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Graham Platner’s exit strategy has apparently instilled a “#MeToo” mentality in the president. Or has it?The Maine Democratic Senate candidate suspended his campaign Wednesday, days after more sexual abuse allegations emerged against him. The situation has pushed Maine into an unprecedented scenario, with questions swirling as to who the state’s Democratic Party intends to pick to replace Platner, in the hopes of unseating Republican Senator Susan Collins with just a few short months until the election. State Democrats have until July 27 to pick a new candidate.Donald Trump was asked about the conundrum while traveling aboard Air Force One late Wednesday. At first, the president claimed that Platner’s future boils down to “whether or not you believe the woman,” not only misunderstanding that Platner had already left the race but also missing the painful irony of his suddenly supporting the “Believe Women” movement while he has used every tool available to him to shut down the voices of more than two dozen women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.But soon he was back to casting doubt on the allegations: “A lot of people say big falsehoods. He’s in a bind, he’s in a bind. But should they be able to do it?” he continued, referring to whether state Democrats should be able to pick a new candidate. “Well, I guess he’s going to lose. I imagine he’s gonna lose.”“It’s very interesting, when a Republican woman came out with the same charge, nobody believed her,” Trump noted, referring to the first woman who explicitly charged Platner with sexual abuse: his conservative ex-girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Fifield charged Platner with being aggressive with her body, using misogynistic language, and fantasizing about rape. In another interview with The Washington Post, published Tuesday, Fifield further accused Platner of removing condoms during sex without her knowledge or consent.Major progressive figures tentatively stayed by Platner’s side despite Fifield’s allegations, in part due to suspicions about her political motivations as she had previously aided Republican campaigns. But the mood around Platner’s campaign changed suddenly when a second woman—Jenny Racicot—offered Politico explicit details about Platner’s violent propensities, including an incident in which he allegedly entered her house without permission and raped her during their on-and-off relationship.“When this woman came out, everyone believed her,” Trump shrugged.But even Trump couldn’t resist making an off-color remark about the situation.“Did you get any pictures of her?” Trump asked a reporter, seemingly referring to Racicot. “You don’t wanna. They wouldn’t sell good.”

For the first time since 1977, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is out of power across the country, marking a turning point for the nation’s Left, writes Betwa Sharma. Communist Party of India (Marxist) rally in Ernakulam, Kerala, India, in 2004. (Soman/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5)  Betwa Sharma Consortium News The defeat in the southern state of Kerala […]

Where does the Communist movement go from here? That’s the first question Betwa Sharma asks Mohammed Salim, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).  Betwa Sharma Consortium News With the loss of Kerala, the communists are no longer in power anywhere in India for the first time since 1977. In an accompanying piece […]

Plans for a luxury resort in an ecologically sensitive area have set off more than a month of protests in Albania, where thousands have taken to the streets to oppose the megaproject backed by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The Flamingo Revolution — named for its feared impact on migratory birds — began as an environmental protest but has now turned into anger at the entire political system, threatening to bring down the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama. For more, we speak with two members of the left-wing Lëvizja Bashkë party who call the planned resort a “money laundering operation” that exposes a deeper rot in the country. “The protests will go on, and the people are very determined,” says researcher and labor organizer Bora Mema.

Jackson’s concurrence traces the 14th Amendment to work done by people ‘beyond Congress’ and Black Americans who ‘helped galvanize the push for full equality.’

The Pentagon recategorized Native religions as ‘other.’ A scholar of Native American and Indigenous Studies explains the implications of that change.

On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s “Saving America’s Story” report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all. Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at hand, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the museum world, annoyingly, calls “didactics,” meaning those posters and cards that explain what you’re looking at. My method here is to search the document for the word “didactic.” There are 160 of these, so obviously I can’t field all these, either. But to give you some flavor, here are the first four.“A didactic in NMAH’s American Democracy exhibit entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Classroom’ … provides no information about the accomplishments of the two great American heroes it cites—Lincoln and Washington—noting only that both were presidents and that Americans have used images of them in an attempt to ‘instill patriotic values and reinforce the idea of a shared national heritage.’”I did not see this particular didactic when I visited the museum earlier this week. But it would appear its subject is not the life of America’s beloved Railsplitter but rather how Lincoln is, you know, taught in the classroom. If the Domestic Policy Council is trying to suggest that biographical information about Lincoln is hard to find at the NMAH, let me assure you it is not. For example, a permanent exhibit titled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” contains a large section about the Civil War and, inevitably, much discussion of Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the didactics here tilt rightward. Here’s one:Lincoln hoped that the nation could be reunited without rancor, but he found himself at odds with Republicans in Congress. They wanted to punish the South for seceding and wanted Southern states to guarantee the freedom and rights of African Americans.Lincoln’s assassination, and the ineffectual leadership of his successor, Andrew Johnson, enabled the Congress to control Reconstruction. They divided the South into military districts, withholding statehood from some former Confederate states until 1870s.This approximates the pro-South narrative still taught when I attended high school in the 1970s, all about Northern carpetbaggers, Northern scalawags, wild-eyed Radical Republicans, and ex-slaves unready for citizenship rights in dear old Dixie. I know that the Domestic Policy Council is aware of the Reconstruction revisionist Eric Foner, who called bullshit on all this in 1988, because he’s quoted favorably elsewhere in the report. (It’s probably heard, too, of W.E.B. Du Bois, who made a similar case in his 1935 text Black Reconstruction.) But peddling a Gone With the Wind story about Reconstruction’s tragic overreach is never going to raise any hackles in the Trump White House.“One didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in ‘Entertainment Nation’ simply called Alexander Hamilton an ‘influential and flawed founding father’ likely, in part, because he may have owned slaves.” Any child who’s seen Hamilton knows that the man’s most conspicuous character flaw was not that he “may have owned slaves” (he also may not have; the historical record on this point is inconclusive, and I don’t think the matter comes up in Hamilton at all). Rather, it is that Hamilton had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds that, when made public, destroyed his chance of becoming president. In the age of Trump, is it now “woke” to look askance at a politician who cheats on his wife?In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, according to the report, a didactic presents ours as “a fundamentally oppressive nation” in saying European settlement was “a profound unsettling of the American continent” because its “population actually declined … as Old World diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity.” For starters, during the period described here our nation couldn’t have been “oppressive” because it didn’t yet exist. To say that European settlement spread disease “through Native populations that lacked immunity,” and that the North American population therefore declined, is merely true. To describe all this as “a profound unsettling” is offensive only to those who question the value of human life.In the same exhibit, the following sentence appears in a didactic: “In creating the new nation, early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This, the report states, is a “slander of America.”A slander by definition is untrue. Where’s the untrue part in that sentence? Early leaders granted the vote only to white male property owners. Women were excluded. Blacks were excluded, and anyway most of them were slaves, and slavery is the precise opposite of freedom.As I stated Wednesday, even when judged by the standards of the form, the White House’s anti-woke polemic is a shoddy piece of workmanship not unlike the peeling blue sealant in the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool. No honest conservative could argue otherwise. I wonder whether that matters. I hope it does.

This spring, Mac Barnett, the award-winning children’s author of such contemporary picture-book classics as Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, dug himself a hole. In Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, his new book-length work of literary criticism about children’s books, he makes a forceful argument for adults to take children seriously as readers. Their sense of taste, their sense of justice, their sense of imagination. Too many children’s books, he suggests, condescend to their readers. The best stories for kids, he argues, don’t preach or preen or strive to impart pat moral lessons but “tell the truth about what it means to be a human in the world.” And, because of this possibility for great art in children’s literature, and because of its intimate importance to the young people who read it, it behooves us to take it seriously as a mode of literature. “If you don’t think children’s books are real books,” he writes, “on some level you don’t think children are real people.Then, he steps in it. “I have a nagging fear,” he writes, “that children’s literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole.” For Barnett, this means that the preponderance of kidlit is clunkily didactic at best, thinly exploitative at worst. On its own, it’s probably hard to argue with this sentiment—the sheer number of children’s books based on Paw Patrol episodes alone seems to prove the point. But Barnett goes on to facetiously offer a guesstimate that 94.7 percent are duds. Only 5.3 percent of children’s books, then, would be worthy of the children reading them.The backlash was immediate, especially among authors of color who felt that the books Barnett dismissively described as “didactic” might likely include many titles meant to reach out to children historically underrepresented in children’s literature. Barnett immediately apologized, but the damage was done. A petition circulated, and a movement began to have his position as the Library of Congress national ambassador for young people’s literature revoked. Barnett’s “crud” remarks, many felt, stood to cause real harm in an industry that is still struggling to diversify and that is threatened constantly by state-sponsored book bans. As the writer and publisher Meg Reid pointed out, though, Barnett’s (hyperbolic) assertion reads differently if you think about the sheer volume of children’s literature published every year. If we take Barnett’s unserious analytic seriously, then his claim means that many thousands of children’s books of the vast number published annually are not crud. Pretty good!Children’s television, I’d argue, is in a similar state. In this streaming environment, there is more space for children’s TV series than ever before. Lots of it is CGI sludge, of course, and nursery school nonsense and cynically concocted consumer training, but, amid all that “crud,” there’s a lot to be grateful for. If I were to make a long list of the best TV series of the past decade or so, a decent number of those series would certainly be children’s TV shows: Netflix’s City of Ghosts, Hilda, and The Baby-Sitters Club; Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe; Disney+’s Gravity Falls and The Owl House; and, of course, Bluey, the formally perfect Australian animated series that would be pretty hard to keep out of the top 10. Kids don’t automatically reject series that challenge them. They can feel when they’re being taken seriously, and they like it.It’s into this environment of crud and classics that Netflix has now released two series adaptations of beloved novels: Little House on the Prairie and Lord of the Flies. One is a show for kids, the other a show about kids. But both tell the truth—or at least part of it—about what it means to be a person in an often inhospitable world.You may have heard that the new Little House on the Prairie series is “woke.” When the new adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel series was announced early last year, former Fox News pundit Megyn Kelly immediately tweeted at Netflix, “if you wokeify Little House on the Prairie I will make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” Melissa Gilbert, star of the original 1974 series, responded by saying, “Ummm…watch the original again. TV doesn’t get too much more ‘woke’ than we did. We tackled: racism, addiction, nativism, antisemitism, misogyny, rape, spousal abuse and every other ‘woke’ topic you can think of. Thank you very much.” And this was all before the new show even had a cast list.The actual series, which has already been green-lit for a follow-up season, is neither the nostalgic tradlife fantasy Kelly hoped for nor the Resistance Lib fever dream she feared. Still, it’s easy to imagine that she might take umbrage with the new show’s primary departure from the beloved series of her childhood. That show, also called Little House on the Prairie, was not strictly an adaptation of the novel of the same name. Indeed, the ’70s series, set in Minnesota in the 1870s, takes place after the events of Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novel. In other words, the Little House on the Prairie that Kelly romanticizes isn’t really Little House on the Prairie at all.This new show is. That slightly nudged timeline makes Netflix’s Little House not only different, but dirtier, too. It begins, as the novel does, with the Ingalls family departing the big woods of Wisconsin and traversing the mighty West in a covered wagon, heading for a new home, and free land, on the Kansas prairie. There’s handsome, hopeful Pa (Luke Bracey), worried and wary Ma (Crosby Fitzgerald), angsty older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and, of course, rascally, openhearted Laura (Alice Halsey). A tight-knit unit, they brave the elements and the isolation of frontier life together.Upon arriving in the town of Independence, Kansas, however, Pa realizes that he’s brought his family there on a false promise. The “free” land advertised by the crumpled poster he carries in his pocket actually belongs to the Osage. Building a home, as he does, on that prairie, makes him a squatter and a speculator. The Ingalls family’s future, then, rests entirely on the completion of an unlikely treaty between the Osage and the federal government that would sell the land to the United States and legitimize all of the settlers’ claims. Pa’s sense of disappointment and guilt—and the sense that he’s betrayed his family by not telling them—hangs over everything.If the new show is “woke” at all, it’s in the way it holds on to the dark moral compromise at the foundation of the Ingalls family’s adorable log home. Indeed, its primary innovation is in the degree to which it tests Laura’s relentless cheer. There’s nothing uncomplicated about even the show’s happiest moments. The script teases a troubled backstory, suggesting that the Ingallses are less pioneers than exiles from Wisconsin after some unacknowledged family squabble; Pa has several encounters with the ghost of his dead younger brother; the odd fact that the family has come alone, without siblings, parents, or cousins to help settle the land, is pointed out ominously by several different experienced settlers. Even the construction of the “little house” itself seems cursed: Ma graphically injures her foot hauling logs, only then to have a falling-out with neighbor Mr. Edwards over his alcoholism. Laura is the same bright-eyed optimist Megyn Kelly remembers, but her optimism here can read as almost delusional in its insistence.This is, in some ways, a change that actually makes the show more faithful rather than less to the tone of Wilder’s stories. The biggest structural departure from the book is in the addition of an Osage family, whose trials we follow in parallel with the Ingallses: There’s Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), a mixed-race Osage man; White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), who is as distrustful of the white settlers as they are of her; and their daughter, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts), who is basically an Osage Laura Ingalls. They don’t get the same screen time as their white counterparts, but the struggle of a mixed-race Osage family caught between a desire to make peace with newly arriving white settlers and make amends to their furious, soon-to-be-displaced people is a crucial element of the new show.Wilder’s books feature famously vicious depictions of Indigenous people, so there is certainly some corrective impulse in the show’s fleshed-out portrayal of a Native American family, especially as Laura and Good Eagle become besties. The show never has the full courage to make the ­Ingallses true antiheroes—Ma, for instance, is only frightened by rather than prejudiced against their Osage neighbors—but it gestures toward self-consciousness about the kind of erasure that allowed Wilder’s cottagecore mythology to grow in the first place. In the pilot, Laura finds a torn Indian doll on a riverbank. She takes it for her own and has Ma sew it back up with ribbon but gladly surrenders it when she realizes it belongs to Good Eagle. The Osage girl gets back what belongs to her, mended by her new white neighbor.Netflix’s Lord of the Flies is a nasty little hallucination of a show—I mean that as a compliment. The four-part miniseries, developed and written by Jack Thorne for the BBC, should be read as a spiritual sequel to Thorne’s acrobatic dirge Adolescence—his 2025 miniseries about a young boy’s seemingly inexplicable murder of a teenage girl and all the apps that drove him to it. This time, there’s no social media to turn these little chaps into monsters, but they still manage the old-fashioned way.As in William Golding’s novel, the new Lord of the Flies starts when a planeload of young British boys crashes on a tropical island. Left to their own devices, the boys fight between the impulse to reestablish some form of civilized society and the temptation to go absolutely wild, indulging in every taboo impulse their parents and schoolteachers forbade. On the side of order and democracy are Ralph (Winston Sawyers), a charming young man who has a way with the littler children, and Piggy (David McKenna), the smartest and least socially adept of the castaways; on the side of bacchanalia is Jack (Lox Pratt), a real little shit of a sociopath, who commands fierce devotion from the other boys who sang with him in the school choir.All the stuff that happens in Lord of the Flies, the novel, happens here, too, though often from a slightly different perspective or turned out in a slightly different way. This is a story about logistics and survival, and, ultimately, about what the way we choose to survive says about us. Ralph and Piggy struggle to get a beach full of kids to reproduce the civic ideals of modern Britain; they can’t even get them to pee in the right place. Meanwhile, Jack’s and the choir boys’ efforts to assert their heroic masculinity—by hunting for boar and maintaining a dangerously large signal fire—produce only disappointment and strife. And yet, the stunning complexity of these child actors’ performances convinces us of the inevitability of their roles. McKenna imbues Piggy with an almost immediate frank command of this situation and its requirements, while Pratt seethes with the kind of theatrically compensatory overconfidence that both makes men legends and gets men killed.While not shot with the long-take extravagance of Adolescence, Lord of the Flies is similarly visually striking. Lots of fish-eye lenses help us to share in the topsy-turvy swirl of the boys’ new situation, and some pretty hardcore color-grading gives the gorgeous flora of the island the texture of Gothic horror. Outside of these cinematographic flourishes, Thorne’s major addition to the text is some degree of backstory for our main characters. Specifically, he goes out of his way to show that Jack—the show’s main antagonist—and the spiritual Simon (Ike Talbut) both have difficult fathers back home. These boys aren’t just allegorical baddies or toxic men-in-training; they’re damaged little kids who act out in ways that ultimately make sense. Hurt people hurt people.As Rebecca Onion has pointed out, this change means that Thorne’s series makes it harder to read the boys as archetypes or as metaphors for this or that geopolitical crisis. They are individuals; their failure to be peaceable doesn’t tell us anything about boys in general or society in general. All they need, perhaps, is love.I showed the pilot episode of the new Little House to my daughters, who are 10 and six years old. The show was too scary for the six-year-old, and too serious, I think, too. But it was catnip for the tween. Lots of shows she watches occupy this same realm of socially conscious melodrama. This Laura will immediately be the kind of heroine, navigating the thorny contradictions of her world, that appeals to girls in her age bracket. I will not, however, be showing my daughters Lord of the Flies. The extreme violence of these boys in crisis is not exactly pitched at my elder daughter’s age range—and, honestly, might too closely resemble some of the social dynamics she sees on the playground every day. Much like Adolescence, Lord of the Flies is mostly a horror series aimed at parents. All the same, both of these shows take seriously Barnett’s admonition that children are real people—people who can understand concepts like justice, complicity, and repair, and who can, left to their own devices, destroy a new world as easily as they can imagine one.