Weekly Review

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, died at the age of 87.¹ “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed,” she dictated in a statement during her final days. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell released a statement hours after Ginsburg’s death announcing that Republicans would vote on President Trump’s nominee for her replacement, and Senator Lindsey Graham, who said after the 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland, “I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say, ‘Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever that may be, make the nomination,’ ” voiced his support for the effort to fill the vacancy.^{2 3} The Trump Administration reimposed UN sanctions on Iran, which recently had its largest single-day increase in coronavirus cases since June; the sanctions had been lifted as part of the Iran nuclear agreement, and a majority of UN members oppose them.^{4 5} The U.S. Department of Justice designated New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, as “anarchist jurisdictions” because, in the words of the attorney general, the Democratic-controlled cities “impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs” and endanger their citizenry; the cities stand to lose billions in federal grants used for education, security, and public housing.^{6 7} Michele Bachmann, who once requested a police investigation after her house had been egged and reported two women, one of whom was a former nun, for “possible false imprisonment” after they had asked her questions in a public bathroom, said that “there are transgender Marxists—transgender black Marxists—who are seeking the overthrow of the United States.”^{8 9 10} It was reported that sheriff’s deputies in Williamson County, Texas, including two who were involved in the death of Javier Ambler, a 40-year-old black postal worker, had been rewarded with steak-house gift cards for “good uses of force.”¹¹

At a campaign rally in Minnesota, Trump said that his supporters have “good genes.”¹² The president announced that he would sign an executive order to create the 1776 Commission, which will “promote patriotic education,” and the American Enterprise Institute and the Woodson Center unveiled the 1776 Unites curriculum, which was expressly created to refute the 1619 Project.^{13 14} “1776 Unites maintains a special focus on stories that celebrate black excellence, reject victimhood culture, and showcase African-Americans who have prospered by embracing America’s founding ideals,” read a page on the project’s website. The U.S. Department of Education said that it would investigate Princeton University for potential civil-rights violations after the university’s president published an open letter acknowledging the persistence of systemic racism at the school.¹⁵ The FBI director testified to a House committee about the growing threat of white-supremacist violence, and elected officials in a town in upstate New York containing a hamlet called Swastika voted unanimously against considering a name change.^{16 17} A whistleblower at an ICE facility in Georgia reported that an outside gynecologist whom she called “the uterus collector,” later identified as Mahendra Amin, had operated on at least eight detainees without their consent; one woman, who has since lost all reproductive ability, was improperly anesthetized during an operation and heard Amin say that he had removed the wrong ovary.^{18 19} A woman who allegedly mailed envelopes containing ricin to the White House and law enforcement agencies in South Texas was arrested at the U.S.-Canada border.²⁰

A Thai national park announced that it will begin mailing garbage back to tourists caught littering, residents of an Indonesian municipality were made to dig graves as punishment for refusing to wear masks, and the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season exhausted its list of storm names, forcing the World Meteorological Organization to name storms after letters of the Greek alphabet for the second time ever.^{21 22 23} President Trump unveiled a $13 billion aid package to repair electrical infrastructure in Puerto Rico, three years after Hurricane Maria damaged it.²⁴ The athleisure manufacturer Lululemon, which is valued at $45 billion, promoted a “resist capitalism” yoga workshop with programs on the relationship between violent colonialism and consumerism.²⁵ Peruvian shamans performed a ritual requesting a peaceful resolution to the U.S. presidential election.²⁶ An expert at the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned that the United States is home to an “out of control” population of feral “super-pigs,” which will occupy some 386,000 square miles of land by the end of the year.²⁷—Ani Wilcenski