The fight is only just beginning. Democrats were eager to impress that message upon a crowd that gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday afternoon after emerging from a sit-in on the House floor demanding action on gun control that lasted more than 24-hours.
“Don’t give up, don’t give in,” the Democratic congressman and civil-rights leader John Lewis said as onlookers waved rainbow-colored signs that read “Disarm Hate.” The crowd began to sing the civil-rights protest anthem “We Shall Overcome,” with lyrics slightly modified to suit moment: “We shall pass a bill someday.” A woman recording a video on her cellphone remarked aloud, “This is history, baby,” to no one in particular.
The sit-in was an unusual moment of protest inside the United States Congress. The willingness to make such a bold, publicity-ready move suggests the Democratic Party feels emboldened to demand action on gun control in the wake of a tragic mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub earlier this month. In the end, however, Democrats did not succeed in securing a vote on the gun-control measures they had hoped for in staging the protest.
Faced with that failure, Democrats insist this is only the beginning. “We’re going to continue to work,” Lewis said in a brief interview outside the Capitol. “Many people are supporting our efforts,” he said. “People all over America and around the world are supporting our efforts to do something about gun violence.”
The sit-in may also indicate that House Democrats are increasingly willing to make use of confrontational tactics to make their voices heard. “It’s not just about guns,” the Democratic congressman James Clyburn said in an interview. “This particular issue is about guns, but this is just the start … I wouldn’t get hung-up on sit-ins, but I would call it activism.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi seemed reluctant to declare that this will be the way Democrats try to get their message on future issues. “No, I think you have to just take it on a day-to-day basis,” she said at Thursday’s press conference. She called the sit-in a reflection of the “the complete insistence that we cannot go through another moment of silence without taking action” on gun violence.
The sit-in seemed to intensify the divide between Democrats and Republicans on guns. House Speaker Paul Ryan denounced the action as a “publicity stunt,” during an interview with CNN. “This is not about a solution to a problem,” he said. “This is about trying to get attention.” House Republicans expressed frustration over the Democrats’ action, describing the event as a political distraction and a way to obstruct the business of legislating.
In an interview, the Republican congressman Mark Meadows said that while it is “certainly within every member’s right to be able to articulate their concerns,” he disagreed with the tactics deployed by Democrats. As Yoni Appelbaum noted, “even having phones switched on, much less snapping photos, tweeting updates, or periscoping the proceedings, is a violation of the rules of the House”—all common sights during the sit-in.“I think it poses a very bad precedent and quite frankly other nations are watching what is happening,” Meadows said.
The Democrats’ agenda faced criticism from progressives as well. Democrats were agitating for a vote on measures to expand background checks for gun purchases and prevent suspected terrorists from buying the weapons. As The Intercept’s Zaid Jilani wrote, the “unusually bold and moving tactic was undercut by the fact that its chief goal is a political gimmick that would do little to stop gun violence, while expanding the use of a deeply flawed anti-terror watchlist.”
In spite of various criticisms, many House Democrats appeared defiant and energetic Thursday afternoon. “The American public has been crying out for help on this issue, for their families, for their kids, and we said ‘We hear you, we’re listening to you and, we’re going to do something about it,’” the Democratic congresswoman Rosa DeLauro said in an interview. “We may leave here today, but everybody is going home to a district where they’re going to take this fight on, and in addition to that we get back on July 5th and nothing changes. We’ve only just begun.”
Other Democrats reveled in the fact that they had been able to broadcast to a wide audience using social media. Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic congressman from Texas who live-streamed the Sit-in on Facebook, said, “In a one-hour period, when I was streaming, we received 10,000 comments.” He pointed to his social-media metrics as evidence of the event’s resonance. “There was obviously a lot of pent-up urgency and excitement about this.”
For now, it seems unlikely that House Democrats will win the votes they seek on gun control. But their agitation on the issue will probably continue, and maybe increase. —Clare Foran
Roll Call photographer Tom Williams tweeted several images of the scene outside the Capitol this afternoon. House Democrats addressed on-lookers after concluding their sit-in at roughly 1 p.m.
.@repjohnlewis @repjoecrowley @Clyburn speak on the East Front after the #NoBillNoBreak sit-in to end #gunviolence pic.twitter.com/MRsqXf5MHr
— Tom Williams (@pennstatetom) June 23, 2016
It was an odd juxtaposition, this sit-in. Led by Representative John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, it drew its spirit from the non-violent protests at lunch counters and bus terminals across the South that ignited national interest and eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Throughout the day Wednesday, black Democrats shared stories of people shot and killed in their communities, driving home the point that gun violence is not merely a problem of policy—it is also a matter of race and justice.
But some have pointed out the incivility of the proposal the sit-in supports, the so-called “no-fly, no-buy” bill.
Thanks for sitting in. Let's ditch racist no-fly-buy bill and make this a movement for the real fight against guns. https://t.co/W8geMD6sgJ
— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) June 23, 2016
As the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the Senate version of the “no-fly” bill, argued in a letter, government terrorist watch lists have long been criticized for targeting Muslims with little evidence:
Publicly available information and the ACLU’s experience with people who know or credibly suspect that they have been watchlisted raises serious concerns that the government applies the watchlists in an arbitrary or discriminatory fashion, particularly against American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities. An internal August 2013 government document, for example, shows that Dearborn, Michigan—home to the country’s largest concentration ofArab-Americans—was second only to New York City in the number of people on the government’s “known or suspected terrorist” watchlist. This was despite the fact that, as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan noted at the time, not a single person from Dearborn had ever been prosecuted for terrorism.
Granted, Democrats also want other things, including stronger background checks and a ban on assault weapons. But while the central chant of “no-fly, no-buy” may incrementally help solve one civil-rights crisis—the slaughter of people of color by guns—some say it unfortunately worsens another.
House Democrats are now hugging, shaking hands, and taking photos on the floor. The sit-in is now over, and they plan to address supporters outside the Capitol in the next few minutes.
Georgia Representative John Lewis, who helped lead the House sit-in, is addressing his fellow members on the floor right now. “We’re gonna win the struggle,” Lewis said, calling for members and constituents to organize. To his colleagues, he said: “You got it out there, you got in the way, you got in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble. So we must never give up or give in. We must keep the faith and come back here on July 5, more determined than ever before."
It sounds like House Democrats might be wrapping up their sit-in. They held a meeting earlier today on steps forward. “We’re going back to our congressional districts...and we will not allow this body to ever feel as comfortable as they have felt in the past silencing our voices,” South Carolina’s James Clyburn just said on the floor. They'll return on July 5, he notes, and “we will be operating on a new sense of purpose."
House Speaker Paul Ryan's disdain for Democrats' sit-in is clear: “I don't think this should be a very proud moment for democracy or for the people who stage these stunts.”
Ryan, speaking at his weekly press briefing Thursday morning, seemed agitated, criticizing Democrats for violating the norms of the House. He told reporters that he was worried about the precedent the sit-in could set, and hit Democrats for sending fundraising missives off the sit-in.
“If this is not a political stunt, then why are they trying to raise money off this—off of a tragedy?” Ryan said.
Social media has played a critical role in the House sit-in. Democrats used platforms, such as Periscope, to live stream from the chamber floor when C-SPAN was unable to air the protests. Similarly, the hashtag #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor took off on Twitter. Politico’s Carla Marinucci reports:
Reported by @Twitter: In the last 24 hours, #NoBillNoBreak and #HoldTheFloor have been Tweeted 1.4M times.
— Carla Marinucci (@cmarinucci) June 23, 2016
It appears some Democratic members of the New Hampshire House of Representatives are staging a sit-in of their own in the state capitol. Local reports say about dozen legislators are participating.
In solidarity with our friends in DC, #NHHouseDems are sitting in today in Concord. #DemocraticSitIn #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/WuAjJkhomE
— NH House Dem Caucus (@NHHouseDems) June 23, 2016
While Periscope was the Democrats' streaming app of choice on Wednesday amid a broadcast blackout, the New Hampshire legislators are recording their broadcast using Meerkat.
The mood inside the House gallery feels subdued this morning as Democrats continue speeches and a sit-in demanding a vote on gun control measures.
It was a long night, and members of Congress who stuck around are clearly exhausted. At least a few lawmakers dozed off, according to Ted Deutch, a Democratic congressman from Florida. “There were definitely some people sleeping,” he said, adding that he wasn’t going to name any names. “I have not pulled an all-nighter in quite a while,” Deutch said. “It’s certainly my first one on the House floor.”
Jan Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois, said she was stepped on while sitting on the floor. When asked if it was by a Republican, she said yes. “I don’t know if it was intentional, but there certainly was no apology,” she said, though she noted that she wasn’t hurt. “He was in a hurry to get over to his side ... and there was a certain amount of contempt.” Democrats have been “inspired, in part, by the kind of cynicism we saw last night from the Republicans,” she said.
What happens next? “It could be another hour, it could be five hours, ten hours, that I don’t know,” Deutch said. “I really don't know what the plan is,” Schakowsky said, “[but] what I do know is this is really just the beginning.” She added: “We own this issue now. This is now the issue for the Democratic caucus. I don’t know what form it will take…but we are not giving up.”
New revelations show the CNN anchor betrayed his obligation to his viewers.
Andrew Cuomo’s resignation as governor of New York might have been a godsend for CNN. The network faced a nearly intractable conflict of interest: The governor was a major national figure, but his brother, Chris, was also one of CNN’s prime-time stars. Instead, the fallout from Andrew Cuomo’s departure has made Chris Cuomo’s position untenable. He should resign; if he doesn’t, CNN should sack him.
On Monday, New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose investigation into sexual-harassment complaints against the Democratic governor precipitated his August resignation, released new documents that show how Chris mixed his roles as brother and broadcaster. The documents show that he was engaged in passing information to a top aide to the governor, Melissa DeRosa, as his brother’s team scrambled to respond to accusations. “I have a lead on the wedding girl,” he texted DeRosa, referring to a woman who complained that Andrew had made an unwanted advance at a wedding.
Every year thousands of Americans die on the roads. Individuals take the blame for systemic problems.
More than 20,000 people died on American roadways from January to June, the highest total for the first half of any year since 2006. U.S. road fatalities have risen by more than 10 percent over the past decade, even as they have fallen across most of the developed world. In the European Union, whose population is one-third larger than America’s, traffic deaths dropped by 36 percent between 2010 and 2020, to 18,800. That downward trend is no accident: European regulators have pushed carmakers to build vehicles that are safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and governments regularly adjust road designs after a crash to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
But in the United States, the responsibility for road safety largely falls on the individual sitting behind the wheel, or riding a bike, or crossing the street. American transportation departments, law-enforcement agencies, and news outlets frequently maintain that most crashes—indeed, 94 percent of them, according to the most widely circulated statistic—are solely due to human error. Blaming the bad decisions of road users implies that nobody else could have prevented them. That enables car companies to deflect attention from their decisions to add heft and height to the SUVs and trucks that make up an ever-larger portion of vehicle sales, and it allows traffic engineers to escape scrutiny for dangerous street designs.
People with scant illusions about Trump are volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.
If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.
Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.”
Franklin Foer: Russiagate was not a hoax
The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. With Trump out of office—at least for the time being—they now feel free to subordinate their past concerns about him to other private quarrels with the FBI or mainstream media institutions. On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.
The idea that anti-racist is a code word for “anti-white” is the claim of avowed extremists.
Below a Democratic donkey, the Fox News graphic read ANTI-WHITE MANIA. It flanked Tucker Carlson’s face and overtook it in size. It was unmistakable. Which was the point.
The segment aired on June 25—the height of the manic attack on, and redefinition of, critical race theory, which Carlson has repeatedly cast as “anti-white.” It was one of his most incendiary segments of the year. “The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it’s too late?” Carlson asked. “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”
David A. Graham: Tucker Carlson, unmasked
Some white Americans have been led to fear that they could be massacred like the Tutsis of Rwanda. CRT=Marxism, Marxism→Genocide Every time, read a sign at a June 23 Proud Boys demonstration in Miami. Other white Americans have been led to fear America’s teachers—79 percent of whom are white—instructing “kids to identify in racial terms,” as Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, said in May. “You are good or bad, depending on what you look like. At this point it is straight up anti-white racism. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that. But let’s call it what it is.”
An epidemiologist joins five Atlantic parents to discuss just how long their pandemic trade-offs can hold.
Parents know that winter is the season of sickness. Your kid will have approximately infinite colds. You, too, will have approximately infinite colds. Last winter, COVID precautions kept sickness at bay. But this year, school is in session, day-care colds are spreading fast, and the only cohort of people in America not yet eligible for COVID vaccination is our youngest children.
Aside from promises of clinical-trial data by the end of the year, the timeline on which children younger than 5 might be vaccinated is still unclear. The parents of these kids are staring down months more of carefully weighing the risks of COVID against the benefits of indoor cheer. My own child, now 20 months old, was born in March 2020, so my entire experience of parenting has been pandemic-inflected. As the cold creeps down the East Coast, where I live, and nudges the people around me inside, I have been thinking about how the responsibility and anxiety of navigating around this one infectious disease might linger longer for the parents of small children than for most other Americans.
Here’s everything we do.
As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday.
Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast. South Africa, the country that initially flagged Omicron to WHO this week, has experienced a surge of new cases—some reportedly in people who were previously infected or vaccinated—and the virus has already spilled across international borders into places such as Hong Kong, Belgium, Israel, and the United Kingdom. Several nations are now selectively shutting down travel to impede further spread. For instance, on Monday, the United States will start restricting travel from Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Malawi.
Amelia Whelan used social media as an accelerant for her sales community. Then things blew up.
So you’ve been scrolling through Facebook for a while—dull, dull, dull—when you hear the sound of tropical bird chatter. You glimpse a 20-something woman floating in a natural pool of water with her eyes closed, and then she starts to talk to you about her passion for “manifesting money” and how every little thing she’s ever wanted is now hers. What’s this? She’s looking out the window of an airplane, through the clouds at a mossy mountaintop; she’s scooping up sand and blowing it at the camera as if the grains were dandelion seeds; she’s biking in a white dress on a secluded path, no handlebars. She has more time and wealth than she knows what to do with—and so now she will pause to bathe an elephant. Wait a minute, you say to yourself. Could this be my life too?
What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference
Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.
One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”
Freedom was once a rallying cry for justice, but the country’s Realtors had a better use for it.
Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.
This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.
The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s. This wasn’t an organic response. Rather, conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests. That effort can be seen in the role played by one of the most overlooked yet powerful forces in 20th-century America: the nation’s Realtors.
Midnight Mass is a morally urgent critique of how faith can fuel everyday cruelty and violence.
This story contains spoilers for the Netflix series Midnight Mass.
The Exorcist is a film I’ve long loved because it raised the bar not just for horror, but also for movies that explore questions of faith and doubt, good and evil, life and death. I know all of its beats by heart, but when I recently rewatched the 1973 classic, the ending hit differently. The movie concludes with an exorcism, naturally. Chris MacNeil has brought her daughter, Regan, to a host of medical professionals in a desperate attempt to save her from what turns out to be a demonic possession. But the only person who can save the girl, it seems, is a priest. The camera lingers on the mother’s exhausted face as two priests close the door to her daughter’s bedroom and go to work.
A wealthy white lawyer has spent 16 years and millions of dollars turning the Whitney Plantation into a memorial to the nation's past.
In 1986, 1.5 million balloons were released over Cleveland, resulting in an unforeseen tragedy.
Three young Yazidi women who were captured and enslaved by ISIS share their stories for the first time.
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