Featured
What the 2024 Election Is Really About for Trump Supporters. By Jonathan D. Karl / The Atlantic
He promised them: “I am your retribution.”
I asked Steve Bannon, who had served as the CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign and had once again emerged as one of Trump’s most important advisers, why the former president would go to Waco for his big campaign reboot. He wasn’t coy. “We’re the Trump Davidians,” he told me with a laugh.
“For seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten, and sinister forces trying to destroy America,” he told the crowd. “They’re not going to do it, but they do get closer and closer with rigged elections.” “Twenty twenty-four,” Trump declared, “is the final battle.” This wasn’t a campaign speech in any traditional sense. Trump echoed the themes of paranoia and foreboding that grew out of the Waco massacre. “As far as the eye can see, the abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt, and depraved chapters in all of American history,” he said. “They’re not coming after me,” he told the crowd. “They’re coming after you.” Read more
Related: Taking the Trump Davidians Seriously. By Charlie Sykes / The Bulwark
Related: Trump’s purge begins — with the Federalist Society. By Heather Digby Parton / Salon
Related: Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds / NYT
Political / Social
Obama Urges Americans to Take in ‘Whole Truth’ of Israel-Gaza War. By Lisa Lerer / NYT
In his comments on Friday, delivered at a gathering of his former staff in Chicago, Mr. Obama acknowledged the strong emotions the war had raised, saying that “this is century-old stuff that’s coming to the fore.” He blamed social media for amplifying the divisions and reducing a thorny international dispute to what he viewed as sloganeering.
Yet he urged his former aides to “take in the whole truth,” seemingly attempting to strike a balance between the killings on both sides. “What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it,” Mr. Obama said. “And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.” Read more
Related: Muslim, Arab Voters At A Breaking Point With Biden: ‘They’ve Taken Us For Granted.’ By
Related: Congress’ Progressive Israel Critics Face A Wave Of Primary Threats. By Daniel Marans / HuffPost
Mike Johnson is not a “culture warrior” — he’s an enemy of democracy. By Chauncey Devega / Salon
Throughout his career, new House Speaker Mike Johnson has displayed a troubling commitment to minority rule
Johnson rejects the Constitution’s separation of church and state. He is a “Christian Nationalist” who wants America to be a white Christofascist plutocracy and not a pluralistic democracy. In an excellent interview at Politico, historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation“, explains how Johnson rejects real democracy in America: Read more
Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism. By Damon Linker / NYT
What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country. Read more
A newspaper giant tried to diversify its staff. White workers sued. By Taylor Telford / Wash Post
The proposed class-action lawsuit against Gannett is among a wave of recent cases claiming some corporate diversity policies disadvantage White employees. Steve Bradley, of Rochester, N.Y., is one of five named plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit that claims Gannett “discriminated against non-minorities” to achieve diversity goals.
Now, Bradley is one of five named plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit that claims the country’s largest newspaper publisher “discriminated against non-minorities” to achieve diversity goals. Filed in August in Virginia federal court, the suit alleges that Gannett fired White employees, denied them opportunities for advancement and replaced them with less-qualified minority candidates as the company sought to diversify its workforce. Read more
Civil rights are under assault in Florida, coalition of activists say. By Deborah Barfield Berry / USA Today
In recent weeks, more voting rights activists, faith leaders and civil rights advocates from across the country have joined Benton and other activists in Florida, which national civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton this week called “ground zero’’ in the modern-day fight for civil rights.
“The battle around book bans and censoring Black history, the battle around voting all resides in Florida,” Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, told USA Today. “I’m worried about if the template in Florida works…other governors, particularly Republicans, will see that as the playbook on how to run.” Read more
A debate brews among Black Ivy League students over representation on campus. By Uwa Ede-Osifo / NBC News
Michaela Glavin did not feel a sense of belonging in the Black community when she arrived as a freshman at Harvard.
The Black student body was warm and welcoming, but as a multigenerational African American — a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. — she said she felt like “a minority within a minority.” “The descendants of slavery on campus are woefully underrepresented,” said Glavin, now a junior. Read more
Former Memphis officer pleads guilty in Tyre Nichols death. By AP and NPR
A former Memphis police officer changed his plea to guilty Thursday in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, becoming the first of five officers charged to reverse course, with prosecutors recommending up to 15 years in prison.
Desmond Mills Jr. entered his plea during a hearing at the Memphis federal courthouse as part of a larger agreement to settle charges in state court as well. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the four other officers would follow suit. Their attorneys declined to comment on Mills’ plea change. Read more
FBI search home of Eric Adams’ fundraiser, consultant. By Savannah Kuchar / USA Today
FBI agents raided the home of Brianna Suggs, Mayor Eric Adams‘ top fundraiser Thursday. Suggs, a consultant for the Adams’ re-election campaign, was reportedly home at the time.
Adams had been in Washington, D.C., for a series of meetings with White House officials and members of Congress. The mayor left the capital shortly after landing in the city, though, “to address a matter,” a spokesperson for Adams said at the time. The FBI has not released any information about the raid. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
Mike Johnson’s reading of Scripture misses what it really means to be a Christian nation. By Liz Theoharis / RNS
MSNBC’s Sarah Posner soon called Johnson “the most unabashedly Christian nationalist speaker in history.” News articles and op-eds this week have detailed Johnson’s (and his wife’s) reactionary takes on sexuality and gender, abortion bans, even Medicaid and Social Security.
What has been missing from many of these exposés, though, is a deeper wrestling with the unsound and even contradictory theological beliefs that Johnson has said drive his worldview. In his first speech as speaker, Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” Read more
Related: Speaker Mike Johnson and the alliance of white evangelicals and Republicans. By Ron Elving / NPR
Antisemitism on the rise? Three charts on religious-based hate. By Jacob Turcotte and Harry Bruinius / CS Monitor
From graffiti and online threats to physical assaults, antisemitic attacks appear to be on the rise since Hamas’ Oct. 7 assault on Israeli civilians.
On Friday, the Israeli government warned citizens to avoid outward displays of their Jewish identity as antisemitic attacks tick upward around the world, and in Germany, officials responded to rising numbers of antisemitic incidents with warnings that they would be prosecuted as crimes. Perceived spikes in antisemitism this October also follow a series of record-setting years in the United States. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League tracked an average of 10 antisemitic incidents a day, the most since its founding in 1979. Read more
More Black Women Land Leadership Roles At Divinity Schools—and Beyond. By Stacy Jackson / Black Enterprise
A wave of Black women stepping into leadership positions at top divinity schools is making sure their voices are heard over the historical noise of racism and sexism in academia.
Vanderbilt University’s new divinity school dean Yolanda Pierce, a specialist in womanist theology, which examines the role of women in faith, scripture, and ministry, is excited about the surge of Black females heading top divinity schools. Read more
Historical / Cultural
Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback — but it never went away. By Mike Lofgren / Salon
We’re a Christian nation! The Civil War wasn’t about slavery! Fighting Hitler was a mistake! The lies run deep
It is hardly surprising that ideologues are tempted to hijack history to vindicate their worldview; the interpretive nature of the field makes it vulnerable to misappropriation in a way that math or physics, generally speaking, are not. As we have seen in Florida, Texas and other laboratories of autocracy, once Republicans obtain unified control of government, they are compulsively driven to monkey with the history curricula of the public schools. Read more
Sojourner Truth Was a ‘Double Woman’ in More Ways than One. By Obbie Tyler Todd
She championed both abolition and women’s rights. And she wasn’t afraid to challenge advocates of either cause.
Truth’s story does not fit the conventional mold of a runaway slave. (In fact, she claimed she did not “run” away from her enslaver—she walked.) Nor did she always agree with Tubman and Douglass on issues of moral reform. Nor was she immune to some of the extreme religious views (and cults) that arose in her unique New York context. Yet Truth was one of the most extraordinary Americans to ever live. Her complexity is precisely why she has so much to offer us today. Nancy Koester’s We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth. Read more
The Legal History of Travel Discrimination. By Rebecca Dudley / AAIHS
Many of us take for granted the ease of our particular American-style mobility. We can go wherever we want to, whenever we want to, usually in a car. Bus station in Durham, North Carolina in 1940. (Jack Delano/Library of Congress)
At the heart of American mobility, University of Pennsylvania History Professor Mia Bay reminds us, are American politics of race, class, and gender and contested battles for freedom and equality. As she says, “African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom” to move (Bay 2021, 3). In Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021), Bay examines how racial segregation and racial discrimination were enacted during and through travel, and how many of the battles for civil rights revolved around equal access to travel. Read more
Long before Elon Musk, Henry Ford went to war with Jewish groups. By Shera Avi-Yonah / Wash Post
An auto tycoon, one of America’s most prominent businessmen, stood accused of enabling antisemitism on a platform he owned, allowing hate speech against Jews to spread to new audiences. The businessman was Henry Ford; the platform was his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
Filipinos who fought for the U.S. in WWII never saw benefits. A new bill seeks to change that. By Kimmy Yam / NBC News
The U.S., which recruited tens of thousands of Filipino servicemen to fight with it in World War II, rescinded the promise of benefits and citizenship after the war ended.
The Filipino Veterans Fairness Act aims to grant benefits to the remaining veterans and the families of the hundreds of thousands of Filipino servicemen who were recruited by the U.S. in the early ‘40s, in part by promising full access to veterans’ benefits and citizenship. The pledge, however, was rescinded by Congress in 1946 and only partially fulfilled in recent decades. Read more
Leroy Stover, Birmingham’s first Black police officer, dies at 90. By AP and ABC News
Stover joined the force in 1966 and rose to the rank of deputy chief.
“Today, our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of former Deputy Chief Leroy Stover. As the first black officer to integrate the Birmingham force, his legacy and work at the Birmingham Police Department paved a way for others to follow in his footsteps,” the department said. Read more
‘City of a Million Dreams’ documents Black jazz funeral tradition of New Orleans. By Nate Tinner-Williams / NCR
The group Black Men of Labor is seen marching and singing “Amazing Grace” during their annual second line parade in the documentary “City of a Million Dreams.” (Courtesy of Spirit Tide Productions)
To tell a story of New Orleans requires a certain patience and reserve. A willingness to draw connections that are hardly possible for any other city in America, yet undeniable in the Big Easy. Most of all, telling a New Orleans story means telling a Black story. A Black Catholic one, I might add. Jason Berry’s 2021 documentary “City of a Million Dreams” is such a tale, taking viewers through the contours of the northernmost Caribbean city by way of its greatest hallmark: jazz music. Specifically, the film describes how the tradition of jazz funerals emerged from the confluence of West Africa and Franco-Spanish colonialism, in an era when excessive death was an ever-present reality. Read more
Louis Armstrong Gets the Last Word on Louis Armstrong. By Ethan Iverson / The Nation
For decades, Americans have argued over the icon’s legacy. But his archives show that he had his own plans.
“He was also born at the right time to be a multimedia superstar. Louis was there for acoustic recordings in 1923. After accompanying silent movies, he then made pioneering appearances in film, radio, and television. In many cases, he was the first African American to have featured billing in these new industries. Read more
George C. Wolfe Would Not Be Dismissed. By Vinson Cunningham / The New Yorker
A conversation with the longtime director about “Rustin,” growing up in Kentucky, and putting on a show.
If that shit don’t work, I don’t wear it,” the director and writer George C. Wolfe told me when we spoke last month. He was talking about the baggage of childhood and the aftermath of his early life in a small, segregated Southern town, but he might just as easily have been talking about his approach to art. Read more
Sports
New Orleans Pelicans guard CJ McCollum asks how to help Black youths in the city. By Marc J. Spears / Andscape
New Orleans Pelicans guard CJ McCollum speaks to youths in the cafeteria of the New Orleans Juvenile Justice Intervention Center on Oct. 18 in New Orleans.
CJ McCollum was sitting in a circle of chairs trying to come up with a game plan to help New Orleans. No, this wasn’t during a timeout late in a tight game for his New Orleans Pelicans. Rather, he was trying to create a game plan to help the troubled youth of New Orleans, who are predominantly African American, to try to change their lives for the better while detained at the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. Read more
NFL coaching diversity ‘plagued’ by offensive coordinator position. Tom Schad / USA Today
In recent years, more young Black coaches like Ashton Grant have gotten entry-level jobs on the offensive side of the ball. Now the question is: Will they have a chance to climb?
Nathan Martin will race in the New York City Marathon. Black runners are amped. By Michelle Garcia / NBC News
Martin, currently the fastest American-born Black marathoner, will be competing at the front of the pack in the elite open division Sunday.
At first, Nathan Martin didn’t realize the scope of what he’d achieved when he crossed the finish line at the Marathon Project in Chandler, Arizona, two years ago. He just knew that running the 26.2 miles in 2:11:05 represented a personal best at a time when races were still being canceled and postponed because of the pandemic. Read more
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