Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 290 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
As we say goodbye to 2025 and move into the new year, it’s our custom to say goodbye to musicians who joined the ancestors this year. While sadly departed, they have left us with the everlasting gift of their music.
The list in the jazz genre alone is very long—too long to pay individual tributes in this post. But all of these luminaries are listed on a website named Jazz Passings.
Some of the artists who passed this year have already been acknowledged in Black Music Sunday posts. While I can only briefly note some of the passings, there will be more tributes in the comments section below this story.
January
Sam Moore, born Samuel David Moore on Oct. 12,1935, passed on Jan. 10, 2025.
Sam Moore, the tenor half of the scorching soul duo Sam & Dave — known for indelible hits like “Soul Man,”“Hold On, I’m Comin’” and “I Thank You” — died on Friday in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital after surgery, was confirmed by his wife and longtime manager, Joyce Moore. She said the exact cause was unclear.
At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
February was also the month we lost Jerry Butler, who was born Dec. 8, 1939, and passed on Feb. 20, 2025. Richard Williams wrote Butler’s obituary for The Guardian:
Singer nicknamed ‘the Iceman’ whose hits included Only the Strong Survive and Hey, Western Union Man
When a Philadelphia radio disc jockey gave the young Jerry Butler the nickname of “the Iceman”, it was in recognition of the singer’s avoidance of on-stage histrionics rather than any lack of warmth in his polished but ardent delivery.
Butler, who has died aged 85, had hits across three decades, with records that spanned the evolution of African-American popular music, from the gospel-influenced doo-wop of For Your Precious Love, aimed at the teenagers of the 1950s, through the suave balladry of Moon River and Make It Easy on Yourself in the 60s, to the sophisticated boudoir soul of I Want to Do It to You in the 70s.
There was a background to his unruffled demeanour. In his 2004 autobiography, titled Only the Strong Survive: Memoirs of a Soul Survivor, Butler gave credit to a teacher in the fifth grade at his elementary school in Chicago. Her name was Ernestine Curry and she taught “maths, English, history, music, etiquette and how to box”.
Roy Ayers, the vibraphonist, composer and jazz-funk pioneer behind "Everybody Loves the Sunshine," has died at the age of 84.
He died Tuesday in New York City after a long illness, according to a statement shared on his Facebook page.
Ayers was born in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 1940, to a musical family. Like a scene out of a movie, a 5-year-old Ayers boogie'd so hard at a Lionel Hampton concert that the vibraphonist handed Ayers his first pair of mallets.
"At the time, my mother and father told me he laid some spiritual vibes on me," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011.
Also in March we lost neo-soul, hip hop, and rap artist Angie Stone, who was born Dec. 18, 1961, and died in an automobile accident on March 1, 2025. She and R&B singer D’Angelo, who died later in 2025, shared a son. Peter Mason wrote Stone’s obituary for The Guardian:
Angie Stone, who has died aged 63 in a traffic incident, was an American soul singer and songwriter. She rose to international prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s with two albums, Black Diamond and Mahogany Soul, that spawned a pair of popular singles, No More Rain and Wish I Didn’t Miss You.
Eight further solo albums displayed Stone’s command not just of soul but of gospel, R&B and funk, often in collaboration with other songwriters and artists, including Prince (U Make My Sun Shine, 2001), Snoop Dog (I Wanna Thank Ya, 2004), Anthony Hamilton (Stay for a While, 2004) and Betty Wright (Baby, 2007).
Stone had first come to light in the late 70s as a member of the Sequence, a pioneering hip-hop trio whose much sampled 1979 single Funk You Up is generally cited as the first rap record released by an all-female group.
Jazz singer Andy Bey, who died at 85 on April 26, 2025, was a striking vision at the piano: a compact, muscley, mahogany-skinned man, half-smiling and lost in his own inscrutable world. Bey’s midnight-blue bass baritone was full of tension and drama; he colored his phrases with growls, hums, soft wails and gospel-like melisma. His work was full of jarring contrasts. He could leap into a satiny falsetto then sink down onto a rumbling, subterranean low note. A featherweight passage on piano might give way to a crashing, dissonant chord.
In June we lost Sylvester Stewart, who you know as Sly Stone. Born onMarch 15, 1943, he died on June 9, 2025. His official websitehas his full biography but if you get a chance, read his AUWA Books autobiography titled “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” which was written with Ben Greenman.
Drummer, pianist, and composer Jack DeJohnette was born on Aug. 8, 1942, and died of congestive heart failure at the age of 83 on Oct. 26, 2025. The Jazz Passing website has posteda stunning listof all the musicians he worked with over the course of his career.
In a career that spans five decades and includes collaborations with some of the most iconic figures in modern jazz, NEA and Grammy winner Jack DeJohnette has established an unchallenged reputation as one of the greatest drummers in the history of the genre. The list of creative associations throughout his career is lengthy and diverse: John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Keith Jarrett, Chet Baker, George Benson, Stanley Turrentine, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, Joe Henderson, Freddy Hubbard, Betty Carter and so many more. Along the way, he has developed a versatility that allows room for hard bop, R&B, world music, avant-garde, and just about every other style to emerge in the past half-century.
Singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer Michael Eugene Archer, known to the world as D’Angelo, was born Feb. 11, 1974, and died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2025.
Julie Qauckenbush at Black Past wrote about D’Angelo:
D’Angelo was born to Mariann Smith and Luther Archer Sr., in Richmond, Virginia on February 11, 1974. His father and grandfather were both Pentecostal preachers which led to D’Angelo’s gospel roots. He began pursuing his musical talent on the piano and eventually started a band in his teens. At 16, his talent was recognized after winning awards three consecutive nights at the well-known Amateur Night contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
[...]
D’Angelo’s solo success is closely tied to his role in the Soulquarians, a neo-soul and jazz fusion group that formed in the early 1990s. While members of the group changed over time, the core four members included J Dilla, Questlove, James Poyser, and D’Angelo. His close connections with these artists led to heartfelt and authentic music, much of which was released as a part of his album “Voodoo.” These artists used each other’s unique styles to create their own sound that, as many said, restored black music to its former glory.
His album, “Voodoo,” won a Grammy Award for Best R&B Album in 2001.
Last, but not least, fans of the music of Puerto Rico are mourning and paying tribute to Rafael Ithier, founder of El Gran Combo, who was born Aug. 29, 1926, and passed on Dec. 6. NPR’s Isabella Gomez Sarmiento wrote “Rafael Ithier, a legend of salsa music, dies at 99”:
For decades, El Combo served as an informal training ground for dozens of salsa musicians, leading to the nickname "la universidad de la salsa" (the university of salsa), which was also the title of a 1983 album. But even as the group's lineup changed, Ithier remained its faithful leader, recording dozens of albums and performing on stages around the world. In 2015, El Gran Combo received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Latin Grammys.
Following news of Ithier's death, musicians, collaborators and politicians took to social media to share their condolences. "Ithier leaves behind an eternal legacy in salsa," wrote the Latin Recording Academy. "Thank you, maestro, for a life dedicated to music."
Within the mainline Linux kernel already is the SteelSeries HID driver for supporting basic battery monitoring on the Arctis 1 and Arctis 9 gaming headsets. But a new patch series posted this morning to the Linux kernel mailing list overhaul this SteelSeries HID driver support. The patches take the support to 25+ different Arctis headset models and provide more comprehensive driver support...
The This Week In Plasma series written by KDE developer Nate Graham has been a great way to keep-up with all of the interesting KDE Plasma desktop developments over the past eight years. This Week In Plasma is regularly featured on Phoronix and always provides an interesting weekend look at the very newest innovations to land in Plasma. Unfortunately, This Week In Plasma will become less frequent or even go on hiatus without new volunteer contributors...
At the end of every Banner & Company episode — the very end, after the credits have rolled and the theme music fades out — there’s a little hidden feature that regular listeners are likely familiar with. We call it “the final question,” and it’s when we ask our guest to pull a slip of paper from a fish bowl (fish not included) and read what it says. On that paper is a question, left by a previous guest on the show. It’s a little bit random, but also an intentional way to connect all of our guests to each other.
So just for fun, for the last episode of the year we present a few of these “final questions” in sequence, from asker to answerer, in a way you can’t usually hear them.
Fish 4.3 is out today as the newest update to this user-friendly command line shell. Fish 4.0 released at the beginning of this year in porting the codebase from C++ to Rust and now before closing out 2025 they have out Fish 4.3...
As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software's performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0...
The Simple DirectMedia Library that is widely-used by many cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime now has better support for handling more mouse button events under Wayland...
Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Republicans started 2025 with the wind at their backs, following Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race and bolstered by Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
But by the end of the year, the party finds itself in retreat.
Trump is increasingly unpopular and isolated, presiding over a slowing economy thathas led multiple Republicans to flee for the exit—rather than face life in the minority during a lame duck presidency.
The point of Explaining the Right is discussing how the right arrives at their positions, but as 2026 begins, what needs to be explained is how the right blew 2025.
Bluesky bump
Almost immediately following the election, it became clear to many on the left that billionaire Elon Musk had put his thumb on the scale for Trump in multiple ways. When he wasn’t spending millions to elect Trump—and possibly breaking the law in the process—Musk was utilizing his ownership of X, formerly Twitter, to amplify his own content and right-wing narratives (including racism and antisemitism). As 2024 ended and Trump’s return to the presidency loomed, there was an exodus.
Blueskybenefited the most of all the rival social media services, and while conservatives initially cheered that they had inherited what remained of Twitter, they soon began to realize social media is a lot less fun without liberals to bully. Since then conservatives have begun to make tentative steps onto Bluesky, but their abuse and trolling is not allowed to be as toxic as it is on X.
Immediately after he was sworn in, Trumpbegan to make good on his promises to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Conservatives have opposed diversity on the basis of race, gender, and sexual orientation for decades, and under Trump, they have tried to enshrine their bigotry within the American government. Programs focused on diversifying those who work for the government came under attack, even if data shows such diversity to be a boon to public safety—either via services like air traffic control or the military.
Elon Musk’s devotion to Trump led to the creation of Musk’s infamous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Early in the year, Musk and a group of devotees were given free rein to pillage and destroy programs across the federal government. DOGE undermined multiple agencies and initiatives under the guise of cutting wasteful spending, but while the project succeeded at disastrous actions like cutting USAID and triggering starvation and the spread of disease, the amount of government cuts was far less than the “trillions” Musk and Trump touted.
Trump also fulfilled a campaign promise of vengeance against detractors and his perceived political enemies, particularly in the media. Heused his position to push phony claims that CBS News had altered video of former Vice President Kamala Harris, and instead of standing up to Trump and defending their journalism, CBS ultimately capitulated and installed a pro-Trump figure, Bari Weiss, to run its news operation.
The bullying of the media has been echoed in the leadership style of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon. A longtime advocateof faux masculinity during his time at Fox News, Hegseth spent the year constantly arguing that the military must adopt a “warrior” mentality.
The real-world manifestation of the new tough-guy regime? Embarrassing national security leaks on group chat. Purging capable transgender military members. And joking about likely war crimes in the form of bombing fishing boats.
Advocating for (alleged) sexual assault, promoting conspiracies
Many accounts of the 2024 election have credited the world of right-wing chauvinist podcasting for giving a boost to Trump’s campaign. In office, Trump—a serial sexual assailant himself—used the power of the presidency to pressure Romania’s government to go easy on Andew Tate and his brother. The Tates have been accused of rape and sexual assault and were welcomed to the U.S. by the world of pro-Trump content creators.
Even though he is the highest-ranking U.S. official,Trump returned to his safe space of advocating for conspiracy theories in the early days of his second term. Trump, accompanied by Musk, began circulating absurd conspiracies that the gold in Fort Knox had been removed under former President Joe Biden. Of course, the story wasn’t true—but that has never been an obstacle for the right before.
Trump repeatedly argued that the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have never happened on his watch and that he would solve it on his first day in office. Instead, when Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House, he came under attack in an Oval Office ambush. The right-wing media, given new positions of authority under Trump,used the opportunity to complain about Zelenskyy’s choice of clothing, insisting that he wear a proper suit before seeking Trump’s help in protecting his people from brutal Russian assault.
When he was busy not solving the Ukraine-Russia crisis, Trump was deeply involved in screwing up international trade. Dissatisfied with the economic recovery Biden had achieved after stimulating the weak Trump economy he inherited,Trump went wild with tariffs.
His mostly one-sided trade war has now hurt the domestic economy, leading to layoffs, a worsening job market, and increased costs for families.
The administration wasn’t just happy to attack diversity programs but instead gave a federal boost to the practitioners of slavery. Part of reversing course from Biden meant that Trumprolled back the name changes affixed to military bases, erasing names put in place to honor diverse American servicemembers, and instead restored base names meant to hail those who fought in favor of human bondage in the pro-slavery Confederacy.
Public media has been a reliable source of historical information for millions of Americans, so it was in line with Trump’s pro-Confederacy actions when he and congressional Republicansacted to defund public television and radio. Like other Republicans before him (most recently former President George W. Bush), Trump painted a target on Big Bird and tried to kill him and other programming of a similar nature.
Torture, another Bush initiative, wasback on the menu as the Trump administration celebrated sending deported people to facilities like CECOT prison in El Salvador. A few years ago the U.S. was condemning human rights abuses, but now figures like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posed for pictures using human suffering as a ghoulish backdrop.
The worm began to seriously turn by mid-year, and as figures like Hegseth were swept up in scandal and bad headlines, the right turned to a reliable boogeyman. Once again, the shadowy “deep state”was invoked as the puppet masters behind Republican failure. The administration, reflecting Trump, simply cannot admit when it screwed up. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of the “deep state,” mirroring the right’s decades of obsession with conspiracy.
Screw up the economy, attack everyone (and be racist)
Surprising no one who follows presidential politics, the economysoured under Trump. His performance has echoed other Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump during his first term. The rhetoric may change, but the underlying conservative ideology valuing the ultra-wealthy over the middle class continues to have a terrible batting average.
Instead of addressing his failings, Trumpcontinued to bully colleges and universities (with far too many caving in to his demands). The Trump teamthrew red meat to their bigoted conservative base by attacking “woke”—aka tolerance and equality. And for good measure, the administration and figures like Musk used their new prominence topush racist mythology like “white genocide,” not only as rhetoric but as official policy used to restrict nonwhite migration.
American cities were alsotargeted with federal force, part of the conservative tradition of demonizing regions of the country with large nonwhite populations. Brown people were also the target of Trump-ordered bombings, based onextremely specious logic that echoed the Republican-led war in Iraq.
The mainstream media has bent over backwards for Trump, even paying him off for legally dubious court cases. It didn’t stop his abuse. Trump and other Republicanswent after the press for not operating as cheerleaders for his policies and rhetoric. This was the latest salvo in the conservative propaganda campaign against the free press. They don’t want journalism; they want a media world that looks like Fox News everywhere.
Conservatives have along and sordid history with pedophilia. From former Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was an admitted pedophile, to Trump and his skin-crawling habit of sexualizing his underage daughter. Despite this, the party tried to smear Democrats on the issue.
This seriously unraveled as Trump and his team, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, worked to cover up the investigation into sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein after promising that it would expose the powerful. The result? Defections and rebuke, leading to a bipartisan congressional vote to release Epstein data.
When they weren’t aiding sex criminals, key administration figures like Stephen Miller were admitting that they walk in near-constant fear.Miller argued that fear of immigration, crime, and other purported threats meant that Trump was justified in using federal officers against cities.
This led to police-state style action, withfederal law enforcement usurping local control. This was the exact scenario conservatives have spent decades arguing would occur under Democratic presidents.
The fascist tendenciesexploded at the national level after the weaponized FCC was used in an abortive attempt to silence comedian Jimmy Kimmel. The backlash was fierce and swift, but the naked attempt to silence dissent was exposed for all to see.
Meanwhile, Trumphas continued to use Fox News not just to hire his key officials (leading to mistake after mistake), but as a source of policy decisions. The surest way to get Trump on board with an idea is to feature it in heavy rotation on the network.
Fox is a useful venue for the right to use in demonizing its ideological enemies. The network, working in concert with Republican officials, insists that left-wing detractors are terrorists—and theyall echo each other, attempting to turn spin into reality.
Republicans also stuck to their guns on their pet issues, using the Trump presidency toattack health care funding. More than a decade ago, the right tried to kill Obamacare. And even as the public has aligned with the Democratic health care policy more and more, the GOP keeps trying to undermine it.
Trump even tried to deprive poor people of food,attacking funding for the federal SNAP program as his administration was under fire for health care cuts.
Being so out of touch and expressly ideological hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Republicans lost key races in Virginia and New Jersey, and performed poorly elsewhere as financial conditions worsened and Democrats argued for affordability.
President Donald Trump did not win a second term because JD Vance was on the ticket. In virtually every poll imaginable, Vance continues to be received by Americans about as warmly as a peeled banana left out in the sun for three days.
In his first year as vice president, Vance has done little to dispel the perception that he is an opportunistic scumbag whose entire being is off-putting.
Trump and Vance teamed up to embarrass the United States and derail any meaningful efforts toward a peace deal in Russia’s war on Ukraine by publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during what was supposed to be a diplomatic press conference.
Vance came under fire from British veterans when he minimized the sacrifices that more than 600 service members made during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Vance called in to right-wing podcaster Vince Coglianese’s show and attempted to besmirch his predecessor, former Vice President Kamala Harris, saying that the main difference between the two is that he doesn’t drink before work.
Vance took a break frompraying for a deadly drone to hit its target to serve Marines lunch in Quantico, Virginia. It was the least he could do after endangering military service members by participating in a catastrophically compromised text thread, discussing war plans on an unsecure app.
Add Vance to the long list of MAGA weirdos wasting time spinning conspiracy theories about former President Joe Biden hiding acancer diagnosis while in office.
Thewildly unlikeable Vance returned to his home state of Ohio to speak at a steel plant in Canton. When asked about the “hundreds of thousands of Ohioans” whose Medicaid coverageis in jeopardy as a result of Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” Vance simply lied.
Vance visited Georgia, where he attempted to sell local GOP leaders on Trump’sincreasingly unpopular policies by attacking homeless people with mental health issues.
Vance spent a day hosting Charlie Kirk’s radio show, using his power to continue whitewashing the late conservative pundit while leveling threats at Trump’s political opponents.
Vance took time after one of his trademark lie-filled public appearances to stridently defend the Trump administration's efforts to squash freedom of speech.
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more...
Ah, the holiday season: a time to gather with friends and family and reminisce about the past year. And what could be better, when gathered with your nearest and dearest, than fondly recalling the many, many times that juries told the Trump administration to pound sand.
In any other administration, we would not all be so acutely aware of the actions of grand juries, in large part because federal prosecutors almost always secure indictments. The most recent data available, from 2010, showed that of 162,000 proposed indictments presented to federal grand juries, only 11 were no-billed, meaning the grand jury declined to indict
But these days, those are rookie numbers. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has managed to get no-billed over 11 times in just one year. And that’s not even counting how many times U.S. attorneys face-planted at trials.
Lindsey Halligan was a spectacular flop as Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Most recently, we got to witness the hilarity of a grand jury refusing to reindict New York Attorney General Letitia James not once but twice, which is quite the achievement. When a federal court ruled that Florida’s bestest insurance lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, was not the lawful occupant of the U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, the indictments of both James and former FBI Director James Comey got tossed. Hence the need to hurl the subpar James indictment at new grand juries, hoping they’ll bite.
While the frantic attempts to salvage Halligan’s indictment of James are the most high-profile embarrassments at the moment, the real superstar of getting no-billed is none other than Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News personality and current U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Pirro’s litany of failures is all the more impressive because, unlike Halligan, Pirro had a lengthy career as a prosecutor, district attorney, and county judge before going on Fox News as one of the cable channel’s louder howler monkeys. She actually does know how investigations and indictments and trials work. But rather than draw on that knowledge, she just keeps bringing comically inflated criminal charges, and D.C. juries just keep laughing in her face.
By September, Pirro had racked up at least seven no-bills. But never fear! She had a foolproof plan: charge some of these same people with misdemeanors instead, which doesn’t require a grand jury indictment. Take that, naysayers. Pirro may have overlooked the part where her office would still have to take these cases to trial and win in front of those juries.
After she tried three times to get a felony indictment against Sydney Reid for allegedly impeding ICE’s transfer of gang members, she dropped the charges down to a misdemeanor. A three-day trial ensued, wherein Pirro’s office attempted to prove that Reid had assaulted an FBI agent. The agent ended up with a lightly scraped hand from helping other federal agents shove Reid into a wall because they didn’t want Reid filming them.
It took roughly two hours for the jury to come back with a resounding not guilty verdict. Turns out the average juror perhaps isn’t a big fan of people being assaulted and charged for the not-crime of watching ICE.
And who can forget that after not managing to land a felony indictment against Sean Dunn for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent, Pirro thought the best thing to do with someone who had already become a folk hero in D.C. was to charge him with misdemeanor assault and take the case to trial. Somehow having the agent testify about the horror of a sandwich that “smelled of onions and mustard” being thrown at him did not lead to the citizens of the nation’s capital convicting Dunn.
Over on the other coast, it isn’t actually clear how many times Los Angeles grand juries have declined to go along with Acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli’s attempts to overcharge people arrested during protests there.
What we do know is that out of 38 felony cases his office filed against protesters, he got only seven indictments. Now, that doesn’t mean he got no-billed 31 times, a number that would dwarf even Pirro’s tally. His office may have decided to reduce the charges in some cases or dismiss them entirely.
In one instance where a grand jury wouldn’t indict, Essayli screamed at the prosecutor via speakerphone outside the grand jury room and told them to ignore the part of the federal government’s Justice Manual that says prosecutors should only bring cases they could win at trial. Terrific ethics you have there, Bill.
Grand juries in Chicago are also getting in on the fun. There, the U.S. attorney’s office couldn’t even get an indictment of a couple who were both carrying loaded guns at a protest outside the Broadview ICE facility. That’s probably because both Ray Collins and Jocelyne Robledo had lawful permits and never brandished their guns. Well, and maybe also because their alleged horrifying crime was just refusing to retreat when federal agents started pushing the crowd back.
That office also couldn’t secure an indictment of Nathan Griffin for allegedly trying to close a car door on a border patrol agent’s leg as they tried to get out of the vehicle. The agent ended up with a small gouge and some scrapes on his leg, but apparently a Chicago grand jury did not see that as worthy of charging Griffin with a felony, probably because it is not.
The administration’s siege of blue cities is a deliberate, intentional “fuck you” to the people who live there. Somehow it never occurred to them that the residents of those cities would take the opportunity to say that in return.
Greg Cook reports the death of Boston cartoonist Dan Moynihan, who leaves his wife Cathy and their 14-month-old son, Ben.
Dan was such a sweet and kind person, whose art was filled with wonder and joy. "I would say that’s a big theme for me," he told me when I interviewed him back in 2009, "believing that there’s more possibilities than seem obvious or that you would usually think of."
As you might expect, Boston 311 today is just completely filled with complaints about snow: Streets the city didn't plow or salt, sidewalks residents and businesses haven't plowed, a car with Florida plates that's been illegally parked in West Roxbury for a week that is now covered in snow, etc., etc., etc. But in the Seaport, one kvetcher has a more pressing complaint to file:
Man playing the drums on the Seaport Common
If you're unfamiliar with the Seaport Common, it's one of the few parks in a neighborhood that went up without any schools, libraries, houses of worship (save that one small Catholic chapel that was held over from the South Boston Waterfront) or cultural attractions (unless you count District Hall, which closed last year, its Web site since claimed by an Estonian casino site, or the Children's Museum, which, like the Our Lady of Good Voyage chapel, long predates the Seaport; OK, let's not forget the ICA).
Daily Kos staff spend our days immersed in the news, and this year the news had a very clear throughline: consequences. Over and over again, President Donald Trump, his allies, and his voters ran face-first into the reality they helped create—and we’ve been here to document it, explain it, and, when warranted, point and say “we told you so.”
“Fascist Santa” by Pedro Molina.
From MAGA true believers discovering that Russia isn’t the paradise they imagined, to billionaires, corporations, and institutions realizing too late that backing Trump was a terrible idea, these stories captured the moment ideological fantasy gave way to reality.
There’s anger in this list, and no small amount of dark humor, but it’s rooted in clarity, not cruelty. This is what it looks like when we refuse to normalize extremism, refuse to launder obvious lies or let powerful people and their useful MAGA idiots dodge responsibility for the damage they cause.
These stories helped us make sense of a chaotic year—and, sometimes, laugh through the rage—while keeping our eyes firmly on who’s responsible for the mess we’re all dealing with.
It’s been a pleasure sharing with you guys this utterly shitty political year. But next year we’re on the offensive as the Republican Party and MAGA spiral into chaos and civil war.
In November 2024, Democrat Josh Stein scored an emphatic victory in the race to become North Carolina’s governor, drubbing his Republican opponent by almost15 percentage points.
His honeymoon didn’t last long, however.
Two weeks after his win, the North Carolina legislature’s Republican supermajority fast-tracked a bill that would transform the balance of power in the state.
Its authors portrayed the131-page proposal, released publicly only an hour before debate began, as a disaster relief measure for victims of Hurricane Helene. But much of it stripped powers from the state’s governor, taking away authority over everything from the highway patrol to the utilities commission. Most importantly, the bill eliminated the governor’s control over appointments to the state elections board, which sets voting rules and settles disputes in the swing state’s often close elections.
Ignoring protesters who labeled the bill a “legislative coup,” Republicans in the General Assembly easily outvoted Democrats, then overrode the outgoing Democratic governor’s veto.
The maneuver culminated a nearly decade-long effort by Republican legislators, who have pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s chief executive — always a Democrat during that time frame — as well as the portfolios of otherexecutive branch officialswho are Democrats.
Over that period, lawmakers have attempted to transfer control or partial control of at least 29 boards, entities or important executive powers. In most cases, they succeeded.
As a result, Republicans now hold increased sway not only over North Carolina’s election board, but also over its schools, building codes, environmental regulations, coastal development, wildlife management, utilities, cabinet appointments and more. All had previously been under control of the governor.
“This is not what people voted for,” said Derek Clinger, a senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, an institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has studied the events in North Carolina.
“You should not be able to make the laws and then control who enforces them — just ask any fourth grader about the three branches of government,” Stein said in a statement to ProPublica. Lawmakers’ actions “throw the will of the voters into the trash can,” he added.
Initially, governors had some success using separation-of-powers arguments in lawsuits filed to challenge efforts to strip their powers. Even majority-Republican courts ruled in their favor, declaring laws that shifted authority directly from the governor to the legislature were unconstitutional.
More recently, though, legislators have found a loophole, writing laws that move traditional gubernatorial powers to elected executive branch officials who are Republicans. Since 2023, when the GOP won majorities on the state’s appellate courts, judges have increasingly rejected lawsuits aimed at blocking such legislation.
The North Carolina GOP’s effort to rein in executive power at the state level stands in sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to expand such power federally. Before the Supreme Court, for example, theadministration has arguedfor a “unitary executive” theory that would allow the president near-total control over personnel.
North Carolina Republican legislative leaders didn’t respond to interview requests or detailed emailed questions from ProPublica about the power shifts. In the past, Republicans have defended whittling down Democratic governors’ authority by pointing to similarly partisan moves byDemocrats decades ago, though these were on a much smaller scale.
Current and former lawmakers also say the power shifts reflect the vision of North Carolina’s founders, who deliberately made the state’s governor weak and its legislature strong to prevent abuses suffered under British rule.
“It’s never been co-equal, never will be, never intended to be,” said Paul Stam, who was the lame-duck Republican speaker pro tempore of the House when the General Assembly began its push to weaken the governor in 2016.
Republicans also dispute the notion that voters oppose reducing governors’ authorities.
“The people voted for a strong Republican majority in the legislature,” Sam Hayes, the former general counsel for North Carolina’s speaker of the House, said in an interview. “That role can involve reassigning the powers of the executive branch.”
After lawmakers took away the governor’s power to appoint the election board’s members, Hayes became its director. The board’s new Republican majority has handed control over North Carolina’s county election boards to conservatives, some of whom have moved to eliminate early voting sites favored by Democrats.
In recent years, states includingWisconsin,MichiganandKentuckyhave waged similar battles over separation of powers. In almost all cases, Republican-dominated legislatures have stripped powers from Democrats elected to statewide offices.
Still, North Carolina’s example has been particularly notable, critics say. According to ascholarly reviewby Clinger, the General Assembly’s power grabs in 2016 and 2024 are the most expansive in recent American history.
Note: Data covers December 2016 to December 2025. Sources: ProPublica review of North Carolina legislation and court cases; expert interviews.
Collectively, lawmakers have brought the powers of the state’s chief executive to a low ebb, said Christopher Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. In 2010, the textbook “Politics in the American States” ranked the institutional powers of North Carolina’s governor the third-weakest in the nation. By 2024, they ranked dead last.
“Soon,” Cooper said of the legislature, “they’re not going to have anything left to take.”
***
When the battles over the election board began in 2016, the joke among Republican lawmakers was that to get things done on elections policy, “you either need the Northern Hammer or the Sweet Southern Stammer.”
The Northern Hammer was Bob Rucho, a famously blunt senator originally from Massachusetts. The Sweet Southern Stammer was David Lewis, a genial Republican House member from rural North Carolina with a speech impediment and an uncommon mastery of election law.
The self-deprecating Lewis, a farmer and tractor salesman by trade, had helped design the gerrymandering strategies that, starting in 2010, handed Republicans long-term control of the legislature even in election cycles when Democrats won a majority of statewide offices.
The importance of controlling the election board — and the potential disastrousness of not controlling it — was clear in the 2016 gubernatorial race, a close contest between Republican Gov. Pat McCrory and his Democratic challenger, Roy Cooper.
Roy Cooper speaks at a campaign event in Charlotte, N.C., in Sept. 2024.
The board makes decisions that can affect election outcomes in myriad ways, such as deciding where and for how long early voting takes place. It picks the state’s election director and members of county election boards, which maintain voter registration lists and operate voting sites. It arbitrates postelection challenges from losing candidates.
As governors historically had, McCrory had appointed the five board members who oversaw the 2016 race, choosing three from his party and two from the opposing party as state law directed.
When Republican legislators launched their first effort to seize control of the board soon after, senior staffers figured it was payback for not helping McCrory.
“I viewed it as retaliation for the board not having played a partisan enough role,” said Katelyn Love, who was then an attorney for the board and went on to become its general counsel.
Lewis, who left the legislature in 2020, said he and other lawmakers were convinced that once appointment power passed to Cooper, he’d “stack the board” against Republicans. “In certain parts of the state,” he said, “elections really do come down to two or three votes, or a small percentage of votes, and we had no confidence” that Cooper’s appointees “would just treat us fairly.”
Republican legislative leaderscalled a special session, proposingmultiple billsthat redirected powers from the governor, often to the legislature itself.
“We said, ‘You know what: We’re the legislature and we decide who appoints who,’” Lewis recalled. “Instead of letting Roy do it, why don’t we put folks in place that kind of support the way we see things?”
Lawmakers targeted not only the elections board, but also Cooper’s ability to hire and fire more than 1,000 political appointees in state government and to choose members of thestate’s Industrial Commission, which handles matters such as worker safety claims. They took aim at some positions in part because they came withbig paychecks, Lewis acknowledged; a seat on the Industrial Commission pays more than $160,000, for example.
“The truth is, a lot of the importance of some of these positions is who gets to appoint whose friends to the board,” Lewis said. “It’s kind of considered a plum job.”
Theelection board measurewas framed as making oversight more bipartisan. Indeed, it increased the number of board members to eight and required even numbers of Republican and Democratic appointees.
But the governor controlled only four of those seats. The legislature appointed the other four. Also, in even-numbered years — those when federal elections are held — the law required the board’s chair to be “a member of the political party with the second-highest number of registered affiliates.” At the time, that meant a Republican. Since the chair shaped what matters were taken up and had other bureaucratic influence, this gave the party an edge.
Lewis insisted the restructured board was designed to even the scales — between the parties and between the governor and the legislature. “If one side can block the other, then bad things don’t happen,” he said. “And if both sides can work together, you can get a more positive resolution.”
Less than two weeks after McCrory conceded, the legislature quickly forced through the changes, despite protests so intense they led tonumerous arrests.
Cooper quickly filed a court challenge, arguing that the law violated the state’s constitution and stymied his ability to enact his policies. The separation of powers isexplicitly enshrined in North Carolina’s constitution, which declares, “The legislative, executive, and supreme judicial powers of the State government shall be forever separate and distinct from each other.”
Democrats also made the case that the new, evenly split election board was intended to produce gridlock that effectively favored Republicans, keeping in place the election director chosen by McCrory’s board and blocking steps that required majority approval, such as establishing early voting sites.
In March 2017, atrial court struck downmost of the legislative changes, including those affecting the elections board, ruling they illegally robbed the governor of executive authority.
Lewis and other Republican leaders went back to the drawing board. Small groups of election specialists and legislative aides met early in the morning or late at night, surviving on food from Bojangles, the much-loved fried-chicken-and-biscuits chain. They sketched out priorities and drafted legislative language on whiteboards, then waited for the opportune moment to introduce a bill.
According to Lewis and other Republicans, they were determined to find a winning formula, no matter how many shots it took. “We felt like we had every right to do that because the constitution invested the legislature with defining the responsibilities” of the governor, Lewis said.
A month after the trial court rejected lawmakers’ first stab at breaking the governor’s grip on the elections board, the legislature tried again. Itpassed another lawthat altered the board inmuch the same waysas the first, expanding it to eight members, for example. But this time, instead of giving the legislature half the appointments, the law directed the governor to make all of them — from lists provided by the chairs of the state’s Democratic and Republican parties.
Cooper, calling the measure the “the same unconstitutional legislation in another package,” swiftly filed another legal challenge. For almost a year, as the case wound through the courts, he refused to make appointments under the proposed rules. The board’s professional staff kept up withadministrative tasksbut struggled to find workarounds for responsibilities handled by board members. They wentto court on multiple occasionsto get judges to rule on election protests and challenges in the board’s absence.
“It was very disruptive and chaotic, and a drain on the agency’s limited resources,” Love said.
Thethird cametwo months later, when lawmakerspassed a bill that resurrected many elementsof the previous one, but with a few new tweaks. In this version, the governor chose the board’s eight members — four Republicans and four Democrats — from lists submitted by each party, plus an additional tie-breaking member, unaffiliated with either party, from nominees provided by the new board.
Despite these differences, the outcome was much the same: another lawsuit from Cooper and, eventually,another loss in court.
Republican legislators realized they were likely to lose the case, so they also decided to try a strategy that took the issue out of the hands of the court system, Lewis said. They puta constitutional amendmenton the November 2018 ballot that proposed removing the governor’s power to choose election board members and giving that authority to the legislature.
“You put your idea out for the people,” Lewis said. If “they vote for it, then it’s no longer unconstitutional.”
Of the six constitutional changes on the ballot that year, the election board proposal and one other — an amendment altering who picked judges to fill empty or added court seats —targeted traditional gubernatorial powers.
The measures were hotly contested, attracting about $18 million in spending by groups for and against them. Lewis said that Republican internal polling showed clear support for the amendments, but the final tallies showed a notable divide: Voters passed four of the measures but rejected the two that stripped powers from the governorby roughly 2 to 1.
At the end of 2018, Republicans temporarily waved the white flag,passing a lawthat returned the governor’s control over the election board. In 2020, Lewis relinquished his longtime role as the House’s election policy point man afterpleading guilty to charges related to using campaign fundsfor personal expenses, including rent. Hethen resigned.
Today, Lewis sells cars in a small town on North Carolina’s swampy southeastern coast and does occasional political consulting. Looking back, he still believes he did the right thing. “I was following the will of the voters that gave us the majority in the legislature to do these things.”
***
Over the next few years, the elections board made one critical decision after another in close or disputed elections, underscoring its importance. In one instance, itcalled a new electionin a congressional race tainted by anillegal schemeto fraudulently collect andfill out mail-in ballots.
Republican legislative leaders bided their time, waiting for another opportunity to launch a takeover. Karen Brinson Bell, chosen as the state’selection director in May 2019by Cooper’s appointees, said lawmakers never let her forget the tenuousness of her position.
“I knew from the day I started that my days were numbered,” she said. “I was never naive to the fact that there would likely be other attempts to change the makeup of the board.”
Bell said that at a December 2022 meeting held by the National Conference of State Legislatures in West Virginia, Warren Daniel, a Senate Republican who worked on election matters, told her that he and his colleagues planned to take over the board and to reduce early voting. (Daniel didn’t respond to ProPublica’s questions about the incident.)
In October 2023, the moment Bell had long expected finally arrived. The legislature’s Republican supermajorityintroduced a new billto remake the election board. It shifted control over appointments to the General Assembly’s majority and minority leaders and put some of the board’s administrative functions under the secretary of state.
On decisions where the board’s four Republicans and four Democrats deadlocked, the law gave Republicans a decided advantage. If members couldn’t agree on an executive director, for example, the legislature’s majority leaders would choose one. If the board couldn’t agree on a plan for expanded early voting (championed by Democrats), then each county would have just one early voting site, the minimum required by law.
The measure was similar to its predecessors, but the courts that would decide its legality were vastly different.
North Carolina state Sen. Warren Daniel (left and standing) presides over the Senate Committee on Elections while it considers legislation to redraw the state's U.S. House district map on Oct. 20 in Raleigh N.C.
Since the demise of the previous election board law, Republicans had won 14 appellate court races in a row and held majorities on the state’s higher courts. The Supreme Court’s chief justice,Paul Newby, had made it clear he saw no legal impediment to whittling down the governor’s portfolio, writing asharp dissentto a ruling thatstruck down an earlier attempt to limit gubernatorial power.
In February 2024, a trial courtissued a decision that reframed the debateover the constitutionality of gubernatorial power transfers. This time, the case didn’t involve the election board. It dealt instead with a law that used a variety of mechanisms to strip away Gov. Roy Cooper’s control over seven other entities that managed everything from coastal resources to building codes.
A three-judge panel found three of the seven transfer schemes legal because power passed from the governor to anotherelected executive branch member. “While the Governor is the chief executive, other elected officers who are members of the Council of State are also vested with executive power,”the judges wrote.
Michael Gerhardt, a constitutional law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies issues related to separation of powers, was aghast, saying the decision reflected partisanship rather than sound legal analysis. The court was “ignoring the fact that the governor was actually elected” and “allowing the state legislature to transfer some of his authority to Republican officials,” he said.
Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the conservative John Locke Foundation, argued the panel’s finding was consistent with North Carolina’s history of splitting executive power among multiple executive branch officials. He dismissed Gerhardt’s comments as partisan “sour grapes.”
“The Democrats are losing, and they don’t like the fact that the Republicans are winning, so they’re casting doubt on what the conservative courts are saying,” he said.
The ruling didn’t affect the October 2023 election board measure, which hadn’t been implemented, blocked by a separatetrial courtdecision. But after Stein’s double-digit win in the 2024 governor’s race, Republican lawmakers again used a legislative session ostensibly about hurricane relief to introduce a new, superseding measure that would finally put the election board under their party’s control.
It used a power transfer strategy similar to the ones that had won court approval the previous February, placing election board appointments in the hands of Dave Boliek, a Republican newly elected to the executive branch office of state auditor. Boliek could choose three of the board’s five members from his own party, giving Republicans their long-sought majority.
No other state auditor in America manages elections and Boliek had no experience doing so, but heexpressed enthusiasmabout taking on the job.
“Governor Josh Stein doesn’t have any experience supervising elections either,” Boliek told ProPublica in an email exchange. “Leading a public office requires a willingness to learn and serve — and I’m a quick study.”
In the same law, legislators also redirected Stein’s authority to make appointments to an array of other boards and entities and stripped powers from other newly elected Democrats, including the lieutenant governor, attorney general and superintendent of public instruction.
Josh Stein is introduced by Roy Cooper at a primary election night party in Raleigh, N.C., on March 5.
Stein sued to prevent the changes from taking effect, but in May, the Newby-ledSupreme Court declined to block Boliek’s takeoverof the election board. Although litigation continues, he has started transforming election oversight, both statewide and locally, in ways that would be hard to undo.
Some of Boliek’s board members have long histories in Republican politics and efforts to tilt state elections in the party’s favor. The new chair, Francis De Luca, had leda conservative institutethatsued to contestMcCrory’sloss in the 2016 racefor governor. (De Luca didn’t respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)
Another new Republican member was Rucho, the so-called Northern Hammer who’d worked on election policy with Lewis. The new board will be fair, he promised. “My goal is to level the playing field so that everyone is playing by the same rules,” he said.
Bell’s replacement as election director, Hayes, has overhauled the board’s 60-member staff, though historically it’s been nonpartisan and largely remained when new leadership took over. Since Hayes took charge, at least nine staffers have left or been placed on leave, according to interviews andpublished reports. At the same time, the board has added seven new political appointees, many of whom have close ties to Republican politicians.
“It’s a nonpartisan shop shifting to a partisan shop,” said one staff member who asked not to be identified, fearing retaliation.
Hayes insisted the board remains nonpartisan and described the changes in staff as “nothing out of the ordinary.” He described his goals as “repairing relationships with the General Assembly” and working to “honor the letter and spirit of the law.”
“If we do that,” he said, “I believe that we will rebuild trust in elections here.”
Under Hayes’ leadership, the board alsomoved swiftlytosettle a lawsuitfiled against it earlier this year by the U.S. Justice Department, agreeing to require tens of thousands of voters to provide missing registration information or risk not having their ballots count in state races,voter advocacy groups say. Bell hadopposed taking such steps.
Hayes said he settled the suit with the “intent of honoring federal law” and to clean up the state’s voter rolls, which Republicans argue have been badly mismanaged.
The new leadership has also taken steps that could limit early voting locations in the state, especially those in Democratic strongholds.
Boliek hired longtime Republican operative Dallas Woodhouse,who has advocatedforrestricting early voting, to fill a newly created role partly focused on early voting. In October, Woodhouseemailed Republican board chairsdirecting them to consider moving polling sites out of urban areas, where there are more Democrats, to “areas that are outside of urban cores,” where Republicans tend to hold the majority.
So far, conservative majorities in at least eight counties have moved to limit early voting sites or weekend hours sought by Democrats. At least two have rejectedsites near universities, including a sitenear a historically Black college.
In an interview, Boliek told ProPublica there was no plan to reduce early voting sites in areas that lean Democratic. He later explained in an email that Woodhouse “simply answered inquiries from board chairs.”
Hayes communicates with Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer whotried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, and Woodhouse regularly attends video calls held by the North Carolina chapter of Mitchell’s national organization, the Election Integrity Network.
Boliek said Woodhouse talks to a variety of organizations from across the political spectrum, adding,“I don’t think people should be concerned.” He said the board was dedicated to making “it easy to vote and hard to cheat in North Carolina.”
Hayes said Mitchell and other network leaders aren’t “receiving special access to me or treatment from this office” and that he talks to people on both sides of the aisle.
All told, Republican legislators have successfully transferred power over 17 of the 29 boards, entities and important executive prerogatives they’ve targeted since 2016, a ProPublica review showed. In addition to the election board, the governor has lost control or partial control over a dozen entities, including the state’s Environmental Management Commission and its Utilities Commission.
Stein told ProPublica that state residents have suffered, in the form of weakened environmental protections and rising energy costs.
Rucho, the Northern Hammer, argues the power transfers have actually improved life in the state.
“You have to change the way the system works, if the system is not working,” he said. “This was a real good remedy to make these boards work on behalf of the people.”
Longtime observers say they have deepening concerns about the erosion of the separation of powers in North Carolina.
Bob Orr, a former Republican state Supreme Court justice, said that if power grabs by Republican legislators continue to be upheld by the state’s Republican-majority courts, it will threaten democracy in the state.
“Really, what can people do?” said Orr, who left the Republican Party because of how it changed under Trump. “A legislature that is literally unchecked with gerrymandered districts and a presumption of constitutionality for everything they do in the courts — that is a danger to democracy because they can change the system regardless of the will of the people.”
Elon Musk has made plenty of confidently wrong predictions over the years. I will even grant him some credit and say that earlier he probably even believed some of them, though saying that he believed something isn't much different than saying Trump believed something. They are actually quite similar.
But nothing he said would have mattered all that much if both tech and mainstram journalists didn't treat his utterances as the proclamations of a genius. And, then, being complicit in the con, remaining unwilling to revisit their own role.
There are a couple of points in time when Elon would have gone bust if not for his hype team in the press and some financial interventions by either deluded or corrupt (both) elected officials.
Elon barely talks about Mars anymore. It was his whole thing!
I think it is the case that lots of people believe that immigration began in 1990s because the past, for some, is nothing more than fake stories, but I don't know what do about people who look at Martin and Sinatra and think "Mayflower children."
I don't know how to deal with people who don't mind being confidently wrong and feel no shame when they are.
Last snow around, Y2000k went traditional and made French toast. This morning, with more snow than was forecast, she mixed things up and went with mini apple Dutch babies - sort of baby pancakes with apple in them. Wonder how they'd go with maple syrup?
Enjoy these cartoons highlighting the many ways that the Trump administration has dropped the ball with the Epstein files. And feel free to share more of your favorites in the comments.
While Jamaica struggles to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, the holiday season there is grim for so many across the island who lost family members and their homes. But there will still be events honoring Samuel Sharpe, a key historical figure in the island’s history.
With the advent of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts here in the U.S., much of what is being taught about our history of enslavement, and resistance to it is slated to be eliminated from American schools. Missing from much of the current curricula here is the history of Caribbean revolts and resistance.
So just who was Samuel Sharpe, and what was the Christmas Rebellion, also called the Baptist War, Sam Sharpe Rebellion, the Christmas Rebellion, and the Christmas Uprising ?
The Christmas Rebellion of 1831, led by Sharpe exposed colonial brutality, united 60,000 enslaved Jamaicans, and accelerated the British Empire’s path to abolishing slavery
THE STORY of Samuel Sharpe and Jamaica’s Christmas Rebellion, which kickstarted on Christmas Day 1831, reminds us of the sacrifices, and resistance that broke and shattered the brutal chains of slavery in Jamaica and beyond.
Sam Sharpe was an enslaved Baptist preacher. But he wasn’t simply a man of faith. He was a revolutionary leader who is rightly revered and celebrated almost 200 years later as a hero. Sharpe’s actions led to one of the largest uprisings in Jamaican history, forcing the British Empire to confront its barbaric system of oppression which ultimately accelerated the abolition of slavery itself.
A Sharpe visionary
Sam Sharpe’s weapons of rebellion was his preaching. His words. His pulpit. Born into slavery in 1801, he was self-taught and deeply influenced by Christian teachings centered around equality and justice.
He believed his faith promised the deliverance of equality. As a Baptist deacon, Sharpe used his position to educate and inspire his fellow enslaved people. His sermons weren’t just about faith but became uniting, rallying cries against tyranny.
By December 1831 Sharpe had created a bold plan. A peaceful general strike was organised during the Christmas season. Those enslaved would refuse to work unless they were paid wages. It was a calculated act of rebellion against the ruthless plantation system, but colonial authorities, ever fearful of revolution, as had been the case in Haiti, responded with violence.
The Christmas uprisings
By the end of day 1, an estimated 20,000 people had joined in the uprising. By December 27th the strike escalated into a full scale rebellion. Eventually, over 60 000 enslaved people rose up against their oppressors. A huge portion of the approximate 300,000 enslaved population. Plantations were torched, as the enslaved fought back against the system that brutalized them.
Sharpe had initially called for nonviolence. But the violent crackdown by plantation enslavers and colonial forces turned the rebellion into a fierce struggle. The British military, desperate to maintain control, eventually crushed the rebellion after two weeks of intense fighting. Over 500 enslaved people were executed. Many publicly, in a gruesome display meant to instill fear. Sharpe himself was captured, tried, and sentenced to death.
A martyr for freedom
Just before his execution on May 23, 1832, Sharpe famously declared, “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.”
These words cemented his legacy as a hero not only in Jamaica but in the global fight against oppression. His leadership and sacrifice sent shockwaves through the British Empire and added fuel to the growing abolitionist movement in Britain.
There are also histories and biographies available on YouTube:
The Croydon in the Mountains Estate’s website provides more information on events honoring Sharpe in Jamaica, even though it is currently closed due to damages from Hurricane Melissa.
Samuel Sharpe’s impact on Jamaica’s path to freedom is etched into the island’s collective memory. But honoring a national hero isn’t just about remembering the past. It’s about actively preserving it, teaching it, and finding new ways to celebrate it for future generations. Today, Sharpe’s name resonates not only in history books but across Jamaica in visible, meaningful ways that keep his legacy alive.
From statues and schools to national holidays and community tours, here’s how Jamaica continues to honor the man who became a symbol of resistance and empowerment.
[...]
In 1975, the Government of Jamaica officially declared Samuel Sharpe a National Hero. This recognition places him among a small, honored group who played pivotal roles in the nation’s fight for justice, independence, and equality.
But what does that really mean in daily life? For Jamaicans, national hero status is not just symbolic. It shows up in cultural celebrations, education, tourism, and the arts. It is a way of integrating Sharpe’s story into everyday Jamaican identity.
His Face on the $50 Bill
One of the most visible ways Jamaica honors Sharpe is through its currency. His portrait is featured on the Jamaican $50 note, used by citizens across the island every day. More than just a financial instrument, the bill is a tangible reminder of Sharpe’s sacrifice and significance. It makes history part of everyday transactions and literally puts his legacy into the hands of the people.
For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder.
While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, triggering a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain’s appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished.
Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He provides the first full portrait of the rebellion’s enigmatic leader, Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the struggles and dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.
Please join me in the comments section below for more and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup. Is this your first time learning about this history? If not, I hope you will share where you first learned it.
GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas...
Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months...
Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow...
Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided...
The data and election results are pretty clear: The GOP is in a rough place. But it’s not just the data—it’s the vibes. Here are 10 reasons why Republicans should probably start emotionally preparing for a rough 2026, because they’re in for a world of hurt.
1. They are losing elections
We don’t need to look at polls to see that Republicans are already struggling at the ballot box. GOP candidates were utterly routed in this November’s off-year elections, without a single speck of good news to point to. And it wasn’t just the win-loss record. The margins were brutal.
New Jersey Republican Jack Ciattarelli lost to Democrat Mikie Sherrill in the New Jersey governor’s race.
Republicans had a legitimately strong gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey—someone who narrowly lost the previous cycle and was supposedly running neck-and-neck with his Democratic opponent in the polls—and Jack Ciattarelli ended up losing to Mikie Sherrill by 14 points.
In an early December Tennessee special election, Democrats outperformed President Donald Trump’s numbers in the district by 13 points. In Miami, Republicans lost the mayor’s race for the first time in 30 years, by nearly 20 points. Four years ago, they won that same seat 79–12.
Democrats don’t need anything close to those margins to win back the House and Senate in 2026. Results half as good would still produce a GOP wipeout. As one Georgia Republican put it after his party got trounced in special elections, “Our donors aren’t motivated and our voters aren’t either.”
2. Trump is not all there
We all know Trump isn’t well. His incoherence keeps getting worse. He can’t walk in a straight line. He struggles with stairs. He shows up at events and press conferences with unexplained bruising on his hands. He’s had multiple MRI scans in a single year. He falls asleep on camera. He misses events without explanation, oscillating between somnambulance and mania.
Former President Donald Trump appears asleep at Manhattan criminal court before his trial in New York on April 26, 2024.
CNN’s medical expert has described Trump’s current state as “jarring.” He is obese, and deeply defensive about all of it, insisting he’s a paragon of physical and mental health.
The practical result is that Trump is incapable of campaigning effectively for his party. Worse, when he does try, he actively makes things worse.
He recently went on a short tour to claim he was the “affordability president,” only to spend his time rehashing grievances and mocking concerns about high prices as a “hoax.” He’s an albatross around the GOP’s neck, either unable or unwilling to do what’s necessary to shift the political conversation onto more favorable ground.
3. Trump is on the ballot
As 2025’s elections have shown, Trump motivates voters to vote against his party. The individual names on the ballot barely matter. For many voters, the only way to register disapproval of Trump is to vote against Republicans, and they’re doing exactly that. With Trump’s approval ratings now lower than they were during the worst moments of his first term, even during his catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Republicans are staring down relentless headwinds.
4. Trump isn’t on the ballot
At the same time, Trump’s most devoted MAGA cultists simply don’t show up to vote when he isn’t personally on the ballot. We saw this in 2018 and again in 2022. Trump can turn out some of the most disengaged voters in the country, but he’s never turned them into reliable Republican voters. Instead, he’s tied them entirely to himself.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump told supporters, “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.” Many people interpreted that as a promise to end elections. But it sounded more like pure narcissism—an admission that without Trump himself on the ballot, his supporters wouldn’t bother showing up at all. And he’s perfectly fine with that.
5. Economic sentiment is in the gutter
The Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential campaign largely boiled down to one argument: The economy is doing great. And by the numbers, it was—low unemployment, easing post-COVID inflation, and wage growth outpacing inflation. But that’s not how most people felt, especially those who are lower on the economic ladder.
Trump and Republicans capitalized on that disconnect, winning poorer voters for the first time while Democrats carried voters making over $100,000. But instead of locking in those gains by actually delivering for working-class Americans, Trump and the GOP immediately pivoted back to tax cuts for billionaires, while pushing tariffs and mass deportations that are inherently inflationary.
Now prices are rising again, unemployment and underemployment are creeping up, and Trump is insisting everything is fine. He’s repeating former President Joe Biden’s biggest political mistake—telling people they’re wrong about their own lived experience.
That doesn’t just alienate voters: It enrages them. Nobody likes being gaslit, and that anger helped fuel Democratic victories in 2025. As Democrats make affordability central to their 2026 messaging, Trump is actively making their job easier by denying voters’ reality.
6. The polls are suspect
Even in the polls—where Republicans usually find comfort—the numbers include warning signs. On the generic congressional ballot, GOP support remains stuck in the low- to mid-40s, but only lagging Democrats by a few points. Under normal circumstances, that might look competitive.
But this year, polling has consistently overstated Republican performance. In election after election, Democrats have outperformed their polling averages, often by wide margins. That gap matters. It suggests Republican support is soft, conditional, or simply not translating into actual votes.
In other words, the problem isn’t just that Republicans are polling poorly—it’s that even their best-case numbers aren’t materializing on Election Day. When voters do cast ballots, they’re increasingly ignoring individual candidates and using elections as a blunt instrument to register disapproval of the GOP as a whole. And that’s a dangerous place for any party to occupy heading into a midterm year.
7. A historic level of retirements
A record number of members of Congress are heading for the exits. As of now, 29 Republicans and 24 Democrats have announced retirements. But while Democrats are defending open seats in a relatively friendly environment, Republicans are doing the opposite.
And it may get worse. Puck News reports that as many as 20 additional Republicans are expected to announce retirements in coming weeks, as defending a shrinking majority—and endlessly defending Trump—starts to look like a losing proposition.
8. Trump has lost young voters
Trump did alarmingly well with young voters in 2024, winning 43% of them. Many of those voters had no real memory of his first term, having been politically formed by social media posts and right-wing podcast culture rather than lived experience.
That’s changing fast. A recent Pew poll shows that among voters aged 18 to 34 who backed Trump in 2024, his approval rating was at 94% in February. But when that same group was surveyed again in early August, his approval had collapsed to 69%. Once young voters actually see Trump governing, the shine wears off quickly.
9. Trump has lost Latinos
Supporters hold a sign before Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives to speak during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall on Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Arizona.
Once touted as proof that Trump was making durable gains with Latino voters, Miami’s mayoral election results instead revealed how shallow and transactional that support really was. As Trump’s rhetoric hardened, his deportation policies intensified, and the economic fallout of his agenda became clearer, Latino voters recoiled.
The GOP’s attempt to reduce the most GOP-friendly Latino voters (Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans) to culture-war fodder and anti-socialism warnings collapsed once those voters saw Trump’s policies directly threatening their families, livelihoods, and communities. And if that shift is happening among those core GOP constituencies, what do you think it’ll look like among more traditionally Democratic Latino voters who pulled the lever for Trump out of economic desperation?
What looked like a political realignment has turned into a backlash—and Miami is likely the template for what’s coming nationally.
10. MAGA is turning on itself
Finally, the movement is starting to eat its own. The opening shots of a MAGA civil war have already been fired, and Trump is powerless to stop it. They can’t even wait until after the midterms to tear each other apart.
At the same time, Republicans are stuck managing open extremists like Nick Fuentes and outright Nazis who continue to inflame internal divisions and repel swing voters. The coalition that once looked frighteningly unified is now fracturing in public—and 2026 is approaching fast.
Don't put anything to the contrary in the newspaper.
The US military said in its initial assessment that “multiple” Isis members had been killed in the strikes on extremist “camps”.
However, residents of Jabo professed surprise at the strikes, saying the bombs had landed in empty fields, causing no casualties, and that Jabo had been relatively shielded from violence. The last attack by militants had occurred two years ago, they said. Video footage on Nigerian television showed pieces of burnt metal in what looked like farmland.
One man told Arise News, a local television station: “Glory be to God, there was no loss of life.”
When Donald Trump gloats online about the galling rebranded “Trump Kennedy Center,” he might face some challenges directing people to its website.
That’s because it’s already taken.
Toby Morton, a former South Park and MadTV writer, told Daily Kos on Friday that he saw the “writing on the wall” back in August and decided to scoop up both TrumpKennedyCenter.com and TrumpKennedyCenter.org.
“Once you’ve spent enough time watching branding, ego, and history collide, the joke basically writes itself,” Morton said.
The comedy writer has a knack for using his creativity to predict—and buy— domains that might be of use to politicians down the road.
Morton has used his resources, most of which come from supporters’ donations, to purchase website domains to point out the absurdities of right-wing groups and personalities like Vice President JD Vance, Moms for Liberty, and Rep. Nancy Mace.
And with the Trump Kennedy Center, the comedian struck satirical gold last week when Donald Trump announced its illegal name change. However, Morton wasn’t exactly enthusiastic when he realized that his prediction came true.
Tarps are installed in front of the sign on the Kennedy Center on, Dec. 19.
“I sighed, stared into the middle distance, and thought, ‘Of course it did,’” he said.
What’s to come for the domains remains to be seen, as the sites still sit empty today. But from the purchase alone, Morton has already gotten plenty of reactions.
While he has received numerous anonymous offers to purchase other domains he owns, he hasn’t received any buyout requests for the two Kennedy Center gems—yet.
But Morton has never been on this comedic mission for the cash. Instead of money, Morton’s end goal is to use the power of laughter to highlight ludicrous actions coming from all political persuasions.
“I don't care what side you're on, I'm gonna make fun of you,” Morton told Daily Kos in an April interview.
“Support for the Arts should be bipartisan so it’s shameful that the radical left keeps boycotting the Arts to make a political point,” he told Daily Kos on Friday.
Trump purged the previous board of trustees in February, installing himself as chair and other loyalists who ultimately signed off on the center’s rebrand.
When the center’s name change became official, and Trump’s tacky name was added to the building’s exterior, another longtime performer at the arts center also called it quits.
Chuck Redd, a musician who hosted the center’s annual Christmas Eve show for nearly two decades, walked away on December 19.
But the White House, driven by Trump’s narcissism, has already come up with replacement programming sure to excite fans of the arts.
Last week, sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Melania Trump’s upcoming self-titled documentary would hold its premiere at the center.
Unfortunately for the Trumps, it doesn’t seem like they’ll be able to market the movie on a splashy new Trump Kennedy Center website, thanks to Morton.
For now, Morton gets a chuckle out of the curious emails he receives as the owner of the domains for the repulsively rebranded Kennedy Center.
A man jumped in front of an Orange Line train pulling into the Oak Grove side of State Street around 7:34 a.m., Transit Police report.
The train driver was able to halt the train about halfway down the platform; the man wound up under the first car but was conscious and able to talk when the first Transit Police officer got to him.
Boston firefighters were able to get him up to the platform around 7:48 a.m., and handed him over to Boston EMS for transport to a local hospital, with injuries not considered life threatening.
Transit Police Supt. Richard Sullivan praised the train driver for doing "an outstanding job" in stopping the train "as quickly and as safely as possible."
"It is our sincere hope [the victim] gets the support and care he obviously needs," he added.
The T brought in shuttle buses to replace service between Jackson Square and Back Bay - with riders told to switch to the Green Line for service downtown.
Regular Orange Line service resumed around 8:30 a.m.
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