Featured
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—But It Must Be Lived. By Ronald J. Sheehy, Editor / Race Inquiry Digest
At this perilous moment in American history, when the shadow of authoritarianism darkens the democratic horizon, too many defenders of freedom seem paralyzed by caution.
Gil Scott-Heron’s timeless warning—“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”—speaks directly to this moment. His words remind us that a true revolution cannot be reduced to images or slogans; it requires a deep shift in consciousness and a collective awakening to what is truly at stake. Read more
Related: “It Is Up to Us to Be the Leaders We Need to Save Our Country.” By cleve Jones / The Nation
Related: How to translate “No Kings” energy to actual political power. By Christian Paz / Vox
Related: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Ups The Ante As He Calls For A General Strike. By
The Week’s Top Stories
Political / Social
How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force. By J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam / Propublica
Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes.
ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Read more
Related: How Trump Is Using Fake Imagery to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters.
The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage.
True Americans, proponents of this emerging patriotic mythology believe, are the cultural descendants of founders who were united by a shared system of values and folkways even more than by an Enlightenment political creed of equality, liberty and democracy.
Those founders were Protestant, largely English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans. Those who can trace their bloodlines to that group, which one essay describes as a “founding ethnicity,” are, in some spiritual sense, deemed more American than those who cannot. And the dilution of that pure American stock by mass immigration has made the country less culturally unified. Read more
Related: Why corporate America fears Trump on DEI. By Jessica Guynn / USA Today
‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat. By Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo / Politico
Thousands of private messages reveal young GOP leaders joking about gas chambers, slavery and rape.
Related: In Trump’s Washington, Hate Is Not a Deal Breaker. Katie Rogers / NYT
Related: The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse. How we got to “I love Hitler” By George Packer / The Atlantic
Republicans Are Making One of the Most Gerrymandered States in the Nation Even More Rigged. By Ari Berman / Mother Jones
North Carolina Republicans just passed a new Trump-inspired congressional map to oust a Black Democrat.
It will make one of the most gerrymandered states in the country even more gerrymandered, likely giving Republicans nearly 80 percent of US House seats in an otherwise closely divided swing state where Trump won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. The state senate passed the bill on Tuesday in near record time, with the state house to follow shortly thereafter. Read more
Related: Why racial redistricting might go the way of affirmative action. By Jason Willick / Wash Post
Black Unemployment Is Not An Accident, It Is A Racial Purge. By Stacey Patton / Newsone
What’s happening to Black workers isn’t a downturn, it’s a pattern hiding in plain sight and a deliberate racial targeting.
Every time Black Americans start to inch toward economic stability, when homeownership increases, wages climb, and the wealth gap narrows, white America finds a new excuse to hit the brakes. Sometimes it’s “budget restraint.” Sometimes it’s “fiscal responsibility.” Sometimes it’s “market correction.” But the meaning never changes: Black progress must be temporary. Every economic cycle becomes a racial reset. Every recovery becomes a reminder of where we’re allowed to stand. Read more
Related: Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s Deep-State Wrecking Ball. By Andy Kroll / The New Yorker
Letitia James Case Shows Ruthlessness of Justice Dept. in Trump’s Grip. Jonah E. Bromwich and Michael S. Schmidt / NYT
The Justice Department’s indictment of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is merely one part of a multipronged campaign that is helping define retribution in President Trump’s second term.
Mr. Trump’s crusade against those he believes wronged him may once have been interpreted as a tit-for-tat effort to go after his enemies. But it is becoming clear that creating the trappings of criminality — the headlines, the scrutiny, the reputational damage — is as much a part of the formula as any realistic chance of conviction. Read more
Education
Black, Latino and international student enrollments drop at Harvard. By Todd Wallack and Susan Svrluga / Wash Post
The freshman class at Harvard University has fewer Black, Latino and international students than last year, a change in diversity that comes after the Trump administration launched a wide-ranging attack to try to force the school to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies and limit the number of international students.
Though Harvard’s freshman class of 1,675 represents a sliver of the more than 15 million undergrads nationwide, the demographic breakout has always attracted outsize attention because of Harvard’s elite status in the ranks of academia and popular culture. Read more
Oklahoma Is Ground Zero in Trump’s “America First” Education Push. By Jennifer Smith Richards / Propublica
The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.
Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education. Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.” Read more
Six States Lead Nation in Anti-DEI Legislative Push, New Report Finds. By Jamal Watson / The Edu Ledger
A new policy brief from the University of Southern California reveals that six states—Texas, Missouri, Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Indiana—have emerged as national leaders in efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education, with significant consequences for students and faculty of color.
The report, “DEI Under Fire: Policy, Politics, and the Future of Campus Diversity,” released by USC’s Critical Policy Collective, analyzed legislative trends across all 50 states between August 2024 and July 2025. Researchers developed a composite scoring system based on bills introduced and laws passed, identifying states with the most aggressive anti-DEI activity. Read more
Related: All but 2 Universities Decline a Trump Offer of Preferential Funding. Alan Blinder / NYT
World
Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela. By Karen DeYoung et al. / Wash Post
The administration has surged warships, planes and troops to the Caribbean for drug interdiction. Some see the ultimate goal as toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
With dozens of warships and planes, and thousands of U.S. troops newly deployed to the Caribbean Sea, Trump has declared an “armed conflict” with drug trafficking groups he has designated international terrorists. U.S. air attacks have blown up at least seven boats that Trump has charged were carrying drugs to the United States in international waters from Venezuela, in the process killing dozens of alleged traffickers. Read more
Related: Holsey’s retirement raises concerns over Caribbean strikes. By Ellen Mitchell / The Hill
The U.S. and China Are One Misstep Away From War. Eric Rosenbach and
On May 26, 2023, a U.S. Air Force plane was on a routine reconnaissance mission over the South China Sea when a Chinese fighter jet banked dangerously close to it. Several months earlier over the same waters, a U.S. military plane was forced to take evasive action when a Chinese fighter came within 20 feet.
The danger of one of these incidents tipping into an actual conflict has never been higher. Yet in sharp contrast to the era of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, there are virtually no reliable systems of real-time communication between American and Chinese military forces to defuse an inadvertent crisis. Read more
Related: Trump Is Forcing the World Into a New Era of Disorder. BRebecca Lissner and
Hamas, diminished but not destroyed, reasserts itself in Gaza. By Matt Bradley / NBC News
Hamas has violently sought to reassert its authority over the Gaza Strip in the wake of the Israel military’s partial withdrawal, but questions remain over the group’s future and efforts to rebuild.
Since the ceasefire came into effect a week ago, the militant group has deployed armed police officers on streets from where Israeli forces have withdrawn, clashed with rival clans, directly fired upon and killed Israeli troops in multiple incidents, and staged at least one public execution of suspected collaborators. Read more
Ethics / Morality Religion
New York faith leaders join ‘No Kings’ march against Trump administration agenda. By Fiona Andre’ / RNS
A diverse group of faith leaders gathered in Manhattan on Saturday morning (Oct. 18) to offer prayers at an interfaith prayer vigil before joining a massive “No Kings” march in Times Square, one of thousands of demonstrations organized to denounce the Trump administration and to support the United States’ commitment to democracy and the rule of law.
The interfaith vigil, organized by the Interfaith Center of New York and the religious freedom network Interfaith Alliance, drew a small crowd of about 50, including Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist ministers, to Columbus Circle, at the southwest corner of Central Park, where the group has been holding “Multi-faith Mondays” rallies for the past six months. Read more
Related: After clergy arrests, religious pushback to ICE expands in Chicago. By Jack Jenkins / NCR
Pete Hegseth Is the Pentagon’s Holy Warrior. By Missy Ryan / The Atlantic
Pete Hegseth is bringing his fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity into the Pentagon.
In an administration that is already heavy-handed in invoking Christian ideas and imagery in government work, Hegseth has gone further than anyone else. The belief that God has picked a political side is widely shared within Trump’s circle of advisers. Mass deportations, the expansion of presidential power, and, especially after Charlie Kirk’s murder, a desire for vengeance against perceived enemies are all, in their telling, divinely ordained. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” the thrice-married, non-churchgoing president has said. Read more
Mandatory mourning. By Mac Loftin / The Christian Century
What the responses to Charlie Kirk’s death reveal about truth, power, and the Christian call to honest grief
Americans have been compelled to parrot the lie that Kirk was our day’s Martin Luther King, and to lie about our feelings towards him and his legacy. But of course we don’t have to. We can, like Cordelia in King Lear, tell the truth. Doing so might make us end up like Cordelia: cut off from any security and financial stability, exposed to the violence of the state. But if the Christian answer to the question of grievability is that every life must be made equally grievable—that we can and must mourn every starved infant in Gaza as well as every callous demagogue like Kirk—then the demand to tell the truth weighs on us far heavier than any worldly power’s demand to lie. Read more
Historical / Cultural
A Horrific Tale of the Slave Trade, Destined to Become a Classic.
Within the blood-soaked history of the Atlantic slave trade, the vessel long known as “the Zong” stands out. It was a death ship of raging mortality on which the slavers, in 1781, decided to throw scores of enslaved sick people overboard to collect insurance premiums. Siddharth Kara’s powerful new history of the horror begins, authoritatively, by explaining that for more than two centuries we have gotten the name of the ship wrong: It was in fact a Dutch vessel called “the Zorg,” which in cruel irony meant “care” or “concern.” Read more
US leaders are erasing Black history. That threatens our future. By Stacey Abrams and Esosa Osa / The Guardian
DEI is being used as a smokescreen to roll back progress and consolidate power. The goal is to rewrite our nation’s story
Democracy flourishes when Black Americans advance. The evidence is clear: birthright citizenship, constitutional due process, anti-discrimination laws from education to housing to employment and equitable small business investments, are all byproducts of the systemic corrections known today as DEI. Yet, in recent years, DEI has been used as a smokescreen by cynical politicians and activists to roll back progress and consolidate power. Read more
The Million Man March 30 Years Later: A Reflection on the Accountability of Atonement. By Edmond W. Davis / Eurweb
The Million Man March—organized by Minister Louis Farrakhan and supported by a coalition of Black faith leaders, activists, and community builders—wasn’t just another protest. It was a day of atonement.
It called on Black men to take responsibility for themselves, their families, and their communities. It was about personal accountability, not politics. For those of us standing on the Mall that day, it was a call to spiritual and social renewal. Read more
Mumia Abu-Jamal Speaks With the Clear Voice of a Free Man. By Dave Zirin / The Nation
Incarcerated for 44 years, the political prisoner remains unbowed in the face of medical neglect.
On October 16, alongside attorney Noel Hanrahan, I went to see the country’s best-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. A jury, who were told that Abdul-Jamal’s political writings could be used in determining guilt, sentenced the former Black Panther to death in 1982 for the murder of Daniel Faulkner, a Philadelphia police officer. It’s not just committed radical campaigners but organizations like Amnesty International that believe his trial and conviction were a sham and are calling for his case to be reopened. Now Abu-Jamal is on what he calls “slow-motion death row,” yet the state has been unable to silence his political voice or the movement to get him home after 44 years of incarceration. Read more
Dr. Frances Cress Welsing: The Psychiatrist Who Redefined Racism And Paid The Price For Telling The Truth. By Gee NY / ShineMyCrown
Before “systemic racism” became a mainstream term, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing had already dissected it — clinically, unapologetically, and decades ahead of her time.
A psychiatrist trained at Howard University, Dr. Welsing’s work reshaped how America — and the world — understood the psychology of white supremacy. But it also cost her everything. Born in 1935, Welsing was not simply a scholar of human behavior; she was a diagnostician of power. In 1970, she published a paper titled “The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation”, where she presented an explosive idea: that white supremacy was not rooted in hatred, but in fear — a genetic fear of extinction. In her theory, Welsing argued that racism functioned as global survival strategy for the white minority population — an effort to maintain control in a world dominated, genetically and numerically, by people of color. Read more
Why ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ is devastating audiences. By Anne Branigin / Wash Post
A new Netflix documentary uses police footage to explore the 2023 shooting of a young Florida mother by the woman who lived next door.
“The Perfect Neighbor,” is stirring audiences. A winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it was released on Netflix this month and quickly became the streaming platform’s most-watched movie in the United States. Ajike “AJ” Owens, was shot and killed by her neighbor, Susan Lorincz, in a central-Florida suburb. Owens, a 35-year-old Black woman, had gone over to Lorincz’s home on June 2 after Lorincz, a 58-year-old White woman, threw a pair of roller skates at Owens’s 9-year-old son. Moments after Owens arrived at Lorincz’s doorstep, Lorincz fired at Owens from behind the dead-bolted front door. Read more
The slow, painful decline of Black celebrity activism. By Jerel Ezell / Salon
Muhammad Ali and Sidney Poitier helped shape history. Today’s Black stars seem content to stay in their lanes
Whatever the medium — art, sport or digital — Black celebrities are thriving. But they are flourishing within a kind of Gilded Age that’s at a deep remove from the rest of Black America. Speaking as a Black historian, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that the 2020s have presented arguably the greatest sustained attack against Black civil rights since the 1960s. By and large, the growing universe of Black celebrities who are at the top of their game has had a muted response to these widening attacks on Black America. Read more
Sports
‘Nightmare for the league’: Gambling scandal roils the NBA. By and
The arrests of two well-known NBA figures Thursday in a nationwide federal investigation into internal gambling and high-tech scam poker — especially a sitting head coach and former Finals Most Valuable Player — have roiled the league, from players to front offices to agents, sources told NBC News.
The arrests, particularly that of Hall of Famer and Portland head coach Chauncey Billups, altered the tenor of this week’s conversations around the NBA, whose new season had started only two days earlier. The mood, a front office executive for one team said, went from fanfare to “fear.” Read more
Kevin Durant becomes highest earning player in NBA history. By Max Winters / Daily Mail
Kevin Durant now holds the record for the highest career earnings in NBA history after signing a new two-year contract with the Houston Rockets worth $90million.
His mammoth new deal means Durant, 37, has now earned $598.2m in current and future salaries during his illustrious career. It also means the four-time Olympic gold medalist has surpassed LeBron James as the NBA‘s leader in career earnings. Lakers star James has taken home $583.9m. Read more
Ohtani, the Greatest Shoh on Earth, just had the greatest game in baseball history. By Jason Stark / The Athletic
There are stars. There are rock stars. And then there’s whatever supernatural phenomenon that Shohei Ohtani is.
Let’s rip through the highlight reel. It’s ridiculous. The starting pitcher for the Dodgers hit three home runs in one postseason game. Those three homers traveled a projected 1,342 feet — and it’s hard to know if that projection is accurate, since one of them left the stadium and might still be hopping along the Hollywood Freeway for all we know. Meanwhile, in his alternate life as an unhittable bat-destroyer, Ohtani spun off a 10-strikeout two-hitter over the six-plus innings he got to hang out on the mound. And hey, just for the fun of it, he threw two pitches harder than 100 mph. Read more
This basketball prospect is making millions — backed by a sports dad like no other. By Jessie Dougherty / Wash Post
AJ Dybantsa, the top recruit in the 2025 college basketball class, is set to make millions through lucrative NIL deals, backed by a supportive dad and a strong recruitment process.
There’s a large, lucrative market for 18-year-old phenoms, especially now that high schools, colleges and corporations can pay athletes before they turn pro. His dad, Ace, is the most modern of hovering sports parents, not dealing in playing time or training but in seven-figure contracts and TikTok views. He is, in his view, protecting his son from those who only want to profit off him. And with so much cash at hand, Ace believes it should stay in the family, putting him at the center of every negotiation, every decision, everything to do with his son. Read more
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