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In September 1888, an aged Frederick Douglass made his second visit to a tiny abolitionist college in rural southern Michigan. He spoke on the looming presidential election, and his words have uncanny relevance today.

In a Presidential canvass three things are always in order: First, we have to consider the character of the candidate, he said in a typed version of the address that matches descriptions of the ones he gave at the college and elsewhere on that speaking tour. A man in the presidential chair should stand for something more than a lucky and successful politician. He should be one among millionsa model man; one to whom the sons of after-coming generations can be referred as an example to them.

Douglass went on to argue that voters should also consider the past actions of political parties when deciding how to cast their ballots. The past is parent to the present, and it is only by the past that we are able properly to discern the future, he said.

That tiny abolitionist school was Hillsdale College, my alma mater, now sometimes dubbed the conservative Harvard. At its heart Hillsdale is simply a liberal arts college, but its alumni pepper the Trump administration and its various lecture programs, online courses, and D.C. outpost serve as intellectual training ground for the conservative movement.

So when hundreds of Hillsdale alumni signed petitions in June asking the college to condemn historical injustices against black people in response to the George Floyd protests, the school was at a crossroads. Would the college that sent more of its sons to fight for the Union than any other Michigan school vocally oppose state violence against the descendants of slaves? Or would it reiterate, as it had in the past, the danger of the Black Lives Matters movement?

Hillsdale chose to be evasive.

The College is told that it garners no honor now for its abolitionist pastor that it fails to live up to that pastbut instead it must issue statements today. Statements about what? read an open letter from leaders of the college, republished in the Wall Street Journal. It must issue statements about the brutal and deadly evil of hating other people and/or treating them differently because of the color of their skin. That is, it must issue statements about the very things that moved the abolitionists whom the College has ever invoked.

But Hillsdale, like all of America, ought to heed Douglasss advice and take a good, hard look at its past. It must lament the evil and treasure the good. The college has more than abolitionists in its pastlike many other institutions, it has a history of tangled, unexamined, internally competing racial views. Hillsdale has plenty of reasons to join the national reckoning on race.

Podcast July 24 2020

On today's Bulwark Podcast, Bill Kristol joins Charlie Sykes to discuss the conventions, the debate on policy vs. punish...

Hillsdale was founded by abolitionist Baptists in 1844. It was the first college in the nation to prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, or religion in its charter. It fought efforts to segregate its ROTC unit in World War I. Its 1955 football team refused to play in a bowl game that barred its black players from the field.

But Hillsdale was not exempt from the racism that permeated educational institutions in the 20th century.

Hillsdale sat out the civil rights movement, as noted by the preeminent chronicler of the colleges history, Arlan Gilbert. The student newspaper, the Collegian, voiced some support of black protesters in the 1960s but was mostly mum on the topic. It did, however, reprint in 1960 an editorial that ran in the Duke student paper: We would question the appropriateness of protesting against a Southern . . . custom by applying pressure on a private business establishment, it read. While we are for desegregation, we realize that the problem is complex and that no easy solution is possible.

The college then found a president who would use apathy toward civil rights legislation to make it famous. When George Roche III became president of Hillsdale in 1971 at age 35, he was fresh from the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, which in the previous decade had issued a steady stream of anti-civil-rights commentary of the type that animated the GOPs Southern strategy. FEE authors defended private businesses right to discriminate against blacks, criticized the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education ruling, argued for a hands-off response to South African apartheid, and saw the civil rights movement primarily as a massive expansion of federal power. Roche echoed these arguments.

The racial problem is still with us (as are innumerable other problems as well) but it ill-behooves us to destroy the American tradition of federalism in the course of attempted solutions to our problems, he wrote in 1967.

The future president of an abolitionist college also questioned whether the Civil War was necessary to end slavery, calling abolitionists do-gooders who pressured the United States into war but did not lead on the battlefield and wondering whether the free market might have averted the Civil War.

National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., a longtime friend of Hillsdale, was on hand to celebrate Roches appointment as president. Buckley in 1957 supported gradual, voluntary change from Jim Crow, because whites were the advanced racea stance he later disavowed.

Roche made a name for Hillsdale. When in 1972 the federal government began to require colleges to track students by their race for the purposes of implementing anti-discrimination law, Roche led the college both to refuse race statistics and to cement its refusal of federal funds. He then trumpeted those refusals around the nation to win conservative praise and donors.

In 1973, under Roches leadership, one of the first editions of the colleges widely circulated digest of speeches, Imprimis, defended minority white rule of Zimbabwe and private discrimination. Imprimis also printed a response from the countrys white prime minister, Ian Smith, who wrote of the backward races and the more sophisticated European and Asian races.

The college continued to keep odious company. Segregationist James Kilpatrick, racist Sen. Strom Thurmond, and racist Jared Taylor, the editor of the white supremacist American Renaissance magazine, spoke at Hillsdale seminars in the following decades. Taylor argued in a college-sponsored lecture that minorities were genetically inferior and more suited to manual labor. Roches statement at the time did not specifically condemn the talk: For 150 years we have prided ourselves on treating individuals on the basis of their own merit and anything that moves from that direction is not keeping with our mission. The college still sells copies of Taylors lecture in its Freedom Library Catalog.

Though many Hillsdale professors are fiercely pro-Union, an odd strain of Lost Cause romanticism lingered at Hillsdale. In 2008, the Hillsdale-published reader for its required American history course included writings by Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. but also introduced an 1891 essay by Confederate apologist Basil Gildersleeve by praising him and saying that his view of the South had universal validity. Gildersleeve argued that the South had fought for states rights and the cause of civil liberty, not to defend slavery; the introduction was signed by a historian who also edited the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan.

In recent years the college has done little to voice sympathy for black Americans protesting police brutality. Imprimis, with more than 5 million subscribers, regularly points to black culture and black-on-black crime as the root causes of any ill treatment from police. For years Hillsdale speakers have pooh-poohed diversity.

Hillsdale as an institution does not endorse the racist alt-right and its hatred. The colleges current president, Larry Arnn, is no Roche; he loves Hillsdales abolitionist legacy, can recite Douglass and Lincoln by heart, and demonstrates his personal care for students of color. In 2016 he led the school to launch the Frederick Douglass scholarships, offering tuition, room and board to first-generation college students from disadvantaged school districts.

But the college has chosen to publicize voices that make the alt-right feel comfortable. For example, the colleges D.C. center last year hosted an excellent symposium with a Howard University scholar on black classical education. Her presentation did not make it into Imprimis, but a speech defending John C. Calhoun and Confederate monuments did.

Meanwhile, Hillsdales colorblindness has made it blind. The college continues to keep no records of students race and awards no financial aid on that basis. But in the 2018-2019 academic year, for example, it did offer four different scholarships to students of Norwegian, Lithuanian, or Polish descent and many more that gave preference to students from predominantly white areas. It also had a handful of scholarships for international studentsfrom China, for exampleand Hispanic students. It had none that explicitly gave preference to black Americans.

What has all this meant for black students at Hillsdale?

Hillsdales graduates are now nearly all white. Many American universities struggle to attract and retain students of color. But Hillsdale has given itself a special challenge and has not done enough to solve it. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a friend of the college, once critiqued conservatives attitude toward race as indifference. He could say the same of Hillsdale.

Since the 1980s Hillsdales black students at any given time have been able to count their total number on two hands, or some years even one. Roche told the Chicago Reader in 1996 that the school was being outbid for black students.

It wasnt always this way. Thirty-one black students attended Hillsdale as it was beginning to parade its federal-tie-cutting in 1976a larger slice of the student population than at many other Michigan schools at the time. The campus Blacks United club had a house, staged events for Black History Month and produced a play about Malcolm Xs life. By the mid-1980s, it disappeared from Hillsdales yearbooks.

Black students in the following decades gave mixed reviews of the school to the Collegian, while recounting a few chilling incidents. In 1991, the same year a Confederate flag hung in the first-floor window of one mens dorm, two black students hung a Nelson Mandela poster on their door. After someone tore it down, they put up a picture of Malcolm X, only to find later the words NS GO HOME scrawled on their door. They reported the incident to an administrator, who in turn told them not to hang anymore posters of black leaders on their door, because it invites racism, the Collegian wrote.

The experiences of recent black alumni have varied. Of the ten black former Hillsdale students I interviewed for this article, three had completely positive experiences at the school. Some might see a lack of diversity and say, Wait theres a problem, but for me I never really had an issue, said Joseph Nchia, class of 2017. Its just one of those things.

Kayla Fletcher, class of 2014, loved Hillsdale and was drawn to the school because it does not consider race in admissions. If I got into a school like Hillsdale, it was just because I was good enough to get into a school like Hillsdale, she said. Thats what mattered to me.

Others describe a painful four years. Christian Campbell, class of 2010, stayed at Hillsdale for financial reasons but grew tired of the constant stares and questions from fellow students about what sport he played, if he could dance and rap, whether they could touch his hair. The stupidity and ignorance just got me, he said.

Some chose to transfer out. Thad Wilson attended Hillsdale in 2006 but left the following year, primarily because of finances but also because of race. While a coach and two professors were kind, he said, one classmate asked him pointed racial questions constantly, such as: You like fried chicken, right?

Not having the ability to really see a black person who was in the same shoes I was in was difficult, he said.

For most of the students I spoke to, Hillsdale was a mixed bag of friends and classes they loved and experiences they wished had been better. Keyona Shabazz, class of 2017, loves Hillsdale but recalled two different students calling her a Negress or n-r on multiple occasions. While Hillsdale gave her a good liberal arts education, she said, it rarely discussed the black experience in America.

Hillsdale has done its populace a disservice by taking itself out of the conversation, Shabazz said. You cant pat yourself on the back for who you used to be.

Shabazzs fellow alumni should look hard at the schools indifference to race. We should question why we have a student body so white that many of the black students feel out of place. And we should think about how the school can show all its students that the good, the true, the beautiful belong to them, and that they belong at the school.

Hillsdale wishes to critique illiberalism on the left, but it will lack the moral authority to do so without critiquing illiberalism and racism on the right. The colleges liberal values should put it at the forefront of the fight to defend Frederick Douglasss vision for America. In the months before his second visit to Hillsdale, Douglass toured the South and witnessed how Reconstruction had failed former slaves. He hoped that his country would change; he hoped that his party, the Republican party, would lead that change.

The national honorthe redemption of our national pledge to the freedmen, the supremacy of the Constitution in the fullness of its spirit and in the completeness of its letter over all the states of the Union alikeis an incomparably greater interest than all others. It touches the soul of the nation, Douglass said in a speech that year. I simply say to the Republican party: Those things ye ought to have done and not to have left the others undone, and the present is the time to enforce this lesson.

With that last sentence Douglass borrowed from Jesus, and likewise Hillsdale should heed the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. The college has a chance to change for the better, to change America for the better, to be better than the whims of the right wing rather than tethered to them. If it does not, many of its alumni will have run out of faith, just as Douglass warned he might with the GOP: If it fails to do all this, I for one shall welcome the bolt which shall scatter it into a thousand fragments.

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Hillsdale Must Join the National Reckoning on Race - The Bulwark

Joe Rogan is one of the biggest figures in podcasting. His show, The Joe Rogan Experience, consists of lengthy, often rambling interviews with a diverse array of athletes, academics, actors, entrepreneurs, and more. But you could also say that Rogan has really built his audience through selecting guests who bring their own notoriety to his show, or whose specialist subject is the kind of hot-button issue that will inevitably gain him some streams.

These interviews can take many forms, like getting infamous tech boss Elon Musk to smoke weed on camera, instantly immortalizing the moment in meme form. Or, more esoterically, speaking with pilots who claim to have had close encounters with UFOs. A lot of the time it's harmless (if slightly deranged) fun. And then there are the episodes which, by virtue of Rogan's massive online reach, lend a veneer of credibility to some truly dangerous prejudices.

Take the recent episode with guest Abigail Shrier. During Shrier's conversation with Rogan, in which she promoted her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Shrier invalidated the lived experience of trans and nonbinary kids and teens, and made numerous dangerous, entirely unsound false equivalencies. She compared transitioning among teenagers to historic adolescent phenomena such as eating disorders, self-harm, and (bafflingly) the occult, calling this age group "the same population that gets involved in cutting, demonic possession, witchcraft, anorexia, bulimia."

She even described wanting to transition as a "contagion" with the potential to infect other children with the same ideas, drawing yet more scientifically baseless parallels with eating disorders. "Anorexics, they are always really careful when they put them together," she said. "They have to be on hospital wards because we know that it will cause it to spread."

Michael S. SchwartzGetty Images

Plenty of savvy producers book guests like this to stir up controversy and accumulate outrage-clicks from their viewers. But was Rogan sitting back as a host and letting Shrier dig her own grave? Nope. He appeared to reaffirm this notion that being trans is something a child can be persuaded into through peer pressure, referring to time spent with "wacky friends" at school. He also mocked Caitlyn Jenner, and described LGBTQ+ activists as people who aren't "looking at all sides of it."

"They have this agenda," he said, "and this agenda is very ideologically driven that anyone who even thinks they might be trans should be trans, are trans, and the more trans people the better. The more kids that transition the better."

For all their talk of self-harm and other issues that teenagers can experience, neither Rogan nor Shrier openly acknowledged that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered attempting suicide last year. And that wasn't due to "wacky friends" somehow transmitting gender dysphoria; it was due to the prolific, ubiquitous messaging in media that tells them there is something wrong with them, and how they feel doesn't matter.

By alluding to a pro-trans lobby with that aforementioned agenda, Rogan positioned himself and Shrier as marginalized voices in their own righta technique commonly employed by high-profile pundits who believe "cancel culture" is somehow coming for their right to free speech. But Rogan has 283 million active users across his social channels. Similarly, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweets her transphobic half-thoughts out to 14.3 million followersmany of whom are the very kids she is attacking. They have huge platforms, and they are using them to actively, willfully spread misinformation and propaganda that will cause very real harm.

"As long as these tactics keep making him money ... he doesn't care who he hurts along the way."

Of course, you could always make the argument that Rogan doesn't actually believe any of the views that he encourages his guests to espouse on his show. Maybe he is just a cultural weathervane, conducting interviews on whatever outrageous topic is making headlines at the time. In one episode, he might endorse Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, or provide a safe space for openly gay strongman Rob Kearney to share his story. But in others, he is guilty of humoring (if not downright enabling) homophobic jokes and alt-right conspiracy theories from his guests.

Which is worse? To expose such bigotry to your millions of subscribers because you genuinely endorse it? Or to have so little conviction that you will knowingly platform hate speech about some of the most vulnerable, persecuted young people in our society to benefit your own career? You be the judge. Both are appalling in their own way.

Rogan likes to put on a furrowed brow and even, pensive voice; the hallmarks of a reasonable man with an inquisitive mind. Someone who is "just asking questions" or "wants to start a debate." In reality, he's an intellectual shock jock who amplifies the voices of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, homophobes, and transphobes in the name of interesting conversation. And it's becoming increasingly clear that as long as these tactics keep making him money and acquiring him followers, he doesn't care who he hurts along the way.

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Joe Rogan Is Spreading Transphobic Hate Speech and It's Putting Lives in Danger - Men's Health

Civil rights experts point to long wait times to vote as a sign of growing voter suppression in the U.S. Here's what to expect in the 2020 election. USA TODAY

The 2020 congressional primary electionshave been marked by a number of upsets, where candidates with little name recognition have been propelled into the national spotlight.

Early primaryupsets demonstrated the strength of some progressiveand staunch conservative candidates, who sometimes lacked backing fromtheir respective parties.

In New York,three Democraticcandidatesare poised to replaceor succeedmoderate longtime incumbents in June. In Illinois, a progressivecandidate, backed by the Justice Democrats organization, beat the most conservative Democrat in Congress.In Pittsburgh, a progressive statehouse candidate making her first run for officeoustedan incumbent who is the brother of the city's former mayor.

More: Booker beats progressive challenger, Van Drew race set and other takeaways from Tuesday's primary

Candidates of color, specifically Black candidates, have been on the winning side of several notable upsets. PhysicianCameron Webb, who is Black, beat three white opponents in Virginia's 5th congressional districtprimary, a seat Democrats hope to take back now that the Republicanincumbent lost his own primary. Wesley Hunt and Burgess Owens,Black candidates who won Republican nominations in Texas and Utah, respectively, are both running to represent districts in which Black people are minorities.

Jamaal Bowman, who's running against Rep. Eliot Engel in a Democratic Party primary, pictured at an endorsement event with Zephyr Teachout in Mount Vernon.(Photo: courtesy Bowman campaign)

More Republican women are also winning primaries. According tothe Center for American Women in Politicsat Rutgers, arecord 55 Republican women won House primaries this year, clearing the previous barof 53 set in 2004.That's in part because more Republican women are running 220 filed to run for the House, up from120 who ran in 2018.

Here are some of this primary season's most surprising upsets:

Rep. Scott Tipton, a five-term incumbent from Colorado, lostthe 3rd congressional district's Republican nomination to Lauren Boebert, a restaurant owner and outspoken gun rights activist. Boebert beat Tipton by nearly ten points.

More: John Hickenlooper wins Colorado Democratic primary, will face Sen. Cory Gardner

Trump hadendorsedTipton, tweeting his support for the congressman in December as well asthe night before the election. Boebert's website describes her asa supporter of Trump, praising "his policies to Make America Great Again."

Lauren Boebert waits for returns during a watch party in Grand Junction, Colo., Tuesday, June 30, 2020.(Photo: McKenzie Lange, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)

Boebert's restaurant, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado,becamethe subject of national media attention in 2014, for an open carry policy allowing staff to be armed with guns. Her commitment to gun rights also earned her a viral moment in 2019, when she confrontedthen-presidential candidateBeto ORourke at a town hall.I was one of the gun owning Americans who heard (O'Rourke)speak regarding your Hell yes Im going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s,'" she said. "Well, Im here to say, hell no youre not.'

Boebert was also covered by local press as a vocal critic of Democratic Gov. Jared Polis' coronavirus lockdown measures, reopening Shooters Grill in defiance of state orders.

Diane Mitsch Bush, a former state lawmaker, won the district's Democratic nomination and will face Boebertin the fall.

New York's congressional primary in June saw a near sweep of Democratic nominationsby progressives. With several candidates projected to beatmore centrist orestablishmentcompetitors, the electionsmirrored Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's upset against 10-term former Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.

Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal from the Bronx,beat longtime Democratic incumbent Rep. Eliot Engelwith about60% of the vote.

Jamaal Bowman speaks to attendees during his primary-night party in June. The former middle school principal has toppled 16-term U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel in New York's Democratic congressional primary.(Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, AP)

Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, represented the 16th District for more than 30 years.

The Justice Democrats-backed Bowman began to surge after Engel, asking to speak at an event, was caught on mic saying, If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care, according to NBC News. Engel was criticized by primary challengers for not returning to his district for months during the COVID-19 crisis.

Bowman, who was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez, ran a campaign firmly aligned with the party's progressive flank. He is a proponent of multiple "New Deals," including the Green New Deal an Ocasio-Cortez-spearheadedproposal that outlines a broadplan for tackling climate change as well as plans to reform education and public housing.

"I am excited, I am happy, I cannot wait to get to Congress and cause problems for the people in there that have been maintaining a status quo that has literally been killing our children," Bowman said during his election night watch party.

There is no Republican challenger for the November election.

More: AOCs blowout win, last-minute voting in Kentucky and other key takeaways from Tuesdays primaries

Madison Cawthorn, theowner of a real estate investment company, unexpectedly beat Lynda Bennett, a real estate agent and activist, in the race to claim the Republican nomination for Mark Meadows' 11th District seat in North Carolina, which he gave up to become Trump's chief of staff.

Madison Cawthorn(Photo: Courtesy Cawthorn for NC)

Cawthorn, 24,beat Bennett with 65.82% of the vote in the district's runoff election in June. The outcome was considered an upset, given that the Trump and Meadows-endorsed Bennettwon the vote in March (but not by a wide enough margin to avoid a runoff election).Like Boebert, Cawthorn is a supporter of Trump.

Cawthorn said that he was inspired to run for Congress because he was disappointed by how the Republican party handled full control of the White House and Congress in 2017.

It felt like Donald Trump was having to pull teeth from Congress to try to get anything done, and so I want to go over to Washington D.C. to break that status quo, to actually get something done, he said in an interview with The Hill.

More: With second primary underway, Cawthorn addresses voting in-person, by mail options

Cawthorn's website toutshis conservative views on health care, immigration, abortion rightsand gun control. "Im running because our faith, our freedoms and our values are under assault from coastal elites and leftists like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," he states.

If elected in November, Cawthorn would become the youngest member in Congress, a title currently held by Ocasio-Cortez. He willface off against Democratic candidateand retired U.S Air Force colonel Moe Davis in the fall.

Iowa Republicans ousted nine-term incumbent Rep. Steve King, nominating state Sen. Randy Feenstra to run for the state's 4th congressional district seat. Feenstra beat King by nearly ten points.

State Sen. Randy Feenstra and Rep. Steve King. Feenstra is challenging King in the GOP primary for the 4th District Congressional seat.(Photo: Robin Opsahl)

The conservative district has long had to contend with King's controversial remarks. While talking about "Dreamers" in a July 2013 interview, King claimed that for every young immigrant who becomes a school valedictorianthere are "100 out there that, they weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."In an interview with The New York Timeslast year, Kingsuggested that the term "white nationalist" should not be consideredoffensive.

King was removed from his committee seats over the comments he made to the Times. King'scompetitors, including Feenstra, used King's rejectionfrom those committees as proofFeenstra would be more effective as an ally of Trump.

Republicans largely rebuked King through their support of Feenstraduring the primary campaign. Feenstra significantlyoutraised King, andwas endorsed by theU.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee. Five Republican congressmen even donated to Feenstra's campaign.

Feenstra will compete with J.D. Scholten, who ran uncontested for the Democratic nomination, in the fall. Scholten previously lost to King by a slimmarginin the 2018 general election.

Feenstra's win is likely. Support for a Republican representativein Iowa's 4th congressional district exceeds support fora Democrat by 22%, according to aJune Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.

Republican Mike Garcia, a former U.S. Navy pilot and defense contractor executive, beat Democrat Christy Smith,a member of the California State Assembly, in the special general electionfor Illinois Rep. Katie Hill's seat in May.

Mike Garcia(Photo: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

Garcia's 25th District victoryrepresents the first time a Republican candidate has flipped a Democratic seat in California since 1998. Trump had endorsedGarcia on Twitter, though he originally saidthe election would be "rigged" by California Democrats.

The two candidates will run against each other again in the fall.

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a freshman congressman, lost the Republican nomination for Virginia's fifth district seat to Bob Good, aformer official in the athletics department at Liberty University in June.

Denver Riggleman speaks during a forum at the Lynchburg Regional Business Alliance in Lynchburg, Va., Monday, Oct. 22, 2018.(Photo: Taylor Irby, AP)

Riggleman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was the subject of intense criticism from Republicans in his district after he officiated a gay wedding for two former campaign volunteers last summer.

The Virginia county GOP formally censuredRiggleman last fall, doubtinghis "support for traditional family values, and other conservative principles," according to The Hill.

"He's out of step with the base of the party on life," Good saidin May,in a debate with Riggleman on The Schilling Show, a Charlottesville radio program. "He's out of step on marriage. He's out of step on immigration. He's out of step on health care, on climate, on drug legalization."

Riggleman claimed the election process was riggedby Republican insiders, by makingthe nomination process a convention instead of a primary. Conventions traditionally favor more conservative candidates and have been used for years by Virginia Republicans to block moderate candidates from winning elections.

Good will face off against physician Cameron Webb in the fall's general election.

Ronny Jackson, aTrump-backed former White House physician with no political experience, beatJosh Winegarner, a former cattle industry lobbyist, in the Republican runoff for Texas' 13th District House seat.

Jackson, whowas a White House physician to President Donald Trumpand former PresidentBarack Obama, received endorsements from Trump on Twitter, who called him "strong on Crimes and Borders" and insisted Jackson would "protect your #2A."

Winegarner had the support of outgoing Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry.

Former White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson arrives at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, April 2, 2018.(Photo: Andrew Harnik, AP)

Jacksonpositioned his relationship with Trump as the biggest asset to his candidacy. Thedistrict has some of the highest rates of support for Trump in the country, giving the president 80% of its vote in 2016, according to the Cook Political Report.

Jackson had afundraising advantage over Winegarner as well, accruing just over $490,000 since April, comparedto Winegarner's almost $300,000 haul duringthat same time period.Jackson won with about 56 percent of the vote, beating Winegarner by more than 11 points.

Jackson, who is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, was in the running to be Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2018, but ultimatelywithdrew from consideration amid a swarm of allegations of prior misconduct.

More: Some Americans refuse to mask up. Rules, fines and free masks will change that, experts say.

Former colleaguestold Senate investigators that Jackson regularly drank on duty, had an "explosive" temper, and that he abused his powers to prescribe himself prescription drugs for recreational use, among other allegations of misconduct.

Jackson denied all of the allegations leveled against him, calling them "completely false and fabricated." Theinvestigation was opened by the Pentagon inspector general in June 2018 and remains ongoing.

More: Wearing a mask doesn't just protect others from COVID-19, it protects you from infection, perhaps serious illness, too

On election night, Jackson celebrated his win by tweeting, "Jane and I just got off the phone with @realDonaldTrump! Its official! I am honored to be the Republican nominee for #TX13! I promise I will make you proud!"

Jackson will face off against Gus Trujillo, who won the Democratic runoff election.

Mondaire Jones, a lawyer from Rockland County, wonthe nomination forlong-time incumbent Rep. Nita Loweys 17th District seat in New York. The Associated Press did not call the race until about three weeks after it ended, though the nomination was always considered Jones', who had picked up more than double the votesof any other candidate by election night.

Mondaire Jones, Democratic candidate for Congress in the 17th C.D., speaks during a rally honoring lives lost to police violence in front of the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains July 15, 2020. The rally was sponsored by the Westchester Coalition for Police Reform.(Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News)

His closest competitor, former federal prosecutor Adam Schleifer, hadfour times Jones budget.

Jones received endorsements from progressive members of Congress such as Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Jones' campaign did not accept corporate PAC donations, and signed the No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge.He ran on a platform that advocated for labor rights and student debt relief, as well as Medicare for All and paid sick leave as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Bowman, he is also a proponent ofthe Green New Deal.

In an interview with NPR, Jones said that it was his commitment to progressive policies that set him apart during the primary election."I am the only candidate in a crowded Democratic primary who supports the only policy that would literally ensure everyone has health care in this country and that is Medicare for All," he said.

In the fall, Jones will face Maureen McArdle Schulman, who won the district's Republican nomination.

Marie Newman, a former management consultant and founder of an anti-bullying non-profit, narrowly beat incumbent Rep. Dan Lipinksi in the Democratic race for Illinois' third district seat in March.

Lipinski's father, WilliamLipinski, held the seat for more than twodecades before his son succeeded him. Newman's win represents the first time the seat will be out of the Lipinski family since 1983.

Marie Newman smiles as she campaigns in the Archer Heights neighborhood of Chicago.(Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast, AP Images)

Lipinskiisnotoriously one of the last few conservative Democrats in Congress. His opposition to abortion rights, the DREAM Act, and the Affordable Care Act all alienated him from his party. In contrast, Newman was backed by progressive groups such as Justice Democrats, the political action committee that supportedOcasio-Cortez in 2018.

Newman will compete withCounty Board Member Mike Fricilone, who won the Republican nomination, in the fall.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was previously Alabama's U.S. Senator for 20 years, lost his runoff bid to former football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Tuberville considers himself a Christian conservative,and ran a campaign that was pro-life and pro-gun rights. He told the Montgomery Advertiser in March that he supported Trumps efforts to build a border wall with Mexico, and wanted to reduce the national debt through cuts to social programs, with exceptions for Social Security, Medicare, andMedicaid.

The race to see who would compete with Sen.Doug Jones, who flipped the traditionally Republican seat in 2018, also highlighted the rift between Trump and Sessions.

Former college football coach Tommy Tuberville defeated former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Tuberville goes on to challenge Democratic Senator Doug Jones. (July 15) AP Domestic

In the early days of Trump's presidency and during his campaign Sessions was a prominent ally. Sessions was the first U.S. Senator to endorse Trump's campaign, providing it cruciallegitimacy before the 2016 Super Tuesday elections. Sessions publicly supported Trump as early as 2015, sporting a Make America Great Again hat at a Trump rally in August2015 and praising Trump's border wall plans.

More: Illinois GOP congressman criticizes Trump for lack of 'loyalty' to former Attorney General Sessions

Sessions' goodwill with Trump expired when herecused himselffrom the Russia investigation, whichled to Robert Mueller'sappointmentas special counsel and anearlytwo-year investigation that shadowed Trump's early years in office. Trump was not charged, and fired Sessions in 2018.

In a television interview last summer, TrumpcalledSessions' appointment as attorney general the "biggest mistake" of his presidency.

Although Trump regularly endorses GOP candidatesusually on Twitter he paid special attention to the race between Sessions and Tuberville,explicitlytyinghis endorsement of Tuberville to Sessions' recusal.

Tuberville will face off against Jones in November.

Contributing: William Cummings, Brian Lyman, Stephen Gruber-Miller, and Nick Coltrain

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/07/22/2020-election-democrats-republicans-both-see-congressional-primary-runoff-upsets/5369587002/

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Congressional upsets: Progressives, candidates of color, and GOP outsiders net primary wins - USA TODAY

Solving Americas race-related problems is hard. So hard that nobody really has any clue how to do it. Burning down an auto-parts store isnt going to help. But forcing people to attend reeducation seminars also seems unlikely to work.

Just as we spend more time watching TV than training for marathons, we lapse into doing whats easy. And whats easy, when it comes to race, is pretending to be outraged about commonly used words. Trying desperately not to get canceled, bosses are trying to think ahead about what words might create a fake Duraflame firestorm of anger, and preemptively ruling ordinary words out of bounds.

At the Los Angeles Times, for instance, an editor has said the word looters, which has been used many times in the paper, now has a pejorative and racist connotation and that anyone who is inclined to use the word should talk to your immediate supervisor. Translation: Best not use the word at all, if you want to stay employed. So what to call looters? Non-paying shoppers? That doesnt quite tell the story: Ordinary shoplifters dont usually bust up all the windows. How about self-appointed retail-justice-commandos? Revolutionary mass goods-redistribution agents?

Harvard, which in 2015 abolished the name House Master for professors in charge of residential houses, is being sweated by a group called the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard that decided to be triggered by the term Board of Overseers, an alumni panel dating back to the 17th century that selects the university president. Past members include John F. Kennedy. The Coalition proclaimed that the name must be changed because Overseer also refers to men hired by plantation owners during that same time period to violently control and abuse enslaved people. Plantation overseers were paid to elicit the most work out of enslaved etc. I didnt finish the paragraph because my stupidity alarm was ringing in my ears. In June, the University of Louisville ditched the name overseer from student government organizations because of slavery.

In Houston, a Realtors association announced it would no longer use terms such as master bedroom or master bathroom not because any sane person ever associated a nice Mediterranean-style 4BR with Kunta Kinte getting whipped in Roots but because some yellow-blazered property guru thought this would be a way of expressing generalized racial niceness. Is any single black person better off because of this word-juggling? No, but people are confusing gestures with actions more than ever.

Twitter, which is saturated with woke-campus paranoia, this month announced that it was blacklisting the word blacklist, along with other supposedly non-inclusive terms such as grandfathered (ageist, I guess), guys (too gendered) and sanity check, which is something most of us could use a little more of in our lives, but Twitter desperately needs on a daily basis, the way Uma Thurman needed that adrenaline shot in Pulp Fiction.

But any noun that has any association with anything bad in anyones mind, or ever did at any point in history, is now under scrutiny. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says the Texas Rangers name is racist. Now that the woke left has succeeded in getting the Washington Redskins to change their name a decision that despite nonstop cheerleading by the media never enjoyed more than 29 percent support in polls every other team name is under scrutiny.

The teams name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen, Attiah wrote.

Wait till she finds out what cowboys did. For that matter, doesnt the term Vikings trigger deep-seated fears of marauding, raping and pillaging, often carried out by people wearing horns they had cut out of the heads of innocent animals? I feel unsafe. Clearly the Minnesota football franchise should stop celebrating a people associated with bloodshed and rename themselves the Conflict De-Escalation Counselors. Rethinking every noun in America is the only way forward, people. Or do you want to be considered one of the Klansmen?

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.

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These are the innocuous words progressives want to ban you from using - New York Post

WASHINGTON Congress went two-for-two swatting down measures to slash the national security budget by $74 billion, rejecting a proposal Wednesday from Sen. Bernie Sanders to redirect the money toward domestic needs.

The Senate voted 23-77 against an amendment to its version of the $740.5 billion annual defense policy bill. Progressives floated the plan to use defense dollars (excluding salaries and health care of military personnel) to address the pandemics economic fallout.

The amendments sponsors argued the social spending would better align with peoples needs and views, and that national security should be redefined in the wake of the global pandemic. They said the military budget is loaded with waste and unjustly benefits defense contractors.

Given all the unprecedented crisis the country faces, now is not the time to increase the Pentagons bloated $740 billion budget, said Sanders, I-Vt. At a time when 30 million Americans are in danger of losing their jobs, now is not the time to be spending more on national defense than we did during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the Korean War.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., encouraged senators to vote against the amendment. McConnell accused Democrats of trying to decimate the defense budget and chided Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for throwing Sanders his support.

The Democratic leader, who in almost every floor speech tries to accuse this administration of being too soft on Americas adversaries, wants to literally decimate our defense budget to finance a socialist spending spree, McConnell said. Defense spending demonstrates our will to defend ourselves and our interests in a dangerous world. Keeping our nation safe is our foremost constitutional duty. We cannot shirk it.

Progressives hoped to spark an internal debate among Democrats, who were evenly split by the Senate vote.

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SASCs ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the amendment would jeopardize defense-related jobs and upend the carefully negotiated bipartisan budget agreement from 2018, which set spending levels for defense and domestic spending for two years. He acknowledged Congress needs to address historically neglected communities.

This across-the-board approach, its good for a headline, its good to make a point, but were here to make policy, and I hope we do make policy, Reed said.

Winning 23 Democratic votes was the most significant step forward in recent years, to reduce the militarys budget, Sanders said in a statement afterward.

We are going to continue building a political movement which understands that it is far more important to invest in working people, the children, the elderly, and the poor than in spending more on defense than the next 11 nations combined, he said.

On Tuesday, the House rejected a companion bill, 93-324, which is roughly a 3-to-1 margin. Democrats split, 92-139, while 185 Republicans voted no.

After the House vote, advocates and the measures co-sponsors said change was on the horizon.

Ninety-three members of Congress stood together to oppose a bloated $740 billion defense budget, tweeted Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Though our amendment didnt pass, progressive power is stronger than ever. We will keep fighting for pro-peace, pro-people budgets until it becomes a reality.

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Progressive effort to cut defense fails twice in Congress - DefenseNews.com