On 7 March 1965, "Bloody Sunday", civil-rights protestors crossing Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by Alabama Highway Patrol Officers. On 8 March 1965, the first American ground troops landed in Vietnam. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed on 6 August 1965. On Wednesday, 29 April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the United States Supreme Court made that Act "all but a dead letter", as Justice Elena Kagan put it in her scathing dissent. Simultaneously, President Donald Trump's war on Iran increasingly looks like the Vietnam War: a strategically unwinnable war that the United States cannot get out of because a president does not want to lose face. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 May 2026)