Today's Liberal News

California attorney general seeks rehearing following ruling against state’s ban on private prisons

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking to return to court to defend a historic state law state banning private for-profit prisons after a three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last month ruled against it. Advocates said at the time that California had two options going forward: to appeal before a full panel, or appeal to the Supreme Court. The state has gone with the former choice.

Elijah McClain’s family may receive $15M settlement

The family of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died after police restrained him with a carotid hold—a now banned maneuver—may receive a $15 million settlement from the city of Aurora, Colorado.

First reported by CBS News, the settlement figure was confirmed by several sources to a local CBS affiliate and described as a “tentative” agreement.

McClain was 23 years old when he was killed in August 2019.

Of Course Kyle Rittenhouse Was Acquitted

The United States is a nation awash in firearms, and gun owners are a powerful and politically active constituency. In state after state, they have helped elect politicians who, in turn, have created a permissive legal regime for the carry and use of firearms, rules that go far beyond how courts originally understood the concept of self-defense.

After decades, two men convicted of killing Malcolm X were exonerated—offering hope to another man

After a half-century of suspicion—at least in the Black community and certainly within the Nation of Islam—around whether those convicted of the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 were, in fact, patsies, two men have been exonerated. 

Thursday, New York County Supreme Court Administrative Judge Ellen Biben granted a motion to vacate the convictions of Muhammad A. Aziz, 83, and the late Khalil Islam.

The Rittenhouse Trial Could Never Have Been What Americans Wanted

Updated at 3:34 p.m. ET on November 19, 2021.A jury has found Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who shot three men during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2020, not guilty of the charges against him. Jurors deliberated for more than three days before delivering the verdict this afternoon, accepting his attorneys’ argument that Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense.

Let the Record Show Is an Essential Story of the AIDS Movement

For an outstanding chronicle of the early years of AIDS activism, look no further than Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, which is also an exemplary model for telling a more complete story of a political movement. In writing Let the Record Show, published earlier this year, Schulman has orchestrated a people’s history of ACT UP New York.

The Anachronistic Joy of Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s life, according to the show Dickinson, had a lot more gay sex and twerking than your middle-school English class would have had you believe. And, from what we now know of the reclusive poet’s life, at least half of that is true.

Real Men Drive Electric Trucks

Photographs by Giancarlo D’Agostaro“We brought the car to the American people. Then we built them a truck,” a male voice boomed during the launch event for the Ford F-150 Lightning. As the streetlights of Dearborn, Michigan, flickered lazily behind the stage set up outside company headquarters, a giant screen showed black-and-white footage of workers at an early-20th-century Ford assembly plant.

Angela Davis: “Forces of White Supremacy” Are Behind Attacks on Teaching Critical Race Theory

We speak to legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis about the latest war waged by ultraconservative lawmakers against teaching the racist history of the United States. North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum signed legislation banning the teaching of critical race theory, defining it as any suggestion that racism is systemically embedded in American society. The law prohibits even discussion of the law in state schools.

Climate Colonialism: Why Was Occupied Western Sahara Excluded from COP26 U.N. Summit in Scotland?

Activists are criticizing the British government for excluding Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco since 1975, from the U.N. climate summit in Scotland. Meanwhile, Morocco is counting renewable energy developments in Western Sahara toward its own climate pledges. Sahrawi activists and the Sahrawi government in exile, known as SADR, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, have described this as climate colonialism.

Eric Swalwell teaches Lauren Boebert that people who live in MAGA houses shouldn’t throw stones

Lauren Boebert’s natural milieu is a dive bar, so it’s kind of hard to decipher her dreck without at least 12 shots of Jägermeister and a Busch Light or three prepping my brain for her authentic frontier gibberish.

Sadly, these days I drink only occasionally—in non-Wisconsin volumes—and so the Rosetta Stone I need to decode this cacophony of crackpottery eludes me.

QAnon mascot’s lawyer blasts Trump: ‘Take care of a lot of the jackasses that you f^%@*d up’

On Wednesday, Jacob Chansley, the QAnon mascot, was sentenced to 41 months in jail. Chansley, sans painted face and buffalo headdress, told the courtroom that he was sorry for his actions: “I am not an insurrectionist. I am certainly not a domestic terrorist. I am a good man who broke the law.” U.S. District Senior Judge Royce Lamberth told Chansley during the steep sentencing: “What you did was terrible. You made yourself the epitome of the riot.