❧ Top U.S. archivists are reportedly censoring and downplaying the uncomfortable parts of the nation’s history. This news comes as an exclusive from Wall Street Journal reporters Andrew Restuccia and Rebecca Balhus, who collected anonymous reports from employees at the National Archives Museum. According to them, Colleen Shogan—the incumbent U.S. Archivist, who was appointed by President Biden back in 2022—has made efforts to present a “rosy spin on U.S. history”:
[Shogan] has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.
A new photo booth at the Museum, in which visitors can take selfies with historical figures, has been a particular source of controversy:
Shogan’s senior aides ordered that a proposed image of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. be cut from [the booth.] The aides also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents. The aides proposed using instead images of former President Richard Nixon greeting Elvis Presley and former President Ronald Reagan with baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.
That’s right: Dr. King didn’t make the cut, but two white Republican presidents—Nixon and Reagan—both did. (The Journal also reports that “alternative photos of King” met with the same rejection, so it wasn’t one particular image that was deemed unsuitable, it was King as a subject.)
Along with Shogan, senior adviser Ellis Brachman reportedly “complained to some employees that they were too woke,” requested that captions on a photo of Black coal workers be edited to omit the fact they were recruited from plantations, “cut references to the environmental hazards caused by the mining industry,” and nixed an exhibit about “how public records had been used to return assets to Jews after the Holocaust.” Apparently, this was all part of an institutional effort to “focus on lighter moments in U.S. history.”
This is a pretty cool picture, but not cool enough to overlook the Civil Rights era for.
This is all incredibly disturbing, as censoring history is one of the ways governments throughout history have hidden their past crimes and paved the way to commit future ones. There’s also an echo of what historian Timothy Snyder calls “obedience in advance”—a pattern in which right-wing authoritarians are aided in their plans by people who quietly acquiesce in a cowardly attempt to avoid conflict. That’s what we’re seeing with Shogan, a Biden appointee who appears so fearful of a “potential Trump administration” that she’ll just give conservatives what they want. In a new article for Current Affairs, editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson explains why that’s such a betrayal:
Since the 1960s, there has been a heroic effort by scholars and activists to get Black Americans, women, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ people, and workers included in “mainstream” historical narratives. That effort has been partly successful, although many liberal historians still have major blindspots.[...]
There will always be backlash to these efforts. There will be attempts at banning books, at pressuring museum curators to dial back the “woke” stuff. There is no guarantee that historical knowledge will survive or be widely understood. Librarians, archivists, curators, and historians all have essential work to do in guarding the truth, and making sure it is not replaced with mythology. The National Archives story shows how little we can count on liberals to maintain their commitment to this mission in the face of right-wing pressure.
Missouri may become the first state to overturn a total abortion ban, with a ballot measure next Tuesday that would codify reproductive rights in the state constitution. According to the most recent Emerson poll, 58 percent of residents plan to vote “yes” on the measure. (The Intercept)
In a welcome bit of good news for public transportation, New Jersey is getting spiffy new double-decker passenger trains. They’re self-propelled, so they don’t need a locomotive, and can go up to 110 miles per hour. (NBC 10 Philadelphia)
Almost all of Alabama is either experiencing a drought or expected to in the near future, something that’s becoming increasingly common around the world thanks to—you guessed it—climate change. (AL.com)
A Virginia-based military contractor, CACI—which provides interrogation services—is being sued for its alleged role in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib in 2003. After more than two decades, three plaintiffs who claim to have been “threatened with dogs, subjected to electric shocks, and stripped of their clothing,” by the company may finally get justice for what was done to them at the infamous U.S. black site. (The Intercept)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs”)
❧ The GOP’s “Project Esther” would crack down on pro-Palestine activism. This is yet another dystopian project from the friendly folks at the Heritage Foundation, who previously brought you Project 2025. Now, they’ve released another extensive planning document for how to eliminate pro-Palestine protest groups in the United States, which they refer to as the “Hamas Support Network.”
As Prem Thakker reports for Zeteo, the Foundation lists specific organizations that it would like to see neutralized, including Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and American Muslims for Palestine. The authors call these “Hamas Support Organizations” (HSOs), claiming without evidence that they are “decidedly antisemitic” (yes, even the Jewish ones), and lay out a step-by-step plan to “extirpate” them from American society. They’re very explicit about their desire to trample First Amendment rights in the process, writing that the activist groups in question should be “rendered unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests,” should “no longer have access to U.S. open society,” should have their “communications disrupted,” and should have their voices “eradicated from the U.S. education system at all levels.”
They have tactics in mind, too. As Thakker writes:
To fulfill their goals, the authors envision using financial and academic audits, “name and shame” campaigns, and “lawfare” – including utilizing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and, astonishingly, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), as well as counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws. They also seek to disrupt communications between and among the targeted groups and monitor their social networks.
If Trump and the Heritage Foundation get their way, this kind of rally could
We’ve already seen how RICO laws have been used to go after activists in Atlanta’s “Stop Cop City” movement (among other dubious uses), so this is a very real threat. Notably, the Heritage Foundation says it will be a lot easier to enact their plan if a “willing administration occupies the White House,” and Donald Trump has been talking about his desire to deport anyone who he deems a “pro-Hamas radical.” So this is also another worrying factor to keep an eye on as Election Day approaches.
Still, in a strange way this is encouraging news. The far-right zealots at the Heritage Foundation wouldn’t need to pursue this kind of repression if the Palestine movement wasn’t making real gains—and they’ve helpfully posted their plan of attack online, so activists will be able to see it coming and defend themselves accordingly.
In other news…
Steve Bannon, one of the biggest forces behind Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, is out of jail. He was convicted after refusing a subpoena from the January 6 committee. And after being released, he’s already urging Trump to declare victory in next week’s election, even if he hasn’t won, just like in 2020. (Mother Jones)
Speaking of which, Trump has already turned on the fire hose of bullshit, claiming that Democrats are “CHEATING BIG” in Pennsylvania. He claimed that Lancaster County was discovered to have received “2600 Fake Ballots and Forms.” In fact, they received a large number of voter registration applications right before the deadline, some of which officials determined had duplicate handwriting, which they decided to investigate. But they were not “fake ballots,” as Trump claimed (Philadelphia Inquirer). Trump also said Bucks County was cheating by extending its deadline for early voting after voters complained of long lines. This isn’t fraud either. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
Expect to hear some VERY long podcasts about "election fraud" from this guy soon.
Politico has released detailed rundowns of all the people who could staff either a Trump or a Harris cabinet, and the lists are a perfect metaphor for the whole election. Trump’s bench (Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, Betsy Devos, etc) is full of menacing far-right figures, whereas Kamala Harris’s (Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Laphonza Butler) is just deeply lame.
Joe Biden bit a baby. In the President’s defense, the baby was wearing a chicken costume for the White House’s Halloween event, so it’s possible that he just mistook the child for a delicious meal. Or maybe Commander’s habits have rubbed off on him. (New York Post)
The Democrats dusted off Bill Clinton this week to try to rein in Michigan’s wayward Arab voters, who remain angry at the Biden-Harris administration over its horrific policy towards Palestine. It would be hard to find a worse emissary than Rep. Ritchie Torres, the ultra-Zionist congressman they sent to speak in Michigan last week. But Clinton actually managed to come close, suggesting that as a result of Oct. 7’s brutality, Israel “had to kill” countless Palestinian civilians. Believe it or not, this does not appear to have impressed many wayward voters. (Middle East Eye)
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
❧ At least 158 people are dead from an unprecedented flood in Spain, which mostly hit the Eastern Valencia region. One of the worst-hit towns, Chiva, experienced a year’s worth of rain within just eight hours. The Associated Press describes the devastating scene:
Crews searched for bodies in stranded cars and sodden buildings Thursday as residents salvaged what they could from their ruined homes…
More horrors emerged Thursday from the debris and ubiquitous layers of mud left by the walls of water that produced Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory. The damage from the storm late Tuesday and early Wednesday recalled the aftermath of a tsunami, with survivors left to pick up the pieces as they mourn their loved ones.
Cars were piled on one another like fallen dominoes, uprooted trees, downed power lines and household items all mired in mud that covered streets in dozens of communities in Valencia, a region south of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast.
While it’s hard to attribute a weather event to any one factor, scientists say that rising temperatures made the storm unusually intense. Spain often experiences rainfall entering the autumn and winter months as cold fronts move in. However, because the Mediterranean Sea has reached record levels of heat, the interaction with the cold air led to much larger clouds forming than would have happened otherwise. Researchers told the BBC that for each additional degree of warming, the amount of rain the clouds carried increased by 7 percent. Additionally, increased heat on soil makes it absorb less water. That water instead flows into rivers, which makes the flooding more intense.
It’s hard not to view this devastation in light of the United Nations Climate report released last week, which found that over the past year, the world made zero progress moving away from fossil fuels, and is actually emitting more greenhouse gases than at any point in history. With the COP29 climate summit coming up later this month in Baku where many countries are expected to reveal their new climate benchmarks. As the World Resources Institute writes:
These near-term benchmarks are critical. Unless the world can dramatically reduce emissions by 2030, it will become impossible to make up enough lost ground by 2035 to hold warming to 1.5 degrees C with no or limited overshoot and avert increasingly devastating climate impacts.
In other news…
Two years ago, at the COP15 biodiversity summit, countries around the world agreed to set aside 30 percent of the planet for the conservation of nature. However, just like with greenhouse emissions, two years later almost zero progress has been made. (The Guardian)
The Biden administration says it is attempting to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. has made “good progress” in getting both sides to come to an agreement to end the current Israeli offensive into Lebanon, which has killed civilians on a daily basis. We should temper our expectations—how many times have we heard that a ceasefire was around the corner, only for Netanyahu to tank the deal? For his part, Lebanon’s prime minister Najib Mikati said a deal could be reached “in hours or days.” But we’ll believe it when we see it. (The Guardian)
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) may go on strike before Christmas, as negotiations with the Canada Post are still deadlocked and workers have voted by an overwhelming 95 percent for strike authorization. Stay tuned, eh? (Toronto Star)
Canadian mail trucks might grind to a halt soon, if wages don't improve.
Mozambique has become engulfed in violence after its election last week, with at least 11 protesters dead in a police crackdown. The long-ruling Daniel Chapo, whose Mozambican National Resistance party has been in control since Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975, won re-election with landslide numbers. But his party is deeply unpopular with Mozambique’s youth, and many of them have taken to the streets claiming his victory was fraudulent. (Al Jazeera)
The Vatican has a new mascot for some reason. Her name is Luce and she looks like this. Because the main reform people were clamoring for in the Catholic Church was “More anime.” (Vice)
Most people know about the Hindu festival of Diwali. But Nepal’s celebration of the holiday (which is called “Tihar”) has a day specifically dedicated to honoring dogs, which took place on Thursday.
It is known as Kukur Tihar (“day of the dogs”) and it honors the important place that canines hold in Hindu folklore. Dogs are companions to Yamaraja, the God of Death, and it is believed that when people die, dogs protect them as they enter the afterlife.Dogs on Earth are considered messengers of Yama. And as one man interviewed by the AFP News Agency put it, “They are on full-time duty. They let you know who is coming and going with a bark.”
On Kukur Tihar, dogs are showered with affection. As the Times of Indiawrites, “Owners adorn dogs with beautiful and vibrant fresh flower garlands, or malas, and apply tika and rice on their foreheads as a symbol of respect, signifying honor and gratitude towards them.”
People do not only revere their pet dogs on this day, but also Nepal’s many stray dogs who are bathed, fed, and given pets and belly rubs.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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