Year: 2021

      At this point, it’s not even much of a controversial thing to say the GOP has a white supremacist problem. But to be more specific, the Republican party has an issue with MAGA-fied conservatives who don’t actually know anything about anything getting elected to office by MAGA-fied voters who also don’t know anything about anything. That’s how Georgia got stuck with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and if Michigan Democrats don’t stay on their toes, their state might get stuck with their own KK-Karen who insists on perpetuating the dumb blonde stereotype.

  With the omicron variant spreading rapidly, the United States is all but certain to see a sharp rise in breakthrough coronavirus infections among vaccinated people. These cases were relatively rare in the pre-omicron days, but the new variant has shown an ability to slip past the body’s first line of immune defenses. That means many Americans who have gotten the shots will at some point test positive.

   Now, during the 21st Century, America has created a new Frankenstein. And he’s none other than Donald Trump. The Hollywood version of Frankenstein was scary and evil.  Hence forth we’ll refer to Trump as “Trumpkenstein.” However, Trumpkenstein’s creation didn’t come from dead body parts. No, he was born man and imbued with a lack of empathy and an insatiable thirst for success by a stoic and demanding father.

     Elections matter. Right now, instead of more judges hand-picked by right-wing legal activists and their corporate allies, President Biden is making good on his promise to bring greater diversity to our federal courts. Biden is naming far more brilliant Black judges and women judges than any other president – including Barack Obama.

     Most folks in Black and brown communities have heard of The 1619 Project that was published by the New York Times Magazine in 2019. This important and ambitious project, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, pulled back the curtain of euphemistic rhetoric composing American historiography that points only to the good in our history and sweeps under the rug the evil deeds perpetrated against people of color for more than 400 years.

     A 2,000-year-old giant sequoia tree in Kings Canyon National Park is America’s official Christmas tree, the only living shrine to the United States Military, and the legacy of an unknown little girl from 1924.

     Seventy years ago this month, on Dec. 17, 1951, the United Nations received a bold petition, delivered in two cities at once: Activist William Patterson presented the document to the U.N. assembly in Paris, while his comrade Paul Robeson, the famous actor and singer, did the same at the U.N. offices in New York. W.E.B. Du Bois, a leading Black intellectual, was among the petition’s signatories.