Opinion

Elon Musk's wealth has surpassed $200 billion. It would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to make that much.

Wealth inequality is eating this country alive. We're now in America's second Gilded Age, just like the late 19th century when a handful of robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages down, and bribed lawmakers.

There was a time when Democrats called their party “the Party of Freedom.”

Largely because of the horrors of the Republican Great Depression, Americans realized that, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1944 State of the Union address, “Necessitous men are not free men.”

Contrary to popular myth, the United States was not founded on the concept of "one person, one vote." In fact, there isn't a right to vote enshrined in the Constitution at all, a fact which the late Justice Antonin Scalia made sure to mention in his notorious Bush v. Gore opinion that decided the 2000 election. Managing elections was at first left entirely up to the states, which meant that in most places, most of the time, only white male landowners had the franchise. It took several decades, until the Andrew Jackson era, before essentially all white men were allowed to vote, let alone anyone else. (A few property-owning African Americans were permitted to vote in Northern cities before the Civil War, but no women could vote anywhere until Wyoming enacted universal suffrage in 1869.)

After the Civil War, the end of slavery and the 14th Amendment, all Black men were officially granted citizenship, but very few were allowed to vote before the enactment of the 15th Amendment in 1870, which specified that the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." That led to the brief period of Reconstruction, which saw Black men not just voting across the South but also elected to high office: Sixteen African Americans served in Congress (including two U.S. senators) and several hundred served in state legislatures. But by the 1880s all that was over, as Southern whites (with the federal government's permission) launched the systematic disenfranchisement, vote suppression and voter intimidation of the Jim Crow era, meaning that virtually no Black people in the South could vote until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

MSNBC producer for Rachel Maddow, Steve Benen, is puzzled how Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) will claim that he has been a successful governor when his policies keep getting shot down in the courts.

Just last week, a federal judge issued an injunction for the Florida governor's anti-drag queen law.

Ron DeSantis has no friends.

The guys he played baseball with at Yale didn’t like him. One told New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins, “Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with.”