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By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Back in 1980, when I was a young activist living in Boston, I had the opportunity to hear Clarence Norris speak. He was the last surviving Scottsboro Boy. He died in 1989. Norris came to Boston to rally support for...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Robust freedom of speech has been one of the greatest things about America. Mouthing off has been largely protected, whatever your political point of view. However, the scope of our First Amendment freedom is...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Early in the “Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx wrote these famous words: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Whatever one thinks of Marx, it is undeniable that class...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. With all the stories about Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, I think the main story has been lost. Biden still has time to use his pardon power to good purpose and he has started. He had used the pardon power...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. From the first moment you enter the federal government, you learn about the obligation to protect federal documents. All federal employees must complete record management training which includes mandatory annual...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. I expect that for the next one hundred years historians of all stripes will be analyzing and debating our last presidential election. It was pivotal and it marks a turning point where a plurality of voters decided...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. As people sort through election results, one thread that has commonly emerged is the idea that Trump won because he was the “change” candidate. He was the disruptor, who was anti-establishment. This supposedly...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. I admit to a fascination with the holes in American history. That is, the time periods outside our blockbuster events like the Revolution, the Civil War, and the 20th-century World Wars. There are periods where...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Outside New Orleans, there is a historical site, the Whitney Plantation, dedicated to showing the history of slavery. It is an indoor and outdoor museum. For many years, the place operated as a sugar, indigo and...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. On US Highway 80, in the middle of a 54-mile stretch between Selma and Montgomery, there is a small unmarked memorial on the hillside near the road. It is a rectangular, fenced-in space dedicated to the memory of...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Almost nine years ago, in these pages, I started writing about Donald Trump and fascism. Then I raised the question of whether Trump and his MAGA movement were fascist. My Jewish, anti-fascist antennae were...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. We have just witnessed two back-to-back monster hurricanes, Helene and Milton. The storms were supercharged by climate change. The storms passed over ultra-warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. The heated waters...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. There is a quote from the writer Edward Abbey that I have always liked. “…there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. During election campaigns, many wild and hyperbolic things get said. One comment that pushed my buttons was Donald Trump’s statement that Jews would bear much of the responsibility if he lost the election. The logic...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to go on a newly designed civil rights tour of the South organized by the Nation Magazine. I had been on an earlier civil rights trip in 2023. This trip started in New...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. Most political coverage of the presidential election has treated the contest as a horse race between two conventional candidates. I would suggest that framing doesn’t do justice to the Harris-Trump match-up. We are...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. When it is election season, political parties typically pose to be seen as a friend to the working class. Nowhere is that more true than in the case of the Republican Party. No matter how anti-labor the party...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. For all the words written about Donald Trump, not much effort has been made to place him in historical context. There is a demagoguery tradition in America that Trump fits in. The tradition goes far beyond boldness...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot. In her novel, “The Nightingale,” Kristin Hannah vividly recreates the mass deportation of Jews from France by the German Nazi occupiers during World War II. The brutality, violence and misery of the enterprise are...

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD

Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.In the annals of American history there have been some truly horrible Supreme Court decisions. I have always thought Dred Scott v Sandford was the worst. Saying African Americans had no claim to freedom or citizenship...