Civics 5/28

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

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News and information about politics, government, civic participation and engagement from the URL Media network.

Former President Donald Trump in his first New York campaign rally in the Bronx. Credit: Rommel H. Ojeda for Documented

Immigrant New Yorkers debate Trump at rally in the Bronx: Thousands gathered in Crotona Park in the South Bronx last Thursday to hear former President Donald Trump, marking Trump’s first major attempt to reach Black and Brown voters ahead of November's election. The event attracted a diverse crowd, including immigrants and locals, with some sporting bright red MAGA hats and anti-Biden shirts. Documented reports that in the midst of passionate debate and arguments between supporters and counter-protesters, the rally felt more like a carnival than a political event. 

The outlet also reported that Trump's speech touched on immigration and included criticisms of Biden for the recent influx of asylum seekers. Even though one might expect this may turn off foreign-born voters, Pilar Red, an immigrant from Ecuador, says she doesn't feel threatened by his anti-immigrant rhetoric. “I think he has a patriotic rhetoric,” she told Documented. “He defends his people as any president should. I hope he protects Christian values; that is why we support him as Christian Latinos.”

Others in the crowd, like Murad Awawdeh, President and CEO of NYC Action as well as the New York Immigrant Coalition, called the ex-President divisive and racist. “It’s an insult when he comes to immigrant-rich communities where he’s literally saying he’s going to be deporting 20 million immigrants,” he told Documented. “He is someone who has continued to be incredibly divisive, spewing hatred, incredibly racist, and people like him make this country worse.”

Roughly four hundred feet away, the Bronx Palestine Solidarity Committee organized its own counter-protest, chanting anti-Trump slogans and advocating for Palestine. One of the posters read, “We may not live in Palestine but Palestine lives in us.” 

Hear from other attendees about Trump’s re-election bid at last week’s rally in the Bronx >>>

The Christian nationalist playbook to usurp democracy: Christian nationalists who supported former President Donald Trump remain determined to influence American democracy by aiming to establish a theocratic government through dominionism, which "is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions." 

Despite setbacks like the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Kieryn Darkwater for Prism highlights that "Christian nationalists are banking on the fact that we don’t take them seriously" and that these groups, led by influential organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the Heritage Foundation, continue to push their agenda through bureaucratic means. Specifically, they point out that the ADF led a successful campaign to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, and the group is now seeking to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

Darkwater’s insight on the Christian nationalist playbook to seize democracy reflects the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Project 2025 is a detailed four-part plan consisting of a manifesto, certified training courses on how to get through red tape, and more, that seeks to dismantle federal agencies and roll back regulations based on Christian dominionist ideology. "The white Christian nationalists behind these plans envision an America where they can legislate their way to having Christian states," writes Darkwater. “Theoretically, everyone who doesn’t like it can pack up and move." The project's overarching goal is to get rid of the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and more.

Already, more than 100 Christian nationalist organizations and leaders have signed on to Project 2025 with the intention of implementing their plan nationally. Read more from Prism.

How some states are responding to the worst attack on voting rights in decades: Last Thursday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed the state’s Voting Rights Act into law, positioning Minnesota as one of the leading states in strengthening protections against racial discrimination in voting and ensuring the integrity of the ballot box, especially for marginalized communities during a critical election year. Capital B reports that this new law follows a November ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which specified that only the U.S. Department of Justice can file lawsuits alleging Voting Rights Act violations, narrowing the scope of who can pursue legal action under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 

State Sen. Bobby Joe Champion, who along with colleagues drafted the legislation, told Capital B, “This is the political environment we live in. It’s not getting better — it’s getting worse.” The Minnesota Voting Rights Act (MNVRA) safeguards voting rights for marginalized communities, revives private enforcement of voting rights, eases voting for college students and addresses prison gerrymandering. By codifying these protections into state law, the MNVRA will protect voting rights and access to the ballot box for every Minnesotan.

For a deeper understanding of the implications of the 8th Circuit decision on Black communities and what the Minnesota Voting Rights Act means for other states, read the full piece from Capital B.

The forgotten origins of Memorial Day in America: Historian and 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner David Blight brought attention to a significant yet often overlooked part of America's history — the origin of Memorial Day. Highlighting a lecture he gave at Yale in the late 2000s, Black Voice News executive editor S.E. Williams writes that Blight uncovered where and who organized the first Memorial Day celebration: freed enslaved African-Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865.Williams cites this passage from Blight’s 2001 book, "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory”:“African-Americans invented Memorial Day, in Charleston, South Carolina. There are three or four cities in the United States, North and South, that claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day, but they all claim 1866; they were too late. I had the great, blind, good fortune to discover this story in a messy, totally disorganized collection of veterans’ papers at the Houghton Library at Harvard some years back. And what you have there is [B]lack Americans, recently freed from slavery, announcing to the world, with their flowers and their feet and their songs, what the [Civil W]ar had been about. . . That story got lost, it got lost for more than a century.”

The event took place at a former planters' racetrack, where Union soldiers had been held captive during the last year of the Civil War. Around 10,000 people, mostly Black residents, and several thousand schoolchildren participated in the commemoration, parading around the racetrack with roses and singing the Union song "John Brown's Body." 

Despite claims from other cities regarding the first Memorial Day celebration, Blight's research emphasizes Charleston's precedence in the historically significant event. Read more from Black Voice News.

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