Sacha Kljestan, Brad Guzan and Melissa Ortiz react to Norway’s 2-1 win over Brazil to advance to the Quarterfinals. Erling Haaland remains hot and scores a b…
Day: July 5, 2026
#ICYMI: #MEMRI Welcomes Blen Mamo Diriba As Special Advisor To #Ethiopia Studies Project ow.ly/AWzc50ZjLw0
Iran’s top officials and brothers of the country’s new supreme leader have emerged into public view to attend the funeral prayers for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, signaling confidence in their safety as Iran pushes back on U.S. demands in negotiations to permanently end the war. Crowds of hundreds of thousands called for revenge over the Feb. 28 attack that killed the 86-year-old supreme leader and other top officials, triggering the war. Some hard-liners called for the assassination of U.S. President Donald Trump. Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has yet to make an appearance in the funeral ceremonies, which are unfolding over several days.
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Worth a watch…
Worth a watch…Proudofus.uk (@ProudofusUK)🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧
Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.
Not for what you done… But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧
So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖
Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.
They weren’t running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.
Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.
In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn’t hold a slave.
In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.
In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn’t vote themselves.
In 1807, Britain banned the trade.
Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.
The Treasury says it wasn’t paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.
From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓
In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.
In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿
Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.
That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧
So why haven’t you heard any of this?
Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.
The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.
We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.
This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.
We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.
If you can afford to support what we do: proudofus.co.uk/support
Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Video
— https://x.com/ProudofusUK/status/2073704654119047169
A MAJORITY OF THE SUPREME COURT decided last week to follow the obvious, black-letter text of the Constitution and uphold birthright citizenship. This should not have been a close call.
But the ruling—a 5–4 decision that Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional—showed that the justices were torn. And they’re hardly alone. When we conducted a focus group with Donald Trump voters on the eve of the decision, participants expressed an alarming degree of skepticism toward the nearly 160-year old legal precedent.
This was a group of Florida women who voted for Trump in 2024. Here’s Debbie:
This kind of thinking is grounded in the zero-sum mentality that Trump has always used to frame the issue of immigration. Foreigners take, Americans lose out. Many participants in the focus group viewed immigrants as a threat to the country and a drain on our resources, which is something like the median position for Republican voters today. Here’s Dianna:
Still, in this group, there was broad support among participants for those who come to America “the right way.” Here’s Tatiana, who emigrated from Ukraine and recently became a citizen:
Tatiana has seen this process from the inside. But oftentimes voters are not familiar with the byzantine, years-long, bureaucratic nightmare that is our immigration system. They just know that there is a process for citizenship, and they think that people should follow it.
This is what I call the moral alibi. In these voters’ telling, they are not hostile to immigrants coming to America. It simply becomes a process question: one about fairness and rules, as opposed to a question about being pro- or anti-immigrant.
Even so, the average Republican voter still isn’t nearly as hostile to immigration as Trump and Stephen Miller. Voters contain multitudes, and many sympathize with the plight of immigrants. Cyndi said she worried that Trump’s approach to immigration would endanger people who became citizens the right way, like her son-in-law, who earned his citizenship in high school:
She went on:
It’s something to think about as we think about global goodwill as well, when you start kicking people out of our country. And why are you doing it? Do you actually have a reason for it?
The attempt to end birthright citizenship was the administration’s most audacious effort yet to rewrite the Constitution around Trump’s warped view of immigration. And even though it failed, it has clearly further moved the frame of the debate. Many rank-and-file Republicans now sound a lot more like Trump and Miller on immigration than the immigration squishes/reformers whom I grew up admiring <cough, Marco Rubio, cough>. Immigration hawkishness spurred Trump’s rise in 2016 and propelled his return to office in 2024. And it is going to be a litmus test for any GOP presidential aspirant in 2028 and beyond.
That is likely to be Trump’s lasting legacy on this issue. He lost in court, but he won the debate inside his coalition.
Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, host of The Focus Group podcast, and author of How to Eat an Elephant, out on September 8.
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