In Italy on Wednesday, the Italian Senate pushed forward the West’s most restrictive ban on international surrogacy, making it a crime punishable by prison time for Italians to use surrogates in another country. The move closes the door on same-sex couples’ last, best option to start a family in the country.
The far-right government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had already banned both surrogacy and domestic or international adoption by same-sex couples in Italy.
The legislation amending existing Italian law would classify surrogacy as a universal crime transcending borders and impose a two-year prison sentence and a million-euro fine for defying it. The law also criminalizes work by Italian doctors, nurses and technicians in foreign fertility clinics that provide surrogacy services.
Last year, Meloni’s government barred Italian cities and towns from accepting birth certificates that list same-sex parents, denying their children access to citizenship, public schooling and healthcare. That edict is tied up in court.
The Senate’s passage of the anti-surrogacy law, 84 to 58, follows approval by the government’s lower house last year, virtually assuring its enactment.
Meloni has made “traditional values” a cornerstone of her tenure leading the Brothers of Italy party, despite being a single mother who never married. The far-right populist league was founded on the ruins of Benito Mussolini’s Republican Fascist Party in the aftermath of World War II.
“It’s like a truck hitting us in the face,” Pierre Molena, a gay man pursuing surrogacy abroad with his partner, told The New York Times.
“We are worried about our future and that of our children,” he said.
“It is nature that decides this, not us,” Sen. Susanna Campione, who voted in favor of the law, told the The Washington Post.
“This is a civilized law that safeguards the child but also the woman, since we believe that surrogacy essentially reduces a woman to a reproductive machine.”
While most U.S. states and Canada allow the practice, surrogacy has become a flashpoint in Europe. Germany and France ban domestic surrogacy, while it’s legal in the United Kingdom and Greece under certain circumstances. Pope Francis has labeled the practice “womb renting,” and called for a global ban.
About 250 couples a year in Italy pursue international surrogacy, according to legal experts. Ten percent of those couples are same-sex.
“This law is disgusting,” Salvatore Scarpa told the The Post. The gay dad and his partner had a daughter with a surrogate based in California last year and plan to have a second child with the same woman. They have an implantation planned for this month.
“They cannot stop our family. How dare they judge us,” he said.
Alessandra Maiorino, a member of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement, said the new law stigmatizes children already born to gay couples as well, telling lawmakers who voted for it: “It looks like you don’t realize these people already exist.”
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A broken window on an LGBTQ fashion boutique storefront in Manhattan, New York on June 12, 2023.Photo: Shutterstock
There has been a 112% increase in documented attacks on LGBTQ+ people nationwide, according to a newly unveiled Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker (ALERT) from the queer media watchdog organization GLAAD. GLAAD hopes to use the tracker to provide comprehensive reporting and analysis detailing anti-LGBTQ+ hate in the U.S. and the specific communities and targets affected by it.
ALERT recorded 524 such incidents between June 2022 and 2023 and 1,109 incidents from June 2023 to 2024. These attacks have included over 450 protests, 330 propaganda drops, 320 acts of vandalism, 200 bomb & mass shooting threats, 130 assaults, and 45 cases of arson that have resulted in at least 161 injuries and 21 deaths, GLAAD’s ALERT Desk reported.
While the cases focus on drag bans and trans protections, they address larger issues of free speech and civil rights.
The attacks have also included over 567 attacks on transgender and gender non-conforming people, 360 incidents targeting educational institutions and libraries, 325 incidents targeting Pride flags and other LGBTQ+ community symbols, 160 protests and violent threats against drag performers, and 140 incidents targeting health care providers of gender-affirming care and their patients.
The tracker, which will be updated quarterly, includes data on criminal and non-criminal acts of hate from sources like news media, partner organizations (like the Human Rights Campaign or Anti-Defamtion League’s Center on Extremism), right-wing forums on social media sites like Gab or chat apps like Telegram as well as incident reports submitted via GLAAD’s website. All documented incidents must occur against groups or individuals within the U.S. and must include harassment, threats, or actual violence specifically targeting LGBTQ+ people.
GLAAD’s ALERT team will verify the validity of each incident to maintain credibility, remove duplicates, and exclude spam and trolling, the organization said.
“The ALERT Desk tells a story not entirely captured by the FBI’s hate crime statistics because many of these incidents, like protests at Pride events, don’t meet the criteria necessary to bring legal charges [and] aren’t included in most official hate crime counts,” GLAAD wrote in its recently released report on ALERT’s findings. “However, we must recognize that the impact of these acts on local LGBTQ communities is felt regardless of whether or not the incident is prosecuted.”
“We must recognize that the impact of these acts on local LGBTQ communities is felt regardless of whether or not the incident is prosecuted.”
GLAAD’s 2024 report on ALERT’s findings
During a press call, Barbara Simon, senior director of news and campaigns at GLAAD, noted that ALERT seeks to contextualize anti-LGBTQ+ incidents to help media and other experts understand larger systems of violence.
“[Recently], there was a bomb threat against a library in Massachusetts,” Simon said, a threat against a Drag Queen Story Hour at the public library in Somerville. “But it’s not just about that library. It’s not just about the inclusive materials and programs they had, about how the bomb squad had to come in and sweep the library, how children and families and patrons had to evacuate the library.”
“Our data shows how that incident is connected to the bigger picture, which is more of a broad-based, systemic attack against LGBTQ people, our visibility, our equality and our allies,” Simon added. “It is one of 365 attacks nationwide against drag artisan events. It’s one of 63 anti-LGBTQ attacks in Massachusetts alone, one of 15 attacks specifically against drag in Massachusetts.”
The quarterly reports will also include stories from those affected by the incidents.
GLAADA bar graph showing anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents from GLAAD’s ALERT Desk. | GLAAD
For example, Dr. Jack Turban, pediatric psychiatrist and director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California in San Francisco, said during the press call that bans on gender-affirming care for youth in 26 states have worsened the mental health of his young trans patients even though they live in a state where such health care is protected. Their mental health has been worsened, Turban said, because of an increase in anti-trans rhetoric nationwide whose indirect effects cross state lines.
“Kids are hearing things like being trans is a mental illness, or being trans is bad, or you shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom that aligns with your gender identity because trans people are sexual assaulters, or you shouldn’t be allowed to play on sports teams with your friends because you’re going to physically hurt them,” Turban said. “My patients know that none of those things are true, right? They can know that, but if you’re hearing it every single day, all over social media and all over the news and now right in their communities, even it’s impossible to not be impacted by that.”
GLAAD pointed out that media coverage tends to falsely frame medical care for transgender people as a “debate” despite every major medical association supporting the care. This coverage compounds the effect of hateful rhetoric from anti-trans politicians, protestors, and pundits.
ShutterstockSalina EsTitties attends the 35th Annual GLAAD Awards on March 14, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. | Shutterstock
The hateful rhetoric affects even LGBTQ+ celebrities and their fans, like Salina EsTitties, a competitor who appeared in Season 15 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. EsTitties told the press call that she’s generally insulated from hatred against gender non-conforming people since she lives in the very gay city of West Hollywood, California. However, she sees its impact whenever she travels to other states or posts social media videos about LGBTQ+ issues.
“There’s comments every single day of people being like, ‘This is not what God created. God created two genders. Oh, they keep adding alphabets. Oh, just shoot it between the eyes and get rid of it,’” EsTitties said. “The online hate is insane and there’s so much of it, and people are so willing to just let it all out, but it’s a clear representation of how people actually feel in America and across, you know, the U.S. here.”
“Not only are our LGBT community dealing with having to be their authentic selves,” she continued. “Being their authentic selves with just who they are outside of their queer identity is a lot to navigate, and it’s not easy, especially when people are telling you, ‘You’re the Devil, you’re a demon,’ or ‘It’s not acceptable to be that.’”
Hate crimes typically increase during presidential election years. Marie Cottrell, executive director for the New Jersey-based LGBTQ+ advocacy center Out Montclair, said she hopes that increased awareness of anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents will empower communities to build intersectional coalitions between other demographic groups whose members are targeted by similar hate.
“I think that it’s really important that you be the person that the community needs,” Cottrell told the press call. “They need to see you stand for and with them. Find folks who in your community who will stand with you in the face of intolerance, build a community of support within your township — whether that’s forging a relationship with your LGBTQ liaison within the local police department … working with the township, the mayor, the town council, and really having open conversations … having conversations that address really hard questions and topics and that starts the process of understanding and healing in your community.”
“It’s a small step, but it’s a step forward and a step forward in helping others understand the community,” she said.
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November 3, 1883 The U.S. Supreme Court, in its decision Ex Parte Crow Dog, declared Native Americans were ultimately subject to U.S. law, “not in the sense of citizens, but . . . as wards subject to a guardian . . . as a dependent community who were in a state of pupilage.” However, the Court acknowledged the sovereignty of tribal authority in the particular case at hand. The Congress, however, essentially overturned the Court’s decision two years later. Chief Crow Dog, 1898 More on Ex Parte Crow Dog
November 3, 1917 Bolsheviks, the followers of Vladimir Lenin, took control of the capital, Moscow, and the Kremlin, the fortress-like grouping of government buildings and churches at the center of the capital city, as the Russian revolution succeeded.
November 3, 1969 President Nixon announced the “Vietnamization” program to shift fighting by U.S. troops to U.S.-trained Vietnamese troops. “We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable.” The last U.S. troops didn’t return home until 1975.
November 3, 1972 Five hundred protesters from the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a Native American march, occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices (part of the Department of Interior) in Washington, D.C., for six days. Their goal was to gain support from the general public for a policy of self-determination for American Indians. Read more about the occupation: Read the Indian Manifesto:
November 3, 1979 Five members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization (later the Communist Workers Party) which had organized a “Death to the Klan” rally, were murdered and ten others injured when the rally was attacked by 40 Ku Klux Klan members and Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina. The political organization had been joined in the march by a group of local African-American mill workers. At the time of the shootings, not one police officer was present. Two all-white juries acquitted the murderers despite the fact that the whole incident was on videotape. But in 1985 a federal jury found two policemen, a police informant/Klan leader, and five Klansmen and Nazis liable for the wrongful death of one of the demonstrators.
November 3, 1985 The Rainbow Warrior bombed Two French agents of the DGSE (Secret Service) dramatically changed their pleas on charges related to the bombing and sinking of the Greenpeace’s ship, Rainbow Warrior, and pled guilty. The ship was attacked in Auckland (New Zealand) harbor in anticipation of sailing to Moruroa Atoll to interfere with French nuclear weapons testing. It was the first act of terror ever committed in New Zealand. Read more
The stakes in United States v. Skrmetti are even higher than most Americans realize and could have wide-reaching consequences if the court rules to keep the ban on gender-affirming care in place.
This piece was published in partnership with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, and policy. Sign up for their newsletter here.
A Supreme Court case that will decide whether Tennessee can continue to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth could imperil the ability of all Americans to make decisions about their health care, experts say. The outcome depends on how far the court is willing to stretch its ruling that overturned federal abortion rights.
In United States v. Skrmetti, the court has agreed to take up the question of whether gender-affirming care bans for trans youth are unconstitutional, in response to the Biden administration petitioning on behalf of trans youth and their families in Tennessee — one of 26 states that has bannedsuch care for minors. The outcome of the case will grant much-needed clarity in a political landscape that has thrown the lives of trans people across the country into turmoil, as hospitals turn patients away, pharmacies deny prescriptions and families travel hundreds of miles to find care.
But with the case set for oral arguments on December 4, the stakes are even higher than most Americans realize, legal and policy experts say. Tennessee has banned gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, for a specific demographic — trans youth — while allowing those same treatments for cisgender youth. If the Supreme Court allows the state to keep its ban in place, that could imperil everyone’s access to health care.
“What the state of Tennessee is arguing is really dangerous for any person who has any sort of medical condition,” says Ezra Young, a civil rights lawyer and constitutional scholar. Tennessee is dictating what medical treatments people should or should not be allowed to have, Young said; that goes well beyond states’ authority to regulate medicine, specifically because giving health care to trans people is not a public health concern.
“The state can make sure that the doctor you see has a medical degree and has an active medical license, for instance,” he says. “What the state can’t do is micromanage the medical decision-making of patients or doctors, and that’s for good reason. Bureaucrats or lawmakers aren’t medical experts.”
Yet in half of U.S. states, Republican lawmakers have banned or restricted medical care that many trans people need to live, over the protests of the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, and other leading medical groups. Federal judges have attempted to block these bans from taking hold, finding them to be likely unconstitutional. Appeals court judges have disagreed and overturned those decisions. Now, the Supreme Court will have the final say.
“If we don’t win here, it’s going to be open season on any health care related to transgender people,” says Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. If the Supreme Court holds that banning gender-affirming care is not discriminatory, then trans people would no longer be protected under the Affordable Care Act, he argues. States and private insurers would be able to exclude gender-affirming care from coverage plans.
“It would be devastating. I mean, absolutely catastrophic,” Minter says.
Ultimately, the outcome of this case will have a wider impact beyond gender-affirming care. A Supreme Court ruling endorsing Tennessee’s argument that the state can ban safe medical care — just because it disagrees with who that treatment is being given to — would enable the government to control people’s health decisions and enact other blatantly discriminatory policies, legal experts say.
“I think this case has bigger and broader implications than a lot of people realize, even frankly within the legal community,” says Michael Ulrich, an associate professor of health law, ethics and human rights at Boston University’s School of Public Health and School of Law. If the Supreme Court agrees with Tennessee’s ban, there’s nothing stopping states from banning or restricting other kinds of health care, he said — like what gets covered under Medicaid.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar’s office, representing the Biden administration, will split argument time before the Supreme Court with Chase Strangio, co-director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
The United States v. Skrmetti case is focused on whether Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. The state insists that its ban has nothing to do with sex and that it does not target trans people. Instead, the law “sets age and use-based limits,” Tennessee’s attorney general argues. Minors can still access hormones and puberty blockers for medical purposes, as long as those treatments are not being used as part of a gender transition or to alleviate gender dysphoria. The state claims such a distinction is not based on sex because “neither boys nor girls can use these drugs for gender transition.”
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that there is no constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. This ruling overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that had guaranteed the right to an abortion since 1973. When writing the majority opinion in Dobbs, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito briefly addressed a theory that suggests abortion could be covered under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. This idea is not part of Roe, or at issue in Dobbs, but was invoked in a separate “friend of the court” brief. Alito dismissed it, saying that state regulations on abortion do not discriminate based on sex.
“So that’s what the state of Tennessee is now latching on to, this passing reference, this brief statement in Dobbs, and they’re pinning their whole argument on it,” says Minter. “Everything hinges on it.”
In Dobbs, Alito wrote that abortion cannot be protected under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, citing the arcane Geduldig v. Aiello — a case about pregnancy-related disability benefits — and Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, a case dealing with the rights of anti-abortion protesters. These rarely cited cases found that state regulations on abortion and pregnancy, or opposing abortion, are not sex discrimination. Tennessee is now using this framework to argue that “any disparate impact on transgender-identifying persons” caused by its law does not single trans people out for discrimination in ways covered by the 14th Amendment.
If the state’s gender-affirming care ban is found by the Supreme Court to be discriminatory under the 14th Amendment, it is subject to heightened scrutiny — a more rigorous review to determine whether a law is constitutional or not. In that scenario, Tennessee is more likely to lose.
Using abortion case law to support bans on gender-affirming care is especially dangerous, experts say. Tennessee is taking the Supreme Court’s own decision in Dobbs out of context, according to lawyers who have worked in LGBTQ+ rights cases for decades. And, if the justices read Tennessee’s law, it is obvious that banning gender-affirming care for trans people is discriminating based on sex, they say.
The United States v. Skrmetti case is focused on whether Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. The state insists that its ban has nothing to do with sex and that it does not target trans people. Instead, the law “sets age and use-based limits,” Tennessee’s attorney general argues. Minors can still access hormones and puberty blockers for medical purposes, as long as those treatments are not being used as part of a gender transition or to alleviate gender dysphoria. The state claims such a distinction is not based on sex because “neither boys nor girls can use these drugs for gender transition.”
But, although the question before the court has become more specific, this ruling still has the potential to broadly set back LGBTQ+ rights.
Tennessee argues that the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which found that employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ workers is sex-based discrimination prohibited under the Civil Rights Act, has nothing to do with this case. But going down this road leads to more questions, Ulrich says: Is discriminating due to sexual orientation also not considered sex-based discrimination?
“Then you can see just a proliferation of discriminatory laws that are coming out thereafter,” he says. “That’s a really dangerous proposition for the entire LGBTQ+ community and it’s setting us back significantly.”
Sruti Swaminathan, an ACLU staff attorney who has been counsel in this case from the beginning, said United States v. Skrmetti will test how far the Supreme Court is willing to stretch its Dobbs decision. They are well aware that the outcome of this case could curtail bodily autonomy for everyone. And taking this challenge before a conservative-majority Supreme Court has stoked fears among trans people of worst-case scenarios.
“We’re already at the place where half the country has banned this care. We need to not let the 6th Circuit decision stand idly and be utilized in the way it has,” Swaminathan says.
But Tennessee’s tactics, and the consequences that they could have during a time when laws targeting reproductive and transgender health care are proliferating, still worry them.
“I’m terrified. What we learned from Dobbs is that these attacks won’t stop with abortion,” Swaminathan says. “Banning abortion seems to be one pillar of an effort to write outdated gender norms into the law.”
U.S. v. Skrmetti began as a lawsuit against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Tennessee’s argument in this case illustrates a larger coordinated effort to attack abortion access alongside gender-affirming care, says Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.
States across the country have attempted to define sex based on reproductive capacity at birth. These efforts open transgender people up to discrimination and ignore the realities of intersex people, as well as cisgender women with conditions like primary ovarian insufficiency. Proponents of gender-affirming care bans inaccurately portray the effects of hormone replacement therapy on trans people’s reproductive ability by conflating the treatment with sterilization.
This Supreme Court case exemplifies a much larger argument that’s been a through line across attacks on transgender care and trans issues across the country, Casey says: What is sex, and who is protected when we think about that?
“Many of these state actors and politicians and extremists are clearly very invested in the concept of sex and defining sex in a very restricted and extraordinarily old-fashioned way that focuses only on people’s reproductive capacity, and then they use that argument in whatever context they can to advance the policies that would match that worldview,” he says.
November 2, 1920 Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs received nearly one million votes for President though he was serving a prison sentence at the time for his criticism of World War I and his encouraging resistance to the draft. More on Debs
November 2, 1982 Voters in nine general elections passed statewide referenda supporting a freeze on testing of nuclear weapons. Only Arizona turned it down. Dr. Randall Forsberg, a key person behind the Freeze movement Dr. Randall Forsberg
November 2, 1983 A bill designating a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (to be observed on the third Monday of January) was signed by President Ronald Reagan. King was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience of the laws that enforced racial segregation. The history of Martin Luther King Day (pdf)
Two Ballot boxes damaged overnight with incendiary devices in SE Portland at 11th and Belmont AND Fishers Landing Vancouver, WA. It’s not known at this time if any ballots were damaged.
Below is what the tRump campaign is all about, toxic masculinity. Gang thug 12 yr old boys on the playground standing around insulting other kids pretending to be tough guys. Is this what you want for president, for congress? People who feel that everyone different from them should be insulted and belittled? Hugs
NFL rules forbid political “messages or gestures” during games or on the field. Just ask Colin Kaepernick, who was attacked by Bosa for kneeling during the anthem. The cult is celebrating Bosa and attacking NBC for editing the incident out of their coverage.
8.2 billion people and he is desperate for more … white ones. Yes that is the truth of it. First he is so egotistical he thinks his genetics are superior to any others. Second the fear he has is that brown people will out number white ones and rule the world. As a member of South Africa’s apartheid system he hates the idea of whites not being firmly and securely ruling over everyone else. He is a sick man. Hugs
They are so sure the voter purges are hurting the democrats that they push deeper and deeper cuts to the voter rolls. Not realizing they are hitting their own people now also. Hugs
And she seethed at the idea that anyone would question the citizenship of a former federal employee with the “whitest name you could have.”
The elections office in Montgomery County, just north of Houston, had sent Howard-Elley a letter in late January saying that she had been flagged after she indicated that she was not a U.S. citizen in response to a jury summons. She had 30 days to provide the county proof of citizenship or she would be removed from the voter rolls, according to the letter.
More than 75,000 spectators gathered in Washington, D.C., to hear Vice President Kamala Harris‘ closing argument speech at the same site of former President Donald Trump‘s infamous “Save America” rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Harris’ event at the Ellipse arrived one week before Election Day and followed Trump’s closing arguments at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that received backlash for its inflammatory and racist rhetoric.
As the vice president took the stage Tuesday night, her campaign’s rapid response director, Ammar Moussa, posted to his account on X, formerly Twitter, that there were “OVER 75,000 people on the National Mall to watch Kamala Harris deliver her closing remarks.”
“Here. We. Go,” Moussa added.
CNN later reported that the Ellipse was at capacity and some guests were directed to an overflow area on the National Mall, per a Harris campaign official.
Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Ellipse just south of the White House in Washington, D.C., on October 29. The Harris campaign said that more than 75,000 people gathered to… More BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump held his January 6, 2021, rally at the Ellipse on the same day a mob of his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol while Congress was certifying the 2020 election in which Trump lost to President Joe Biden. According to the House Select Committee tasked with investigating January 6, around 53,000 people attended Trump’s speech before the attack.
Harris’ previous crowd size record was set on Friday at her rally in Houston, which included an appearance from Beyoncé. The vice president’s campaign said around 30,000 people showed up to the Shell Energy Stadium event, which was focused on reproductive rights.
Trump frequently touts his own rally sizes, although as Newsweek has reported, the former president often exaggerates his crowd numbers. Trump’s campaign said that the former president’s event in New York City on Sunday filled Madison Square Garden to capacity. The venue can fit a maximum of 19,500 people.
Sunday’s event was marred by racist remarks hurled about Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians. Sexist comments were also made about Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by several speakers.
Trump’s campaign has spoken out against one comment, made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who said during his speech that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” The former president’s team said that the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Trump told ABC News’ Rachel Scott when asked about the joke on Tuesday, “I don’t know him. Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”
The former president also failed to condemn other statements made at Madison Square Garden during a speech at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, saying instead, “There’s never been an event so beautiful.”
“The love in that room was breathtaking,” he added. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”
Harris said during her Ellipse speech that Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other.”
“That is who he is,” she added. “But America, I am here tonight to say that is not who we are.”
The vice president also criticized Trump’s comments about going after the “enemy from within” if elected to the White House. Despite receiving immense pushback for the comments in recent weeks, Trump repeated the phrase during his Madison Square Garden speech, telling supporters, “We’re running against a massive, crooked, malicious leftist machine that’s running the Democrat Party. They are smart and vicious, they are the enemy within, we must defeat them.”
On Tuesday, Harris told supporters, “Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls …’the enemy from within.'”
Harris added, “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email Tuesday for comment.
November 1, 1872 Susan B. Anthony and her three sisters entered a voter registration office set up in a barbershop. They were part of a group of fifty women Anthony had organized to register in her home town of Rochester. Anthony walked directly to the election inspectors and, as one of the inspectors would later testify, “demanded that we register them as voters.” The election inspectors refused, but she persisted, quoting the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision and the article from the New York Constitution pertaining to voting, which contained no sex qualification. She persisted: “If you refuse us our rights as citizens, I will bring charges against you in Criminal Court and I will sue each of you personally for large, exemplary damages!” The inspectors sought the advice of the Supervisor of elections: “Young men,” he said, “do you know the penalty of law if you refuse to register these names?” Registering the women, the registrars were advised, “would put the entire onus of the affair on them.” The inspectors voted to allow Anthony and her three sisters to register. In all, fourteen Rochester women successfully registered that day. But the Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized: “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon . . . if these women in the Eighth Ward offer to vote, they should be challenged, and if they take the oaths and the Inspectors receive and deposit their ballots, they should all be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
November 1, 1929 Australia abolished peace-time compulsory military training.
November 1, 1954 A war of independence to end French colonial rule over the north African nation of Algeria began when 60 bombs were set off on this day in Algiers, the capital. Over the next eight years 1.5 million Algerians would die, along with about 30,000 French. The French had dominated the country since 1830. French troops clash with Algerian civilians Read more
November 1, 1954 The U.S. produced the biggest ever man-made explosion in the Pacific archipelago of Bikini, part of the Marshall Islands. The hydrogen bomb, equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT was up to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It overwhelmed the measuring instruments, indicating that the bomb was much more powerful than scientists had anticipated. One of the atolls was totally vaporized, disappearing into a gigantic mushroom cloud that spread at least 100 miles wide, dropping back to the sea in the form of radioactive fallout.
November 1, 1961 50,000-100,000 women joined protests against the resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The demonstrations, in at least 60 U.S. cities, led to the founding of Women Strike for Peace. Their slogan: “End the Arms Race – Not the Human Race.” See Photos from Swarthmore College Peace Collection “Women’s Strike for Peace” storming the Pentagon in a 1967 protest against the war in Vietnam. Bella Abzug demonstrating with WSP photo: Dorothy Marder
November 1, 1970 Detroit’s Common Council voted for immediate withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Vietnam.
November 1, 1983 A senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz about intelligence reports that showed Iraqi troops resorting to “almost daily use of CW [chemical weapons]” against the Iranians. Saddam Hussein had invaded Iran in 1980. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
November 1, 1990 As part of the adoption of the International Law of the Sea, forty-three nations agreed to ban dumping industrial wastes at sea by 1995. Neither the U.S. nor Canada (along with Albania, Burundi, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan and San Marino) have ever ratified the treaty which thus lacks the force of U.S. federal law. More on the Law of the Sea
November 1, 2003 The Tel Aviv memorial for Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, slain eight years previously, was transformed into a peace rally with over 100,000 protesting the military policies of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.”Yitzhak was right, and his path just,” said Shimon Peres, the former prime minister and architect of the Oslo peace accords with Mr Rabin. “His views today are clear and enduring. There will be no retreat; we will continue.” Read more
October 31, 1929 George Henry Evans, an English-born printer and journalist, published the first issue of the Working Man’s Advocate, “edited by a Mechanic” for the “useful and industrious classes” of New York City. Evan covered the Workingmen’s Party (which he helped found) and the early trade union movement. In his Prospectus, Evans focused on the inequities between the “portion of society living in luxury and idleness” and those “groaning under the oppressions and miseries imposed on them.” He advocated “a system of education which shall be equally open to all, as in a real republic it should be” and opposed “every thing which savors of a union of church and state.” Evans became a U.S. citizen one week later.
October 31, 1950 Earl Lloyd became the first of three African Americans who began to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA) when he started with the Washington Capitols. He and Jim Tucker went on to become the first African Americans to play on a championship team in 1955 as members of the Syracuse Nationals, which is now the Philadelphia 76ers. After retiring as a player, Lloyd was a Detroit Pistons assistant coach for two seasons, and a scout for five.
October 31, 1952 The U.S. successfully detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen (or fusion) bomb, in the atmosphere at the Eniwetok Proving Grounds on the Elugelab Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the southern Pacific. The 10.4-megaton device was the first thermonuclear device built upon the Teller-Ulam principles of staged radiation implosion. Mike’s Mushroom cloud
The incredible explosive force of Mike was apparent from the sheer magnitude of its mushroom cloud – within 90 seconds the mushroom cloud climbed to 57,000 feet and entered the stratosphere at a rate of 400 mph. One minute later it reached 108,000 feet, eventually stabilizing at a ceiling of 120,000 feet. Half an hour after the test, the mushroom stretched sixty miles across, with the base of the head joining the stem at 45,000 feet.The explosion wiped Elugelab off the face of the planet, leaving a crater more than 50 meters (175 feet) deep, and destroyed life on the surrounding islands. The details and the results Early U.S.nuclear tests
October 31, 1958 The U.S., the U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics aka Soviet Union) and Great Britain began negotiations in Geneva on whether to let the nuclear testing moratorium become a permanent test ban. General Secretary Nikita Kruschev had unilaterally declared a moratorium on Soviet testing earlier in the year, President Dwight Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold MacMillan following suit in August. There had been growing concern over the health effects of radioactive fallout in the atmosphere from the nuclear explosions. Nonetheless, all three nations did further last-minute tests before the moratorium took effect.
October 31, 1972 20-POINT POSITION PAPER
PREAMBLE AN INDIAN MANIFESTO FOR RESTITUTION, REPARATIONS, RESTORATION OF LANDS FOR A RECONSTRUCTION OF AN INDIAN FUTURE IN AMERICA THE TRAIL OF BROKEN TREATIES:
“We need not give another recitation of past complaints nor engage in redundant dialogue of discontent. Our conditions and their cause for being should perhaps be best known by those who have written the record of America’s action against Indian people. In 1832, Black Hawk correctly observed: You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. The government of the United States knows the reasons for our going to its capital city. Unfortunately, they don’t know how to greet us. We go because America has been only too ready to express shame, and suffer none from the expression – while remaining wholly unwilling to change to allow life for Indian people. We seek a new American majority – a majority that is not content merely to confirm itself by superiority in numbers, but which by conscience is committed toward prevailing upon the public will in ceasing wrongs and in doing right. For our part, in words and deeds of coming days, we propose to produce a rational, reasoned manifesto for construction of an Indian future in America. If America has maintained faith with its original spirit, or may recognize it now, we should not be denied.”
October 31, 1978 30,000 Iranian oil workers went on strike against the repressive rule of the U.S.-installed Shah and for democracy, civil and human rights. Striking Iranian oil workers. Photo: December 1978 issue of Resistance. A publication of the Iranian Students Association in the U.S. (ISAUS) Read more
October 31, 1984 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot to death by two Sikh members of her own security guard while walking in the garden of her New Delhi home. Gandhi’s son, Rajiv, a member of parliament and a leader in the Congress-I Party, was sworn in as Prime Minister following the assassination.
October 30, 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. and seven other clergymen were jailed for four days in Birmingham, Alabama. They were serving sentences on contempt-of-court charges stemming from Easter 1963 demonstrations they had led against discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court had upheld their convictions for violating a court order enjoining them from marching [Walker v. Birmingham]. Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor had twice denied them a parade permit. The law Connor used was declared unconstitutional two years later [Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham]. The constitutional issues
October 30, 1995 Over 80 people were arrested at Sugarloaf Mountain in southern Oregon during a massive direct action to prevent clear-cutting of old-growth forests on public land by private timber companies. Sugarloaf protest
October 30, 2000 George Mizo of the United States, Rosi Hohn-Mizo of Germany (his wife) and Georges Doussin of France were awarded Vietnam’s first-ever State Medal of Friendship by the President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam for their work in building the Vietnam Friendship Village. The Vietnam Friendship Village after five years; the medical clinic is in the foreground, other buildings are residences.
Mizo and the Vietnam Veterans Association built a residential facility for orphan children and elderly or disabled adults. George Mizo was a veteran of both the Vietnam War and the struggle to end U.S. support of the contra insurgency in Nicaragua, and repressive regimes elsewhere in Central America [see September 15, 1986]. General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnam’s senior military commander during both the French and American wars advised the Mizo’s 12-year-old son, Michael, “Never go to war.” About the Vietnam Friendship Village Project
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni
A broken window on an LGBTQ fashion boutique storefront in Manhattan, New York on June 12, 2023.Photo: Shutterstock
Chief Crow Dog, 1898
The Rainbow Warrior bombed
Mike’s Mushroom cloud
Scottie's Playtime 