Weekend Reads 1/23/21

MLK and Malcolm X were more alike than we thought. Here's why.

These two approaches — one that builds personal identity, and another that looks to express that identity and have it recognized by a system that is set up to ignore Black voices — seem more complementary than adversarial when observed objectively. "Their differences really become differences of tactics rather than goals," Joseph said. "They're both going to come to see that you need dignity and citizenship, and those goals are going to converge over time. But it's the tactics and how we get to those goals" that differ.

Here’s How the Impeachment Managers Can Win

Rather than spending time rehashing the many outrages of Trump’s years in office, as they might do when speaking to their own constituents or for the media, the House impeachment managers can bring the senators back to those moments of intensity in the Capitol and to their constitutional significance. They can attach the memory of fear to something higher, to a sense of indignation that all senators ought to feel at the way the chief executive treated what is supposed to be an equal branch of government.

QAnon's 'Great Awakening' failed to materialize. What's next could be worse

QAnon adherents are used to dealing with predictions that have not come true. The conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when an anonymous internet user posing as a government insider posted on 4chan that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, that her passport had been flagged, and that the government was preparing for “massive riots”. None of that happened, nor did any of the myriad other arrests, declassifications, executions, resignations or revelations that the anonymous poster, who came to be known as Q, has promised believers for the past three years.

From doublespeak to alternative facts: How Trump made a mess of the language

It started his first week in office. Beneath a dishwater-gray sky in January 2017, President Donald Trump delivered the first lines of his inaugural address outside the Capitol building. Attendees huddled under ponchos and umbrellas as it began to rain, and the drops continued to fall until near the end of the speech.

The way Trump told the story, the sky opened up and the sun shone down on him, bathing him in its light. “The truth is,” he said the next day, that the rain “stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off, and it poured right after I left. It poured.” (The sun, in fact, had never appeared that dreary day in Washington, D.C.)