Greetings from your Thursday newsletter writer, Timothy Noah, and happy November 18.
Who killed Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in 1965? Not, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. will announce today, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, according to the lead story in todayâs New York Times. (Itâs the off-lead in The Washington Post.) There were three gunmen that day. One of them, Mujahid Abdul Halim, confessed to the crime. Halim is 80 today and lives in Brooklyn after serving 45 years in prison. He always said that Aziz and Islam were innocent, and he told the Times, âGod bless you, theyâre exonerated.â Aziz is still living and was released from prison in 1985. Islam, who was released in 1987, died in 2009. Halim, Aziz, and Islam were all members of the Nation of Islam, with which Malcolm X had broken the year before his death.
Evidence raising questions about the convictions of Aziz and Islam has been available for nearly half a century, but it was assembled compellingly by Abdur-Rahman Muhammad for his 2020 Netflix documentary, Who Killed Malcolm X?, prompting Vance to reopen the case. After the investigation began, a biography by the late Les Payne of Newsday and his daughter Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising, raised further questions about the prosecutions. The book won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The documentary and the book identify as one of the killers William Bradley, an enforcer for the Nation of Islam who died in 2018. Halim actually identified Bradley as one of the assassins, but Bradley denied it.
The House voted 223â207 to censure Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, for tweeting an anime video that showed him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The resolution also removes Gosar from his committee assignments on the House Oversight and Natural Resources Committees. Only two Republicans voted in favor of the resolutionâRepresentative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. A third Republican, David Joyce of Ohio, voted âpresent.â Gosar defended himself by saying it was supposed to be, uh, symbolic. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, as you might have guessed, declined to criticize the video and pledged payback when the Republicans retake the House next year. So watch out, all you Democratic House members posting videos of yourselves killing Republican members of Congress!
In supply chain news, The Wall Street Journal reports that the Ford Motor Company is so fed up with computer-chip shortages that itâs planning to start making the damned things itself through a strategic agreement with GlobalFoundries Inc. It also reports that hedge funds that invested in container ships are making a killing from the supply chain crisis. For more on supply chains, Robert Kuttner in The New York Review of Books argues that this madness should give ballast to a âfrankly nationalistâ report by Bidenâs National Security Council and National Economic Council that calls for more national economic planning. âI know of no federal planning template so thorough and ambitious since World War II,â Kuttner writes, ânor can I recall a government document that is as engrossing to read.â So how about a link, Bob? Oh, never mind, Iâll do it.
At New Republic.com, I document how the January 6 insurrectionists reveal themselves, at their sentencing hearings, to be the sorriest pack of revolutionaries you ever saw. They apologize pitifully the second they learn that, say, slugging a cop, far from being a MAGA ritual of self-actualization, is something that pretty reliably will send you to jail. The historian Eric Herschthal argues that the University of South Carolinaâs Woody Holton, whose new history of the American Revolution was attacked for attributing the revolution to pro-slavery sentiment among colonists, is actually more nuanced than that (and also less exceptional). Kate Aronoff observes that the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow did nothing to bar the Biden administration from opening the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. And Zack Harold reports that most West Virginia Democrats are too terrified of Joe Manchin to criticize him for not supporting Bidenâs reconciliation bill.
See you in two weeks (no, unlike Al Roker, Iâm not working Thanksgiving morning),
Timothy Noah, staff writer |
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