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Since receiving a bachelors degree in theater arts from State University of New York at New Paltz in 2014, Ms. Bonnick, 30, has worked in theater. In 2016, she had her big break as the production assistant for Hadestown at the shows Off Broadway debut at New York Theater Workshop. She went on to work on shows like The Cherry Orchard, Caroline, or Change and, more recently, Sweeney Todd. But several months into the pandemic, she was wondering if her career in theater was over. All she could think, she said, was Ive spent five years investing in something that doesnt exist anymore.

She was facing challenges on a personal level as well. In late spring 2020, Ms. Bonnicks maternal grandfather, Joseph Johnson, died, and in August, her paternal grandfather, Keith Bonnick, also died. The Black Lives Matter protests that began in late May raised difficult emotions for Ms. Bonnick. And she and her roommate found out on short notice that they had to move out of their apartment.

Mr. McDonnell, 28, who received a bachelors degree in theater from Brooklyn College in 2017, had held on to his job for the New York Theater Workshop when the pandemic began. He is currently working full time as a security guard at Madison Square Garden.

That summer, he faced a major health scare. I had a massive tumor growing along the side of my jaw, he said. It started the size of a pea and by summer it was the size of a golf ball. I started going for tests. In mid-August, I had surgery to remove it. When he went in for a follow-up, the doctors told him that the lump had been an extremely rare form of cancer called secretory carcinoma. Luckily it was a clean removal, he said.

Also that summer, Mr. McDonnells grandfather on his fathers side, James McDonnell, died, an event that deeply affected his family.

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When the Broadway Lights Went Out, Two Theater Workers Found ... - The New York Times

LOS ANGELES On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested while breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C.

Dismissed by the White House press secretary as a third-rate burglary, the break-in set off a chain of events that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in August 1974. Ever since, the gate suffix has been shorthand for scandal, and Watergate has provided fodder for movies, books, podcasts, commentaries and television.

But at a time when a former president has been indicted on charges of funneling hush money payments to an adult film star, does Watergate still shock? Is it still the riveting tale of malfeasance that it was 51 years ago?

A new five-part HBO mini-series may offer answers to those questions. White House Plumbers, premiering Monday, recreates the events that riveted a nation and upended American politics, focusing not on the usual characters no Nixon, Woodward or Bernstein on the screen here but on the men behind the crime.

These are the Plumbers, led by E. Howard Hunt, the ex-C. I. A. officer played by Woody Harrelson, and G. Gordon Liddy, the lawyer and former F.B.I. agent played by Justin Theroux. Hunt and Liddy are well-known to historians and Watergate buffs, but they are compared to a Dean, Haldeman or Mitchell secondary players in a scandal that toppled a presidency and whose particulars have faded from the popular memory over five decades.

I was pretty much in the dark about all this stuff, Harrelson said. I didnt know much about Hunt; I was 11 when this went down.

White House Plumbers comes roughly a year after another high-end Watergate series: Gaslit, a stylish Starz thriller that featured Sean Penn as John Mitchell, Nixons attorney general, and Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell. Despite its star power, that show failed to make much of a ripple in ratings or awards, earning four technical Emmy nominations and no wins.

Even the Plumbers creators acknowledge that the Watergate offenses seem quaint compared to, say, Donald Trumps effort to overturn an election that he lost by about 7 million votes.

That was an era in which people could still be shocked that this kind of behavior went on in politics, said Peter Huyck, who created the show with Alex Gregory. People were shocked that people were breaking in and planting bugs, whereas nowadays that would seem like small potatoes.

David Mandel, who directed the series, said he learned about Watergate when he was growing up from All the Presidents Men, the book and movie about how two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, broke the scandal that brought down Nixon.

Im sad to say, you probably have a lot of people that have no idea that there was Watergate, he said.

So why dramatize a small slice of a historical event people no longer seem all that interested in?

First and foremost, it was a great story with larger-than-life characters and astonishing twists and turns, Gregory said. If were hoping to achieve anything, its to get people interested in history in general by making it entertaining. Perhaps people would learn from history if it were served up as a cheeseburger instead of an undressed arugula salad.

White House Plumbers is a descendant of another HBO Washington series: the caustic comedy Veep. Huyck and Gregory were mainstays of that satires writers room and Mandel was a showrunner. But this is no Veep II: White House Plumbers is as sad as it is funny. Its a slapstick tragedy in the words of Frank Rich, an executive producer for the show, and a former executive producer of Veep. (A former New York Times columnist, hes also an executive producer of Succession.)

Hunt and Liddy are true believers, serving their president and, in their view, protecting the country from Communism and the political turmoil of the era. And they were prepared to break the law to do it; the series follows their clandestine effort to run a secret band of Cuban American political saboteurs at the behest of the Nixon re-election campaign.

The inaugural mission by the Plumbers was a June 1971 break-in at the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsbergs psychiatrist, in a fruitless search for information to discredit Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

Its a wonder that this group wasnt caught sooner, said Timothy Naftali, an historian and the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. This was the gang that couldnt shoot straight. The idea that Nixon would have put his fate in the hands of this group is one of the great mysteries of that era.

Indeed, Hunt and Liddy are portrayed as being slightly pathetic, but also sympathetic, if in a bumbling kind of way. Hunt, defeated and incarcerated for his role in Watergate, learns that Nixonhas resignedby overhearing two fellow inmates talking as he is folding T-shirts in a prison laundry.

Theroux said he felt conflicted as he portrayed Liddy. I really liked him, liked playing him, he said, adding: I dont fall in love with his politics or his ethics; I did fall in love with his spirit.

Hunt, like Liddy, is a middle-aged man struggling with a flailing career, but he is also navigating a dysfunctional marriage. All your Watergate was for nothing, Hunts wife, Dorothy (Lena Headey) tells her husband after Nixon wins re-election in a landslide in 1972.

Hunt is a relatively bland character, particularly compared with Liddy, whom Mandel described as anut-ball. But Harrelson found himself fascinated by, if not terribly sympathetic to this shadowy symbol of the Watergate era.

Hes a deplorable man, he said. He just did some coldblooded stuff back in the day.

The story of Watergate has until now been typically told from the vantage point of the Oval Office and the Washington Post newsroom. But this is not your fathers All the Presidents Men, as Rich put it.

Francesca Orsi, HBOs head of drama series, said Plumbers is exploring the scandal from the point of view of the foot soldiers on the ground.

The heart and soul the psyche of the show is about these two men and the way their decisions and choices they made had wider ramifications for themselves and their families, she said.

There has been no shortage of Washington intrigue and scandal since Nixon resigned, including the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, the impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and the Iran-Contra arms-for hostages scandal that shadowed Ronald Reaganssecond term. But Watergate remains a singular chapter in American history that has continued political relevance.

I dont think people are that interested in Watergate, but they are certainly interested in the questions of a deep state and questions of the weaponization of the federal government, Naftali said. The story of Hunt and Liddy and their associates is the story of a federal government gone wild of a president using federal power to hurt people who disagree with him.

Plumbers is based in part on a book by Egil Bud Krogh Jr., a Nixon White House staff member who served time for authorizing the Ellsberg psychiatrist break-in. And for all the attention paid to Watergate over the decades, Plumbers finds some lesser-known corners of this story to explore.

For one thing, there were four attempted break-ins at the Watergate, including two unsuccessful dry-runs and a return visit to repair a failed bug. Hunts wife later died in a plane crash, and the series nods (but only nods) to an old conspiracy theory We didnt want to Oliver Stone it, Gregory said that it might not have been an accident. Liddy had an odd fixation with the Nazis; at one point we see him raising his arm in a Nazi salute.

All these things that people are going to watch and go, Yeah, that didnt happen Gregory said. Those are the things that really happened.

And Dita Beard! Kathleen Turner plays the International Telephone and Telegraph lobbyist who, in this telling, is spirited out of Washington at the orders of the Nixon White House so she wouldnt give damaging testimony about an alleged quid pro quo involving an I.T.T.Corporationcampaign contribution to the Republican National Committee. Other cameos of note include the All the Presidents Men star Robert Redford (actually Redfords voice), in a scene where Woodward is heard calling Hunt.

Production on White House Plumbers was delayed by the Covid pandemic, which occurred amidturmoil, division and disruption in the country. During that period, Trump attempted to overturn the 2020election, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were touched off whenMinneapolispolice killed George Floyd, and the violentJan. 6 rioting eruptedat the Capitol, leading to subsequenthearings all of which makes framing a political scandal as a comedy, even a black comedy, a bit of a challenge, even for the crew that brought the world Veep.

In Veep, we were going for the hard jokes, Huyck said. In this, there are no jokes.

The situation is organically absurd, he continued. You can just write completely straight dialogue and let it sit there, and it will be funny.

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'White House Plumbers' Revisits the Fringes of Watergate - The New York Times

A recent panel on Africas external debt might seem like an odd fit for an arts institution with a permanent collection that includes a ceremonial Baule mask from Ivory Coast and a 2003 mixed-media piece by acclaimed artist Wangechi Mutu.

But it was part of deliberate programming by The Africa Center, a New York institution that after decades of meanders in both location and mission has emerged with new leadership and a new optimism that it can find an audience for dynamic and richly varied events centered on expanding peoples understanding of Africa.

We want to convince you these things do affect our daily lives and are worthy of our attention, said Tunde Olatunji, associate director of policy for The Africa Center, as he moderated the debt panel earlier this year that featured researchers from Nigeria and Kenya.

Far from being a stuffy museum, the space envisioned by Uzodinma Iweala, its chief executive officer since 2018, is a landing place for the African diaspora, an exploration of Blackness and a venue for changing the way Americans interact with the African continent.

Situated on an East Harlem street corner overlooking Central Park, the Center has welcomed billionaires Bill Gates and Mo Ibrahim talking about the future of African business as well as the actress Lupita Nyongo reading from her childrens book on colorism. Hank Willis Thomass Afro Pick installation was situated on its plaza. The Center has hosted African presidents and prizewinning authors and a sweaty crowd breaking into a dance party.

There are places where your behavior has to be precious, said Iweala, speaking about his vision. Then there are the places that are about community the way we interact with each other, the way we build that community, the way we are in that space eating, drinking, talking.

It took a long while for The Africa Center to get to this point, and Iweala acknowledges its still far from reaching its potential. The Center, with an annual budget of $4 million, occupies only about 20 percent of some 70,000 square feet of the space allotted for it in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed tower that includes 17 floors of luxury condos.

Plans call for the rest to be filled out with an auditorium, cafe, administrative offices, an events venue, artists studios and galleries, a performance space and a learning laboratory for science and math.

But that would require significant new fund-raising and a bump in staffing, which now stands at 11 full-time positions and four part-time.

Members of the board, which along with Nyongo includes Chelsea Clinton as well as board president Halima Dangote, the daughter of a Nigerian cement magnate, are considering pursuing a new fund-raising campaign and other public appeals to account for soaring post-pandemic construction and other costs that grew by more than 30 percent. In 2019, the capital campaign goal had been $50 million with hope of completing construction in fall 2021. Officials declined to offer a target number for a new campaign, saying only that it would be announced later this year.

There is a push on our part to get the rest built, Iweala said. These are the things I need to work on.

In its current form, the Center has received $4 million in city funds. But through the years, more than $32 million in public money and tax credits have been steered toward the project, most of it when the Center had a vastly different goal and even a different name: the Museum for African Art.

The institution was first envisioned as strictly cultural when it opened in 1984 occupying two townhouses on Manhattans Upper East Side and later a building in the Soho neighborhood. It was small but received praise for its traveling shows.

In 1997, Elsie McCabe Thompson became president with visions of an expansive and elaborate building on Fifth Avenue at the top of the citys so-called Museum Mile. The institution raised more than $100 million and moved to temporary headquarters in Queens in 2002 while construction began.

But some pledges for money fell through. Construction encountered problems. The financial crisis hit, fund-raising stammered, designs were pared, new leaders cycled through and plans for an opening were delayed a half dozen times.

Eventually, a new board took over with ideas for a new mandate that would explore Africas art, and economic and policy issues.

Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, said the Centers complicated history is an important part of its identity.

In many ways this institution tells the story of what it takes to create an institution, Golden said. It involves complex relationships to create a narrative for how an institution can and does reflect the contributions of many people to come to fruition.

Iweala arrived five years ago with a background that isnt in the arts among other things, hes an accomplished author and medical doctor. Yet because he has a foot in both America and Nigeria, he embodies an institution that wants to mingle both worlds, Golden said.

Uzo is a visionary and I believe he is charting a truly 21st century path, and one I imagine is going to create a model for the future, she said.

Iweala was born in Washington D.C. to Nigerian parents and bounced between Nigeria and the U.S. with a solid grounding in both nations. He went to Harvard and trained as a doctor at Columbia University. He co-founded a Nigeria-based magazine called Ventures Africa, collected awards for his novel, Beasts of No Nation, and wrote two other books. He founded an organization in Nigeria that promotes private sector investment in health services.

The Africa Center, he said, feels like it is part and parcel of my identity.

As a new CEO, Iwealas first mission was to get people into the building. He started by opening Teranga, luring patrons to view art on the walls of the restaurant that serves West African food with a menu designed by Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam.

One of the best ways of getting people together is showing who you are. And food is culture, food is policy, food is economics, Iweala said.

The center was finally set to host public programming. Workers readied the debut exhibition, African/American: Making the Nations Table, a collaboration with the Museum of Food and Drink celebrating contributions of Black chefs and food and drink producers.

But then Covid-19 began spreading, and the exhibition was postponed.

The Center was hobbled by the pandemic, yet it managed to find a foothold. The plaza in front of the building became a venue for music and dancing. And as the nation reeled from the police killing of George Floyd, the Center unveiled a 45-foot-tall display of white letters spelling Black Lives Matter affixed to the outside of windows on the first three floors.

The display was controversial, one city official said.

I knew people were going to have a fit, and they did, and he just did it anyway, said New York City Council member Gale Brewer, speaking of Iweala. I think hes a superstar.

Once the spread of Covid slowed, the Center picked up where it left off, opening the African/American exhibition as well as a mix of virtual and in-person policy programming.

An exhibition earlier this year called States of Becoming offered work from 17 contemporary artists of African descent who have lived and worked in the United States. The idea was shaped by the independent curator Fitsum Shebeshe, who moved from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Baltimore. Many of the works focused on themes of assimilation and colliding cultures.

They understood what we were trying to do, said Shebeshe, speaking of The Africa Center leadership. I view this center as a space thats creating community.

Iweala wants to better integrate the space into its surroundings not a straightforward mission for an institution that sits at the intersection of Black Harlem, Spanish Harlem, Little Senegal and the posh Upper East Side, not to mention its positioning along Museum Mile.

Its both an invitation and a challenge, Iweala said.

The Center has partnered on projects with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which along with other institutions has received loans from the Centers small permanent collection. (The Mutu piece is on loan to the New Museums retrospective of her work.)

For now, between exhibitions, The Africa Center and its restaurant are open only on weekends and for scheduled events, an indicator that the audience has significant room to grow. Preparations are being made for Africa Day, May 25.

Success isnt necessarily measured just in whether we had a blockbuster show by a superfamous artist, Iweala said. But are you reorienting people in their understanding of what it means to be from this continent? And also what is the importance of the continent of Africa and its people in shaping both the history of the world and how the world is changing?

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A Harlem Institution Reimagines How Americans Interact With the ... - The New York Times

When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last month, right-wingers predictably placed the blame on wokenesstheir thinly veiled rhetorical stand-in for Black people. But it didnt take long before white conservatives, apparently unable to help themselves, openly admitted what they truly meant.

Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Andy Kesslereven after noting SVBs singular focus on venture capitalists and startups, overabundance of uninsured deposits, depreciated securities portfolio due to rising federal interest rates, and the tech sectors downturnstill somehow dumbly arrived at the conclusion that having 1 Black and 1 LGBTQ+ members on its board may have indicated SVBs fatal preoccupation with diversity.

Silicon Valley Bank donated more than $73 million to groups tied to Black Lives Matter, Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo pronounced. Silicon Valley Bank, Tucker Carlson dramatically stated during his nightly Fox white-power hour, spent more than $73 million on donations to BLM and related organizations. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who now runs a white supremacist legal operation, groused about the bailout of a bank that has given millions of dollars in BLM initiatives.

Right-wingers being incensed about a single Black member of a 12-person boardwhich still makes SVB one of the countrys whitest major banksis totally in keeping with who they are. Nothing performative about the racism on display there; anti-Blackness is their brand. Its their contention of SVBs death-by-diversitymanifest in some multimillion-dollar cash giveaway to BLMwhere the faux outrage can be found.

Because not only did SVB fall short of giving $73 million to BLM, in reality, the bank never gave a single dollar to the organization.

The most telling evidence of the lie driving this racist hysteria is its origin point. The Claremont Institute may have once been the sort of conservative institution that dressed up its racism and bigotry in intellectual finery, but starting in the Trump era, it opted to change into something a bit less stuffy and more transparent for the white supremacist party.

Days after SVBs failure, Newsweek published an opinion piece from the organizations Center for the American Way of Life that was filled with half-truths, lies, and right-wing racist refrains.

Leaning into the conservative mantra that 2020s racial justice protests were overwhelmingly violent, the article labeled BLMs demands for anti-racism in workplaces a shakedown of corporate Americastopping just short of calling it an armed hold up. According to Claremont, American corporations, cowed and afraid, had pledged or contributed an astonishing $82.9 billion over the last three years. (They noted the figure is more than the GDP of 46 African countries, because why not drag a whole other continent of Black folks into this while youre at it, I guess.)

The authors linked to CAWs new BLM Funding Database, which purports to reveal how much individual companies across corporate America have given to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.

This is where the fine print becomes fraudulent. A general search of the database for SVBs donations to BLM Movement & Related Causes produces a figure of $70,650,000which would certainly be a staggering number, if only it were true. But getting slightly more specific in the search reveals the big lie at its core.

Claremont itself admits the the BLM Movement consists of a limited number of official organizations, including the BLM PAC, BLM Grassroots, BLM At School, and any official BLM chapters, among a few other entities. Search the database for SVB donations to any of those listed groups, and it shows that not a dime has been given.

The discrepancy, it seems, can be found under the link Explanatory Notes, where Claremont explains that it defines a BLM Related Cause as all organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLMs agenda. That means any organization Claremont believes helps BLMs missionwhich, for the record, Claremont explicitly claims is to undermine capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilizationis tagged as a related cause. To call Claremonts related cause category a stretch is to redefine the word understatement.

For Claremont, providing mental wellness services to Black kids is a BLM related cause, which on its own shows how unscrupulous and dishonest the mission behind its database is.

As Popular Information notes, an example of what Claremont tries to pass off as a related cause is Access to Innovation, a fellowship program launched by SVB itself to aid Black, Latinx and women professionals looking to launch their careers in venture capital. SVB pledged to infuse the program with $50 million over the next five years back in 2021, but with the banks failure just two years later, theres no telling how much money was actually invested in the program.

Even so, if every pledged cent made its way into the fellowship, the program would still fail to meet Claremonts own definition of a BLM-aligned cause. To quote Popular Information, integrating marginalized groups into the venture capitalist community seems like an odd way to undermine capitalism, the purpose of BLM, according to the Claremont Institute.

The database also points to another $20 million SVB supposedly gave to a BLM-related causes, but then indicates those dollars supported COVID-19 relief, a needs-based University Scholarship program to students at four universities, including two HBCUs and economic development; and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts through 2022.

Saranac Hale Spencer at Factcheck.org noticed Claremonts math didnt quite add up to the purported $20 million figure, and asked the institution to explain the discrepancy. Claremont responded with a boilerplate statement that neglected to answer her question.

So Spencer did some further digging and found SVBs charitable foundation donated to 10 organizations, including a group supporting wildlife affected by the wildfires in Australia, a hospice care project and various childrens organizations. Along with that, the foundation pledged $5 million for 25 full undergraduate scholarships at four universitiesArizona State University, Tulane University, Florida A&M University and Xavier University of Louisiana. Only the last two colleges are HBCUs, and all of the scholarships were open to anyone who met established financial and academic eligibility requirements.

To recap, theres not a single BLM related cause to be found, nor any group with a demonstrated commitment to torching capitalism, the nation state, and Western civilization.

We could do this all day, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo apparently did, only to find that Claremont pulled this misinformation stunt with nearly every company in its database. In the case of Bank of America, which Claremonts database links to $18 billionyes, billion, with a bin BLM and related cause donations. Marshall found that BOA earmarked $1.8 billion housing and business loans in minority communities, which is money that has to be paid back, likely with interest, to BOA, because thats how loans work. Marshall also noted a tiny fraction of that total (no specific numbers are cited) goes in grants to organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and The Leadership Conference Education Fund.

I did a search under Kelloggyou know, the breakfast cereal companywhich Claremont claims gave BLM and related causes a whopping $91 million. Look through the paperwork, though, and youll find the company gave $1 million in planning funds to 10 groups, including a coalition that helps pastoralist women in Tanzania, and a U.S.-based effort that trains restaurants to desegregate their staff racially and raise wages for workers of color. Five of those groups were then selected to receive $80 million over the next eight years, including a collective working to help Indigenous South and Central Americans with land tilling and ownership; environmental legal groups in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and the U.S; an initiative to end End Youth Incarceration in Hawai'i; a group working to end racism in Brazilian schools; and Healing Through Justice, which addresses trauma and mental health issues in Black and brown kids from underserved communities in Chicago. Kellogg also gave $1 million to the NAACPthe oldest and, frankly, most establishmentarian racial equality group in the U.S.

For Claremont, providing mental wellness services to Black kids is a BLM related cause, which on its own shows how unscrupulous and dishonest the mission behind its database is.

You get the picture.

FactCheck.orgs Spencer calculates that, of the more than $82 billion Claremont claims corporations gave to BLM, actual donations to BLM groups account for about 2 percent of the total amount included in the database for all corporations.

Among the groups Claremont includes as BLM related: the ACLU, NAACP, Urban League, United Negro College Fund, the Jackie Robinson Foundation, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, The American Heart Association, YWCA, Amnesty International, YMCA, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Equal Justice Instituteand I am only stopping here because otherwise we will all age into dust.

Maybe the most laughablebut still dangerousassertion Claremont makes in its Newsweek piece is that its database reveals that the radical Left has the meansand willingnessto realize its policy preferences in ways that bypass the democratic political process.

Whoo boy. Lets get into this.

Claremonts discussion of the lefts means conveniently ignores its own funding by Donors Trustknown as the dark money ATM of the right for the anonymity of most of its backers, which it has no legal obligation to divulge, although right-wing mega-donors including the DeVoses and Kochs are on-record for being among their numbers.

Donors Trust then distributes its dark money millions to the right-wing groups currently leading the charge against voting rights, trans rights, climate policy, and racial equality. It is aligned with groups like the Federalist Society, another Donors Trust grantee, whose leader, Leonard Leo, is responsible for Trumps selection of the triumvirate that completed the courts conservative supermajority, allowing Roe v. Wade to be overturned and a slew of other civil rights to now hang in the balance.

Federalist Society member John Eastman, the author of the coup memo that attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and reinstall Donald Trump, is a senior fellow at Claremont. In fact, Eastman authored Claremonts amicus friend of the court brief in Moore v. Harper, one of the most frightening cases before this Supreme Court, because if Claremont and its allies win, Republican state legislatures will be empowered to commit all kinds of partisan chicanery in elections, and state courts will be barred from doing anything about it. (Eastman, in fact, is the guy who got the independent state legislature theory from the extremist margins to SCOTUS in the first place.)

Claremont also filed an amicus brief in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which has led to gun control laws being challenged in multiple states. Claremont has been a paid booster of Pizzagates Jack Posobiec and anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo, who proudly boasts about creating misinformation-driven social panics around critical race theory and trans existence.

Claremonts president, Ryan Williams, promotes ideas steeped in 19th-century race science, and claims the Constitution is really only fit for a Christian people. As if thats not enough, after helping promote Trumps election denialism, Claremont is now all-in with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, helping him realize every fascistic idea he can come up with.

Thats what Claremont stands for. Their attacks on BLM are really about their disdain for what they see more broadly as ungrateful Black people disrupting the American status quo. SVB failed for many reasons, but BLM had zero to do with it. Its all a great, big racist distraction from the actual undermining of institutions and stability that Claremont is undertaking. And sadly, it sure seems to be working.

(The Claremont Institute did not respond to The Daily Beasts request for comment and clarification.)

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Debunking the Right-Wing Lie That Black Lives Matter Got $82 Billion From Corporations - The Daily Beast

Legendary former NBA coach Phil Jackson says he stopped watching professional basketball in 2020 because he couldnt stand the protests by players for racial justice. In a podcast interview with Rick Rubin, Jackson claimed the NBA had done something wanky when it decided to paint Black Lives Matter on the courts at its quarantine bubble in Orlando and allow players to put social justice slogans on the backs of their jerseys. This was apparently too much for the man who led the Chicago Bulls to six championships in the 1990s, who claimed, People want to see sports as non-political. Politics stays out of the game; it doesn't need to be there. He said he couldnt watch it anymore after that, accusing the NBA of catering to a certain audience. As one can imagine, his remarks set off a firestorm of gifs on Twitter, with users using everything from Interstellar to The Sopranos to mock Jacksons reaction to seeing the league support black people. Other users pointed to a history of problematic remarks from Jackson, including calling LeBron James business partners his posse in 2016.

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Phil Jackson Says He Can't Stand Basketball 'Catering' to Racial Justice Protests - The Daily Beast