As the 2016 Campaigns Heat Up, the Moment Still Belongs to the People

As the 2016 Campaigns Heat Up, the Moment Still Belongs to the People

As the 2016 Campaigns Heat Up, the Moment Still Belongs to the People

What once seemed unexpected is no longer unthinkable.

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“Vertigo: a condition in which one has the feeling of whirling or of having the surroundings whirling about one, so that one tends to lose one’s balance; dizziness.” —Webster’s New World College Dictionary

Maybe the wave of vertigo washed over me the evening one of the cable channels ran the caption, “Awaiting Donald Trump’s National Security Address on the USS Iowa.” Or, perhaps my bout with vertigo this season has simply been caused by all the events I try to make sense of in my job as The Nation’s editor. Just think about what we are witnessing in these vertiginous days:

A pope visiting the United States for the first time who talks in radical terms about “an unfettered pursuit of money,” about a climate in crisis and a social debt owed to a global poor being ravaged by poverty and speculative capitalism. “This system is by now intolerable,” he said. “Farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable.… The earth itself—our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say—also finds it intolerable.” Echoing the late Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero (whose 1980 assassination at the hands of US-trained-and-supported right-wing death squads was recognized as a martyrdom by Francis in February), His Holiness describes the excesses of capitalism as the “dung of the devil” and calls for securing for all people the “sacred rights” of life, liberty and land.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

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The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows each week.

Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world economy and set up yet another constitutional crisis at home. Plainclothes officers continue to abduct university students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown abroad to a mega prison against the orders of the courts. And Signalgate promises to be the first of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence at the core of the American empire.

At a time when elite universities, powerful law firms, and influential media outlets are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is more determined than ever before to hold the powerful to account.

In just the last month, we’ve published reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to other countries, exposed the administration’s appeal to obscure laws to carry out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of brave student activists targeted by universities.

We also continue to tell the stories of those who fight back against Trump and Musk, whether on the streets in growing protest movements, in town halls across the country, or in critical state elections—like Wisconsin’s recent state Supreme Court race—that provide a model for resisting Trumpism and prove that Musk can’t buy our democracy.

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In solidarity,

The Editors

The Nation

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