Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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Why would they do this? That question rises inevitably from a new wave of so-called flash-mob robberies, thieves by the dozens invading retail stores to simply take what they want. It’s happened in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Maryland. Retailers ranging from Nordstrom to 7-Eleven have been hit. For some, the search for answers will be an invitation to uncork pet theories about poverty, permissiveness or punishment. But none of those things is unique to this era. T...
The Nazis are coming. That, to a distressing extent, is the crux of the argument being mounted by some of those who refuse to obey vaccine mandates. Last Sunday, a group of them even showed up at the Bronx office of New York State Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz with yellow Stars of David affixed to their clothes. For those who don’t know: Beginning in 1939, the Nazis required Jews to wear such stars with the word “Jew” written inside on their clothing for easy ident...
She slammed down her white privilege like you’d slam down an American Express black card. Which is to say, with supreme confidence. Two months after posting video of herself in the mob of right-wing thugs who stormed the U.S. Capitol, Jenna Ryan went on Twitter to taunt her detractors. “Definitely not going to jail,” she wrote. “Sorry I have blonde hair white skin a great job a great future and I’m not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade.” This month, Ryan...
Maybe white students deserve more credit than they get. Maybe — apologies to The Who — the kids are all right. Leo Glaze seems to think so, based on a tweet I chanced upon recently. In it, he described himself as an educator who has spent his career in predominantly white private middle schools. “I think I teach ... history about as hard & honest as any teacher in america,” he wrote. “And when kids learn the truth about this country, they’re shocked and pissed off they’ve bee...
Condoleezza Rice wants to move on. She concedes that what happened on Jan. 6 was “wrong.” It was, she told the hosts of “The View,” an “assault on law and order, and an assault on our democratic processes.” And Rice, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, thinks those who attacked and ransacked the U.S. Capitol should be punished. That day, she said, made her cry for the first time since Sept. 11. So yes, it was a terrible day. It was a stunning da...
I’ve got something to say about “you people.” That, as you may recall, was how I referred, in a recent column, to Mike Pence and others who have apparently sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Florida taco bowl connoisseur who used to be president. It left a handful of readers well and truly irked. As one of them put it: “’You people?’ How dare you lump all Trump voters like that.” Well, dear reader, I cannot tell a lie. That objectifying language was no accide...
Dear Mike Pence: Most of them are fervid adherents of bizarre conspiracy theories and fascist dogmas that might yet burn this country down. Many of them spew a noxious slurry of racial, religious and sexual hatreds that defame the principles we purport to hold dear. And on Jan. 6 of this year, a mob of them broke into the U.S. Capitol. They injured police officers. They drove Congress from its own house. They looted government property. They called for federal officials — i...
Maybe Facebook can’t be fixed. Did anyone ever think of that? As a whistleblower releases damning information, as Congress holds another hearing into the harm the company does, the implicit assumption is that the social-media giant can be reformed, that with the right combination of algorithmic tweaks and legislative remedies, it can cease being a malevolent force. Even whistleblower Frances Haugen says that her aim in giving a trove of embarrassing internal documents to t...
Here’s what happened when Ruby Bridges went to school in 1960. Four federal marshals escorted her. She walked through a mob of outraged white people. They called her names. They threatened to poison her. And to lynch her. They held up a small casket with a black doll inside. One Southern belle explained to a reporter why she and other New Orleanians felt it necessary to come out first thing in the morning and scream at a 6-year-old girl. “We’re white people,” she shrieke...
Those pictures are traumatizing. That’s because they contain so much more than what’s in them, so much more than horse-mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents at the Rio Grande in Texas, running down and flogging would-be Haitian immigrants. No, those pictures contain George Floyd and forced removal from ancestral land, contain internment camps and the Pettus Bridge, contain every time the state, in its awful power, came down like a hammer on the head of the tired and poor yea...
It was a day that did not end. It went on for days, it went on for weeks, it went on for years. But then you look up and somehow, 20 years have gone, and you realize with a start that you can’t recall the last time you thought of Sept. 11, 2001. “We’ll go forward from this moment,” I wrote. And we did. And we have. So much so that maybe the events of that day begin to feel a little distant. So it’s shocking how easily it all comes back. Indeed, to review the old footage i...
It’s been five years since I first speculated in this space about the end of American democracy. In doing so, I felt like a man climbing out on an especially creaky limb. But as hyperpartisanship rose to ever more bizarre extremes, as the misinformation crisis left ever more people babbling angry gobbledygook, as voter suppression resurrected the zombie of Jim Crow and as Donald Trump swore an oath he didn’t mean, that limb began to feel like bedrock. Even so, I struggled wit...
He said many profound things that day. He said America had given African Americans “a bad check.” He said he had come to remind the nation of “the fierce urgency of now.” He said we might hew “out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” He said, “I have a dream.” But as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual heirs prepared to commemorate his great oration and the 1963 March on Washington on their 58th anniversary Saturday, a case can be made that the words most appropriat...
Chris Rock described it as a kind of temper tantrum. This was in 2011. “When I see the tea party and all this stuff,” the comedian told Esquire, “it actually feels like racism’s almost over.” He likened the tea party — with its street theatrics, overwrought histrionics and overt panic at the idea of living under a Black president — to little kids throwing one last hissy fit at bedtime. “They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing yo...
They told them they had bad blood. What they actually had was syphilis, but the U.S. Public Health Service never shared that diagnosis with the almost 400 African American men, most of them poor and under-educated sharecroppers, they recruited for a secret study at Tuskegee Institute in 1932. Indeed, health officials did little for those men for 40 years, except watch the progression of the disease. That was the goal of the study: to see what happens when syphilis is left...
Gunther Hashida killed himself last month. We don’t know why. At this writing, we don’t even know how. What we do know is that Hashida, an 18-year veteran of the D.C. police force, is the fourth cop to die by his own hand after responding to the Jan. 6 insurrection by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. What we do know, having heard testimony from four of Hashida’s colleagues before a House select committee, is that the cost of defending the Capitol was high, both in physi...
It’s not that we forget. But sooner or later, news becomes history, and the awful thing that happened loses its power to shock. You remember the emotions you felt, but you don’t re-experience them — not to any degree of sharpness or immediacy. One day, that will happen to the events of Jan. 6. One day, as was the case with Dec. 7 and Nov. 22, that day will primarily be one of remembered pain. But as Tuesday’s hearing into the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol vividly proved,...
We live in ignorant times. By now, surely this is obvious beyond argument to anyone who’s been paying attention. From the Capitol insurrectionist who thought he was storming the White House to Sen. Tim Scott’s claim that “woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy” to whatever thing Tucker Carlson last said, ignorance is ascendant. Yet, even by that dubious standard, what happened recently in Tennessee bears note. According to a story by Brett Kelman of the Tennessean newspap...
It was, let us say, an interesting weekend for democracy. Call it a tale of two cities. One is Dallas, where thousands of so-called “conservatives” — the word has less meaning by the day — gathered in support of Donald Trump and his ongoing efforts to delegitimize a free and fair election that he lost. The other is Havana where thousands of Cubans took to the streets to demand an end to a 62-year reign of communist repression. The occasion in Dallas was the Conserv...
I owe a lot to Gary Mahoney. He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer recall the details of our disagreements. What I do remember is realizing that he was good and that I had to up my game — tighten my reasoning, sharpen my logic — if I hoped to stay in the ring with him. He made me better in the s...
One wonders sometimes if the Democrats really get it. As needed voting-rights reform goes down in flames because some of them thought it more important to defend the filibuster than the ballot, there arises an uneasy conviction that the party does not quite grasp the gravity of the moment, the urgency of the emergency. The filibuster is a vital safeguard, yes. So was the crow’s nest on Titanic. But once the ship plowed into that iceberg, its importance was sharply diminished,...
The morning bell rang at Republican High (“Home of the Fightin’ Pachyderms”) as students shuffled in. Gretchen Niedermeyer dry swallowed a couple of pre-emptive aspirins and reminded herself as she did every morning that she was just 16 months and — a glance at the calendar — seven days from her pension. “Good morning, class,” she said. “As you know, oral reports on African-American history are due this morning.” She ignored a chorus of groans. “Tommy, you go first.” Tommy We...
Dear Sen. Joe Manchin: It has only been 56 years. As Americans, we are pleased to call ourselves one of the world’s oldest democracies. We are actually one of the world’s newest. Democracy, after all, is government shaped by the will of the people. But until 1920, roughly half the people were not allowed to vote, disqualified by dint of gender. And until 1965 — 56 years ago — roughly 10 percent were restricted by color of skin. So American democracy is not even as old as you...
There is no such thing as the united states. As an era of medical mask mandates draws to a close and we begin to ponder lessons learned, that one should top the list. Not to overstate the case. To our credit, we are a nation that has always united in times of national crisis. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, when the Russians launched Sputnik, when John Kennedy was murdered, when terrorists flew planes into skyscrapers, we ceased, albeit briefly, to be red or blue or black or...
Fifty years ago. Left-wing terrorists exploded a bomb at the U.S. Capitol. An Army officer was convicted in the massacre of civilians at My Lai. Vietnam chewed up another 2,414 American lives. And across the country, needles were lowered for the first time to the grooved surface of a certain spinning vinyl disc, and there came the murmur of a party -- "a groovy party, man," one of the guests pronounced it in the parlance of the time. A sinuous saxophone twined among the...
