Today's Liberal News

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.

Liz Cheney on Ted Cruz’s pro-Trump mewling: ‘A real man would be defending his wife’

Standard disclaimer: Like most Republicans, Liz Cheney is simply awful. But also like most Republicans, she’s not nearly as awful as Ted Cruz, whose (mostly) tongue-in-cheek association with the Zodiac Killer gives me the barest whiff of sympathy for the now-brutally defamed Zodiac Killer.

More importantly, Cheney has stood up to the potentially republic-ending nonsense of Donald Trump, who simply can’t own up to his decisive loss in the 2020 presidential election.