Fighting back can matter -- And a new memoir by Kerri Harris
Down below is something I don’t want you to miss about Kerri Evelyn Harris, but first some Kavanaugh updates:
On his way to the Judiciary Committee to vote to move Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate floor Friday, Sen. Jeff Flake, who is retiring this year, was confronted by 23-year-old Maria Gallagher. In an emotional five-minute exchange outside of an elevator, Gallagher talked about her own sexual assault and asked if it, or anything, mattered.
Flake then walked to the committee hearing and stunned the political world by calling for a one week delay on Kavanaugh’s confirmation so that the FBI could investigate the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford. Since shortly after the election of Donald Trump, regular people, rather than party leaders, have formed the backbone of the resistance to his administration, and Friday showed that people do still matter.
Our podcast this week, with Mehdi Hasan, Naomi Klein and me, looks at the question of what the conversation around Kavanaugh says about where we are as a country.
Now that the FBI is belatedly getting involved, we wanted to make a little cheat sheet for them. From Peter Maass and Akela Lacy, here are five questions they could start with.
Briahna Gray and Camille Baker look at the unbearable dishonesty of a man who wants to be one of the nation’s top judges (and already sits on the second-highest court).
And meanwhile, I got written about in the trashy London tabloid the Daily Mail, normally a career-ending development, but not in this case.
Help publish a memoir by Senate candidate Kerri Evelyn Harris
The right wing takes care of its rising stars. When an up-and-coming Republican candidate runs an impressive race and falls short, there’s an entire industry waiting off stage for them with no-show fellowships, inflated speaking gigs or fat book deals with conservative imprints. Then two or four years later, the guy runs again, wins, and is off to a decades-long career. The left, meanwhile, hangs its talent out to dry. And since insurgent candidates tend to come from working class backgrounds, that can stunt the growth of talented people who might otherwise have long careers ahead of them.
Kerri Evelyn Harris’s run against Senator Tom Carper in September 2018 attracted national attention and shook the Delaware political machine to its core. It fell short, and since then, she’s been campaigning for allies in Delaware and in states in the region, and this week was arrested in Washington, D.C. as part of mass civil disobedience against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Yet she’s been offered no paid work, and that’s not sustainable for somebody like Harris, an Air Force veteran and parent who lives, like most of the country, paycheck to paycheck.
But she has a story to tell, and it’s one the country should hear, so let’s get her a People’s Book Deal. Harris is the daughter of civil rights activists and enlisted in the Air Force after 9/11. She was eventually medically discharged after complications from the anthrax vaccine, an under-covered scandal in its own right. Since then, she’s been an auto-body mechanic, fried chicken at a local gas station, a community organizer and a Senate candidate. Kerri understands the urgency of change, she understands the need for solutions that move working people, and she understands that there is a place in Congress for everybody’s voices and interests to be represented. Kerri Evelyn Harris has a memoir in her that needs to be written, and Strong Arm Press, a progressive crowdfunded publishing house, is excited to be partnering with her on it.
Help make it happen by contributing below. Donors will be thanked by name in the acknowledgments, and all contributions will go to Harris and toward production of the book.
It gets better: Laura Moser, a longtime writer and editor who ran for Congress in Houston earlier this year, will edit Harris’s book.
(The fundraising page includes a “goal” it says we’re trying to reach, but the page itself sets that number, not us. I know, that’s strange. Our real target is about $30,000 to give her the runway to write this book.)
And please help share the page on Twitter, Facebook, forward it to your friends, all that. It’s here: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/help-crowdpublish-kerri-evelyn-harris-memoir/