FEATURING KHYATI JOSHI – President Donald Trump has prided himself on promoting the concept of “religious liberty” as part of his presidency. His administration has privileged religious groups and a conservative leaning Supreme Court has affirmed his push. Indeed the US Constitution offers strong protections for religious freedom. 

But… it turns out that not all religions seem to enjoy constitutional protections and the legal precedents equally. Unsurprisingly the religious demands, practices, and beliefs of white Christians dominate the American landscape.

Khyati Joshi is a Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, author of New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America, and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, Third Edition. Her new book is White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America.

150,000 Americans have now died from the Covid-19 virus in the United States, with more than 4.3 million people infected. The grim milestone came at the same time that 21 states entered the so-called “red zone” of emergency as per federal government standards for rising death rates. Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator remarked on Tuesday that, “We can see the virus moving north. What we’re seeing across the south right now is both rural infections, as well as small metros and major metros, simultaneously.” The New York Times surveyed every 4-year college and university in the US and estimated that 6,300 Covid-19 cases have been linked to about 270 campuses offering a sober warning to in-person instruction resuming in the fall. On Tuesday Democratic lawmakers wrote to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos demanding to know if the White House improperly pressured her to reopen schools based on political considerations. And the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced to its membership that it would support so-called “safety strikes” by teachers who were being forced to return to schools. 

Republican Congressman Louis Gohmert has tested positive for Covid-19 during routine White House screening ahead of a scheduled meeting with President Donald Trump. Gohmert had been going about business-as-usual and had been refusing to wear a mask. He even attended Tuesday’s hearing with Attorney General William Barr without a mask on. Meanwhile two employees of a Trader Joes grocery store in Manhattan reportedly were targeted by a pair of mask refusing customers. One ended up in the hospital. The offenders were arrested and charged. 

President Trump is upset that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s approval ratings are higher than his and rather than focus on the mounting death toll, told reporters, “He’s got this high approval rating…why don’t I have a high approval rating?” Reporters have been asking Trump about a video he tweeted earlier this week that was so full of misinformation that social media platforms deleted them. The videos featured a group of Trump-linked doctors including a Houston-based pediatrician named Dr. Stella Immanuel whose controversial claims include linking gynecological conditions to intercourse with demons.

FEATURING TAMMY THOMAS MILES – The Coronavirus pandemic has brought into stark relief the importance of childcare and those workers who provide care for our children. Already the child care industry was struggling for years as costs for parents skyrocketed and wages for providers remained far too low. 

Now, as Congress readies to vote on the Childcare is Essential Act, introduced by Representative Rosa DeLauro, activists around the nation are holding a week of action to highlight the urgent need for fully funded childcare. 

Although the Childcare is Essential Act includes a $100 billion investment in the industry, Senate Republicans have included childcare funding in this week’s Covid-relief bill – to the tune of only $15 billion. A recent survey showed overwhelming public support for childcare funding. 

For more information visit https://www.childcarechangemakers.org.

Tammy Thomas Miles, Senior Organizer at Community Change Action, working with childcare providers.

FEATURING ERIK EDSTROM – Just as there is a national conversation around defunding the police as we see the human toll of a domestic war by law enforcement against people of color, some have begun linking that idea to defunding the US military. After all, we spend a massive chunk of our federal tax dollars to outfit troops and purchase weapons of mass destruction which are mostly used to terrorize and bomb people of color in other nations – nations like Afghanistan where the US’s longest war continues – slipping in and out of the American public’s consciousness. 

Now a veteran of the longest official war in US history has written a scathing indictment of that never-ending battle. Writing in his new book Un-American author Erik Edstrom says, “In American parlance, ‘Never Forget’ is tacitly—and exclusively—reserved for Americans to serve in their role as righteous victims, never as aggressors. Instead, let us ‘Never Forget’ the far larger costs of America’s permanent war posture and realize that humanity’s greatest problems will not be solved by the military.”

Erik Edstrom, a West Point graduate and a veteran of the Afghanistan war, author of Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War.

**This interview was originally broadcast on June 24, 2020.

The United States Attorney General William Barr testified to the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. It was the first time in a year that he agreed to speak with lawmakers. The defiant Attorney General, who has been accused of politicizing the Justice Department, focused in his opening statement primarily on the deployment of federal officers to Portland, Oregon, referring to protesters as “rioters,” and justifying the use of force. Barr also refused to answer a question from committee chair Jerrold Nadler about whether President Donald Trump discussed with him the use of federal officers as a strategy for reelection. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee also confronted Barr about the issue of systemic racism in police departments and the nation at large. The Attorney General responded saying he didn’t agree there was systemic racism. 

A day earlier the new emerged that Trump was sending another hundred officers to Portland, this time, US Deputy Marshals. Mayors of several cities, including Portland’s Tom Wheeler wrote a letter to Congress demanding that they take action against the deployment of federal troops in their jurisdictions. Joining Wheeler were the mayors of Seattle; Chicago; Kansas City; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Washington. In the letter the mayors wrote, “This administration’s egregious use of federal force on cities over the objections of local authorities should never happen.” But US Attorney for the district that encompasses Oregon, Billy Williams, said that federal officers would not leave while protesters remained outside the city’s courthouse. Several Portland activists including those participating under the banner of the “Wall of Moms” and Black Lives Matter filed a lawsuit against Barr’s Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security over violations of their constitutional rights. 

On the same day that Barr testified to the House Judiciary Committee, an Army National Guard officer addressed lawmakers about the use of force on June 1st in Lafayette Square outside the White House. The incident, which involved a violent and unprovoked clearing of anti-police protesters ahead of President Trump’s church-front photo-op, has come under scrutiny. Maj. Adam DeMarco, an Iraq war veteran who serves in the DC National Guard told Congress members that, “our fellow American citizens — were engaged in the peaceful expression of their First Amendment rights…Yet they were subjected to an unprovoked escalation and excessive use of force.” But the head of the DC Park Police is now claiming that the clearing of protesters had nothing to do with Trump’s photo op– even though the President walked thr...

FEATURING ARUN GUPTA – President Donald Trump on Monday announced he would be sending more federal agents to Portland, Oregon to ostensibly protect the courthouse whose fence was breached by protesters. The new contingent of paramilitary forces will be 100 deputy U.S. Marshals according to a report in the Washington Post. They will join hundreds of Department of Homeland Security officers currently in Portland. 

This past weekend saw thousands more residents of the northwestern liberal city show up in the thousands, to face federal agents in what has now turned into a war zone. Meanwhile several other cities including Seattle, Washington, Austin Texas, Aurora, Colorado, and LA and Oakland in California, held protests in solidarity with Portland. Trump says he will deploy up to 75,000 forces to American cities if he has to. 

Arun Gupta is an investigative journalist who has written for the Washington Post, The Nation, Raw Story, The Guardian, and Jacobin. He is also a regular news correspondent for Rising Up With Sonali. 

FEATURING DAN VICUÑA – After losing his appeal at the Supreme Court last year to have undocumented immigrants identify themselves in the 2020 US Census, President Donald Trump chose a new approach just months before the November election. In a recent memorandum Trump decided that states should not count immigrants when drawing district lines based on the 2020 Census, using logic that appears to be at odds with the US Constitution. Now, the group Common Cause is suing the Trump administration over the new rule. 

Dan Vicuña, National Redistricting Manager at Common Cause.

Violence and chaos broke out in Portland, Oregon over the weekend with federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) firing munitions into crowds of thousands of activists. The Guardian newspaper described it saying, “The federal agents fired waves of teargas and ‘non-lethal projectiles’ to drive back thousands besieging the courthouse to demand Donald Trump withdraw the paramilitaries, ostensibly sent to curb two months of Black Lives Matters protests.” Portland city police joined the federal agents to make arrests as protesters broke through a steel fence that had been erected around the courthouse. The LA Times reported that, “early Monday, federal agents in camouflage waded blocks beyond the federal courthouse that the Trump administration had said they were there to protect — against the wishes of local and state officials — and pushed back demonstrators.” Here is one dramatic scene from Saturday night. Reporter Ed Pilkington recently revealed that a top internal affairs investigator inside the Customs and Border Protection named James Tomsheck found that the agency that President Donald Trump has drawn from to deploy officers to Portland, was involved in “inappropriate use of lethal force resulting in needless death,” from the years 2006 to 2014.” 

Similar scenes of violence played out north of Oregon, in Seattle, Washington, over the weekend when protests were held in solidarity with Portland activists. Police arrested 47 people in response to what they say were violent actions that included throwing projectiles. But the scenes of Seattle police beating and tear gassing people at close range contradicted claims that only protesters were violent. The officers declared the situation in Seattle to be a “riot.” The New York Times described it as, “Carrying signs such as ‘Feds Go Home’ and shouting chants of ‘No justice, no peace,’ some among the crowd of about 5,000 protesters stopped at a youth detention center and lit several construction trailers there on fire.” 

In Austin, Texas, one man was killed after he approached an armed motorist who was attempting to drive through a crowd. The victim has been identified as Garrett Foster, a white man who showed up to the protests armed with an AK-47 rifle that he had slung around him and that he reportedly had a license to carry. Foster was attending the Black Lives Matter protest with his long-time girlfriend, a black woman and quadruple amputee. One attendee captured the armed exchange on video. The suspect who shot Foster is now in custody. Meanwhile in Aurora, Colorado, a car drove through a crowd of protesters, in what has now become a familiar tactic of those seeking to disrupt the Black Lives Matter actions. One protester was shot but is in stable condition. 

FEATURING ZOË MCLAREN – President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the US is conducting more tests for Covid-19 than other nations in the world. He has also insisted that the numbers of infections in the US are so high because the US is doing so much testing and that if testing were to slow down, so would infections. 

Testing is a critical part of the tool kit for bringing the pandemic under control and the President’s misinformation on the issue—or misunderstanding of it—has hampered efforts. The resulting patchwork approach to testing state by state has left some parts of the nation reeling with new infections. Many test sites are not able to return test results in a timely manner. Meanwhile Congress has appropriated billions more to funding testing in the latest Covid-relief bill but it not clear how the funds will be used if the bill passes into law.

Read Zoë McLaren’s article for TheConversation.com, called “Making coronavirus testing easy, accurate and fast is critical to ending the pandemic – the US response is falling far short,” HERE.

Zoë McLaren is Associate Professor of Public Policy, University of Maryland.

FEATURING DAVID DAYEN – Corporations in the US have never been happier. They have friends in high places—in the White House, Congress, the Treasury, and the Justice Department—all of which have ensured that the US economy is more and more dominated by monopolies.

David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His first book, Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, won the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize. His latest book is called Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.