Tag: donald-trump

Vote Virginia and Louisa: Early Voting End Oct 31

No time to mince words.  I’ve told family and friends that the most dangerous period in our lives as a nation will be between the first Tuesday in November and Jan 3 next year.  The trickster in the White House has much up his sleeve should the Republicans lose control of the House and the Senate. I fear that there will not be a peaceful transfer of power in January.

With less than two weeks before November 3, polls show Democrats leading in many races, close in others.  Some decidedly red districts are also in play.   There is an excellent chance that Democrats will retake the House and even the Senate.

Trump’s domestic and foreign policies are a disaster. Trump’s tariffs, failed Iran war, and gross mistreatment of everyday immigrants have misfired with most Americans. Folks are just plain angry at the Republicans because they have wrought a slumping economy for working class folks; inflation continues to rise since Trump took office; diesel prices have surged to record highs; gas was below $3 a gallon now it hovers at $4; interest rates skyrocket for credit cards, car loans, and mortgages.  No wonder Trump’s approval rating is in the low 30s.  

While he is not on the “ticket” he is on the ticket.  Democratic donations are soaring, usually an indicator of voter enthusiasm and historically the party in power gets a comeuppance during the mid-terms.  Republicans on the other hand are relying on billionaires to fund their candidates and are in panic mode.

Every day it seems Trump and the Republicans get more looney and desperate.  Kicking the press out of the White House; diesel deals with Putin; overt bribes (remember the $5k promise, $90 dollar social security checks, $500 Afford Care Act “rebates,” $8 billion to farmers to offset diesel prices); threats to arrest election officials in various states and cities; A DHS search warrant executed on a sitting member of the House of Representatives over alleged citizenship fraud (she was a child of 17 when naturalized); arrests of supposed illegal voters in California; U.S. Post Offices seizing ballots or refusing ballots.  The list goes on and on.

How desperate will Trump get?  That is the million-dollar question.  We know at a minimum Trump will claim massive fraud and challenge the results and open criminal investigations.  The DOJ will go to court to get search warrants to seize ballots and voting machines in select districts.  From there, there is a high likelihood, that Trump will escalate. This includes:

  1. Declare a national emergency for alleged election interference by foreign powers (China, Ukraine) in collusion with democrats,
  2. Order the FCC to shut down ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and radio stations,
  3. Order his tech bros to slow down, gum up, or block social media accounts on their platforms,
  4. Invoke the Insurrection Act,
  5. Declare Martial Law,
  6. Suspend Habeas Corpus.

We know in our hearts that Hegseth and Patel and Mullins will do whatever violence Trump demands to overturn unfavorable election results.  I think and hope they will be in for a rude surprise when everyday FBI agents, DHS agents, and service members say, not only “no,” but “Fuck no” to the illegal, immoral, and heinous orders they are likely to receive as Trump spirals out of control.  We must be prepared for this day, a day I hope will never come.

Time is short, get out and vote early.  Early voting in Virginia ends Oct 31.  After that day the next opportunity to vote is election day Nov 3.  The last day to register to vote is October 23.  So please, register to vote if not already registered, and get out and vote.  The more overwhelming the democratic vote, the less likely Trump and his henchmen will do the things listed above.  

This election is a vote for more than how we fair in this Trump economy, this is a vote to restore our democracy.  A vote against John McGuire and all of Trump’s endorsed candidates is a vote to save our democracy. Time to take back the House, the Senate, and the Rule of Law.

Discipline and Punish: America’s Moral Injury in the Age of Trump

Mister Hegseth, have you no dignity?  Livestreaming an execution?  Sadly, I am not shocked given Hegseth’s cowardly bloodlust; neither am I surprised by the idea of streaming an execution.  Our government does it all the time nowadays.  Our military (and CIA) under Hegseth’s orders and direction has been conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific for well over a year now as part of Operation Southern Spear.  200 plus victims. You can scroll through dozens of videos of these extrajudicial executions on YouTube. 

 Problem is most Americans, it seems, shrug their shoulders, ‘they are drug smugglers’ they tell themselves. Some are, many aren’t, but they have two things in common whether innocent or smuggler: none were given the opportunity to defend themselves in court and they are dead, dead, dead.  We have become addicted, habituated, and desensitized to this government’s use of violence to discipline and punish those they dislike or disagree with.

This moment has been a long time coming since Americans developed a toleration, no, a sweet tooth, for these DoD snuff videos during the first Gulf War.  Antiseptic, digital vengeance, news as entertainment.   This has antecedents in our country’s history.  Back at the height of lynchings in early 20th century America, photographs of lynched men were made into postcards and mailed to family and friends with ghastly preprinted references to southern BBQ.  Not quite a Hallmark moment.  

Many Americans it seems were shocked at Hegseth’s pronouncement, however. A step too far.

Timothy Broglio, Archbishop of the Dioceses for the Military Services, released a statement questioning the morality and intent of Secretary Hegseth’s announcement that Nidal Hasan, an active-duty Army Major convicted of murdering 13 persons during a mass shooting at an Army base in Texas in 2009, will be executed by firing squad and that it would be livestreamed.  

Bishop Broglio condemned the heinous act of Hasan, but also objected to the execution of Hasan.   The Catholic Church has a long-standing opposition to the death penalty.  Not that long really, but recently long. Like from 2018.  For most of its 2000-year history it found executions expedient for heretics and witches and the like.  But that is another story for inquisitive minds.

Broglio also questioned the intention to livestream the execution: “Do we really want to imitate the terrorists of this world and make a public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries” Broglio wrote.  He also asked to “what purpose” would the livestream serve and opined that the members of the firing squad would sustain a “moral injury.”  You can read his full statement at this link: (https://www.milarch.org/archbishop-broglio-issues-statement-on-proposed-execution-livestream/).

Indeed, a serving member of the armed forces turning on their fellow soldiers, is monstruous and deservedly is a capital offense, I believe.  But livestreaming?  What caught my attention is that Hegseth characterized Hasan’s act as a terrorist attack rooted in Islam.  If Hasan was catholic or protestant or any other sect other than Islam, his execution would not be livestreamed, I judge.

Bishop Broglio asked what purpose this public spectacle of Hasan’s execution could serve.  That’s an easy one. Its primary purpose, I argue, is not to execute Hasan by firing squad but to discipline and punish the Islamic world in general, and American Muslims in particular.  Frankly, this proposed livestreamed spectacle is reminiscent of America’s long history of lynching the “other.”

Even Speaker Johnson appears skeptical of the public execution as well, claiming it would motivate more terrorist attacks.  Yes, it would.  It would make the cowardly Hasan a martyr.  It would also ignite a surge of right-wing white nationalist violence towards  American Muslims. Or as Trump would describe these right wing nationalists, real American patriots.  It would inflame religious inspired fanatics and bigots of both the Christian and Muslim faiths.

Media outlets quickly pointed out that the last publicly attended execution occured in Kentucky in 1936 when twenty thousand spectators gathered to participate in the execution of Rainey Bethea, an African- American man.  In fact, the last man publicly hanged and left dangling from a tree limb was a 19-year-old African American man named Michael Donald in 1981, in Mobile, Alabama.

Yes, I understand the counter argument, that the execution of Hasan is the implementation of a judicial death warrant, but I think an execution behind prison walls is one thing while the public spectacle of livestreaming an execution to tens of millions of homes, bars, schools, is another. It is a lynching spectacle.  This is what ISIS, Iran, and the Taliban do.  This proposed spectacle does a moral injury to our nation.  Are we not a better people than the murderous thugs of ISIS, Iran’s rulers, and the Taliban?  

Hasan was selected for this lynching because he is Muslim, and Hegseth, a Christian zealot, wants to use Hasan’s public death to restore the suzerainty of white, Christian America.  I make my case below.

In a seminal work “Discipline and Punish,” Michel Foucault, argued that a public execution is a “ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores the sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular.”  Adding, “[It] belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored…; over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force.  Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law,” in this case a Muslim killing Christian soldiers, “and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.”

Hasan’s streaming public execution is just such a display by Hegseth and Trump.

If anyone deserves a livestreamed public execution it is Dylan Roof, a white supremacist fond of the confederate flag, for murdering worshippers at the Emmanuel AMC Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during a prayer meeting.  The Supreme Court is to hear arguments about this case in October I believe.

A week after the announcement of the execution plans for Hasan, federal agents raided the home of Representative Ilham Omar in Washington DC, an outspoken and frequent critic of President Trump.  Omar, a Somali refuge now American citizen, is Muslim and proudly wears a head scarf.  The federal search warrant is still sealed.  According to news reporting, however, the warrant was issued as part of a broader immigration and citizenship fraud investigation.  The affidavit for the warrant would have had to have stated that there was “probable cause’ to find evidence of a crime at Omar’s residence. 

Given the tainted and corrupt and laughably incompetent U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia under Jeanine Pirro, I suspect the probable cause was questionable.  Surely the judge that read the supporting affidavit must have questioned the agents/federal prosecutor who submitted the affidavit, and would in my mind, have serious reservations about the timing of the search warrant so close to the November mid-terms and veracity of the information provided. Yet, he or she still signed the warrant.

Additionally, the search coincided with a Trump rally held later that day.  I presume Trump’s remarks were written in advance knowledge of the raid and to complement the raid.  According to Fox news, Trump said at the rally spectacle, that “she’s a disaster.  She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military.  All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and says, ‘I have a constitutional right,’” Trump joked.  “She’s got a constitutional right.  She’s telling us about the Constitution and she’s coming from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”  The crowd at the spectacle started on cue to chant “Deport, Deport, Deport….

The Hasan execution announcement and the execution of a search warrant at Omar’s residence within a week or so of each other is no accident.  This is part of Trump’s mid-term strategy: Fear mongering and love of the spectacle.  Create a sense of fear and revulsion towards American Muslims and prophesize the imminent collapse of American and western civilization through replacement by sub-human invaders.  He is the patriarch, punisher and disciplinarian. It seems to work far too often on many Americans who succumb all too readily to Trump’s vile, racist, and misogynistic tropes and memes. 

One word of advice to Hegesth, who said that there are consequences for one’s actions.  Yes, there are Pete.  For someone who ordered, organized, and directed the extrajudicial murder of over 200 men and young boys on boats suspected of drug smuggling, you are a mass murderer no better than Hasan, perhaps worse. Hasan murdered his colleagues for ideological reasons.  You also murder men and young boys on the high seas for ideological reasons.  You are a criminal and should be charged with conspiracy, murder, and piracy (18 USC 1658 et al and 2280).  

Bills of Mortality: America’s Declining Public Health System

London, 1664

Sometime between 20 and 27 December, Christmas week, a parish church bell rings in London announcing a death; two poor elderly women drop what they are doing and check in at the church. They are the parish’s official “searchers.”  The Sexton dispatches them to the place of death and they inspect – search — the body for signs of the cause of death. After inspecting the body, they report to the local constable that the cause of death was plague. No doubt they noted the bulbous telltale signs of plague, black death. The report of death goes up the chain of local government. Next Wednesday, the weekly Bill of Mortality is published. A curious reader would note that there was one plague death in London.

The Bill of Morality for the week of December 20-27 reported other deaths as well.  Small Pox or Flox, French Pox (the English term for Syphilis), Childbed (what we call Childbirth); Rising of the Lights (respiratory illness, lungs were called lights back then), and wormes.  There were 39 causes of death listed that week.  The Bill also reported the number of persons christened and the number of persons buried.  Burials always outnumbered christenings.  That week 116 boys and 113 girls were christened.  Buried were 144 males and 147 women.  

Months later, without another plague death, 43 plague deaths were reported from the week of May 30, 1665.  The following week that number was 112, the week after 168, the next week 267, the thereafter 470.  London was in the early stages of a new plague:  Black Death, Bubonic and Pneumonic plague.  By the time the plague burnt itself out over 100,000 Londoners were dead.  Thousands more had fled London, mostly the well off or political elites.  Then came the great fire of 1666.

It was brutal year for Londoners.  Households that had a plague death were quarantined.  The house was boarded up with the occupants inside, a guard posted outside, a white cross painted on the door, and the words “Lord have mercy upon us” painted on the side of the building.  Family or friends provided food or the household paid someone to bring food.  The 40-day quarantine was extended with each new infection.   Everyone inside died, mostly.  Locked up with the fleas hosting the bacteria Yersinia Pestis that jumped to humans once their rat hosts died.

Surveillance and Containment

London’s Bill of Mortality is an early example of municipal governments gathering and tracking data on disease and death.  Originally, when it was first established in 1515, the Bill was to track only plague.  This information was closely held by London’s government leaders.  By 1550, however, the scope of the Bill had expanded to include all causes of death. By the 17th century the Bills were no longer kept secret but published and posted throughout London.  One could even buy one for a penny or so.  

Today, most governments also conduct disease surveillance, and if necessary, move to contain any outbreaks of communicable diseases, through isolation or vaccination.  Given the advent of vaccines, preventative measures have been put in place to prevent outbreaks by creating a ‘herd immunity’ across communities.  The elimination of smallpox in the wild is perhaps the greatest vaccination success story.  Hundreds of millions of lives have been saved.  Smallpox, if you did not know, had a 30 percent fatality rate.  

Public health standards have evolved since London’s first Bill of Mortality was published.  The gold standard of surveillance, containment, and vaccination, have saved hundreds of millions of lives from premature death from smallpox, measles, polio, and other transmissible diseases.   Antibiotics and anti-virals treatments also played a key role in reducing or eliminating deaths where vaccinations are not available. 

America’s Public Health Care System in Shambles

Today, that gold standard in America is crumbling under the Trump administration’s deliberate and calculated actions to disable and disrupt the Centers for Disease Control among other public health services.  All because Trump has a personal vendetta against the CDC because of his own inept management of the COVID pandemic. Trump lied to the American people, delayed containment, and misled on all fronts regarding masking and treatments. Even going so far as to suggest ingesting or injecting bleach during a live news conference. He expected federal government public health professionals to be loyal to him. They were not.

Certainty after the COVID pandemic receded, lessons learned could of, and should have been, implemented to make our country’s public health care system better.  Gutting the system in an act of personal retribution because he thought government organizations were personally disloyal to him, is criminal, dangerous, and outrageously cruel. Children are needlessly dying because of him.

Today, the uncontained measles outbreaks in America are an example of the consequences of deliberately undermining and disabling the trifecta of surveillance, containment, and vaccination.  Pennsylvania is experiencing an unprecedented measles outbreak, with four reported deaths.  One of whom was a newborn.  Texas experienced an earlier outbreak which resulted in deaths as well.  Trump’s war on vaccinations is killing Americans. 

Despite two serious outbreaks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Junior, who oversees America’ public health infrastructure, continues to downplay measles outbreaks, denigrate vaccines, and cripple research funding.  He is a one-man plague on America’ health.  The causes of death attributed by Pennsylvania’ public health services have even been denied and questioned by Kennedy.  As I understand it, the CDC does not list the deaths as measles related.  17th century Londoner’s had more access to information about public health threats than today’s average American it seems.

The Next Global Pandemic

Smallpox was eliminated in the wild, however, smallpox virus samples still exist in vials in two places in the world.  One is in Atlanta, Georgia, at the CDC.  America has about 451 vials.  The other vials of smallpox are in Russia at their State Research Center of Virology.  They have about 120 vials.  Lost vials of smallpox virus have been discovered, worryingly, over the years.  For example, at an NIH lab in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2014, six vials were found.   In a lab near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 15 vials were uncovered in a lab in 2021.  Not a good indicator that all vials of smallpox are “safely” in government hands.  Then there is Putin’s Russia.

It would be foolish for any government to weaponize smallpox, to include the Russians.  Once unleashed it would end up killing millions of them as well.  However, in the hands of a millenarist apocalyptic terrorist group, smallpox may be a weapon of choice, where death is the message and smallpox the medium.

For such contingencies, the U.S. has about 360 million doses of smallpox vaccine as of 2003 stockpiled around the country.  Given the degradation of public health surveillance infrastructure, the mass firings of scientists and other experts in epidemiology, and vaccine hesitancy, America’s response would be delayed, slow, inadequate, and uncoordinated.  If 100 million Americans were infected by smallpox, at least 30 million would die.  Smallpox is a virus, so antibiotics would be useless and there are no approved antivirals for smallpox.  Antivirals have been tested on animal test subjects, but not humans, at this time.

The average 17th century Londoner lived in fear of the return of the black death, which appeared periodically.  Disease and death were a daily fixture, however, even without plague.  In the 15th century half of England perished in the great plague of 1438.  They even banned kissing.  Whole towns of people disappeared. After centuries of progress, America is going backwards.  While the smallpox epidemic envisioned above is remote, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  

The COVID pandemic should be a cautionary tale, yet, our government is dismantling our system of surveillance, containment, and vaccination.  For all intents and purposes, they are invoking God not science to save us.  They might as well paint “Lord have mercy upon us” on the side of the CDC in Atlanta…. You know the one with smallpox vials in it.

Groom of the Stool: A Bottom-up History of Political Power

I will start with the proposition that the most powerful person in the White House, and in our government, is Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old White House Appointments Secretary.   

Trump’s latest salvo against a free press came last week when Trump announced he was banning CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House. Media reports later emerged that Trump erupted in rage after Harp played him video excerpts of reporters and pundits criticizing his policies and missteps.   In a fit, and apparently without consulting his staff and cabinet, Trump unilaterally banned certain press organizations from the White House press pool, thus creating the current crisis of free speech and government transparency.

Meanwhile, Costco is rationing motor oil and diesel is at record highs.

I don’t know whether the reports of Harp’s involvement are true in whole, in part, or false.  Given that Harp continuously follows Trump around and feeds him news that inflates his ego and buoys his moods, the report sounds plausible.

Way back, and I mean way back, Henry VIII of England, who cut off the heads of a few of his many wives, created an official position within his royal court that is known as the “Groom of the Stool.”  This person’s primary responsibility was to attend to the King’s bowel movements, his morning ablutions.  One doesn’t learn these scraps of history reading grand political histories but bottom-up social histories.

Before the age of flush toilets and toilet paper, commodes weren’t exactly spread around the manors and castles, the king needed a place to poop when out doing kingly things.    The groom of the stool was entrusted with the king’s “stool” kit and ensured it was available wherever he went.  The stool was a box upon which he sat when needing to go.  The stool contained a chamber pot, a water source for washing up, and a cloth.  

For the curious, it’s why poop and stool are related.

There are no records to suggest that the groom of the stool ever wiped the royal buttock, which is probably true.  Nonetheless the groom of the stool did attend to the king’s most private moments.  This closeness and intimacy with the king also brought power and the groom of the stool was sought-after by courtiers.  As a result, over time, the groom of the stool became the King’s amanuensis, managed the King’s personal finances; basically, became a close and powerful advisor.  One of his privy advisors. 

For the very curious, it’s why privy and bathroom are related. 

The position of the groom of the stool eventually ended (yes, a pun) in 1901 or thereabouts.  I argue that Natalie Harp occupies a similar position of access and trust.  While she may not attend to Trump’s bathroom ablutions, she does spend much time in Trump’s private quarters, basically the 15th century equivalent of the privy chambers.

Harp apparently has almost 24-hour access to the president. We know she produces Trump’s social media posts, feeds him memes, for instance the racist video of the Obamas as apes, and eventually posts his Truth Social missives.  Dangerously, Harp seems to deliberately encourage Trump’s basest instincts, incites his racial animus, and foster Trump’s self-conception that he is ordained by God to rule. 

These Truth Social post double as official government policy.  This access and influence make her the most powerful person in our government.  She, in effect, develops and publishes government policy while simultaneously manages his public persona as this all-seeing divine ruler.  Part Sauron, part Jesus. Trump not Harp. Although it does seem she is channeling herself through Trump’s social media.

Who is this, Natalie Harp? Is she a love-struck fanatical follower?  Or is she a brilliant interloper masquerading as infatuated aid?  Or somewhere in-between?  Or worse, an asset of an intelligence service?

Undoubtedly foreign intelligence adversaries, to include China, Israel, and Russia knew about her and her relationship and access to Trump years ago, before he returned to office.  Any intelligence service, either friend or foe, would have at least thought about targeting her.  You can imagine the intelligence coup that would have been.  A false flag operation would have been a perfect avenue to approach her as a witting or unwitting asset.  

An intelligence service could not only gain daily insights into Trump’s mental state, his inner thoughts, but also intimate knowledge of his other medical conditions, medicines he is taking. Maybe even introduce listening devices. More importantly they would be able to reliably feed Trump information to influence his decisions, promote conspiracy theories, exploit his severe mental health decline. Basically, damage America from within and foster global economic and political chaos abroad.

Trump’s social media posts are for the most part insane and destabilizing.  One wonders if they go beyond Trump’s obvious mental incapacitation and are products of a clever intelligence operation.   I think the former and not the latter.  Regardless, they are, we know, produced by Harp.

As a modern-day groom of the stool, Harp, contrary to media portrayals of her as a love-struck assistant, a stereotype affixed to women and never men, would seem a brilliant tactician and strategist. In Trump’s Thunder Dome of a White House, she has made herself a very powerful person indeed. The courtiers of Henry VIII would be respectful of her, so that they would not lose their heads. She is not to be underestimated.

Early Voting Starts TODAY in Virginia

Time to get out and vote Virginia. Early voting starts today and it’s time our voices are heard loud and clear: No Kings In America. Given the apparent appetite of Trump to mess with the election process vote early.

The Louisa Democrats sent out a notice about sticky return envelopes for mail-in ballots:

STICKY SITUATION

We’ve heard from the Registrar’s Office that some mail-in ballot return envelopes are sticking together due to high humidity. You can contact the Louisa Registrar’s Office at 540-967-3427 to request a replacement envelope. Alternatively, if you’re able to open yours without significant damage, you can tape it closed and initial next to the tape.

The Mismeasure of Man: Democracy in America

As a young boy, around 8 I think, my family was stationed at West Point, New York. One of many places I lived as an Army brat. My favorite place to hangout and play was at the old stone fort overlooking the Hudson River:  Fort Putnam.  One’s childhood imagination filled the space with soldiers, and prisoners in the dungeons, as we played on the ramparts and nearby woods.

One day, wandering through the fort’s grounds, there was a young man digging a shallow pit, about four feet by four feet and several inches deep.  A small pile of dirt was nearby, along with a shovel, a small shallow wooden box with a screen, and some bags.  I stopped and asked what he was doing.  He said he was doing archaeology for a class project.  He showed me some bits of pottery and a handful of rusty nails.  He let me hold them.  He even let me do a little digging.  

About a decade later I was majoring in Anthropology with a concentration in Archaeology.  My favorite class, ever, was a lab in human osteology.  Bones, human bones.  Ancient bones. My favorite professor, Dr. Ann Palkovich, was giving the class.   The bones we were studying were from a dig in the middle east, Israel, I think.  They were approximately two millennia old.

Every Friday there was a quiz.  There were about a dozen small boxes, labeled with a number, and in that box was a fragment of a bone.   Our task was to identify it.  Was it a bone?  If so, was it a human bone?  If it was a human, what bone was it?  What side of the body?  As the course progressed, and our skills and knowledge developed, the bone fragments became smaller and smaller. 

One day, walking into the lab, sitting on the tables were skulls from the collection.  Their empty eye sockets – orbits technically – beckoned.  Holding one, looking into the empty orbits, one wondered what that person had seen, what their life was like.  Skeletons spoke to us.  They told us their age, height, sex, what diseases they may have had, a history of injuries, markers of malnutrition, signs of what labor they engaged in.

Skulls have a very disturbing history in anthropology I learned in another class.  Much of it dark. Stephen Gould’s Mismeasure of Man greatly influenced me; a tattered copy of his book sits next to my keyboard as I type.

 In the mid- to late-19th century, the emerging science of anthropology was consumed by racist notions of white European superiority.  There was a confluence of 18th century notions human species being divided into race-based species — endowed with different levels of intelligence—and empire, colonialism, and Darwinian evolution.  Scientifically determined racial hierarchies of intelligence and civilizations were developed, with white European men (and their descendants) at the very top, with blacks at the very bottom.  Women of every race were also inferior to the men within their race.

This combination of naturalists, anthropologists, and cranks set out to scientifically prove that whites were superior.  The skull was the key, they thought.  Skulls were collected (mostly looted and stolen) from around the world and the craniums volumes were measured.  Cranial volume was a measure of brains, or intelligence.  And wouldn’t you know it.  Skulls of white European origin men had the highest cranial volumes.  Blacks the lowest.  Criminals also had the lower cranial volumes…. as did women.

The results were rigged we know.  Through both intentional and unintentional selection biases, data was manipulated or ignored.   This era of scientific racism had massive consequences.  It informed government policies on immigration, policing, the penal system well into the 20th century.  It served to justify colonization, empire, slavery, Jim Crow, and oppression of certain peoples.  You see, they believed, blacks could never be civilized, or intelligent, or worthy of humane treatment.  

You hear this racist legacy now when a white person says a black person is articulate.  Or, read that Florida’s school curriculum requires teachers to teach that black slaves learned life affirming skills from their white owners.  Or when black and women generals are fired for no reason other than their skin color or gender.  Hegseth believes that blacks and women can’t achieve high ranks in the military without preferential, woke, promotions. They are, Hegseth is convinced, inherently inferior intellectually and morally.

I thought scientific racism had met an ignoble death.  But alas, it’s rearing its ugly head once again and is alive and well in Trump’s world.  It is a corner stone of America’s foreign and domestic policies of the current administration.  Trump’s national security policy paper claims that western European civilization is being diluted by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East.  His constant demeaning of Africans – Somalis are low-IQ – or banning of visas from mostly African and Islamic countries, harken back to that dark age of scientific racism. 

Does Trump not know that the wheel was simultaneously invented in Mesopotamia (Southern Iraq), Turkey, and in Hungry (per recent study), some six thousand years ago while west Europeans were, well, still eating each other.

Does Trump not know that the chemical compound now known as gunpowder, was invented in China in the 9thcentury? Then about four centuries later the Chinese also invented the cannon.  According to a Ming dynasty book, they called it a “thousand ball thunder cannon.” Now that’s cool. West Europeans, were, well, still too uncivilized to invent a cannon.

Does Trump not know that an Arab mathematician at Baghdad University in the 9th century, wrote a book titled “Al-jabr ‘wa al-muquabala“?  Or, as we know it, Algebra.   Mohamed al-Kwarizimi, is the father of Algebra and the namesake of Algorithm. West Europeans, were, well, still in the Dark Ages. 

Does Trump not know that our number system 0 to 10 (the Arabic System) was invented in India, adopted by Arabic mathematicians?  That zero was not a western invention? In addition, trigonometry developed over millennia in Babylonia, India (sine, cosine, versine is attributed to an Indian mathematician and astronomer named Ayabhata), and the Arab world before reaching so-called western civilization, those great Teutonic cultures, who, were, well, still eating without proper utensils.

(Note to dumbass Texas: since you recently codified a state school curriculum denigrating Islam and the Arab world perhaps you ought to ban the teaching of high-level math. Don’t want them ‘Arab’ ideas to infect your children’s brains do you?)

So called western civilization is greatly indebted to other “civilizations.”  All those right-wing gun owners who don’t want to be replaced and fear western civilization is in terminal decline fearfully clutch guns made possible by those barbarians, the Chinese. 

Perhaps the one thing so-called western civilization can lay claim to is Democracy.  A Greek word meaning rule by the people.  Our Constitution’s preamble, “We the people….” traces directly back to Ancient Athens.  Mind you, in the late 19th century as Greeks emigrated to the U.S. they weren’t welcomed.  One person wrote they were ‘broken men from a broken land.’

Paradoxically, America’s claim to fame – a constitutional republic where the people rule – our one true gift to the world, is being laid to waste day-by-day by Trump, his administration, and his supporters that insatiably guzzle his tonic of racism and white supremacy.  Quite the contradiction to destroy democracy to save it from the clutches of non-western civilization.

The movement of people, and thus, ideas and inventions over millennia are what makes humans so powerful.  When you block the movement of people, you also block innovation and new ideas.  These inventions and ideas are what power our modern way of life in America.  A cumulative synthesis of ideas spanning peoples across the globe. Building walls and rejecting new people invites a slow decline and death of American civilization, not a golden age, but a new dark age.

Les Enfants Terribles

“The infant is more secure in his world than the mature man is in his wider world,” wrote American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History. Stop, pause and think deeply about those words.  That thought is both simple and profound, I think.

Niebuhr was an influential voice of conscience as the shadow of the Cold War darkened the world and McCarthyism was eating at America’s soul. He wrote through the lens of a mid-century white male American gaze, eliding some of America’s worst excesses as a nation, or, at times, obliquely referencing them.   But who doesn’t write though the lens of the present and one’s lived experiences.   

His salient points, nonetheless, were about virtue, and in his book’s case: not rejecting the “Christian idea of the ambiguity of human virtue” while America pursues it Cold War battles with the Soviet Union through proxy wars.   He wanted America to avoid the trap that our way, the American way, was the one true way. 

You can imagine, were he alive today, Niebuhr would be a tenacious critic of Trump and the Christian right’s cult of virility; embodied by Stephen Miller’s pronouncement that the only virtues in the world are power, strength, and violence. Niebuhr’s and Trump’s concepts of virtue and Christianity are diametrically opposite. 

As for an infant being secure in his world, I think Niebuhr was critiquing the naiveté of the growing popularity of the myth of American exceptionalism and government policies that flowed from that belief.  The hubris that Americans of European heritage were a chosen people, in a land created by God for them, blinded them to history’s lessons.  We see that myth once again resonant in America.  Our government is run by these man-infants, these enfants terribles who naively and mistakenly believe that they are God’s chosen, that they speak for God, that only they have the virtue to lead America.  

Well before Niebuhr, many, many centuries ago, Abu al-Ala al Ma’arri  — a freethinking  poet, philosopher, and writer, some would say heretic — was born in Syria in the late 10th century.  He was skeptical and suspicious of any religion’s claim to absolute truth.  

Blinded by smallpox while young, he was nonetheless a prolific author, dictating his many works.  I came across a quote of his while reading about the crusades.  At the time, I was posted to Beirut and had borrowed a three-volume work on the crusades to help pass the nights away.   While al Ma’arri lived before the first crusaders set foot in Jerusalem in 1099, he did live in an Arab world where Shia and Sunni battled over the soul of Islam, territory, and power.  

Al Ma’arri’s truism stuck with me.  I even printed and framed the quote, hung it in my office for years:  “The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:  Those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.”  It was reminder to me of the sectarianism, fanaticism, and zealotry that drove (and drives) much of our world’s history.  In Beirut, the grim reminders of sectarian civil war were everywhere.  

It’s about extremism.  Whether it be religious bigotry and zealotry predicated on deliberate interpretations, misreadings, or misconceptions of religious texts to murder the other; or scientific Darwinism used to justify the sterilization or murder of the mentally and physically disabled.

We never seem to learn the lessons of sectarian violence.  If anyone is the personification of this ideation of no brains but religious certitude and bigotry it is Secretary of Defense Hegseth.   For Trump in general, and Hegseth in particular, the Iran war wasn’t really a war to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons, although it was part of the equation. The war is really about going to war with Islam on a global scale, punishing a transgressive Iran for not becoming supplicants like the Saudis or Emirates.  

Netanyahu, for his part, exploited Trump’s and Hegseth’s biases and infant-like world view for his own purposes.  For all his faults, and there are many, Netanyahu is not naïve like an infant, he sees the world for its complexities.

As for domestic politics, most every single consequential executive order issued by this President revolves around a form of white male Christian sectarianism and zealotry:  American history (who counts and who’s erased), DEI (reinstating white male privilege), Immigration/birthright citizenship (racist replacement theory), access to reproductive rights (male control of the female body), and vaccinations (God decides who lives or dies). 

Our government, it seems every day, is falling deeper into the latter half of al-Ma’rri’s dictum and continues to self-radicalize as Trump’s misjudgments tanks the economy and he is humiliated on the world’s stage by Iran.   It is bad enough that the Executive Branch has been captured by these enfants terribles, but when Congress and the Supreme Court are also controlled by this gang of enfants terribles, things become dangerous.  

Trump’s strongman grip strangling America’s democratic institutions is starting to slip as he becomes weaker politically, but his weakness is also simultaneously a time of greater danger.  All strongmen flail violently when the end nears.  Miller’s virtues — power, strength, violence — are a warning.

Democratic institutions like the courts should be rallying around the Constitution, and they are at the lower levels.  But, given the Superme Court’s recent stay of a lower court’s order blocking implementation of parts of Trump’s executive order regarding mail in ballots, I doubt the Court will block Trump’s meddling and interfering with the mid-term elections. 

America has had periods of rupture before and come back stronger.  Will our country recover from the coming rupture this November?  We have seen what Trump’s acolytes can and will do to overturn an election.  Unlike January 6, 2021, the guard rails are gone.  They are acting for God, they believe.  Will Trump’s paramilitaries (DHS) rain pain on Americans after the mid-terms?  Will the military occupy blue cities and seize ballot boxes?  Will the Justice Department conduct mass arrests and detentions of Trump’s political opponents, blue state governors?  Will Speaker Johnson refuse to seat newly elected democrats in the House?  I wouldn’t be asking these questions if I thought they were far-fetched.  Ten years ago, I would say these are crazy questions.  Now, you feel in your gut that they aren’t far from the mark.

 Our 250-year-old experiment in in serious jeopardy, both at home and abroad.  We are a nation without friends.  A bully pushing agendas driven by sectarian ideologies.  Even our geographic neighbors – Canada and Mexico — hate us, it seems with a passion.  Why? Because we the people choose this nut job now residing in the White House.  We put him there. We choose this path with eyes wide open.   Most Americans who voted choose to reelect a Machiavellian, narcist, psychopath with a god-complex whose first disastrous term ended in an attempted coup.  What could go wrong?

V is for Voting

Famously, presidential candidate Bill Clinton posted a reminder note that said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  A cue that wonky policy sound bites or nuanced discourses on the pro and cons of a particular policy only go so far with the average voter.  For most voters, it comes down to kitchen table issues:  

Can I pay the mortgage or rent? 

Can I feed my kids?

Can I afford a middle-class life?  

They measure these questions against the previous few years:  Am I better off today than I was four or two years ago?

For conservatives and Republicans, continuing failures to successfully manage kitchen table issues – remember 2008 and 2020, the Great Recession and then the COVID pandemic – brought them down a path to embrace the most divisive candidate, and then President, in modern American politics.  Kitchen sink issues were replaced by xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and its corollary misogyny, and racial animus.  

The basic kitchen table question must be revived.  Am I, and the people of Louisa, better off today than they were January 20, 2025?

I say, “No.”  The people of Louisa are worse off by most kitchen table measures.  

Louisa’s farmers are hard hit.  High diesel and gas prices, record fertilizer costs combined with low prices for commodities, and disappearing lucrative foreign markets, like China, are crushing Louisa, and American, family farmers.  This is the result of Trump’s misguided tariff war with China.

While unemployment remains at 3.9 percent, core inflation continues to shrink paychecks.  Wage shrinkage from inflation continues to be a self-inflicted wound.  Trump’s economic nationalism, which includes steep tariffs on most countries, continues to drive inflation up and shrink real wages.  

The disastrous never-ending war on Iran continues to keep gas at over $4.00 a gallon and diesel at over $5.00.  Borrowing money is increasingly costly as investors sour on America’s ten-year bond, raising interest rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and small farm and business loans. 

Food Insecurity: The Louisa Resource Center Council’s Food Bank has seen record numbers of visitors, I learned, over the past year.  Louisa County Public Schools this  summer — starting June 8 — began a summer school age nutrition program serving meals at various locations throughout the county. The meals are free of charge, and available for any child ages 2 to 18. No ID is required. This program speaks to the ongoing food crisis for vulnerable children in our county. How is it we have the first trillionaire, yet our children go hungry?

Housing costs in Louisa soar:  Housing costs have been increasing for well over a decade.  The median sales price for a home in Louisa is $445k, up from $234k a decade ago.  The price per square foot, however, increased close of 6 percent over the past year.  This is a huge rise, directly correlated to Trump’s tariffs.  His recent 50 percent tariff on Canadian wood products, will only make matters worse regarding affordable housing.

Access to health care continues to shrink: Deep cuts to Medicaid and Medicare subsidies and the elimination of the Affordable Health Care Act premium subsidies have left many folks in Louisa County with no health care or delayed health care, many of them vulnerable children.

Meanwhile, as the denizens of Louisa pay the price for Trump’s mismanagement of about everything he touches, he and his family have profited to the tune of $2 billion dollars, mostly in the dark world of crypto currency.  The swamp he promised to drain has turned into a deep sea of corruption.

You can also frame the “are you better off today” question in terms of our democracy.  Is America’s democracy better today than it was before January 20, 2025?

I think most Americans would respond with an emphatic “No.”

By most measures, America is backsliding from the hallmarks of liberal democracy:  Pluralism, the rule of law, a healthy civil society, a government with three coequal branches, government transparency, equal access to voting and representation in government at local, state, and federal offices.

Sustained attacks on America’s institutions such as a non-partisan civil service, an apolitical military, Congressional powers, the federal courts, an independent justice Department have severely degraded America’s 250-year experiment.

Our Justice Department has become so rotten that a man was arrested and charged with vandalizing the Lincoln reflecting pool just to support Trump’s claims that his embarrassingly botched reflecting pool make over was sabotaged.  Prosecutors lied to and mislead the grand jury that indicted him.   This is what dictators do.

Despite all these challenges and threats to our democracy, we must still care …. and take the time and effort to vote.  The Democratic primary is this coming Tuesday, August 4.  Get out and vote for one of the three Democratic candidates for our district (Tom Perriello, Rob Tracinski, and Suzanne Krzyaowski).

As for this November, Rep. John McGuire (R) must go.  He has done nothing over the past two years for the folks of Louisa County or the 5th Congressional District.  His main job has been to kiss Trump’s big, beautiful orange ass. His legislative achievements for Louisa: a ‘big fat nothing burger’ as right-wing influencers are fond of saying.  Mostly culture war stuff.  He did vote for the big, beautiful bill, however, which crushes Medicaid and Medicare services to Louisa’s poorly paid working class and her seniors, and refuses to reign in Trump’s never ending illegal war with Iran.  As for Louisas farmers, he has been a big fat zero.  

Seems he is more interested in the stock market as he bought Nvidia stock twice this year and other stocks that his House Committee assignments oversee.  Once a couple of weeks after Trump purchased his own Nvidia shares.  Hmmmm?

Now, as we near the November mid-terms, Trump is increasingly signaling he will not accept the results.  He is positioning the Justice Department, the country’s intelligence services, and the Department of Homeland security to support his claims of fraud.  Will the military stay above the fray or go all in with Trump? What will the Supreme Court do?  

This raises the very serious question that are on many minds.  Will there be a peaceful transfer of power after the mid-terms?  Voter turnout this November must be huge. A democratic win must be overwhelming. Not by one or two points but by tremendous majorities.  Trump won’t dare to challenge a massive electoral loss, especially in deep red counties and states.  At least I hope he doesn’t.  But he is crazy, and not all there, so who knows.  If he does, then we must be prepared take a different tact, massive civil disobedience in coordination with court action. 

So, ask yourself, and ask your family or friends, are we better off today than we were in January 2025?  No. So, let’s get out and make our voices heard next week and in November. 

This Old Flag: What is the 4th of July to Americans?

“Our masters, they have lived under the flag, they got their wealth under it, and everything beautiful for their children. Under it they have grind us up, and put us in their pocket for money.  But the first minute they think that old flag mean freedom for we colored people, they pull it right down and run up the rag of their own. But we’ll never desert the old flag, boys, never; we have lived under it for eighteen hundred six-two years, and we’ll die for it now.”

Corporal Prince Lambkin, 1st South Carolina Colored Infantry

What is the 4th of July to Americans? 

Besides the obvious play on Frederick Douglass’ famous speech, that question has occupied, no troubled, my mind these past several months.  Not only for Americans as a people, but for myself as well.  Why does our 250thanniversary simultaneously inspire me, but also repel me?  I recall the energy and excitement of our bicentennial in 1976, although through the lens of a 12-year-old.   

As a patriotic American that served in uniform and served in our foreign service overseas in war and conflict zones, this anniversary bothers me. It vexes me because I think, it is deeply tarnished and soiled.  Mostly because it has been stolen and appropriated by Trump for his personal glorification and enrichment.  I ‘ve been to countries where tinpot dictators’ rule and Trump’s America has many hallmarks of these petite regimes.

There are two national plans on how to celebrate our nation’s story of independence. One, a bipartisan celebration planned by a commission authorized and funded by Congress in 2016, and the second, a partisan celebration highlighting one faction:  The Trump Organization.

America250 is, according to its website, is the “U.S. Semi-quincentennial Commission established by Congress in 2016 to plan and orchestrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”  It is led by persons “Appointed by the House and Senate leadership of both parties, the nonpartisan Commission is composed of 16 private citizens, 4 U.S. Representatives and 4 Senators, as well as 12 Ex Officio members from all three branches of the federal government and its independent agencies.”  For close to a decade this commission has been working across party lines to plan for our 250th anniversary celebrations.

Freedom250 is a Trump initiative managed by an event planning firm – Event Strategies LLC — with long ties to Trump. As with anything Trump, things are opaque and murky, like the reflecting pool.  Its’ website is silent as to its leadership, organization, and make-up.  The White House calls it a ‘public-private venture.’  The company, according to a Wired article, has raked in tens of millions of tax payer dollars, to including a potentially $100 million windfall in government contracts with the General Services Administration. (https://www.wired.com/story/they-helped-plan-the-january-6-rally-now-their-events-company-is-raking-in-millions-in-government-contracts/)

Initially, from what I could gather, both the America250 commission and Trump’s Freedom250 organizers worked together.  The original event organizer for America250 was let go and Event Strategies LLC got the gig.  This explains, I think, what happened to $150 million that was appropriated by Congress for the 250th anniversary in the “big beautiful bill.  The bill did not designate whether the taxpayer dollars went to America250 or Freedom250.  From what I learned from an NPR interview regarding Freedom250, it was initially agreed that $100 million would go to America 250, with the remaining $50 million going to Freedom250.  That decision was reversed.  As of this writing, less than a week before the 4th of July, America250 was allocated only $25 million. This begs the question, where did the $125 million go? 

Freedom250 quickly monetized July 4th by selling Freedom250 logoed merchandise through its website, mimicking America250 website selling America250 logoed anniversary products.  Sales from America 250 would go to the Congressionally authorized Commission presumably.  Where then, do the sales from Freedom250 go?  Event Strategies LLC?   It seems Trump and his corrupt cronies are perhaps profiteering from our grand 250th anniversary.  

This arrangement highlights, I think, that Trump’s love of America is purely and simply transactional.  “Make America Great Again” is a multimillion-dollar profit center for Trump.  A slogan to capture the MAGA masses imagination and rake in their hard-earned dollars.

Our country has many blemishes, our history is troubled, great injustices were perpetrated, but as Corporal Lambkin intoned in his remarks, this is our country good or bad, we love it, and we will die for it.  It is as much our land as it is anyone’s, slave master or freed slave, and we will fight for it.  And we [the former slaves now soldiers] have the patriotic moral high ground.  He probably wouldn’t understand the MAGA slogan, or, more likely, think it more fitted to the slave master’s rebellion than his own quest for freedom and equality.

Lambkin and his fellow soldiers knew something about what it means to be a patriotic Americans.  Something that Trump can’t ever grasp.  America is about community, about service, about sacrifice, about progress towards a better good, to work for something bigger than oneself.  Trump is and always will be about himself.  Greed, corruption, money, power, and fame.  Trump had an opportunity to fight for his country.  He did not.  He thinks those that served and died for their country are “suckers.”  His words not mine.  

Trump is like those slave masters who got their wealth under the American flag, but when it became too pluralistic, too inclusive, too democratic, they rebelled like spoiled pampered aristocratic slave masters.  Instead of moving forward toward a better America, Trump wants ‘real’ Americans to follow him as a redeemer, a modern-day liberator of white Christian America.  

This self-styled autocratic piped piper of Mar a Lago is trying to take America back to a mythological, godly ordained America where great white men ruled wisely and justly, women swooned and had babies, and blacks knew their place.  That is the America Trump yearns for. I can’t tell if he wants to go back all the way to 1856 or just 1954.  Erasing the history of blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and women is part of that strategy.

Trump and Freedom250 hijacked our 250th anniversary. It is the coronation and deification of Trump, not a celebration of America and all walks of American life.  The mixed martial arts extravaganza on the White House lawn is an example of this Trump centric spectacle.  An eroticized male theater of mostly naked white men grappling with each other for the affections of our dear leader Donald Trump, with Trump sitting ring side admiring their hard, sweaty bodies, in a space mostly devoid of women.   Happy Birthday wishes big boy!

In the run up to into 2026 we have been subjected to a barrage of endless Trump vanity projects.  Renaming the Kennedy Center after himself.  Building a billion-dollar ballroom, hanging three-story tall portraits of himself on government office buildings, bejeweling the White House with gold, having the Treasury mint coins with his image, ordering special U.S. passports be printed with his image superimposed over a famous print of the signing of Declaration of Independence.  The message:  Trump is America, America is Trump.

It is hard to remain enthusiastic about our 250th anniversary when it is overrun by rats and imbeciles.  The constant conveyor belt of assaults on our constitution, on who’s a citizen, on our rule of law, on our civil society, on our courts, on our men and women of color who serve our country with dignity and honor, fatigues the everyday American. This list of Trumpian inspired vainglorious squalor can go on for pages.   

So, what then is the 4th of July to me?  For me it remains a time to reflect on our American origin stories, the confluences of many nations, representing peoples already here and those that immigrated, willfully or otherwise.  We were conceived as a nation built on an ideology of equality, not race or nation.  It was this enlightenment promise that all men are created equal that drew people to this country in the decades that followed. That promise today is still seen as equally valid as it was the day it was penned.  

We still have work to do, however, as anyone not blinded by rightwing propaganda can see.  Our founders in the preamble to the Constitution recognized that achieving this grand promise was just a beginning.  The preamble is a statement of a goal, an endpoint in some distant future.  It is a goal I think most Americans continue to strive for.  To go backwards is un-American, to go forward is quintessentially American.  

I am proud to be an American, but I find myself more akin to Corporal Lambkin’s ideal of what it means to be an American, to make for a more perfect union, despite our imperfections.  Not the backwardness, hate, and greed represented by the current person soiling the White House and its hallowed grounds. America and Americans are better than that.