Featured
Donald Trump Flirts With Race Science. By Ali Breland / The Atlantic
The former president says that there are “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It was perhaps inevitable that Trump would eventually dip his toes into the grimy puddle of race science—the pseudoscientific belief that race carries specific genetic tendencies that explain differences in intelligence and other behavioral proclivities. He has also long expressed a belief that genes determine your life. In 1988, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and professed that “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” He has repeated versions of this sentiment since then. It was only a matter of time before he began linking his belief in genes with his belief in the inferiority of migrants. Read more
Related: Donald Trump’s Hitlerian logic is no mistake. By Sidney Blumenthal / The Guardian
Donald Trump Is the Tyrant George Washington Feared. By Tom Nichols / The Atlantic
The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments. “He went home,” Kelly said. The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” Read more
Related: Republicans are drowning in Donald Trump’s lies. By Heather Digby Pardon / Salon
Related: Trump Is Running a Disinformation Campaign, Not a Political Campaign. By David Corn / Mother Jones
Related: The Media Is Finally Waking Up to the Story of Trump’s Mental Fitness. By Michael Tomasky / TNR
Political / Social
America Is So Ready for Kamala Harris. By Kali Holloway / TNR
This is no ordinary campaign, but it is exactly the campaign we needed at this extraordinary historic juncture.
Imagine, for just a moment, if Kamala Harris’s supporters were prone to the sort of political idolatry that characterizes Donald Trump’s devotees. It’s a thought experiment suited to an election for which the word historic feels inadequate to capture either Harris’s political ascent or the sheer number of unprecedented events that led to it. Read more
Related: Never-Trumpers agree with Harris on plenty. By Jennifer Rubin / Wash Post
Latinos Who Support Donald Trump Have ‘Internalized Racism,’ According to Journalist Paola Ramos. By Pedro Camacho / The Latin Times
According to Ramos, Trump feels comfortable with Latinos because “he believes that he can sort of tap into a racial and ethnic grievance that is very familiar”
“I think what I discovered in the book is that the real answers, the hardest answers, are the ones that are perhaps more uncomfortable to talk about. By that I mean really understanding the sort of racial baggage that I believe a lot of Latinos, including myself, a lot of us are carrying from Latin America. What it means to sort of have been colonized for so many years, the weight of colonization. That in and of itself creates I believe a lot of internalized racism, a lot of colorism, that manifests in American politics.” Read more
Black Men Are Waiting for a Democratic Party That Delivers for Them.
Adams’s Top Deputy Mayor Resigns, Intensifying Wave of Departures. Dana Rubinstein and William K. Rashbaum / NYT
Sheena Wright, the first deputy mayor of New York City, became the seventh senior leader to leave City Hall in the past few weeks, as federal investigations into the Adams administration widen.
The departures seem to reflect the administrative housecleaning that Gov. Kathy Hochul — as well as some of Mr. Adams’s own advisers — has sought as four federal investigations have enveloped City Hall and cast doubt on Mr. Adams’s viability as mayor. Read more
Related: Mayor Adams’s Damage to New York Began With the Police. By Mara Gay / NYT
Pulling Back the Curtain on the Right’s Ideas About Education. By Eleanor J. Bader / The Progressive
A new book explores what’s actually going on in public schools—and it’s not CRT.
Shortly after scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” was launched in 2019, the Pulitzer Centerannounced that it was partnering with the project to create curricular materials for public school use. The initial response was nearly completely positive, with more than 3,500 classrooms in all fifty states opting to use the lessons. As the momentum built, the right took notice, and conservative historians and organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute set out to stop schoolhouse discussions of race, racism, and the ongoing impact of chattel slavery. Read more
World News
Democrats Must Confront an Inconvenient Genocide. By Wajahat Ali / The Progressive
President Joe Biden and his party need to use their power to stop Israel’s war crimes.
Once upon a time in America, an inconvenient genocide threatened to ruin the joyful vibes of the Democratic Party ahead of the 2024 election. President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election briefly prompted hope that the Administration might pivot from its disastrous policy in Gaza, which has armed, funded, and otherwise supported Israel’s brutal war. Read more
Related: How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart. By Ezra Klein / NYT
Related: On Israeli Apathy.
They Flew 7,000 Miles to Fight Haiti’s Gangs. The Gangs Are on Top. Frances Robles / NYT
Hundreds of Kenyan police officers are in Port-au-Prince, trying to take the capital back from gangs, but financing and personnel shortages have hampered the effort.
I, along with a New York Times photographer, went on patrol through Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, with a Kenyan-led multinational security mission deployed in the country. During the six-hour tour, the Kenyans were mostly ignored by people on the street and occasionally heckled; the vehicle was shot at once. Read more
Ethics / Morality / Religion
The Paradoxes Facing the Christian Right in Election 2024. By Amy Littlefield / The Nation
This year’s Pray Vote Stand summit revealed fissures around Trump’s refusal to support a nationwide abortion ban.
Tony Perkins, the clean-shaven, smooth-talking, dad-joking president of the Christian right think tank the Family Research Council (FRC), was halfway through a sentence at the group’s annual Pray Vote Stand conference on October 4 when he seemed to lose his way. Then he sat on stage beside a panel of three leading pastors who stared at the floor looking like their football team had just lost and began to rally the faithful for exile. “We’ve lost the culture war, you could say,” said the Rev. Andrew Brunson. “We’ve lost the culture and we’re a post-Christian country now.” Read more
Related: How Can Christians Support the Godless Immorality of Trump? By Jim Meisner / Patheos
Jemar Tisby on ‘The Spirit of Justice’ and the Black Christians who pursued it. By Adelle M. Banks / RNS
In his bestselling book “The Color of Compromise,” author and historian Jemar Tisby explored the history of racism in the American church.
Now, in his new book, “The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance,” he looks at the other side of that history: “What about the Christians who did fight against racism?” The book details the faith and fortitude of more than 50 people, mostly Black individuals and often women, whose stories are little known. As his research, which included the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, neared the present day, his book shifts to include some non-Black leaders. Read more
How the Trump Bible grift spells danger for public schools. By Lisa Needham / Daily Kos
In the absolute worst possible example of your tax dollars at work—well, your tax dollars if you live in Oklahoma—the state department of education is planning to buy 55,000 Bibles to put in every school district in the state. Yes, that includes public schools.
This is a terrible enough idea in and of itself, given that whole separation of church and state thing. It’s made worse by the fact that this is all part of a larger push by conservatives to engineer a collapse of public schools. Read more
Historical / Cultural
The road to a slave-free Georgia: the little-known history of state founder James Oglethorpe. By George Chidi / The Guardian
Michael Thurmond’s book about the ‘father of Georgia’ followed a surprise discovery that the former enslaver was an abolitionist
Thursday night, Michael Thurmond held court in the decorous, genteel salon of the British consulate in Atlanta, describing nearly 20 years of scholarly research behind his latest work: a history of James Oglethorpe, the abolitionist founder of the Georgia colony in America. Read more
America’s newest monuments unveil a different look at the nation’s past. By Krystal Nurse / USA Today
For nearly 100 years, Robert E. Lee’s 10,000-pound monument rode high over the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. Now, it’s been melted into bronze slabs and another memorial in town has risen to national prominence.
It’s on the University of Virginia campus, titled the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers. It stands as the antithesis to the Confederacy, honoring the slaves forced to work at the university in the 1800s as carpenters, blacksmiths, roofers, stone carvers and other back-breaking trades. Read more
The Troubled History of Medical Harm to Black Women. By Savannah Flanagan / AAIHS
In 1805, a Black woman known in the historical record as Pleasant, took a deep breath and pushed her son into the world. She was surrounded by Indigenous and white Moravian women who lived in the Appalachian mountains of northern Georgia. Pleasant pulled her son to her chest. The women helped her deliver the afterbirth and cleaned her tired body. Having survived the dangerous trials of childbirth, Pleasant held and fed her son.
Today, Black women continue to seek control over their bodies and pregnancies. They face incredible risks during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. Read more
Gospel great Cissy Houston has died at the age of 91. By Brandon Gates / NPR
Cissy Houston, a singer whose career began in childhood and spanned generations and genres from gospel to pop, has died.
As a child, Houston performed with her siblings, and she later sang backing vocals with Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison and more. She was also a renowned solo gospel artist and the mother of one of the biggest pop and R&B stars in the world, Whitney Houston. Read more
Otis Redding gets a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Redding scored 17 Top 20 singles on the R&B charts in less than six years of recording before he died in a plane crash in 1967 at the age of 26.
In 1962, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers had an audition in Memphis for the rising new label, Stax Records. Jenkins blew his shot, but with time left at the end of the session, his driver persuaded the Stax team to let him take a turn at the microphone. The solemn, simmering performance of “These Arms of Mine” that followed stopped the musicians cold — and went on to alter the sound of pop music to come. That opportunistic vocalist was named Otis Redding, who received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Friday. Read more
Sports
U.S. athletes make it plain that Trump’s genetic analysis is junk. By Sally Jenkins / Wash Post
Despite Trump’s rhetoric, if you’re looking for aspiration and work ethic, take the first- or second-generation American every time.
Coco Gauff has new mindset after coaching change and it’s working. By Sai Mohan / Tennis News
Coco Gauff’s 2024 season went from bad to worse when she suffered a fourth-round loss at the U.S. Open, following her early ousters from the 2024 Paris Olympics, Wimbledon and Cincinnati Open.
It seemed like the young American had reached her breaking point as she fired her coach, Brad Gilbert, and hinted at taking an extended break to recuperate physically and mentally. That’s precisely why everyone was shocked when Gauff declared her last-minute entry into the China Open, and even more so when she steamrolled her way to the WTA 1000 title with a win over Karolina Muchova on Sunday. Read more
Doc Rivers, Malcolm Brogdon describe their paths to advocacy in new book.
Their essays are included in ‘The Power of Basketball’
Rivers’ path to advocacy is one of many stories told in the new book from the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, The Power of Basketball: NBA players, coaches, and team governors on the fight to make a better America, written in partnership with the Vera Institute of Justice, an anti-mass incarceration organization. The book, a collection of personal essays, is meant to highlight the coalition’s work on social justice reform since its creation in the wake of the anti-Black racism movement in 2020. Read more
What Does College Football Have to Do With College? John Branch / NYT
The question isn’t new. But seismic changes to college sports, embraced by Coach Deion Sanders and his University of Colorado Buffaloes, have made it more relevant than ever.
What is the point of college football these days? For more than a year, from a distance, I had watched Colorado absorb the “Prime Effect” of Coach Deion Sanders, the famous former football player nicknamed Prime Time. He has injected the place with enthusiasm and brought it fresh attention. Friends and family have been so gaga that I worry for their senses. Colorado is my alma mater. I have attended games in Boulder since I was a kid in the 1970s. But it’s 2024. I am a reporter. I have questions. Read more
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