

• The Guardian: Secret Systems Used by Israel in Mass Killings of Gaza Civilians Revealed in New Film

• AP News: Netanyahu and Hamas War Gaza Warning

• BBC News: Latest International Updates

• NBC News: UK Announces Trade Ban on Israeli West Bank Goods

U.S.-Iran Escalation & Economic Impacts

• AP News: Iran-US War, Strait of Hormuz, Trump, and Yemen Houthis

• CNBC: Diesel Prices, Iran, Strait of Hormuz, Ukraine and Russia

• NBC News: US Crude Oil, Iran, Trump, and the Strait of Hormuz

• The New York Times: Inflation, US Prices, Gas, Food, and Tariffs

Elections, Voting Rights & The Republican Convention

• Missouri Independent: US Supreme Court Blocks Use of Missouri’s Gerrymandered Congressional Map

• The New York Times: How Trump is Using the Postal Service to Intervene in Elections

• Common Dreams: Trump Vote Order Blocked

• NPR: Republican Convention, Trump Dividend, Vance, and Midterms

• The New York Times: Trump and Vance at Republican Convention

• The New York Times: Trump’s Pledge at Republican Convention Speech

• CNN: Tim Scott’s RNC Speech

• The New York Times: Live Updates on Trump’s RNC Midterm Convention

• YouTube: Broadcast Coverage of Republican Midterm Convention

Federal Data & The Census

• The Guardian: Trump Census Changes Targeting Immigrants

• NPR: Trump, US Census, Citizenship Question, and Race Categories

Civil Rights & Hate Crime Investigations

• TheGrio: Democrats Urge DOJ to Investigate Black Americans Found Hanging

• CNN: Tasia Fortune Hanging Reclassified as Homicide Investigation

Immigration Enforcement & ICE

• The Guardian: Haitians in Ohio City Targeted in Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Crackdown

• Instagram: Markwayne Mullin Post on Haitian Deportations

Cultural Institutions & Transitions

• The New York Times: Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch Announces Resignation