Heather Cox Richardson in Letters from an American writes a daily synopsis of events of historical significance in the U.S. The sheer volume of her work these days is breathtaking as the torrent of news from this administration threatens to drown us all. What is most impressive is how she can keep the professional attitude of a journalist while recanting one atrocity after another. She meticulously lays out item after item with story background, first-hand references when available, and news sources. Today, July 11, 2020, was a particularly news-packed day, each story worse than the next. It’s hard to believe that the commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence, the states of Texas, Florida, and Arizona simultaneously hitting record-high numbers of covid-19 cases while their legislators fight to remove health-precautions and reopen, an invitation from ICE to any citizens who wish to help them track immigrants and Tucker Carlson’s chief writer stepping down after it came out that he regularly posted racist material, were overshadowed by the U.S. setting a single-day record for new cases of covid-19. Any one of these stories makes me too furious to consider what transpired from a journalist’s perspective. — they should all rot in hell.
Heather Cox Richardson
