Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Tonight
on The Joy Reid Show, the Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!
Islamophobia is on the rise in the US, and it's coming from both the
right and the left. If you aren't Muslim yourself, you may be tempted to
say, "Eh, that doesn't affect me." But not so fast! Fascism is always
looking for its next target. Whatever the regime can get away with doing
to one group, it'll do to all of us eventually.
Rula Jebreal: IG & X: @rulajebreal Rep. Rashida Tlaib: @RepRashida on all socials
ABOUT JOY REID:
Joy-Ann
Lomena Reid (AKA Joy Reid) is a LIVE best-selling American author,
political journalist and TV host. She was a national correspondent for
MSNBC and is best known for hosting the Emmy-nominated, NAACP
Award-winning political commentary and analysis show, The ReidOut, from
2020 to 2025.
Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020).
The Muslim left is becoming impossible to ignore — and Hasan Piker has plenty to say about it. Wajahat Ali sits down with Hasan Piker for a wide-ranging conversation about Muslim Americans, progressive politics, MAGA, the Democratic Party, Gaza, Israel, Islamophobia and the future of the American left. Piker has become one of the most prominent online voices on the American left, particularly among younger voters. His political commentary frequently challenges both Republicans and Democratic leaders, while his outspoken criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza has made him a major target of controversy. So what happens when Muslim voters and progressive young Americans demand a bigger voice in American politics? Is the Democratic establishment prepared for that shift — or will it continue alienating the very voters it needs? Waj and Hasan dig into the political backlash, the rise of progressive populism, Islamophobia, Gaza, MAGA and what comes next for the Democratic Party.
PHOTO: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 8, 2026, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.
As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby ZvĂ«rnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.
The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)
Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:
Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….
It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.
Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”
In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.
The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,
One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.
Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.
As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion
by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.
Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.
The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.
PLEASE NOTE:A consigliere is a person who serves as an adviser or counselor to the leader of a criminal organization. In Mafia terms, it’s the advisor to the boss and sometimes acts like a trusted “right-hand man.” In this unforgettable scene below from The Godfather (1972), Tom Hagen visits Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with a polite request from Don Corleone: VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9xv9SqgPWM
ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE IS DONALD TRUMP’S PERSONAL CONSIGLIERE
Blanche Refuses to Say He’ll Always Be Independent of Trump as Attorney General
The new head of the Justice Department said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people — and never would.
Listen · 4:53 minutes
VIDEO: Blanche Says He Will Not Pledge to Always Act Independently of White House. 1:19
PHOTO: Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say that he would always act independently of the White House in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press. Credit: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
by Glenn Thrush Reporting from Washington August 16, 2026 New York Times
Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say on Sunday that he would always act independently of White House control but claimed during an interview that President Trump has “never” demanded he prosecute specific people.
Mr. Blanche, displaying a greater ease in fielding a variety of pointed questions than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, sought to balance his loyalty to the president and a commitment to the evenhanded administration of justice during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case, and act independently of the White House,” Mr. Blanche said when pressed to pledge his independence by the show’s host, Kristen Welker.
“No, I’m not going to pledge that, and no attorney general should ever pledge that,” he said.
But he suggested in another interview that he was not afraid to push back. “It’s my job to talk to him about those issues, which I have done for many years and I will continue to do,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Mr. Blanche told NBC that Mr. Trump had never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical — and claimed that reports of White House meddling in the department were overhyped.
“There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, ‘Todd, go prosecute X or Y,’” Mr. Blanche said. “He does not do that. He has never done that. He will never do that.”
In September, Mr. Trump demanded the immediate prosecution of several adversaries in a social media post aimed at Ms. Bondi. He fired Ms. Bondi in April, in part because he thought she was moving too slowly in prosecuting his perceived enemies whom he had identified, with scant or nonexistent evidence, as being criminals.
Mr. Blanche, then her deputy, was elevated to fill the post and was narrowly confirmed by the Senate earlier this month. His confirmation was imperiled by the opposition of some Republicans who questioned his role in a $1.8 billion compensation fund for purported victims of abuses by the Biden-era Justice Department and a deal granting Mr. Trump sweeping immunity from tax investigations.
After weeks of wrangling, Mr. Blanche secured the support of several holdouts by putting on paper a commitment to rescinding his previous order creating the fund and limiting the scope of the tax immunity agreement.
On Sunday, he repeated his claim that the fund was dead but said that those who felt they had been wronged — including Capitol rioters convicted of crimes and pardoned by Mr. Trump — could still apply for compensation through the courts.
On Friday, Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer, appeared alongside the president at an event in Long Island with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running for governor of New York.
“In my Department of Justice, if anybody touches a federal law enforcement officer in any way inappropriate, we will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Blanche said at the event.
When Ms. Welker asked him to square that statement with Mr. Trump’s mass clemency to the rioters on the first day of his second term, Mr. Blanche offered the same answer he gave during his confirmation hearing: Presidents have the constitutional right to pardon anyone they want.
He also expressed support for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington who has drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over her dropping of charges against a man accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and blaming a “botched” renovation.
Mr. Blanche’s public support was a significant endorsement for Ms. Pirro, a longtime friend and ally of Mr. Trump, who has recently become a target.
“I absolutely support U.S. Attorney Pirro, as does President Trump,” he said — even though Mr. Trump has considered firing her and raged against her decision.
“Now, that’s different than whether the president is extraordinarily frustrated at what happened in that case, and I don’t in any way fault him for that,” added Mr. Blanche, who suggested the department was still investigating vandalism in and around the pool.
Mr. Blanche emphasized his commitment to focusing on law and order during a speech at Justice Department headquarters last week, seeking to shift the narrative away from the political maelstrom that has engulfed the department during his tenure.
Mr. Trump, he told Fox News, “wants law enforcement out there arresting bad guys.”
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
The Latest on the Trump Administration:
U.S. Cuts Back Military Drills With South Korea: President Trump had ordered the Defense Department to reduce joint exercises with the key U.S. ally, declaring the drills “hostile” toward North Korea.
F.D.A. Commissioner: The president plans to nominate Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official and a proponent of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, to serve as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to two senior administration officials.
Trump’s Most Devoted Aide: Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?
University Investigations: A former Justice Department lawyer says Trump administration leaders ignored findings that elite schools, including Brown and Columbia, hadn’t broken the law as they pressed them into deals.
Watchdog Replacements: Trump is installing his allies in the offices of inspector general, which are meant to provide independent government oversight.
Logging in National Forests: The Trump administration advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.
PHOTO: Brothers in race-baiting: Donald Trump and Elon Musk attend a SpaceX launch in 2024. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a year and a half ago that Elon Musk found himself on the wrong side of the new right after he signaled support for the H1-B visa program. No one contributed more money to Donald Trump’s reelection—and no one seemed to fall from grace faster. Musk’s thought crime was to acknowledge that the talents of foreign workers have “made America strong” and built his companies. MAGA turned on Musk with shocking speed and ferocity, and he was defiant in turn. “Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” he told critics.
Then, a few months later, Musk began feuding with Trump himself over the outlays in the GOP’s signature spending and taxation bill—a fight that soon metastasized, given the magnitude of the egos involved. Musk went so far as to accuse Trump of intentionally sabotaging the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called on Trump to nationalize Musk’s companies and deport him. Online, Trump’s most fervent sycophants fantasized about Musk being executed for his disloyalty.
Many observers believed Musk’s MAGA affair had come to an end. But as a recovering MAGA adherent myself, I noticed something that made me suspect otherwise: Around the time the world’s richest man saw his influence with the right slipping, he began to post more about race. The right, in response, slowly warmed to him again. An analysis by The Washington Post found that, from October 2025 to mid-April, Musk indeed “significantly increased his rate of online posts about race and his concerns about perceived threats to Whiteness or what he views as calls for a ‘genocide’ against White people.” He posted about race almost every day during this period, at “nearly triple the rate for the previous two years.”
The online right took notice. “This rethoric [sic] from Elon Musk is huge and if he keeps it up, it will save lives,” wrote one influtential race-baiting X user. This shift reached a crescendo this summer, when Musk publicly supported Citizen Vigilante, a film about a man who kills immigrants—criminals and noncriminals alike. One person posted a menacing image of the film’s titular vigilante captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Musk replied, “Yes,” endorsing the notion of executing perceived race traitors. The phrasing and the sentiment behind it were lifted right out of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a race war in which non-whites and their white allies are slaughtered by a group of radicals who usurp the federal government. The novel had helped shaped the worldview of the right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, who killed 167 people and injured 684 in his 1995 bombing attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Musk was able to survive the fallout from his initial break with the MAGA right, because he, like Trump, understands something important about the present moment: There is no more powerful force in the right-wing psyche than racial conflict. It’s the reason that Musk is once more viewed as a movement hero on the right—and why the conservative movement remains is in Trump’s thrall. Every other issue and consideration is a far-distant second to the specter of the racial conflict that, in the right-wing imagination, is forever looming on the horizon.
This tendency has always existed in the GOP, though under the pressures of maintaining respectability in the political mainstream, gatekeepers in the conservative movement sought to marginalize its uglier manifestations. The racial panics that gained more recent favor in the conservative movement were also somewhat more targeted than the race hatreds that convulsed the right in the 20th century, zeroing in narrow, disfavored groups such as Muslims.
With Trump’s takeover, however, the GOP has once more become a clearing house of viral racial animus, building up a far more extensive—and expanding—list of enemies. The centrality of racial conflict also why the efforts of Republicans such as Mike Pence—who recently launched a think tank to reclaim the party from Trump’s influence—are doomed to fail. People like Pence want to go back to serving warm beer after Trump has had everyone slamming the hard stuff for the last decade. In 1968, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips said that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” and no one has embraced that cynical philosophy—or utilized it more effectively—than Trump.
Phillips is an important figure in GOP history because it was his 1968 memo for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign that outlined the “Southern strategy” to exploit racial resentment among certain white voters. Phillips built out his strategy in response to segregationist George Wallace’s third-party bid. Wallace, then the Democratic governor of Alabama, ran for president on an openly anti–civil rights platform. By dog-whistling about “crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order,” Phillips wrote, Nixon could implicitly appeal to the racial anxieties of Wallace supporters without using the governor’s incendiary language, which would jeopardize the support of white moderates. The Southern strategy worked so well that every Republican president since Nixon has embraced it to some extent.
Trump’s central innovation in his second term has been to elevate the Southern strategy from a campaign tactic to a governing agenda—a fact the right simultaneously celebrates on its own terms and denies when others notice. Take, for example, the case of Scott Greer, who was fired from The Daily Caller, the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson, for his ties to white nationalist groups. In an interview with The Ezra Klein Show, Christopher Rufo, the senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute best known for his crusade against critical race theory, argued that Greer should still be granted a platform, since Greer himself has since advocated against the white nationalist label. But this proves to largely be a distinction without a difference. Greer hasn’t so much reconsidered his core views on race; rather, the MAGA GOP has gravitated more closely to them—which means that he can rehabilitate his standing in the movement with minimal, and mostly cosmetic, changes to his rhetoric. He’s comfortable calling himself a “conservative” because that label now includes views that once were relegated to fringe white nationalist figures. Even the self-described “white advocate” Jared Taylor has criticized Greer and those like him for wanting to “have it both ways”—discarding fraught segregation-friendly labels for the sake of optics while claiming that the Trumpified GOP is the best vehicle for advancing the views associated with those labels.
On one level, this feud among white nationalists is eloquent testimony to how far right the GOP has veered on race; what might have earlier been fodder for an unhinged right-wing Reddit flame war is now a platform for commentators on the right like Rufo to ally themselves with white nationalists who until very recently disparaged his work as an accomodationist obstacle to full-blown “right-wing identitarianism.” And by most reasonable measures, both Greer and Taylor are right: racists can have it both ways on the right, and the savvy career move for ambitious white nationalists like Greer is to throw in with the GOP. After all, the people running White House social-media pages have incorporated themes and even music drawn from self-consciously white supremacist scenes. What was once relegated to the fringe is now mainstream on the right.
I know this firsthand, as a former enthusiastic recruit to the MAGA right. I watched this transformation happen in real time from the inside.
I traveled from the edge of the right to becoming a Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute—which, like virtually every other conservative institution today, has given Trump carte blanche under the belief that he is the only thing standing between the West and “race communism” or, more commonly now, “Third Worldism.” The nomenclature is always fungible; what’s constant is the invocation of a mortal racialized threat to civilization as we know it.
In a nutshell, the right understands itself as being in a struggle against a racial and demographic clock. Without some drastic intervention, a long line of demagogues on the right routinely lament, the United States will be swamped by a coalition of nonwhites, immigrants, and white enablers who will bring about a dark age of acute government dysfunction and naked corruption. The prime directive of this new regime will be the formal persecution of whites, who will become the victims of an ever-intensifying system of racial favoritism that places them at the bottom.
As the Musk episode showed, no one on the right can be seen as a backslider from this vision and still have a viable political career: It has bulked into a badge of right-wing identity, fulfilling much the same role that tax-cutting antigovernment ideology did in the 1980s and ’90s. Its status as an unshakable article of faith in the MAGA movement also means that it doesn’t really matter whether the leaders who’ve bought into it really subscribe to it; its instrumental value is simply too great, so long as these apocalyptic delusions have the movement’s base in their grip. Trump understands this instinctively, and Musk figured it out by paying attention to him. So did JD Vance. An empty suit is a reliable weathervane, as we’ve seen in Vance’s cunning reinvention from a Never Trump conservative who compared Trump to Hitler into an ardent purveyor of MAGA racial panics.
The price of this sort of cynical demagoguery is steep. The “civilization” that’s dogmatically held to be imperiled by brown and foreign-born hordes has degenerated under Trump’s watch into a kleptocratic kakistocracy without an analogue in American history. It’s impossible, in this compass, to detail all the ways Trump has made American life materially worse and more dystopian while profiting from the collective misery of millions of everyday people. A partial inventory would include monetizing the White House for Trump to make more money than he did as a businessman, Musk’s own colossally destructive and deadly reign at DOGE, unleashing new disease threats through sheer incompetence, the relentless onslaught against the environment and wildlife, the unprecedented weaponization of the Department of Justice, the killings of American citizens by federal agents with impunity, and the construction of a digital police state that groups like Claremont, prior to their own MAGA makeovers, would have decried as a civil-liberties travesty.
Yet all this criminal dysfunction is only part of the cost of doing business, so far as the white nationalist right is concerned. Within its charmed Caucasian chalk circle, there’s simply no price that’s too high for “saving” America from “Third Worldism”—even if the rescue operation turns America into the very sort of squalid authoritarian regime the right associates with that incoherent term. This is also why there is no reason to believe an internal course correction is in the cards. If there is hope, it is in an expanded Democratic coalition that is more amenable to dissent, disagreement, and defectors.
After the cavalcade of race panics, the second most powerful tool in the right’s arsenal is the fear of no return: the notion that the mandate of civilizational restoration means that there’s no alternative but to be locked in to the right—that changing one’s mind is irrelevant, or futile, because one’s allegiance is preordained in one’s genetic makeup.
Of course, this is another lie—one that appeals to the worst aspects of our nature. The truth is that America’s story, at its best, is one of reconciliation. Even George Wallace turned a hard corner later in life and found redemption. It’s high time that conservatives in America took due note of how Wallace turned his life around, rather than mimicking his opportunistic descent into bigotry and hatred.
A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”
It’s a measure of the president's staggering corruption that preliminary approval of an application for a charter by Trump’s crypto firm is just another story. Also, Hakeem Jeffries finds a new low. by MARTIN PENGELLY August 17, 2026 First Draft Zeteo
On this day in 1998, President Bill Clinton admitted in grand jury testimony that he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, which he then told the nation “was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.”
Good morning… Martin here, delighted as ever to wish you a Happy Monday. It’s almost late summer now, but summer it still is, so Congress is still on its extremely generous holidays. Fear not: Donald Trump is here to fill the news with yet more absurd corruption.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at two aspects of the second Trump administration that go hand in hand: the financial self-dealing allowing the president’s family and associates to rake in untold riches, and the obsequious yes-men who populate his Cabinet, ready to act with complete disregard for convention and the law.
Trump looks set to turn his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, into a bank, while his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, gets on with targeting the boss’s enemies and rigging the law in his favor, without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s staggering – as is Hakeem Jeffries, very possibly the next speaker of the House, opposing Medicare for All, a policy favored by nine in 10 in his party. We’ll look at that and more, including Trump’s continuing stalemate with Iran. Let’s read in.
‘The Most Brazen Act of Self-Dealing’
Trump before boarding Air Force One on Aug. 14, 2026. Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images.
On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.
Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.
World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”
Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”
Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view...
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
