Happy Monday! Sam and Emma speak with Dylan Penningroth, professor of Law and History at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss his recent book Before The Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. First, Sam and Emma run through updates on Iran’s military-specific retaliation to Israel’s bombing of their consulate, Trump’s ongoing hush money trial, FISA renewal, Mike Johnson’s Ukraine package, dropping violent crime and burglary rates, Haiti’s “ruling council,” Tesla’s mass firing, and Biden’s polling, before diving a little deeper into the rationality behind Iran’s approach to Israeli violence. Professor Dylan Penningroth then joins, diving right into the personal story behind his decades-long research into the major evolution of Black civil rights as a concept. Stepping back, Professor Penningroth, looks to the 19th-century conceptualization of Black civil rights, with a particular distinction from any political or social rights, carving out a minuscule space in civil society where Black people were given very particular privileges, first contextualizing what these “civil” privileges entailed (largely relating to low-level contract and property law), before walking through the evolution of these rights in both the reconstruction era and during the subsequent White Supremacist backlash at the turn of the 20th Century. Expanding on this, Penningroth walks through Lincoln’s role in enumerating the ideology of separate political, social, and civil rights in the US (with only the latter needed for true equality), and the consistent pushback from Black activists from the 1830s through the 1960s, insisting that both social and political rights were needed to guarantee the civil. Wrapping up, Dylan walks Sam and Emma through how the mainstream conceptualization of civil rights evolved from the Party of Lincoln to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma discuss the Biden Administration’s careful approach to ongoing developments between Iran and Israel, dive into coverage of Trump’s hush money trial (and MR’s potential coverage), and discuss AOC’s growing role in the Democratic Party. Kari Lake, Charlie Kirk, and Ben Shapiro rally behind Donald Trump’s pitch to step back on abortion (at least rhetorically). Mike Lindell gives some major updates on the Democratic plan to steal Texas, plus, your IMs!

Check out Dylan's book here: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324093107

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