On Tuesday, Feb. 3. at 11:59 pm, 15,000 Haitian immigrants are set to lose their "Temporary Protected Status" in Springfield, Ohio (population 60,000). Local residents are preparing for a 30-day ICE surge - even though conditions in Haiti are more dangerous than ever, thousands of children could be separated from their parents, and the Haitian community has helped fuel the small town's economic comeback. We stood up for Springfield, Ohio, when JD Vance and Donald Trump lied about Haitians who live and work there during the 2024 campaign, and we're doing it again now. Join us to hear from local residents and legal experts, help raise funds for local groups providing direct support to Haitian families in Springfield, and take action, no matter where you live.
Amid widespread revulsion at the behavior of the second Trump administration and its Republican loyalists, there is a curious tendency to blame Democrats for the slide of the United States toward fascism. As one enraged commentator put it recently, “the Democrats” have “let us down day by day by day.”
But, in fact, “the Democrats”―at the grassroots and at the federal government level―have repeatedly displayed overwhelming opposition to the rightwing Republican onslaught. By contrast, Republicans have almost uniformly backed Trump’s priorities. Indeed, the gap between the two parties on most key issues has been enormous.
After sold-out screenings across the country and multiple festival awards, the documentary Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round will screen at Columbus’ Gateway Film Center on Sunday, February 15. The latest film by Emmy-award winning filmmaker Ilana Trachtman (Praying with Lior, Mariachi High, Black in Latin America, etc.) recounts a watershed moment in American history: the first time Black student activists were joined by an organized white community to protest segregation. Together, they demonstrated against Washington, D.C.’s whites-only Glen Echo Amusement Park in 1960, provoking the first counter protests by the American Nazi Party, luring civil rights giants A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Adam Clayton Powell to the picket line, and addressing the U.S. Supreme Court.
I am a member of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, and I also sit on its board of directors. Our president, Marc Murphy, wrote a statement for the organization in defense of journalist Don Lemon, who was arrested by the Trump regime for doing his job.
Don Lemon followed a protest into a church in Minneapolis, where the minister is an officer in ICE. Lemon had received a tip about the protest beforehand, so he went to the location to cover it. Donald Trump's Department of Justice figures that since Lemon knew beforehand of the protest, he must be a part of it. This displays either a total lack of understanding of how journalists often work or that the Trump administration is just out to get Don Lemon.
One’s morning ritual has become something unpleasant over the past year. Opening up the computer homepage after breakfast invariably brings up the image of the Orangeman who unfortunately is otherwise known as the president of the United States of America. The person in question, who goes by the name Donald J Trump, is invariably scowling, radiating hatred, and raising his tiny fist to express his willingness to pummel anyone who has offended him in thought, word or deed. The accompanying article usually describes how he is ready to fire someone in the government or punish a journalist for failure to bow and scrape when they are dealing with the imperial presence of the self-described “Man of Peace.” Occasionally, when on a roll, Trump threatens to kill either an “enemy” or even an entire group or nation full of people if they offend him. He justifies his savagery by his assertion that he possesses some kind of high level but indiscernible personal “morality” which permits him to claim that “I can do whatever I want!”
A group of House Republicans has formed the Sharia Free America Caucus to address the influence of Islamic Sharia law in the United States. They argue that Sharia is not simply a religious code; they see it as a political and legal system that conflicts with the U.S. Constitution. The caucus intends to advance legislation. One key proposal is the No Sharia Legislation.
Those who are advocating that 3.5 million Muslims in America want to impose Sharia law on the rest of America are either ignorant, liars, or both. Most polls show that American people are not truly concerned by the potential spread of Islamic Sharia.
Sharia is to Islam what Halachah is to Judaism and Canon law is to the Catholic church. So why single out Muslims? The Republican Party preys on people's fears and depicts Muslim Americans as if they are evil or snakes hiding in the grass waiting for the next move and as such constitute a threat to our homeland security.
Analyses of Iran’s political system often emphasize overt coercion: imprisonment, torture, executions, and episodic violence against widespread protests. These instruments are real and consequential. Yet an exclusive focus on repression obscures a more pervasive and durable mechanism of rule: the sanctification of political authority. The Iranian regime does not govern by force alone. It has cultivated a political environment in which obedience is experienced as moral intuition rather than contingent political choice. Through a dense network of religious institutions, ritual practices, and managed historical memory, political power is rendered sacred, dissent morally suspect, and compliance endowed with spiritual significance.
