Good morning! It’s time to get up.
I am trying something new here at The Uprising World Headquarters, a morning news roundup. These will eventually only be available to paying subscribers, so if you dig it, please sign up!
For those of you who are into the behind the scenes newsletter strategy stuff, I will explain more about what I am trying to do with these at the end of today’s issue, but for now, on to the news!
FIELD TRIP: In case you missed it, last night The Uprising broke the news that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York, is having a meeting with President Biden today. AP has more details on the other attendees who will be at the sitdown, which comes as Biden is touting an initiative to reduce gun crime.
The meeting also is taking place as national observers are trying to make sense of What Adams Means. In last night’s scoop, I pointed out that Adams’ win wasn’t the simple rebuke to progressives that many pundits have made it out to be. City Hall veteran and Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson wrote in to The Uprising to offer his analysis on Adams’ unique brand of police reform, which is “unequivocally against” calls to defund police departments.
“On the question of fighting crime vs fighting bad cops Adams is absolutely in favor of both and … his biography gives him unique credibility to be,” Wolfson wrote, adding, “National Democrats are not embracing Adams because he is “tough on crime” — they are embracing him because he was against defunding the police. It’s a nuance — but an important one.”
HAVANA: Street protests have raged across Cuba for the past several days amid food and medicine shortages that the island’s government blames on the U.S. embargo. Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel spoke about the demonstrations, which are the country’s biggest in decades, Monday morning. Diaz Canel has argued that “Yankee imperialism” and the “U.S. blockade” are chiefly to blame for the island’s issues.
President Biden’s Cuba policy has been something of a question mark. McClatchy got the scoop on his initial response to the protests, which is a statement declaring that he stands “with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”
THIELMENTUM: Blake Masters, who is the chief operating officer at Peter Thiel’s investment firm and president of the billionaire’s foundation, is running for Senate in Arizona as a Republican. Masters is the second Thiel associate to throw his hat into a Senate race after author and investor J.D. Vance, who is a friend and former employee of the billionaire. Thiel has previously been known for taking down the gossip blog Gawker and trying to develop an autonomous libertarian society on platforms in the ocean.
INFIGHTING: With Bernie Sanders ally Nina Turner solidifying her status as the frontrunner in the special election for Ohio’s 11th district, firms linked to the Democratic establishment — and specifically the DCCC — launched a six figure assault on the airwaves to stop her. The primary, which should determine who ends up taking the seat, is set for next month.
RECOMMENDED READS: These dispatches from West Virginia, Arkansas, and Haiti are all worth your time.
HOUSEKEEPING: So what is this little news rundown? It’s basically the third iteration of this newsletter in as many months.
Since launching this project, a major question for me has been how to balance my own exclusive stories versus a more general daily update. I originally tried to have a big original item in each daily newsletter. That proved tricky to schedule, so I was planning to switch to a more chaotic guerrilla style publication where I would just show up in your inbox each time I had a big story. Last week, I realized we can have it all!
I am planning to send out relatively quick news roundups every morning Monday through Thursday. After the next week or two, these will exclusively be for paying subscribers. This will give you a sense of the things I am reading and the stories I am watching. Think of it as a chance to peek onto my desk. I will send out original, exclusive stories separately as I have them!
This approach seems to me like the best of both worlds and I hope it is something that my most loyal readers will find valuable! As always, thanks for coming on this journey with me.
And, of course, the news rundowns will always end with a fun fact!
FUN FACT: The world’s most expensive bottle of liquor is a nearly 260 year old bottle of cognac from 1762 that sold at auction for $144,525 last year. Both Motzart and George Washington were alive when the cognac was bottled. A 2014 auction of a bottle from the same vintage resulted in watches and pens that were made with the ancient booze.
That’s all for today! If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Uprising and tell your friends! And if you work in politics, please don’t forget to leave a (news) tip on your way out → hunter.walker@protonmail.com
The Democratic establishment in a nutshell...laissez-faire about an authoritarian takeover, gerrymandering, and massive losses of voting rights, but fighting-to-the-death against a progressive challenge to a House seat.