The Early Days

“You hear ‘DEI’ and you probably think of your job’s HR department,” explains Kat Abughazaleh. “But for your QAnon uncle, ‘DEI’ is an activation phrase to send the most unhinged memes in the family group chat.” In her new video for Mother Jones, Kat dives into the right’s obsessive co-opting of the term “DEI”—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—to attack Donald Trump’s new 2024 foe, Vice President Kamala Harris: Kat dissects how this innocuous little acronym became the latest dog whistle for Fox News hosts and elected Republicans, drawing parallels to Nixon’s Southern strategy, which also deployed coded language to appeal to old bigotry. Earlier attempts to caricature Kamala Harris caught right-wing pundits somewhat flat-footed, when compared to their other misogynistic masterpiece: their attacks on Hillary Clinton (a phenomenon documented by Kat in her first video for Mother Jones).

One certainty about the assassination attempt two weeks ago on former President Donald Trump is that rampant conspiracy theories about it will endure—probably forever. The fascination with spectacular, if highly improbable explanations long predates social media. Yet it resonates now with the Trump shooter’s documented search for information about the JFK assassination, which has sustained a cottage industry of books, movies, and other content for more than half a century. Wild claims about everything from Trump staging the attack to the Biden White House orchestrating it began spreading online just hours after the fateful campaign rally on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

This article is part of The D. C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. There’s no point denying it: Vice President Kamala Harris’ rollout has been nothing short of a storybook introduction. A clean exit from President Joe Biden? Check. Delegates and donors falling in line?

If you caught even a few seconds of the RNC convention and you thought it was really monochromatic, that's because it was. According to this report, 97% of the people attending the convention were white: So how did the 2024 convention in Milwaukee stack up? Only slightly better. Only 1,780 of 2,429 RNC delegates reported their ethnicity, according to convention officials.

I love it when Democrats turn around right-wing attacks and go on offense. During Karine Jean-Pierre’s Thursday press briefing, Fox News’ Peter Doocy tried a gotcha with the right-wing talking point about Vice President Kamala Harris being some kind of failed border czar. The truth is, she was never a “border czar,” was never assigned to work on or at the border but was put in charge of a diplomatic effort with Latin American countries to deal with root causes of migration. After reading what appeared to be a White House statement that there has never been a border czar in the Biden administration, Doocy tried a different vehicle for the same attack: “Why are Democrats so sensitive about the vice president and the border?” he asked.

On this day in 1986, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” shot to the #1 spot on the US pop chart. The Brad Blog, featuring our very own John Amato! From Tengrain: Cap’n Guyliner Has Some Thoughts On Voting Rights. No More Mister Nice Blog: The Response to a Key Part of Kamala Harris's Stump Speech Will Be Very Gendered. Attention space nerds!