Author: TheGuardian

During Donald Trump’s presidency, the UC Davis law professor Carlton Larson spent a lot of time on the phone telling journalists: “It’s not treason.” Trump’s behavior towards Russia: not treason. All the FBI investigations Trump labeled as treason: also not treason. Then came the 6 January attack on the Capitol by hundreds of Trump supporters. That was treason according to the founding fathers, Larson wrote in an op-ed the next day. But in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of “treason” as the framework for understanding what happened, Larson said. “Everything was...

At campaign rallies, Donald Trump specialized in crafting political slogans whose catchiness obscured the lack of actual policy behind them: “lock her up, America First, build the wall, drain the swamp.” But there was one Trump slogan that turned out to have a shocking amount of policy behind it – hundreds of pieces of legislation nationwide in just the last three months, in fact, constituting the most coordinated, organized and determined Republican push on any political issue in recent memory. The slogan was “stop the steal,” a tendentious reference to Trump’s big lie about the November election result. And...

The United States has long prided itself as being an exceptionally fluid society with respect to social class and economic mobility. The American Dream holds that anyone who works hard can achieve economic success – perhaps even rise from rags to riches. Underlying this belief is the assumption of abundant opportunity and meritocracy. Arriving immigrants often believe they have come to a land of opportunity, with a level playing field allowing for advancement and success. Those who fail to do so tend to blame themselves. Yet according to recent research, the United States has far less mobility and equality...

Asian Americans reported nearly 3,800 hate-related incidents during the pandemic, a number that experts believe to be just a fraction of the true total. From March 19, 2020 to February 28, 2021, Asian Americans from all 50 states experienced everything ranging from verbal abuse to physical assaults, from getting coughed on to getting denied services because of their ethnicity, according to a report released on March 16 by Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit coalition tracking incidents of violence, discrimination and harassment. A third of the incidents, 35.4%, took place in businesses, 25.3% were in public streets, and 9.8% in...