The Dictatorship
‘Fundamentally, I’m a Southerner;’ how a SCOTUS ruling complicates Black voters’ sense of place
Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated six million Black people left the South, changing the region from a place where almost all Black Americans lived to one where slightly more than half did. Even so, I was born the child, grandchild and great-grandchild of Mississippians who stayed put. And like the frog who reliably croaks for its own pond, I was defensive of Mississippi, defensive of the South and I resented those who suggested we lacked the good sense to leave.
Medgar Eversthe field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP who was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home in 1963, had a deep love for Mississippi and once said, “I don’t know if I’m going to heaven or hell, but I’m going from Jackson.” My father, Melvin DeBerry, has long expressed a more cynical reason for staying: “At least the white man in the South will tell you what he thinks about you.”
I was defensive of Mississippi, defensive of the South and I resented those who suggested we lacked the good sense to leave.
“Y’all need to shut up, boy!”
Dadrius Lanus, a Black man who serves as Louisiana’s Democratic Party executive director, said that’s what state Sen. Jay Morris, a white Republican, said to him May 8 during a redistricting committee hearing at the Louisiana State Capitol. Morris and his party were gleefully redrawing the state’s congressional map in a way that will hinder Black people’s political power and, for good reason, Black people in the room weren’t being quiet about it.
Morris denied using a pejorative, and a Baton Rouge TV station said it only captured him saying, “Y’all need to shut up” as he walked out of the committee room. (The word “boy” is not clearly audible in a video of the exchange posted by the Louisiana Democratic Party.) But Lanus said he heard it directly: “He said, ‘Y’all need to shut up.’ Then, he looked me in my eyes and said, ‘Y’all need to shut up, boy.’”
“Boy” or no “boy,” Morris telling Black people to shut up is offensive, but the greater, more lasting offense is the map itself. (The current proposal strips the state of one of its two majority Black congressional districts.) Rather than acknowledge that, Morris suggested that what’s being said about him is worse than what he is doing to Louisiana’s Black voters.
“The falsehood attributed to me has been very hurtful to me and my family,” Morris told the assembled Louisiana Senate on Monday. According to a news report, Morris then took a long pause “apparently to hold back tears.”
He’s not the victim here. Black voters are. Not only because of him, but also because of the U.S. Supreme Court, which in last month’s disastrous ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gave states permission to dilute Black political power as they see fit.
When I was growing up, my dad’s sister Mary regularly led the choir at our Baptist church in the Black gospel version of “This World Is Not My Home.” The song’s message is one of hope: There’s a heaven after all of this.
Last month’s disastrous Louisiana v. Callais ruling gave permission to the states to dilute Black political power as they see fit.
But since last month’s Supreme Court ruling, I’ve heard it differently. White Southern Republicans are feeling a wind at their backs stronger than any since the federal government abandoned Reconstruction, and that song’s refrain — “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore” — has played on a loop in my head.
But not because I’m hopeful.
I’ve never lived in a South without a Voting Rights Act that restricted white officials’ worst impulses.
And now that I do, home is feeling a lot less so.
These particular Republicans sound like the Redeemersthe white supremacists who rushed to strip Black people of their political positions and political power as soon as Reconstruction was over.
Republicans in Tennessee, by splitting into three a congressional district centered on majority-Black Memphis, have made it next to impossible for Black people in that state to elect someone to Congress. South Carolina may soon redistrict Rep. James Clyburn, the state’s only Black member of the House and a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, out of his seat. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves called the tenure of Rep. Bennie Thompson, the state’s only Democrat and only Black member of its congressional delegation, a “reign of terror.” The Alabama House Speaker said he hopes the “Supreme Court will overturn Amendment 14.”
On April 30, Louisiana’s MAGA Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law a bill Morris drafted that eliminated an office that Calvin Duncan, a Black man, had just been elected to but had not yet been sworn into. The mayor of majority-Black New Orleans, five council members and the district attorney rightly objected, and they called for a special election. The Republican attorney general has threatened to have all those officials forcibly removed and replaced with politicians of Landry’s choosing.
There’s a long list of similar moves being made by white Republican officials across the South. Even if they don’t explicitly say it, “Shut up, y’all” is always implied.
Southern Republicans seem to believe they can be exonerated of accusations of racism by calling what they’re doing an attack not on Black people, but on Democrats. And the Supreme Court has given them cover with its ruling that racial gerrymanders are forbidden but partisan gerrymanders are OK.
Even if they don’t explicitly say it, “Shut up, y’all” is always implied.
But race and party are near proxies for each other in the South and, beyond that, there’s convincing research that “voters’ race is a more reliable predictor than their party of how they will vote in the next election.”
“How do you make that [racial or partisan] distinction in the South?” I asked my uncle, Roy DeBerry, on Wednesday.
“You can’t,” he said.
My 78-year-old uncle has a Ph.D. in political science and government; he’s worked in state and local governments, taught at the college level and served as a university vice president in Mississippi. But even more significantly, he was on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement at least a year before there was a Voting Rights Act. He and my dad participated in protests in Mississippi, but as a baby-faced teenager, my uncle picketed outside the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City demanding that the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and not the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party, be recognized as the real delegation.
The goal then was the same as it is now: a multiracial democracy. The Voting Rights Act, signed into law a year after my uncle picketed on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, made that a possibility. I don’t know to what extent the Voting Rights Act had in ending the Great Migration, but it for sure made life for Black people in the South more tolerable. But now, the Supreme Court has made multiracial democracy harder to accomplish and Black people in the South have to brace themselves for harder times ahead.
“People don’t understand history,” Uncle Roy said during our chat Wednesday. “The Supreme Court has never been your friend.” He noted 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education as an exception but said otherwise change has come “because of people deciding to engage and put the pressure on, get Congress to do what it needs to do and then the Supreme Court sort of lags behind. The same thing is true now. People say, ‘Oh, we’re shocked that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did.’ I’m not shocked at all.”
The Supreme Court has never been your friend. People say, ‘Oh, we’re shocked that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did.’ I’m not shocked at all.
roy deberry
At one point during our conversation, I began a question with “What do you think is next —” but before I could say everything I intended, he interjected: “Struggle.”
“How long that struggle will take to get this thing reversed? I have no idea. But I know one thing: It’s not going to happen automatically. It’s never happened automatically in America.”
Because I’m struggling with my own place in the South, I asked him why, after getting his doctorate from Brandeis, he didn’t stay in the Boston area. Why did he come back home? He began by talking about where he thought he could have the most impact, but eventually he arrived at an answer that’s consistent with what Medgar Evers said: “Fundamentally, I’m a Southerner.”
As am I. As are the Black people who have been raising their voices against the concerted attempts from white Republicans to shut us up and make us feel like the South is not our home.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Consultants tied to President Donald Trump may have engaged in financial fraud, tricking donors who wanted to support the nation’s bipartisan 250th anniversary organizer into sending their money instead to a rival group set up by his administration, according to a report released Thursday by House Democrats.
The report draws in part on interviews by Democratic staffers of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Those interviews suggest that donors seeking to celebrate America fell for a bait-and-switch that, if true, could have violated various criminal statutes.
Donors who were intending to contribute funds to America250, a bipartisan committee created by Congress, were instead given the banking and routing numbers for a different but similarly named group, Freedom 250, the Democratic report says.
The key difference was that Freedom 250 was set up under the auspices of Trump’s Republican administration to be “a vehicle for a Christian nationalist, partisan, and Trump-centered vision of American identity,” according to the report.
Freedom 250, which has denied the report’s claims, has focused on staging big splashy events largely held in Washington, such as the UFC cage fight at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday, the Great American State Fair on the National Mall and the upcoming July 4 celebration featuring a Trump speech and a fireworks extravaganza the president is touting as the “show of a lifetime.”
Freedom 250 calls report ‘partisan smear’
Freedom 250 spokesperson Danielle Alvarez dismissed the Democrats’ report as “categorically false” and a “partisan smear from politicians who would rather manufacture division” than celebrate a national milestone.
“Freedom 250 remains fully committed to uniting Americans at this historic moment and giving all Americans a spectacular birthday they can be proud of — and we won’t be distracted by those rooting for it to fail,” said Alvarez, who previously served as a spokesperson for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.
Democrats allege in the report that this fits a broader pattern in which Trump hijacked the nation’s 250th birthday celebrationredirecting tens of millions of dollars in both taxpayer money and private donations to boost “the President’s ego, political ideology and pet projects.” Much of the spending was directed to companies connected to Trump’s political operation, including the event planners for the Trump rally that immediately preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a mob of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
“The American people are the big losers in this,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee. “I’m old enough to remember the bicentennial in 1976. No one cared about party labels or political agendas, religious agendas or anything else. Donald Trump stole that. He took this unifying America250 moment, and he made it all about himself.”
The White House did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Report recounts Trump administration effort to control America250
The Democratic report recounts how the Trump administration sought to control America250, the nonprofit arm of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission established by Congress in 2016 to plan celebrations for this year’s anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
After the Trump administration faced pushback, Freedom 250 was created last fall as a limited liability corporation that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation, the fundraising arm of the National Park Service.
Freedom 250’s sole employee appears to be CEO Keith Krach, a wealthy Trump supporter who served in the State Department during the president’s first term.
Democrats said this structure enables Freedom 250 to operate as a “financial black box,” shielded from having to comply with competitive bidding, accounting and transparency rules that would typically apply to a federally controlled entity receiving tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and private donations.
Under Trump’s big tax and spending cuts bill approved by Congress last year, $150 million in federal funds was allocated to the Interior Department for events celebrating the 250th anniversary. America250 was expecting $100 million of that, though it has received only $25 million, according to the Democratic report.
Even as a member of a congressional oversight committee, Huffman said that he has no way to know exactly how much taxpayer money has been redirected into Freedom 250 by the Trump administration.
Freedom 250 CEO solicited donations from foreign government officials, Democrats allege
The Democrats alleged Krach, the Freedom 250 CEO, traveled in January to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to personally solicit foreign government officials and business leaders for money to help fund America’s birthday celebrations. The report says Trump appointees at the State Department, including some ambassadors, have also held fundraising events overseas and sent out written solicitations seeking foreign donations for Freedom 250.
Krach did not respond to an email seeking comment. Alvarez denied the group accepts foreign donations.
The publicly named sponsors of Freedom 250 include defense contractors, oil conglomerates and big tech companies that have federal contracts, that have regulatory issues before federal agencies and in some cases that Trump has personally invested in. Democrats said the arrangement creates the appearance of a cozy pay-to-play scheme in which donors to Trump’s pet projects could get favorable treatment from his administration.
There has been no public disclosure of how much corporate money has been raised. Freedom 250 also allows donors to request to remain anonymous, and the contributions are tax deductible.
Democrats allege donors were pressured to withdraw commitments from America250
The allegation of potential criminal wrongdoing stems from fundraising by Meredith O’Rourke, who served as the national finance director for Trump’s successful 2024 presidential campaign and as a board member for the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social media platform.
O’Rourke’s firm, Forward Strategies, initially worked as a contractor for America250, which coordinated with the White House to organize last year’s military parade in Washington to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday. O’Rourke is also a primary fundraiser for other projects Trump has championed, including the construction of the White House ballroomthe planned renovation of the Kennedy Center and the Garden of American Heroes.
After the creation of Freedom 250 last year, the report alleges, corporate donors were pressured to withdraw fundraising commitments to America250 and shift their financial backing to the new Trump-backed entity.
Democrats say they have also interviewed donors who were misled by fundraisers, including O’Rourke, into believing they were contributing to America250 but were given wire transfer instructions that routed their money to a bank account controlled by Freedom 250 — a ruse the report says could constitute wire fraud.
O’Rourke did not respond to a text message seeking comment.
The Dictatorship
We should be exalting this major American milestone. Instead we’ve got Trump’s Great American Fair.
This piece is part of“America in the balance: the fight for our history and future,”a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
One of my first fond memories was watching a patriotic pageant on TV, celebrating a major American anniversary, led by a president who, as a candidate, promised to “Make America Great Again.”
It was July 4, 1986, and the Statue of Liberty was turning 100.
Two years earlier President Ronald Reagan had appointed Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca to helm a foundation that would raise private funds, in coordination with the National Park Service, to restore Lady Liberty in time for its centennial. France’s fantastic gift of a few hundred tons of copper, granite and steel had been looking the worse for wear after a century of weathering the elements in New York Harbor — and “Liberty Weekend” was a ubiquitous, nationally televised four-day event featuring A-list performers and tall ships parading through the harbor, culminating in a massive fireworks display.
It wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party.
I was just a little kid, and I hadn’t yet formed a political identity. Given a few more years to read up on the topic, I’m sure I would have had strong opinions about Reagan and the divisive politics of his movement, to say nothing of the jingoistic, late-Cold War era style of rah-rah American patriotism.
But it wasn’t just because I was so young that the moment resonated. This was a pervasive American happening, celebrated by millions no matter their party. And looking back on it, the messaging seems pretty unobjectionable: America is a land of opportunity, appreciative of its allies, welcoming of the “poor…huddled masses yearning to be free,” confident that the uniquely American melting pot is not only a good thing, it’s our thing.
Liberty Weekend also featured a helpful reminder for why we were all celebrating a statue, and why Americans felt so patriotic about it. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Standing before the ghostly red-brick ruins of historic Ellis Island, [Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren] Burger swore in 267 people from 109 countries with a solemn oath of allegiance to this melting-pot nation of immigrants.”
I remember thinking at the time that, with any luck, I’d be alive to witness the next big, round American anniversary, the semiquincentennial — which would surely be an even more awesome and universally patriotic celebration of America’s best and most enduring values.
Well, that time has come. America’s 250th birthday is here and the president is yet another Republican who promised to make America great again.
But instead of a near-universal event celebrating the miraculous success of a nation proud to be made of immigrants, we have Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, which kicked off on June 24 with a sparsely attended and barely watched opening ceremony featuring a military band playing cartoonish “patriotic” tunes like “Real American (Hulk Hogan’s WWE theme).”
Remarking on the many performers who dropped out of the event weeks ago — once it was evident that it would be a hyperpartisan political rally rather than a celebration for all Americans — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy praised the military band as “way better than those libtards that canceled on us.” (Duffy, a father of nine, has a child with Down’s syndrome, who was onstage as he expressed his version of patriotism.) And rather than even pay lip service to uniting the country, Trump’s low-energy speech rambled through his rote menu of culture war red meat, liberally peppered with falsehoods and braggadocio about the war he started, swiftly lost and now seems helpless to bring to an end.
The day after Trump’s fair kicked off, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s move to revoke temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti and thousands from Syria who fled their war-torn countries. The architect of Trump’s war on immigrants, Stephen Miller, told reporters that same day, “One way or another, this nation has to end birthright citizenship.” (That dream of Miller’s was crushed on Tuesday when the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s executive order to end birthright citizenshipallowing a nation founded by immigrants to breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now.)
I’m not trying to put rose-colored glasses on the Reagan era, but when it came time to celebrate America on a grand scale — to express a universal version of patriotism — Ellis Island was the backdrop, and the swearing in of new American citizens was the ceremonial coup de grace. Trump’s celebration is only of himself, and all he could offer the few attendees was fear and hatred for “the other.”
It would have been nice for America’s 250th birthday to have been celebrated with class, fellowship and optimism — like Liberty Weekend 40 years ago. Instead, the semiquincentennial looks to be a limp and dreary nonevent, attended by extraordinarily fewunifying no one and mostly ignored even by its target audience.
Say what you will about Reagan, but he understood far better than Trump what really makes America great.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.
This is an adapted excerpt from the June 30 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”
In the 2024 elections$9.5 billion was spent on congressional races, and $5.3 billion on the presidential race, for a total of $14.8 billion on federal political campaigns, according to data compiled by Open Secrets.
That makes 2024 the second-most expensive election cycle in history, second only to the 2020 election figure of $18.7 billion.
This is not the way the system is supposed to work. Or is it?
Of that $14.8 billion, an estimated $1.9 billion came from so called “dark money groups, nonprofits and shell companies that spend on elections without revealing their donors,” a figure that nearly doubled from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
One man, Elon Muskthe world’s richest man and an ardent backer of far-right causes, spent more than $291 million in the 2024 elections, an analysis by Open Secrets found. That made him the biggest individual political donor in the entire 2024 election cycle.
In this election cycle, Musk has poured another $85 million into groups supporting Republicans running in the midterms, per The Washington Post.
This is not the way the system is supposed to work. Or is it?
A majority of Americans don’t seem to think so. Seventy-two percent say there is too much money in politics, according to recent polling from Politico. That many Americans usually don’t agree on much of anything.
But too much money in politics is there by design. Campaign finance laws allow outside groups to pour vast sums into elections.
And here’s the thing: It’s a really bad return on the investment. The U.S. stands alone among our peer nations. According to The Wall Street JournalCanada’s 2021 federal election saw spending of “$69 million in today’s dollars—about 1/27th the price tag per voter south of the border. U.S. elections cost about 40 times more per person than the U.K. or Germany.”
Now, in fairness, Canada’s population is about one-tenth the size of that of America. But multiply the $69 million by 10, and you still aren’t at $1 billion, let alone $15 billion.
This has been an escalating issue in American politics for the past half century. In 1976, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that declared most campaign spending limits unconstitutional. In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commissionthe problem was supercharged. With that decision, the Supreme Court opened the door for corporations and other groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.
This led to the creation of super PACswhich can campaign on behalf of candidates from whom they are ostensibly separate, all while keeping their donors shrouded in secrecy.
But it wasn’t just on the federal level. NPR noted how in 2011, “The court dismantled Arizona’s public election financing scheme, which gave money to less-funded candidates in order to equalize spending between politicians. And in 2014, the court struck down limits on how much money an individual can donate in national elections.”
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dismantled one of the few remaining limits on money in politics, striking down spending limits imposed on political parties themselves. The law had been on the books since 1974, passed as a post-Watergate safeguard against corruption.
Democracy is perverted and corrupted when the wealthiest Americans can use their money to blanket the airwaves with their political messaging.
This case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, began in 2022 when JD Vancewho, at that time was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio, sued to challenge limits on campaign spending.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan spelled out the consequences of this move. “With no limits on coordinated expenditures, the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account,” she wrote, adding that the decision creates “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”
We all get one vote. That’s democracy. But that democracy is perverted and corrupted when the wealthiest Americans can use their money to blanket the airwaves with their political messaging.
Wide majorities of voters, both Democrats and Republicans, believe the amount of money spent on campaigns is corrupting our elections. Refusing to take corporate PAC money has become a point of pride for many Democratic candidates running in the midterms.
But, thanks to the court’s ruling, they, and everyone else who cares about cleaning up this polluted campaign finance ecosystem, have their work even more cut out for them.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on BLN. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Oscar Kim Bauman is a Segment Producer for “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”
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