... you can use the second Iraq war to understand
the present state of things in American politics. We are told that
there is a shift underway to a conservative cultural atmosphere of
deference to and accommodation with the MAGA movement. But this isn’t
some amorphous transformation in the ether; it is the result of
individuals making deliberate choices about how to exist in the current
political environment. Powerful individuals and institutions in the news
media, business and politics are choosing to align themselves with what
they believe to be a new order.
Viewed
as an active choice and not a passive evolution, this “vibe shift”
looks quite a lot like the war fever of 2002 and 2003, when political
and cultural elites decided that they had more to gain through
submission and accommodation than they did with criticism and
resistance. ...
We saw how that worked out. Ignorant young right wingers thought they could remake an ancient faraway society, perhaps one million people died, and the Iraq invasion came to be known as a national shame and defeat.
Donald and his buddy Elon are off to a good start at replicating that catastrophic national humiliation. Let's help them and ourselves.
The institutions of US civil society seem to be getting themselves together to oppose the Trump/Musk coup. We'll find out whether they can be effectual as time goes on. I'm going to list a few of them here:
The non-governmental sector is also getting organized. The Movement Voter Project, an intermediary outfit that brings together non-profit groups working for progressive change, is on the case.
• • •
So are the advocacy and pressure groups that operate around the edges of the political parties such as Indivisible and Move-On. Their job is to goose Democrats into resistance action while afflicting Republican officeholders who are being traitors to the Constitution. It's hard work.
• • •
In some places, offshoots of the Democratic Party can lead resistance. Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles channeled progressive electoral energy vibrantly during the past campaign and has not given up the fight for a vision of America rooted in Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and the New Deal.
• • •
And, of course, we must care for the victims of MAGA's cruelty among ourselves in our neighborhoods and homes.
• • •
We can slink away in horror at Trump/Musk's betrayal of our hobbled democracy -- or we can say with one of the heroes of the American struggle to come into existance:
I don't think we understood when we introduced Mio (the big boy in the back here) that there was a chance that he and Janeway might not get along. We have friends who live with cats who jealously attack each other. But these two not only get along; they act as co-conspirators. When one thinks it is time to turn up the demand for cat food can opening, the other usually joins in. When the magic of the can finally happens, they eat contently and non-competitively along side each other.
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important — say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade
— and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This
country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its
existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population)
and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however
imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom
triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100
years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this
moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to
the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to
recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier
when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be
too late....
Looks like speculations written 10 days ago hold up all too well. Read all about it.
At San Francisco's 24th Street BART plaza Wednesday evening, several hundred people reinforce the truth: the people are still here. Screw Trump/Musk! They don't get to take over our city and country! We don't quit.
Your blogger has a wide choice to write about in this moment of the Musk/Trump coup against the United States of America. What to highlight. ..?
Smart people -- correctly I think -- say the most egregious violation of what all Americans expect from our government -- supposedly ruling by and for the people -- is a billionaire's lawless intrusion on government databases. And, probably, that's a right instinct. But it is not something I know much about. Go to Don Moynihan for this.
Here I'll often focus on the injuries Trump's coup is doing to migrants. Immigration restrictionists wish to forget that people have always got around.
In any subject area, I'll bring up instances where I have something to share out of my life experience and study that I think more people should know about.
And I promise to chronicle, to the best of my ability, these monsters' assault on the humanity of people whose realities to do not conform to their myopic gender expectations -- transpeople, binary people, uppity women all round, the weirdos!
Chris Geidner is a legal commentator who writes Law Dork. He reports a conversation with Shannon Minter, legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Chase Strangio, co-director of the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project. They are both already engaged in litigation seeking to preserve the rights and dignity of transpeople against the onslaught.
LAW DORK:At one point, Minter really summed up the discussion: “We're under
attack in a very terrifying way, but we do still have a lot of power,
and how this story comes out does depend to a great degree on what we do
right now.”
... basically what we've had is a series of executive orders in the first
two weeks of the Trump administration that started right from January 20
with the executive order defining — purporting to define — sex for the
federal government, but, as we'll discuss, that also contained several
other provisions that led to fallout across agencies. ... There has already been significant litigation and even some court orders pulling back on some of this.
SHANNON MINTER: ... this is an attempt to brutalize, humiliate and crush a tiny
minority group [so] as to desensitize everyone. And I'll just say, if they
can do this to transgender people, they can do it to you or to anyone,
and they're already doing that. They're already coming after many other
groups....
CHASE STRANGIO: ... we're fighting this on the front of the states and the federal
government, with huge implications for individual constitutional rights
protected under the Reconstruction amendments, but also what the
separation of powers will continue to look like.
LAW DORK: ...How are you all dealing, in advocacy organizations, with trying to
talk with organizations and entities that have been providing care —
not just in the medical care context, but anybody. As the education EO
ripples out, as these funding questions ripple out, how are how are you
talking with people about what they should be doing, what they can be
doing, what they need to be doing right now? ...
STRANGIO: So, I would say sort of two main
things: Trying to remind people that these executive orders are not self
executing. President Trump on his own did not change the law. It did
not become illegal to treat transgender people under the age of 19 when
he signed that order on January 28 and, especially with the education
EO, it's very important for people to understand, these are directives
to federal agencies that in no way change people's legal obligations,
and, in fact, as the California Department of Education rightfully came
out and said, does nothing — the President doesn't have that
authority. So we're trying to remind institutions and individuals of
that fact.
... I'm curious, Shannon, as well, how you're helping people understand the
difference between an executive order and what their legal obligations
actually are.
MINTER: ... I mean, you've
captured it beautifully. And I think we should remember, most hospitals
and clinics are continuing to provide care, but some, as you said, are
complying in advance out based on fear and intimidation. I think it's
just very important that we recognize, they're not the bad guys here.
We've got to remember to keep the focus on where the trouble is coming
from him. This is the president. ...
he's doing it — just because he can get away with that, because
transgender people are such a vulnerable minority.
... But the real goal is to just do away with all checks and balances, to
take power away from Congress, take power away from the Supreme Court,
make Trump and Musk just be the unchecked rulers of our universe.
... They're saying they're not going to have
any events celebrating MLK Day, and look at what's going on with the CDC
where they're removing massive amounts of public health information
from the website, everything about transgender people, but a lot of
stuff just about women. At this point, acknowledging the existence of
women as half the population in this country has been labeled as an
unlawful DEI activity....
STRANGIO: To that, you can see how there's
this very strategic move to cast human beings as ideologies. You see
transgender people become gender ideology, and then that ideology can be
attacked and eradicated in their mind. Of course, we as transgender
people are going to continue to exist, in the same way they talk about
individuals as DEI hires, as if they're not just using that as some code
word for people of color or for women or for disabled people, and then
weaponizing all of this language with very serious, material
consequences.
... I don't want people to wake up three months from now and realize, "Wow,
we should have stood up right on the first two weeks when they were
attacking trans people, because now all of a sudden, I can't get my
birth control, or my doctor doesn't know how to advise my child on
adolescent health," and that's really where we're headed. ...
Eduardo Porter, late of NY Times economic journalism and now writing in the Wapo, goes for the gut in his explanation of the Trump regime's attempt to do away with birthright citizenship. People born in the USofA, are --simply -- citizens; MAGA wants none of it.
Here's the gist:
Ending birthright citizenship won’t make America White again.
For a country seemingly proud of calling itself a melting pot, a country
that is unquestionably a nation of immigrants, it is astonishing just
how hard the United States has tried over the years to put an end to the
process that has shaped it. ...
... Trump’s urge to protect the homeland from alien races, religions and cultures taps into a feature of the American psyche
that has been around for 100 years or more. ...
... Muzaffar
Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute once told me that American
tolerance for accepting new immigrants seems to hit a limit every time
foreign-born citizens reach about 15 percent of the population. They
reached that share when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882 and
when the [restrictive] Johnson-Reed Act [of 1924] was signed into law. And they are nearing 15
percent today.
I
would, however, propose another numerical tipping point, one that has
no precedent in American history: when the non-White share of the
population approximates one half of the population. The fact that the
United States is approaching this milestone underscores how, in that
long battle between the nation’s demand for foreign labor and the
entrenched mistrust of foreigners, so far the economic imperative has
won. Xenophobia today is punching back. ...
... [The immigration reform of 1965 was managed by] Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) who promised that the new legislation “will not upset the ethnic mix
of our society.” As he signed the act in the shadow of the Statue of
Liberty, Johnson assured the American people that it would not change much of anything.
Artist Yolanda Lopez
But
migration didn’t proceed according to plan. Europeans, as it happens,
no longer wanted to come, as Europe was growing like gangbusters.
Mexicans, on the other hand, did. They had been supplying labor in the
fields and pastures of the American West even before the Bracero Program
had formally invited them in from the 1940s to the 1960s. And they were
untouched by the 1924 quotas. When limits were imposed as part of the
1965 reform, they kept coming to work anyway.
The story of immigration over the next several decades was largely a Mexican affair. By 2000, Mexicans accounted for 30 percent of the foreign-born population, up from 6 percent 40 years earlier.
That,
in a nutshell, is why Trump so vehemently wants to do away with the
birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment:
The Mexican immigrants had babies.
And Jonathan Eig has done what is hard: he's made King's story human, yet still dramatic; larger than life and still accessible. Here's how Eig summarizes the short life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he led:
Before King, the promises contained in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution had been hollow. King and the other leaders of the twentieth century civil rights movement, along with millions of ordinary protesters, demanded that America live up to its stated ideals. They fought without muskets, without money, and without political power. They built their revolution on Christian love, on nonviolence, and on faith in humankind.
This book tells the story of a man who, in a career that spanned a mere thirteen years, brought the nation closer than it had ever been to reckoning with the reality of having treated people as property and secondary citizens. That he failed to fully achieve his goal should not diminish his heroism any more than the failure of the original founding fathers diminishes theirs. To help readers better understand King's struggle, this book seeks to recover the real man from the gray mist of hagiography. ... He was deliberately mischaracterized in his lifetime and he remains so today.
... King was a man, not a saint, not a symbol. ... He was a man who announced at an early age that God had called him to act. He lived his life accordingly. And he was willing to die.
Can someone be both human and a hero? In every time, we doubt this is possible, until we recognize heroism embodied, even if fleetingly, by someone among us.
• • •
I belong to the last American age cohort for whom the public events of King's life are lived history. I remember, dimly, the Montgomery bus boycott demanding integrated service as background noise in the '50s; the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom made the civil rights movement live indeed, as the rector of my Episcopal church attended fearfully; the Civil Rights Act of 1965 seemed to announce that the nation had turned a corner on racial discrimination. Oh well. Those heady days had to give way to realization that, especially for descendants of slaves, "freedom is a constant struggle."
Movement attention moved on. Before he was killed, King came to seem a relic of a more hopeful time as the young generation, my generation, turned to repudiating US imperialism's brutal Vietnam campaign of death. Even King turned this way, to his credit; this turn likely undermined his even more significant effort to mobilize beyond racial injustices against the crimes of American capitalism.
A hero's lot is not a happy one. Yet from heroes spring life.
• • •
Jonathan Eig's King corrects a deficiency in how we remember the man's life. He needed and depended on his long suffering wife.
During a 1965 television interview conducted at this house, King was asked if he had educated his wife on matters of activism. "Well, it may have been the other way around," he said. "I think at many points she educated me. When I met her, she was very concerned about all the things we are trying to do now. I will never forget the first discussion we had when we met was the whole question of racial inequality and economic inequality and the question of peace ... I wish I could say to satisfy my masculine ego that I led her down this path, but I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved when we met as she is now."
[Coretta Scott King agreed.] "I considered my own role very important from the beginning," she wrote.
The time for assertive women came a little later.
• • •
Eig, I am sure, believes King had a message for our time:
... Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King;...
"Our very survival," he wrote, "depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."
New York Times smart guy Ezra Klein (gift article) offers a political realist's assessment of the Trump shit show so far. He's mighty sanguine.
Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him. ...
... One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. ... And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
... The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it. ...
He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.
Unfortunately, the victims of Trump's delusions of omnipotence can't be so relaxed about all this performative cruelty. Real people, our neighbors, are getting hurt so the toddler-in-chief and his assorted goons can get their jollies. Migrants, transpeople, loyal government workers.
When I read articles like this assessing, and condemning, Trump's wrecking crew, I use my search function to see whether the writer has recognized the gratuitous pain being inflicted on transfolk, on those among us who are gender-nonconforming. I believe in standing with the least among us. And I find the search revealing. The writers who come up empty may be allies in the necessary big tent of opposition, but they are eliding the generous humanity which makes the driving moral force for a more compassionate and just America.
Klein may well be right that the structural constraints of an advanced democracy may limit Trump. Trump is high on his own supply. And though wily, he's kind of stupid as well as ignorant. We don't have to believe him. But we certainly can condemn the casual harm he inflicts on real people, on us all, in service of his delusions.
Kim Lane Scheppele has seen a lot. She worked in Putin's Russia while that dictatorship was closing down civic space. Then she worked in Hungary until run out by the American fascists' good buddy Victor Orban. Now she's the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International
Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. That is, she's a certified intellectual big thinker with experience.
You can get her informed take on our condition by listening to this podcast "Trump's American Takeover" with Dahlia Lithwick.
Scheppele knows what we're seeing in the United States during the Trump/Musk coup. Here are some words if that's your thing.
Governing through cruelty and loyalty reverses the basic premise of the rule of law, which is that people should be able to live without fear or favor. In a democratic and constitutional government, people are supposed to be treated with equal respect and with guaranteed rights under a government that is not permitted to entrench itself in power. But when generating fear through cruelty and demanding favor through loyalty become the central organizing principles of government, then rights fray, checks on government fail, the entrenchment of a particular leader begins, and autocracy is on the march.
Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish lawyer writing from inside Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, described what he saw as a legal practitioner. For most Germans, life went on as usual. Laws were enforced as written; the courts operated predictably. He called this the Normative State.
But there was another parallel state operating at the same time into which people could be cast when the government had decided to target them. This was the Prerogative State, in which arbitrariness reigned and all safeguards of law disappeared. This Dual State relied on the surface appearance of normality from the Normative State to whitewash the use of emergency powers, enabling acts, special decrees and discriminatory laws that created a Prerogative State where cruelty was the order of the day. Hitler’s government counted on the appearance of the Normative State to avert people’s eyes from the Prerogative State.
Fraenkel’s description of the Dual State should warn us that we cannot be complacent because the United States just had a free and fair election followed by a peaceful transfer of power or because the Democratic Party now acts like they can will normality into existence by enacting their half of normal politics.
Even the most terrible dictatorships that history has produced found ways to make life seem normal for most people, as long as they demobilized politically and didn’t challenge the dictator’s hold on power. To understand what kind of government we have, we need to look at how that government treats those whom the leader believes are his enemies as well as those who are on the margins of society.
Trump’s parade of executive orders starts to build the foundations of a Dual State. With cruelty dispensed to enemies and favor to friends, he has bullied his way into power and now proposes to use the federal government to amplify his threats. Many vulnerable people in the US now live in fear, as Bishop Budde movingly explained to Trump directly on his first full day in office. She might have added that those who fear Trump include members of Congress and the judiciary and the media who, as a result of this fear, are now failing in their duties to check his powers. Out of fear, some are desperately trying to appear to be loyal or at least trying to acquiesce by telling themselves that democratic deference is due to those who win elections no matter how they choose to govern. But those unwilling to live in fear or curry favor are leaving government or disengaging from politics. Democracy dies when no one defends its promise of a life free from fear and without the requirement to grovel.
Buried in everything that happened in this exhausting first week of the new Trump administration, then, is this important big idea: Trump seeks to govern through cruelty and loyalty. Defending our constitutional democracy requires that we don’t look away when cruelty is visited on members of our community and that we refuse to allow our democracy to crumble into personalistic attachment to the leader. To stand up to this will require a unity of purpose so that we cannot be divided by fear and it will require that we defend the principle that no man is above the law—nor can he change the law to put himself above it. Those of us concerned about the future of our democracy need to regroup and prepare for a long hard fight. We cannot let ourselves be divided and conquered—or distracted by everything that is flooding the zone right now.
My emphasis.
Today we will attend a memorial service for a dear friend who lived a good and long life. Tomorrow we will go to church and then to a museum. We will live our lives, largely unafraid. But times are not normal.
For all the afterthoughts and recriminations, Joe Biden/Kamala Harris are not in office because a tiny majority of us believed they were not doing a good job. (Yes, different people had different notions of what the job was they weren't doing; it's a big country.)
So it's Trump's job now. How's he doing?
Egg prices going up because of the avian flu? That’s on Trump.
People not getting needed aid because of the federal funding freeze? Trump’s fault.
Criminals set free to wander around the country? Trump.
Chaos abroad? Trump.
A collapse in the Gaza ceasefire? Also Trump.
That's Obama comms guy Dan Pfeiffer's list (lightly edited).
Let's see how many I can add off the top of my head:
MLK holiday, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance cancelled by order of Trump's DOD guy? Trump.
Commercial plane over DC hits errant military helicopter. No FAA leader? Trump's fault.
Crooked NYC Mayor's prosecution to be ended? Trump.
Reopen Guantanamo prison in Cuba? That's on Trump too.
AIDS drugs to be denied to African countries? Trump.
Too few workers to harvest crops in California? Trump.
... Trump won the presidency despite his flaws because he promised to make everything better. We need to hold him accountable when he fails. Just start fighting back and we’ll figure out the rest later.
We watched this goon try to overthrow the government on live tv four years ago. Now, we are witnessing him try to overthrow it from within. We are the last line of defense against fascism. If we leave, we will be replaced by loyalists. Read P2025 and, for the love of god, please believe what is written because that is what is happening. All the EOs are directly from that document.
I didn’t dedicate years of my life serving this great country to be bullied into quitting my career by a bunch of fascists. We are being led by the same types of people our grandparents fought against in WW2.
They don’t care about us, regardless of the fact that one-third of us are veterans and many are military family members. They don’t care about your kids, your homes, your bills, your livelihood. They don’t care that you’re an American citizen. They don’t care that the annual spending on us is only 4% and won’t make a difference if we’re gone. They don’t care that we’re middle and lower class employees. They want to harm you.
Do not give in to this nonsense and remember your oath to the constitution and the people of America. I don’t know what the future holds, but I refuse to bow down to this fascist authoritarian elite class. Nobody is coming to save us but we have strength in numbers. It’s time to buckle up, and continue protecting freedom and democracy.
Sand in the gears, folks. These goons are very determined, but not very smart.
Amid the general carnage of the Trump coup against American government, it's easy to get lost in a recital of horrors. But here's one that feels awfully familiar.
Click to enlarge. Marked for death.
The administration has brutally shut down PEPFAR, the global program launched by George W. Bush to limit the further spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yesterday recipients around the world were ordered to shut down and not even distribute anti-HIV drugs already in their possession. Here's the NY Times:
The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries
to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if
the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.
... Appointments
are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics,
according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared
retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing
abrupt interruptions to their treatment.
But
most federal officials are also under strict orders not to communicate
with external partners, leading to confusion and anxiety, according to
several people with knowledge of the situation.
... Without
treatment, virus levels in people with H.I.V. will quickly spike,
hobbling the immune systems of the infected people and increasing the
odds that they will spread the virus to others.
About one in three untreated pregnant women may pass the virus on to their babies.
Interrupted treatment may also lead to the emergence of resistant strains that can spread across the world.
One
study estimated that if PEPFAR were to end, as many as 600,000 lives
would be lost over the next decade in South Africa alone. And that
nation relies on PEPFAR for only 20 percent of its H.I.V. budget. Some
poorer countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.
This is premeditated murder.
UPDATE, January 29: The PEPFAR cancellation has been momentarily rescinded, but the coup by the President and his tech bro handlers continues. The KnowNothings rule.
I dumped my subscription to the LA Times when it's crackpot owner sucked up to Donald Trump. I had found that, even in its contemporary emaciated condition, it was a pretty good paper, providing a slant on the news not present in East Coast pubs. But I can live without it.
For reasons unknown to me I still receive the paper's email newsletter under this logo. That will probably end one day. But for the moment that means I can sometimes read Anita Chabria, an honest, elegant writer who I hope will land an even more prominent and permanent perch when her current journalistic ship sinks.
Today Chabris reported on the conflict between people desperate to return to the remains of their burned out homes and disaster officials still trying to keep them out. It turns out the burned over areas are full of dangers, including the large size lithium batteries that power cars and solar installations that might not have burned but will might explode.
In general, Chabria applauds the municipal and state effort:
Having covered fires across California, I can honestly say I have never seen an effort like this. Though it is little consolation for those left to wait, the speed and resources being put into recovery in L.A. are extraordinary.
So for all the politics and finger-pointing that have so quickly filled our public space, here’s one more thing that everyone I spoke with can agree on: The science doesn’t lie.
The burn areas are dangerous right now, and though patience feels like another trauma, it is better than regret.
This morning, January 27, an article which appears to be several years old [gift] popped up in the version of the New York Times which their algorithm deigns to show me. (You do know that we all get slightly different online versions of the "paper of record" in our digital feeds, don't you? Just part of life in our current mediated information environment.)
The Nazi's human death factory at Auschwitz (Poland) was liberated by the Soviet Russian army on January 27, 1945. The article is a thoughtful survey of what has happened to memory of the atrocities of a previous generation.
... as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, an occasion being marked by events around the world and culminating in a solemn ceremony at the former death camp on Monday that will include dozens of aging Holocaust survivors, Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is worried.
“More and more we seem to be having trouble connecting our historical knowledge with our moral choices today,” he said. “I can imagine a society that understands history very well but does not draw any conclusion from this knowledge.”
In this current political moment, he added, that can be dangerous. ... With the very notion of the truth and facts under assault in increasingly polarized societies, control over the historical narrative is yet another battlefield.
This cuts to the quick for me. I understand the human present through memory and interpretation and re-interpretation of what I know of what has gone before. And yes, history makes for both material and moral lessons. I cannot imagine trying to understand the world around me without the lens of history.
Yet I am well aware most Americans live without much historical awareness. Where do people find a moral compass? I don't know. I try to retain mine.
• • •
A couple of years ago, I explored the strange phenomenon which is US "Holocaust Education." Too much of this operates as a comforting morality play about distant lands whose enormity reinforces contemporary ignorance. That piece still reads well.
• • •
And today I can make the same recommendation I always make on the subject of the memory of 20th century Nazi barbarism: find a copy of the memoir from Gerda Weissmann (later Klein), All But My Life. Ms. Weissmann was one of lucky (??) few; the Nazis transported her to a series of slave labor camps while killing all her family and eradicating the world she had known. It is brutal, simple, and totally approachable at nearly 80 years distance.
Frederick Douglass -- born enslaved in Maryland, assertive interrogator of and prod to President Abraham Lincoln, later Republican ambassador to Haiti -- saw much over a long life. In a speech in 1894 he proclaimed:
I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair.
I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. By way of Kevin M Levin
So Douglass responded to the racial and anti-democratic backlash of America's last Gilded Age. He'd seen cruelty and disappointment, but also found courage and determination.
The Prosecutor General's Office in Ukraine this week opened yet another criminal case against Russia for war crimes after a video emerged that shows Russian soldiers executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war. The events shown in the video, which include the Russian soldiers discussing who should shoot each prisoner of war, apparently occured in the Donetsk region.
The number of executions of unarmed Ukrainian POWs immediately after their capture has increased significantly in the past year. The Ukrainian authorities have recorded in excess of 180 executions of Ukrainian POWs by the Russians since February 2022. Given how much ambiguity there often is in combat operations, there almost certain to have been many more than this number. ...
The prevalence of these crimes in the Russian army indicates that their soldiers are either ordered or incentivised to shoot PoWs by their commanders, or that Russian commanders willingly look away from such events. Either way, it has been systematised now in the Russian system. And the fact that Russian soldiers video these crimes and post them online means they don’t fear any form of retribution from their own commanders.
As such, not only are the individuals who commit the crimes responsible but so is their entire chain of command that has ignored these events. There is simply no way now that any Russian officer can claim in the future that ‘I didn’t know this was occuring’.
For those interested in more details about the magnitude of Russian war crimes committed since February 2022, this report from the Congressional Research Service provides a good overview.
I have to wonder whether under the Trump regime, that government report will be trashed. Get it while you can.
I'm sure Trump's idea of "peace" in Ukraine is that the embattled country must surrender. Ukraine can't.
By way of @leighcreates.bsky.social. Is this real? I see no reason to disbelieve it. Even if the various flavors of immigration cops largely mean to follow legalities, there are plenty of individuals among them who equate dark skin and accents with candidates for deportation. Just like their bosses, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.
For a minute amidst the inaugural Trump carnival of greed, cruelty, and stupidity, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde grabbed the nation's attention by issuing a clear if gentle rebuke to the man and his enablers.
Her words (and his scowls) grabbed the attention of anyone who wanted to listen. And that is a broad swath of us; it's worth remembering that even today at what is almost certainly the Trump show's high water mark of approval, he's never broken 50 percent.
This all reminded me that such breakthroughs in what seems an irresistible tidal wave of societal ugliness do happen. Over and over.
I remember well the first occasion on which one of these breakthroughs grabbed me -- way back in the spring of 1969. The American war on Vietnam was at its height; the young men of my generation were being drafted to die in a fight that was at best meaningless and, in actuality, a crime. The US confronted the Soviet Union with our respective nuclear arsenals of mass death. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was dead and the movement for racial and economic justice stalled. It was a terrifying year.
And then, in print and on cassette tapes, a speech by someone I'd never heard of spread like wildfire among many young people. George Wald was a scientist, a professor, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. Speaking at an anti-war teach-in at MIT in March 1969, he somehow touched and lighted up a moral nerve for many worn down by the horror around us. His speech was called: A Generation in Search of a Future.
The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed. ... I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. But there are those students of mine, who are in my mind always, and there are my children, the youngest of them now seven and nine, whose future is infinitely more precious to me than my own. So it isn’t just their generation; it’s mine, too. We’re all in it together.
Are we to have a chance to live? We don’t ask for prosperity, or security. Only for a reasonable chance to live, to work out our destiny in peace and decency. Not to go down in history as the apocalyptic generation.
Our business is with life, not death. Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home; and, most of all, what becomes of men [humankind]—all men, of all nations, colors, and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all ... It is only such a world that can now offer us life, and the chance to go on.
In that moment, Wald broke through. In the next month, the speech was broadcast in several cities, and reprinted
in the New Yorker, the Progressive, the New York
Post, Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, Chicago
Daily News, Buffalo Evening News, San Francisco Chronicle...
Many of us in a disheartened generation trudged on, making Richard Nixon's perfidious presidency impossible and inventing the environmental, women's, and gay movements.
I don't think Wald had all that in mind. But somehow his moral insight provided a jolt of humanizing energy in a bad moment.
These eruptions of some powerful truth spoken to powers, to rulers, are what make humans the tantalizingly hopeful species that we are.
And they happen for different people at different times in different contexts. Does anyone remember Acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to violate her oath to the Constitution at the beginning of the first Trump administration?
Does anyone remember the masses of us who marched for justice and against police murders of Black and Brown people in the midst of a pandemic in 2020?
Eruptions of truth and justice recur. Some are vast and some are small. And they are never just past and gone. Thanks Bishop Budde for reminding us!
What such breakthroughs in the enveloping shroud of injustice and violence do readers remember from their time on the planet?
Before dozens of attendees at a national prayer service in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington directly addressed President Donald Trump in her sermon, urging him to reconsider his attacks on marginalized communities.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde told Trump as he sat in the front row at the Washington National Cathedral. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children, and Democratic and Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”
Budde made her plea on behalf of undocumented immigrants who work jobs, pay taxes and live among others, as well as refugees who come to the United States in search of safety and a better life.
“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities — these children fear that their parents will be taken away,” she said. “And that you help those that are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands find compassion and welcome here.” ... MSNBC
In 2017, along with many Epicopalians, I was critical of the National Cathedral for hosting the incoming monster. There was no sermon that year. Bishop Budde spoke bravely this year.
As anticipated, Donald the restored king has issued executive orders designed to legislate people who experience the fluidity of gender, broadly trans- and gender binary-folk, out of existence.
Good luck with that. The World Wildlife Fund chronicles how commonly gender fluidity manifests among animal species. (Wonder if WWF' will submit in advance by taking that page down?)
But MAGA's got to try to create its own reality. Trump killed off several Biden executive orders, including one protecting transfolk in the military and another against discrimination based on gender identity. (Don't be surprised if those links die -- MAGA may not be able to erase transfolk, but it can probably corrupt the Federal Register.)
MAGA is going to do anything it can to make life hellish for people who live in gender non-conformity. Gotta have someone to project their insecurities onto when you are bullies and cowards.
Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte's Web gently explicates what's next:
... Once the discomfort over trans and non-binary people has been directly addressed through the full gamut of the resources of the federal government and every lever under Trump’s control has been pulled, his supporters will not only find their problems in life have not improved but trans folks are still very much around.
Their stubborn discomfort over trans people will never go away because trans people will never go away.
Trans and non-binary people exist all over the world and always have. In every nationality, every race, every ethnicity, every country, every culture, every religion, over thousands of years of recorded human history, all around the globe, you will find trans and non-binary people.
We have always been here, and we always will be. We are naturally occurring.
And it will be a crushing realization for a lot of non-trans people in this country when, after Trump has done all he says he will, their struggles are still present and targeting trans people both failed to remove their discomfort with our existence and alleviate their growing rage and desperation with trying to exist in a country that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for working class families to survive.
So, yes, as strange as it may sound to many, I genuinely feel bad for these people. They have been sold a senseless narrative that revolves around a cruel solution to a non-existent problem that's used to assign blame for their struggles by someone who could not care less about their welfare.
I find that tragic.
Meanwhile, once again, trans people aren’t going anywhere.
I spent all of childhood and most of adulthood in deep anxiety, depression, anger, and denial over my gender identity. For many years, I prayed God would somehow heal me—would somehow cleanse me—of being who I am.
It took a long time to recognize being trans is a gift from God and that I am lovingly made in God's image, and for all the obstacles, I am never closer to God than in my full authenticity.
The worst president in U.S. history is about to be sworn in again because, as philosopher George Santayana said, those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The fact that Trump is even more doddering, rambling, and incoherent than before is an even greater cause for concern. His selections so far are incompetent loyalists for his cabinet, for diplomats, and key administrative posts are beyond cause for concern, they are cause for trembling.
... At the last Trump inauguration, there was a very public controversy as his press secretary lied about the size of the crowd in attendance. Trump tried to claim the crowd was larger than Obama’s but news reports and photos comparing the crowds proved otherwise.
This time around, Trump wants to make a big public splash to show how extensive his support is because that’s important to people who choose their morals based on popularity.
To help bolster this inauguration, tech billionaires have donated millions (to pay people to show up?). These wealthy business tycoons have read the room and realize Trump’s favor is for sale (“Tech moguls Altman, Bezos and Zuckerberg donate to Trump's inauguration fund”). Their billions make them untouchable to the concerns of the people or the threat to democracy. At one point in the past, I had hopes that these men would be opposition leaders, but they turned out to be collaborators.
Because no matter how much money they have, it’s never enough.
Kareem is a man of principle, of convictions hard elaborated on the basis of experience and rational thought.
For the time being, we've chosen to be led by another kind of people (mostly men) -- shallow figures awed by wealth including especially their own. However powerful, the oligarchs celebrating today form a brittle assemblage of ignorance and greed which will shatter on contact with reality. (How many of them had homes in Pacific Palisades?) Let's do what we can to protect who we can from the trail of carnage they will leave in their wake.
Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires. ...
... many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”
... So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration.... What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.
Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation [the tech bros] miss..., so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.
... for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”
Here I must insert an aside (gift) from NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie.
We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.
Krugman goes on:
... they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.
The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires.
Empty, ignorant men doing ignorant things. What a time!
Every pundit around is summing up Joe Biden's accomplishments and failures. I want to play too. In a few days MAGA's merry band of saboteurs are going to preoccupy our attention. If I'm ever to unload these thoughts, today is the day.
I learned things I had not known from watching him stagger to failure.
There were times in the last few years when I considered Joe Biden the most successful occupant of the presidency for the majority of us that I'd seen since LBJ. New York Times business columnist Peter Coy (gift) summarized some of what Biden accomplished:
... he rose to the occasion of fighting the Covid pandemic and its economic effects. Although the recession was over by the time he was sworn in, the unemployment rate was still elevated at 6.4 percent. He had served as vice president during the feeble, “jobless” recovery from the recession of 2007-9, and he was determined to prevent a repeat of that slump.
Less than two months after taking office, Biden got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included stimulus checks of $1,400 per person, extended unemployment insurance and a beefed-up child tax credit. That November, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized $1.2 trillion of transportation and infrastructure spending.
Those bills did what they were intended to do. They speeded the economic recovery and brought down unemployment, helping the poor and working class most of all. The expanded child tax credit alone cut child poverty nearly in half.
The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%. Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.
Observing these successes, I thought Biden's age gave him a secret sauce: his orientation to governing was formed in the years before Ronald Reagan's "revolution" dethroned the idea of an activist federal state that worked for the benefit of the people. Reagan and the GOPers sold an exhausted people on the hokum that "the best government governs least." This was always stupid and unworkable; today, the notion merely makes room for oligarchs to rob us blind.
Biden's basic orientation was toward building a more equitable state and economy. This enabled him to ally with Elizabeth Warren's technocrats on interventions that haven't yet been fully realized. I suspect that our new MAGA overlords will bluster and howl, but they'll also take credit as much of this survives and works out for their constituents.
Biden's deep experience of American foreign policy and influence in the world helped him at times and also left him up shit creek when he couldn't adjust to contemporary realities.
Ditching our failed state-building project in Afghanistan was unequivocally the right move. Twenty years of failure needed to be shucked off. And Trump had set Biden up to get out. But the mismanagement that killed US troops and left too many Afghans in the lurch was horrible and compound the ugliness of the whole misbegotten enterprise.
The Biden administration initially responded forcefully to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then retreated to timidity when only an all-in commitment was going enable the Ukrainians to repel the invading imperialist power. The tragedy of Ukraine reminds me of the failure of the democratic states -- Britain, France, and the US -- to support the messy but legitimate government of Republican Spain in the mid-1930s against Hitler and Mussolini. We can only hope the consequence will not be similar, forcing the more law-abiding and democratic states to fight the authoritarian axis somewhere else if we're to survive. And now we've elected the modern America Firsters who always wanted capitulation to the dictators ...
And then there is Israel, the Palestinians, and the multiple oil autocracies of what Europe labels the Near East. Biden has been utterly clueless in this arena since October 7, 2023. His age and experience seems to have gifted him with completely the wrong lessons and, bluntly, the wrong racial and ethnic sympathies. His policies seem to assume that Palestinians are uppity natives to be repressed. His supine posture toward Bibi and enabling the demise of any chance for a decent order in the region has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, from day one.
All this was made more fragile and less understandable because aging Joe had lost any feel he ever had for communicating his aims to his riling constituencies. He was the president who wasn't there. And sending Kamala out to the rescue at the last minute couldn't save his legacy.
Jim Fallows is gentle about Joe. He's seen a few presidents up close.
Presidents obsess about their place in history, mainly because they can’t control it. Joe Biden must have dreamed of being seen as another FDR. His best chance now is to be seen as another Harry Truman or even Jimmy Carter—under-appreciated in his time and then gaining respect for the long-term effects of his work.
[in his final address] ... like Dwight Eisenhower before him, Biden was in fact honest. Brutally, unsparingly so. He was honest about who was causing problems: The modern versions of robber barons, and the politicians they had bought or intimidates. He was honest that citizens had to do something themselves if they didn’t like the trends, rather than waiting for someone to save them. He was presumably honest enough with himself to imagine the outrage and attacks the speech would certainly provoke. Honest enough to imply that some of the centrist reassurances of his career may have been naive.
Biden seemed a good and decent man trying to do a job he was too aged for and perhaps also a job that his experience had both suited and unfitted him for in contradictory ways. On to the next American misadventure ...