Compare and contrast Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker. An Hyperion to a satyr.
As I write this newsletter, another woman is about to announce in a press conference that Herschel Walker took her to get an abortion. He is, hypocritically, an anti-abortion candidate.
Nearly every utterance of this man’s mouth is outright buffoonery. He is a modern day stereotype of a black man.
“He suffered a lot of concussions coming out of football,” explained Newt Gingrich.
And yet, according to polling, Warnock’s path to victory is still narrow. It is not inconceivable that both candidates are eventually forced into a runoff, around Thanksgiving time, with the fate of the United States Senate hanging in the balance.
A race between a Black Republican and a Black Democrat may determine control of the Senate. Zak Cheney-Rice, in New York, writes:
On the day Herschel Walker was born, in March 1962, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in The Nation, “The President has proposed a ten-year plan to put a man on the moon. We do not yet have a plan to put a Negro in the State Legislature in Alabama.” Electing Black officials was a key goal of civil-rights activists, who believed it would make lawmakers more accountable to Black interests, and King had become convinced that they were running out of time. Every second of inaction from the federal government, he argued, emboldened the southern ruling class and breathed new energy into its efforts to block desegregation. By the time Raphael Warnock was born in 1969, the Eagle had landed on the moon, but King had been killed, Georgia had two segregationists as U.S. senators, and the path to answering the reverend’s challenge was still dark.
Five decades later, Warnock, Georgia’s first Black senator, is defending his seat against Walker, the Republican Party’s first Black U.S. Senate nominee in the state. It is a historic spectacle. Just two years ago, Georgia lagged behind Mississippi and South Carolina in never having elected a Black senator; in January, a Black man is guaranteed to continue to represent the state. But given whom Warnock is running against, the race seems less like a fulfillment of King’s vision than a perversion of it. “There are sharp contrasts between me and my opponent,” Warnock said, peering over his rimless glasses, at every stop on his Georgia bus tour this summer.
The most recent Monmouth poll finds that one in four potential Georgia voters have already cast their ballots, choosing Warnock over Walker 61% to 34%. But for late deciding voters waiting until Election Day, Walker has the advantage. Amazingly, Warnock has yet to seal the deal in this race.
Chris Licht’s CNN will allow election-deniers on their airwaves. (Jay Rosen)
“Asked to define the metaverse, Microsoft's Phil Spencer calls it, ‘a poorly built video game.’” (Dawn Chmielewski/#WSJTechLive)
“Decades before the adult-dorm decor of Big Brother and its ilk dominated fly-on-the-wall reality TV, tabloid sets carved their own seductive, distinctive and budget-friendly vernacular, similarly centered on profiting off class alienation by hotboxing participant emotions.” (Laura Bannister/Dirt)
“And that’s true of the Africa coverage, too. In each of our beats, we’re trying to go fairly deep and verticalized. Aimed at a sophisticated reader who’s interested in the subject.” (Ben Smith and Peter Kafka/Recode)
Race for GOP whip turns nasty as Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. angrily weigh in. (CNN)
Senegal’s Oscar Submission Blends Universal Melodrama With Enticing Traditional Storytelling. (THR)
“Trevor Noah’s successor may be someone ‘Daily Show’ viewers haven’t seen on the program in some time — if ever.” (Variety)