whitewashing US history with ‘patriotic education’

Good morning,

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Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Weeks from the presidential election, and with a national reckoning on racial justice under way, Donald Trump has decided it is time to rewrite the American history curriculum to downplay the dark legacy of slavery.

Speaking at a conference in Washington DC on Thursday, the president announced a new national commission to promote “patriotic education” and counter the “decades of leftwing indoctrination” to which he claims US schoolchildren have been subjected. “Our youth will be taught to love America,” he said.

• The president called his initiative the 1776 Commission, while attacking the New York Times’s Pulitzer prize-winning 1619 Project, which marked the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in America. Trump has threatened to cut funding to schools that teach the 1619 Project.

Biden says trust the scientists, not Trump, on Covid

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The Democratic nominee took part in an outdoor town hall meeting with CNN in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

The simmering tensions between the Trump administration and its own scientists over the response to the pandemic were exposed again on Thursday, when the New York Times reported that controversial Covid-19 testing guidance posted on the CDC website was not written by the agency’s scientists, and had been posted despite their objections.

© Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Trump speaks at the National Archives, during his White House Conference on American History.

Appearing at a drive-in town hall in his native Pennsylvania, the Democratic nominee Joe Biden accused the president of politicising the US coronavirus response, and said he did not trust Trump’s claims that a vaccine was imminent. “I don’t trust the president on vaccines. I trust Dr Fauci,” he said:

If Fauci says the vaccine is safe, I’d take the vaccine. We should listen to the scientists, not to the president.

Russia is interfering in the 2020 election, says the FBI director

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FBI director Christopher Wray testifies to the House committee on homeland security on Thursday. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/AP

The FBI has witnessed “very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020”, the bureau’s director told a congressional committee on Thursday. Christopher Wray warned of a “steady drumbeat of misinformation” originating from Moscow, in the form of social media, state media and the use of proxies, which the US intelligence community believes is intended to:

both sow divisiveness and discord, and… primarily to denigrate vice-president Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.

Trump immediately responded to Wray’s testimony on Twitter, claiming China was a “FAR greater threat than Russia” and accusing Beijing of interfering with the US vote-by-mail system, which the president has falsely claimed is particularly vulnerable to voter fraud.

A chorus of support for Trump’s accuser, but no consequences?

E Jean Carroll, the writer who accused Donald Trump of raping her at a department store in the 1990s, has added her voice to the chorus of support for Amy Dorris, the former model who told the Guardian’s Lucy Osborne, in an interview published on Thursday, that Trump had sexually assaulted her at the 1997 US Open. Trump has vigorously denied both women’s claims.

On the latest Today in Focus podcast, Osborne discusses how the alleged incident fits within a wider pattern of alleged abuse by Trump. Dorris is at least the 25th woman to have accused him of sexual misconduct. The president has denied wrongdoing in every case. Jill Filipovic asks if his supporters will ever take any notice:

We have a pile of credible accusations. We have an accused perpetrator who has admitted, on tape, to doing the very thing he is accused of. And yet we all know that the Amy Dorris story, like the many stories before it, will not result in any consequences for this predatory president.

In other news…

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Last Thing: putting towns on the tourist trail with Wikipedia

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Adding two paragraphs and a single photo to a town’s Wikipedia page can boost tourism revenue by tens of thousands of dollars. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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