The green hornet and kato

There was a time when one could often find Mandela Barnes on MSNBC. His hits peaked in late summer 2020, when Wisconsin ’s 33-year-old lieutenant governor took to the liberal airwaves to register his outrage over a police shooting in Kenosha. Those appearances left a strong impression, as Barnes — young, Black, equal measures charismatic and unapologetic — condemned law enforcement’s accounts of how one of their own shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man. ”We’re being told not to believe our eyes,” he said on the network. “If we have the accountability we deserve … we wouldn’t be in the place that we are with this racial reckoning.” It was an era when Democratic Senate candidates were fixtures on MSNBC, preaching soundbites to the liberal choir and hoovering up millions of dollars’ worth of donations, a reward for taking on a reviled Trump toady. Fast-forward two years, and Barnes is now a Democratic Senate candidate himself. But he’s appeared on the liberal cable network … [Read more...] about The Hot New Strategy for Unseating Trump Republicans: Don’t Make It About Trump

T he black Cadillac pulls into the diner’s parking lot in Queens. Built in the 1950s, the building looks like it only exists on a rainy day, the rock-lined exterior out of another time. I step out of the Uber and look up at the restaurant where, in 1983, my father was arrested after escaping federal prison. He had spent two years on the lam, and was brought down by the U.S. Marshals after eating breakfast with his longtime mistress. He had just come from organizing a new shipment from Colombia. I imagine the day was also rainy. Almost 40 years later, I am there to meet with the Drug Enforcement Agency officer who tracked him for nearly a decade, trying to bring down one of the biggest mari juana kingpins of the 1970s, the man I once called “Daddy,” and one of the architects of the modern drug trade: Dan McGuiness. When the Cadillac arrived at my hotel, I had to laugh. The last time I saw my father, he, too, was driving a black Cadillac. He had just arrived in Los Angeles … [Read more...] about Learjets, Mistresses, and Bales of Weed: My Dad’s Life as a Drug Kingpin