Though I fear that given what evidently is a skin too thin to weather our winter at Valley Forge, I fear it is most likely that you will find these thoughts irrelevant, irritating and intrusive. Nevertheless, I shall take the liberty of sharing some of them with you although, or mayhap because, so much separates us, among them devotion to sacrifice, not self-indulgence; to humility, not hubris and to a humble presidency, not a lust to erect some gilded and self-indulgent expressions of the monarchy that my comrades and I sacrificed so much to expel.

It pained me greatly, as it did my treasured comrades Mssrs. Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and others with whom I regularly sup here in our eternal home, where like you I am uncertain that you will join us in God’s good time, to witness a descendant of our foe King George III publicly school you on the principles that we strove to uphold as we sought to build the Republic you now lead.

It is, I long have believed, impossible to lead an army or a nation without knowing from whence you have come, and because you seem to be both ignorant of and uninterested in our shared history, please allow me to offer the following opinions to you and to your comrades, just as I shared them in my own time.

Might I add that in the present moment, you might recall, mayhap learn, that our Republic’s independence, and with it your presidency, could not have been achieved without the assistance of numerous allies from across the sea, including Admiral the Compte de Grasse, the Marquis de Lafayette, the Baron von Steuben and numerous others who unbidden came to our aid.

For you, my dear sir:

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

“Arbitrary power is most easily established in the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” From my Farewell Address, Sept. 19, 1796

“Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for it is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature, and in all cases of passion admit reason to govern.”

“History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

“Be not glad at the misfortune of another, though he may be your enemy.”

“No punishment, in my opinion, is too great for the man who can build his greatness on his country’s ruin”

For you and for those whom you have chosen to secure our nation’s borders and provide assistance to those in need, both near and far:

“Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.”

“I had always hoped that this land might be a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.”

To you and to all those whom you have chosen to indulge without question your impulses to build arches, ballrooms and battleships:

“We must consult our means rather than our wishes.”

“If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash.”

“There is no practice more dangerous than that of borrowing money.”

To your Secretary who seems enamored of war from one who has witnessed far more of it:

“Real men despise battle, but will never run from it.”

“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”

“The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and approved such a measure.”

To those who have seized the pursestrings of science, health and education:

“There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature.”

To the members of the two co-equal branches of our republican government:

“To the efficacy and permanence of your Union, a government of the whole is indispensable. No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute.”

“Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.”

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”

To you, you chosen few, you band of mostly brothers and to those whom you have chosen to speak for you:

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” My address in Newburgh, NY, March 15, 1783

“When only one side of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.”

“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.”

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.”

To all Americans:

“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important?”

“Where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forward to save their Country?”

Sources:

https://www.azquotes.com/author/15324-George_Washington

https://www.rd.com/article/george-washington-quotes/

https://www.georgewashington.org/quotes

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4356.George_Washington

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/george-washington-quotes

It belongs to the Voice of America (VOA), which President Trump all but shut down last year when he signed an executive order and accused VOA of disseminating “radical propaganda,” citing unfounded, out-of-context claims.

For more than eight decades, VOA has told America’s story to the world in dozens of languages. Its broadcasts of accurate, fact-based news and information are based on the belief that America is stronger and safer when people who live where free media are banned or limited have access to the truth about events in their countries, the United States, and the world. VOA reporting gives people in such countries information and hope and demonstrates how free expression is the oxygen of democracy.

VOA is required by law to include in its programs “clear and effective presentation of the policies of the United States Government and responsible discussion and opinion on those policies.” Simply put: VOA tells the truth about America and events in the world, and as Edward R. Murrow (the director of the U.S. Information Agency under President Kennedy) said, “truth is the best propaganda”.

That has been a formula for success. Before President Trump’s executive order in March 2025, VOA was reaching 361 million people around the world each week and producing content across media platforms — radio, television and digital — in 49 languages. According to the 2024 Agency Performance Report of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VOA’s parent agency, 86 percent of VOA users considered the information they received from VOA to be very or somewhat trustworthy, and 76 percent said the network’s broadcasts helped them form opinions on important issues.

That success came cheap: the cost of U.S. international broadcasting (VOA, as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and Radio/TV Marti) accounts for less than .01 percent of the U.S. federal budget.

Following President Trump’s executive order, approximately 600 VOA contractors (journalists and support staff) were fired, and about 800 full-time employees were put on administrative leave; those who have not resigned continue to receive pay as court cases play out to determine the network’s future.

Silence Like a Cancer Grows

Now, VOA is producing minimal content in just six languages. Open the voanews.com website and see for yourself: Rather l than the latest news in English, the leading language of the digital world, you’ll find stories from March 14, 2025, the last time the page was updated.

At the time of its suspension, VOA’s English content was drawing 80 million people weekly. By comparison, Fox News draws just under 1.5 million viewers daily.

With the cessation of most VOA broadcasts and severe budget reductions imposed on the other USAGM networks, America is more disconnected from the world and — just as important — the world is more disconnected from America.

At a time of unprecedented global influence operations by adversaries led by Russia, China, and Iran, America’s silence is deafening. It’s no wonder that the head of Russia’s RT international channel called the Trump administration’s cuts to VOA “awesome” and official Chinese outlets gloated that the U.S. administration had “discarded” VOA “like a dirty rag.”

There are indications that the Trump administration might be rethinking its decision to shutter VOA and strangle the other U.S. international broadcasters. In March, President Trump nominated Sarah B. Rogers, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to head USAGM, a position that requires Senate confirmation. At her hearing (no date is yet set), senators should get commitments from Ms. Rogers that USAGM and VOA management will adhere to the high professional standards set by the VOA Charter and the U.S. International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (USIBA).

Under Kari Lake. Trump’s previous appointee to direct USAGM, VOA pushed a relentless pro-administration line, violating the requirement for reporting that presents not only administration policies but also other perspectives, including disagreement with those policies.

Lake also violated the legally mandated “firewall that shields USAGM journalists from political interference in their reporting. Such violations severely erode the impact of VOA. As Murrow put it in 1963: “To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful.”

America’s voice is particularly important at this challenging time for democracy and for our country’s image around the world. According to Freedom House, global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. A new Pew Research Center study documents a steady, accelerating decline in global attitudes toward the United States, with just 37 percent of adults having a favorable view of the U.S. and 57 percent expressing an unfavorable view.

For more than two centuries, the language of the Declaration of Independence we celebrate has inspired not only Americans, but also people around the world in their pursuit of freedom and democracy.

That is why we, as Americans, should be engaging the world on our important anniversary and not leaving the narrative to Russian and Chinese propagandists who frame America’s 250th anniversary through a lens of national decline, political and social friction and historical revisionism. It’s high time to revive VOA to help the world sing, in dozens of languages, Happy Birthday America.

Jeffrey Trimble has been an international journalist, editor, and media manager for more than 40 years. For more than two decades he held senior positions in U.S. international broadcasting, including Acting President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Deputy Director of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Prior to that, he reported from Moscow on the collapse of the Soviet Union and from Rome and other locations.

Beati divites, quoniam ipsorum est regnum deauratum.

Dicitur etiam mites terram hereditate habituros esse, sed ego dico vobis mites et quietos nihil hereditate habituros esse, et solum clamosos et audaces milliarda liberis suis relinquere, solis poenis legalibus parcentes.

Infelix ego, qui semper plus esurio et sito, quia numquam satiabor.

Qui divitias appetunt et esuriunt, satiabuntur si libenter cuivis quidvis praestent ut eas adipiscantur.

Fortes sunt qui properant ad bellum gerendum et vastant terras eorum qui eis adversantur.

In mundo vivimus, in mundo vero, qui vi regitur, qui vi regitur, qui potestate regitur. Hae sunt leges ferreae mundi ab initio temporis.

Beatus sum cum alii te maledicunt et me persequuntur et omne genus mali contra me dicunt. Gaudete, qui me colitis, quoniam merces scientiae secretae metiemini.

Nihil referunt qui esuriunt et sitiunt, quoniam percussi mollicordes qui eos curare volebant.

Beatus ego sum, quoniam propter politicam causam accusar.

Beati qui perturbant pecuniam, quoniam ipsi haereditabunt thesaurum meum.

Ego sum via et lux; veritas nihil refert.

With apologies to Pope Leo XIV., to Google Translate, to Mr. McKenzie, my Latin teacher at Ramapo Regional High School and to Julius Caesar: Americam es omnis divisa in partes duas: ​​eos qui Donaldum Trump colunt et eos qui veritatem aestimant.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205&version=NIV

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/us/politics/stephen-miller-greenland-venezuela.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Coined in 1765 by French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau to symbolize the French aristocracy’s disregard for those who could not afford bread.

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

President Donald J. Trump’s response to a reporter’s question about whether Americans’ financial situation was motivating him to strike a trade deal with China.

Americans celebrated their country’s 250th birthday back in 2026 by recalling the politics of the Revolution, but the American Revival that started slowly then had more in common with the French Revolution than it did with the events of 1776.

The rigged 2026 midterm elections, reduced voting rights, Republican cowardice and partisan court decisions allowed Trump to maintain his chokehold on both houses of Congress. Still, the roots of the American rebellion against his growing autocracy were primarily economic, much like the seeds of France’s rebellion against the aristocracy.

A combination of factors, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United and other court decisions, the rise of a powerful billionaire technocratic elite, the failure of federal and state tax laws to close loopholes, rising interest rates and prices, growing under- and unemployment and a proliferation of shady financial schemes and government corruption triggered economic and political unrest.

“By the mid-2020s, an American economic and political aristocracy had emerged that bore a remarkable resemblance to France’s 18th Century Second Estate,” Dr. Benjamin Dover of the London School of Economics wrote in his 2035 book Kairotic Moments. “In addition to a near monopoly on economic and political power, both lacked the slightest concern for the tribulations of their respective Third Estates, though they comprised more than 90 percent of the population in both countries.”

There was at least one important difference: While French aristocrats were able to conceal much of their privileged lives from their countrymen behind castle walls and inside vast estates, 21st Century technology made even their more reclusive successors’ wretched excesses visible to everyone.

“It was easy for taxpayers struggling to pay for housing and health care to see the rich and famous prance around the Metropolitan Museum of Art in attire that cost more than a store clerk earned in six months,” said Prof. Rufus Leaking of the Harvard Business School. “To make matters worse, old money notions such as modesty, duty and good taste had given way, as they did during the first Gilded Age, to the idea that if you have got it, flaunt it.”

Trump craved his own gilded age, but unlike the Vanderbilts and Morgans, he made the Oval Office a tacky gilded cage and built his arches, ballrooms, battleships and other narcissistic monuments on public property, often using taxpayers’ dollars.

All species of the media, endlessly in search of audiences, applause and the revenue they brought, were only too happy to broadcast and celebrate the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Drawn for centuries by the mantra that “if it bleeds, it leads”, websites, blogs and all species of social media, real and artificial, also dwelled on how the wounded American democracy was giving way to a new oligarchy that resembled Trump’s idol Xi Jinping’s China more than Thomas Jefferson’s or even Ronald Reagan’s America.

Evidence that some Americans had abandoned all hope was abundant. The populations of Boston and New York shrank as American emigres fled to Ireland, Portugal, Costa Rica and Italy. Intimidated by Trump’s bullying, timid national and many of the few principled state and local leaders gave up trying to combat rampant corruption and gerrymandering at home and the abandonment of Ukraine, Taiwan, NATO, and the Baltic States, as well as international agreements on climate change, public health, technology regulation and more.

Time found that the damage Trump did to America could in time be mostly repaired. His destruction of America’s relations with its longtime allies was irreparable.

What much of the national media, which had become as elitist as politics and economics, missed, however, was that out in what was dismissed as “flyover country”, unrest was brewing.

In fairness, a growing number of local news outlets, many of them relative newcomers such as the Baltimore Banner, the Texas Tribune and the New Bedford Light were filling some of the void left by the extinction of local newspapers and global wire services. Their reporters noticed, in the words of an old song: “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”.

For one thing, at many swing state polling places in 2026 and at more in 2028, there was a man with a gun over there, usually a masked Immigration and Customs officer claiming to be looking for illegal immigrants but mostly telling voters they had got to beware.

Those scattered Fourth Estate outlets, whose reporters and editors lived and worked among the people they covered, noticed a less visible rebellion against the Second Estate slowly beginning to take shape.

Beyond the sight of official Washington and the national media, glimpses of it began to appear in religious services, in supermarket checkout lines, in high school and college hallways, at unemployment offices and gas stations and hospital emergency rooms, in school board and zoning commission meetings and local elections.

“What began to arise in the mid-2020s was a loose alliance that crossed almost all the conventional age, demographic, geographic, occupational, religious, racial, gender and other lines, in fact all but the ones that isolate the Second Estate,” said political scientist Amana Peppridge of Williams College. “Even most elements of the First Estate, all but the most radical Christian Nationalists and most extreme Zionists and Islamists, found common cause with one another and with much of the Third Estate, consistent with the teachings of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran.”

Such alliances became increasingly visible in local protests against billionaires’ water-sucking data centers in drought-stricken areas, curtailed voting rights, loading docks filled with tariff-free job-sucking Chinese robots and warehouses converted into holding pens for unwelcome non-white immigrants.

In Baltimore, the Banner reported, newly arrived white South Africans welcomed by the Trump administration were greeted with portraits of Nelson Mandela.

Outside the ICE detention center in Social Circle, GA, Baptist clerics and Jewish rabbis brandished banners with Biblical quotes reading, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me” and “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong”. An imam from Atlanta joined the group, carrying a sign that read: “Do not let the hatred of a people cause you to be unjust. Be just; that is closer to piety. Surah al-Ma’idah (5:8)”.

Outside Trump’s New York Tower and at his Florida home and at his golf courses, old and young protesters, many of them women waving pictures of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, set up loudspeakers and blasted a 1985 oldie by the aptly named British band Dire Straits:

“Get your money for nothin’, get your chicks for free . . . “

As the protests grew, the Trump administration tried to discredit them as left wing, violent and bankrolled by Iran, at the same time claiming that the Islamic Republic was “beyond bankrupt” because the Strait of Hormuz remained closed except to ships from nations such as China that had cut deals with Tehran.

In San Francisco, Austin and Boston, local law enforcement officers arrested armed members of the Proud Boys and other groups that supported Trump who were masquerading as protesters and seeking to incite violence.

As the protests multiplied, a new generation of leaders emerged that included not only younger moderate Democrats, but also Republican defectors, clergy members, labor leaders and local officials.

“Unlike the conventional wisdom that coalitions are assembled by leaders from the top down, this one was built from the bottom up,” said Lawrence Kroger, the author of The Rebirth of Democracy in America. “Their leaders did not form the protest groups; they built on and knit together ones already in existence.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/shane-massey-south-carolina-clyburn.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

“A number of skeptics argued that such a diverse coalition could not hold together. But was it really much more diverse than the Continental Army of slaveowning Southern planters, Northern merchants, frontiersmen, free and enslaved blacks, some Native Americans and ordinary farmers and tradesmen?” asked Vernon Wormer, the dean of Georgetown University’s School of Public Policy.

By the middle of 2028, as the protests against the Trump administration’s handling of the economy, insider trading, cryptocrookery, health care policies and more spread, a growing number of disgusted former federal law enforcement, military, intelligence, public health, economic and other officials joined them. A few risked their lives and their fortunes— but not their sacred honor — by revealing evidence of official wrongdoing.

Some groups even appropriated the last verse of the national anthem:

“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave;

“O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?”

Trump, no profile in courage, panicked and ordered drastic action to maintain control of the government in 2028 and avoid the legal, financial and other consequences of defeat, chief among them being remembered as a loser.

Desperate times demanded desperate measures. Trump had bought a second six months for his flailing Iran war, derided as Operation Epic Fubar, by arguing that changing the conflict’s name to Operation Sledgehammer reset the clock and bought the disastrous stalemate he started six more months without congressional authorization.

Faced with a threat to his presidency, his already tarnished name, his memorials to himself and above all to his wallet, Trump claimed in an early August 2028 barrage of early morning Truth Social posts that he was entitled to a third term because his first and second terms had been interrupted by a crooked 2020 election.

In one, he added an AI video of former Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall supporting his claim, although its impact was limited because he mistakenly labeled the former judge Clarence Marshall.

In a live interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, Trump argued that “James Garfunkel was president like that”. When Collins asked if he meant James Garfield, he replied, “Like that, but not that Simon guy. He’s an idiot, and I don’t like him.”

When Collins asked if he knew that a 1947 constitutional amendment barred presidents from serving a third term, he called her “a stupid loser and she’s not my type”.

Trump’s last ploy was a grudge too far, even for some of his longtime supporters when it dawned on them that he was no good for them and belatedly began moonwalking away in an effort to save their own seats (double entendres intended) and the remnants of their reputations amid nine percent inflation, an ever-growing wealth gap, a deteriorating health care system and a paralyzed and sclerotic political system owned by the Second Estate.

“Dictators drown in their own inflated egos and grandiose ambitions and surround themselves with sycophants, so they often overreach,” said Dr. Faun Rosenberg, Professor of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University. “Napoleon invaded Russia. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Putin invaded Ukraine. Trump invaded America.”

Soundtrack:

Full credit to the Harvard Lampoon’s 1964 Dacron High School yearbook Kaleidoscope for all but one of the names cited in the fake quotations, and to the good friend who recklessly lent me his copy of that heirloom, a predecessor to Animal House.

Though I fear that given what evidently is a skin too thin to weather our winter at Valley Forge, I fear it is most likely that you will find my thoughts irrelevant, irritating and intrusive. Nevertheless, I shall take the liberty of sharing some of them with you although, or mayhap because, so much separates us, among them devotion to sacrifice not self-indulgence, to humility not hubris and to a humble presidency not a lust to erect some gilded and self indulgent form of the monarchy my comrades and I sacrificed so much to expel.

It pained me greatly, as it did my treasured comrades Mssrs. Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and others with whom I regularly sup here in our eternal home, where like you I am uncertain you will in God’s time join us, to witness a descendant of our foe King George III publicly school you on the principles upon which we strove to build the Republic you now lead.

It is, I long have believed, impossible to lead an army or a nation without knowing from whence you have come, and because you seem to be both ignorant of and uninterested in our shared history, please allow me to offer the following opinions to you and to your comrades, just as I shared them in my own time.

For you, my dear sir:

“Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.”

“Arbitrary power is most easily established in the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”

“Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.” From my Farewell Address, Sept. 19, 1796

“Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for it is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature, and in all cases of passion admit reason to govern.”

“History and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.”

“Be not glad at the misfortune of another, though he may be your enemy.”

“no punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness on his country’s ruin”

For you and for those whom you have chosen to secure our nation’s borders and provide assistance to those in need, both near and far:

“Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distress of everyone, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.”

“I had always hoped that this land might be a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.”

To you and to all those whom you have chosen to indulge without question your impulses to build arches, ballrooms and battleships:

“We must consult our means rather than our wishes.”

“If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash.”

“There is no practice more dangerous than that of borrowing money.”

To your Secretary who seems enamored of war from one who has witnessed far more of it:

“Real men despise battle, but will never run from it.”

“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”

“The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and approved such a measure.”

To those who have seized the pursestrings of science, health and education:

“There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature.”

To the members of the two co-equal branches of our republican government:

“To the efficacy and permanence of your Union, a government of the whole is indispensable. No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute.”

“Laws made by common consent must not be trampled on by individuals.”

“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”

To you, you chosen few, you band of mostly brothers and to those whom you have chosen to speak for you:

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.” My address in Newburgh, NY, March 15, 1783

“When only one side of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.”

“One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.”

“Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.”

To all Americans:

“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important?”

“Where are our Men of abilities? Why do they not come forward to save their Country?”

Sources:

https://www.azquotes.com/author/15324-George_Washington

https://www.rd.com/article/george-washington-quotes/

https://www.georgewashington.org/quotes

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4356.George_Washington

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/george-washington-quotes

1. The King quoted Oscar Wilde saying the United States and Great Britain “have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language”.

   Who was Oscar Wilde?

2. The King said there are “certain patterns, certain self-evident truths from which we can learn and draw mutual strength”.

   What is the source of that phrase?

3. The King also cited “no taxation without representation” as a shared democratic value the U.S. inherited from Britain.

   What is the origin of that phrase, and what is the British origin of the principle?

4. He also said Charles Dickens might have called the time of the American Revolution “A Tale of Two Georges”.

   To which of Dickens’s books was he referring and why was it an appropriate reference?

5. The King called America’s Founding Fathers “rebels with a cause”.

   To what movie was he referring, and who starred in it?

6. He said America’s Founding Fathers “united 13 disparate colonies to forge a nation on the revolutionary idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

   What was he quoting?

7. What is the Magna Carta?

8. What was the British Declaration of Rights of 1689, and name three of the principles in it that are repeated in the American Bill of Rights.

9. Compare the King’s references to “the living mosaic of the United Ststes” and “vibrant, diverse and free societies” to the Trump administration’s policies on diversity, equity and inclusion?

10. While some members of the Trump administration call the U.S. a “Christian nation”, the King said he is “inspired by the profound respect that develops as people of different faiths grow in their understanding of each other”.

    Name three values common to all three Abrahamic religions. (Those are Christianity, Islam and Judaism.)

11. What is Article 5?

12. The King said Britain and the U.S. have stood “shoulder to shoulder through two world wars, the Cold War, Afghanistan, and moments that are defined our shared security”.

    Name three other conflicts in which American and British forces have supported one another since the end of World War Two.

13. What is the AUKUS submarine program?

14. Who was General George Marshall?

Short Answers:

1. Oscar Wilde was a 19th Century Irish playwright and novelist whose works include The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray.

2. The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

3. Taxation without representation is tyranny was an American revolutionary slogan protesting the British Parliament’s imposition of taxes on stamps and other items without the American colonists’ agreement. The roots of that argument can be found in the Magna Carta and in the thinking of English philosophers such as John Locke.

4. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, which is set in the French Revolution.

5. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) stars James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.

6. The Declaration of Independence

7. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, which rebellious barons forced King John to sign in 1215, established the principles that no monarch is above the law and that everyone accused of a crime has the right to an immediate and impartial trial. In practice, however, its protections applied almost exclusively to landowners and the clergy. Sound familiar?

8. The 1689 Declaration of Rights transformed Britain into a constitutional monarchy by requiring parliamentary consent to execute laws, maintain a standing army in peacetime and take other actions. It also barred monarchs from interfering in parliamentary elections. Relevant in America today?

9. The King of England, a symbol of primogeniture, is more supportive of diversity, equity and inclusion than the current U.S. administration.

10. Compassion for the less fortunate, care for the Earth created by the one God and the sanctity of life. Yes, all these and more are routinely violated by self-proclaimed believers in all three faiths.

11. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty that established NATO holds that an armed attack on one member of the North Atlantic alliance is an attack on all. It has been invoked only once since 1949 — after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, when other NATO members contributed to U.S. efforts to defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

12. The Korean War, Lebanon and Iraq

13. Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. are cooperating on a controversial $368 billion effort to design and build a new class of attack submarines.

14. Gen. George C. Marshall served as chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Secretary of Defense (not war) and Secretary of State. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in developing the Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II. The King may have been making a point here.

World War I had Over There and How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning, and the Second World War is remembered in We’ll Meet Again, The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, In the Mood and many others. The Korean “Conflict” inspired Old Soldiers Never Die and A Heartsick Soldier on Heartbreak Ridge.

Barry Sadler’s The Ballad of the Green Berets celebrated American soldiers in Vietnam, but as support for the war ebbed, it brought a tsunami of antiwar music.

The 9/11 attacks inspired Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, and the Global War on Terror brought John Michael Montgomery’s Letters From Home.

So far, however, Donald Trump’s attack on Iran has been met by the sound of silence (apologies to Simon and Garfunkel).

In an effort to fill that void as we wait for Bruce Springsteen and others to write more appropriate songs, and in an effort to offer a brief diversion from serious news, here’s a starting list of songs that seem apropos for the Iran War.

First, though, a pause for a tribute to all the men and women who, as the late, great war correspondent Joe Galloway put it, pay the price when the government f*^ks up.

Unlike our Secretary of Offense, this song in their honor never mentions lobster tails and ribeye steak.

Toby Keith - American Soldier

Now, with due respect to all of us in the U.S. and around the world who are paying or will pay the price, and with a little help from my friends, here’s a launch of an Iran War song list. Please take it from here,

Beneath it all:

Pink Floyd - Money (Official Music Video)

Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (Official Music Video)

Why Trump attacked Iran:

Blue Swede - Hooked On A Feeling

What might have helped get this war started:

DJ Khaled - All I Do Is Win feat. Ludacris, Rick Ross, T-Pain & Snoop Dogg (Official Music Video)

Daryl Hall & Cheap Trick - I Want You To Want Me

Worst case scenario that was not considered:

AC/DC - Highway to Hell (Official Video)

The big question:

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Who’ll Stop The Rain

For Pete Hegseth, including one tune from one of the Commander in Chief’s favorite groups:

Village People ‘Macho Man’

Carly Simon - You’re So Vain

Inspired by oil, diesel, gasoline, fertilizer and other prices:

The Byrds - Eight Miles High (Audio)

Here’s a tribute to Vietnam veterans in the hope of avoiding yet another quagmire like our generation’s.

If you are (I hope) too young to remember it, here’s a key couplet:

“So let us not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late”

All Along the Watchtower

A nod to the President’s Mar a Lago situation room — and its occupants:

Cream - White Room (Official HD Video)

The question everyone’s asking;

Marvin Gaye - What’s Going On (Official Video 2019)

For Jared and Junior, Eric, Barron and their father, here’s another Vietnam memory:

CCR - Fortunate Son with lyrics - Creedence Clearwater Revival - John Fogerty - Vietnam War

For those too numerous to mention, Iranians included:

Liar, Liar

For White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and other press officers:

The Twist - Chubby Checker

How it’s likely to end at the White House:

Edith Piaf - Non, je ne regrette rien - (original)

Last but not least:

Edwin Starr - War (Original Video - 1969)

Further Reference:

https://www.countryadventures.net/the-11-revolutionary-war-songs-that-echoed-through-americas-fight-for-freedom/

https://www.pdmusic.org/american-civil-war-songs/

https://archive.org/details/SONGSOFWORLDWARI-NewTransfer

https://discover.hubpages.com/entertainment/songs-about-ww2

https://coldwarstudies.com/2016/01/25/korean-war-music/

https://spotterup.com/popular-songs-played-during-the-global-war-on-terror/

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1966/3/30/the-ballads-of-the-green-berets/

I am one of those who, throughout my adult life, have taken United States leadership of NATO for granted. The Trump regime has put an end to that.

Donald Trump’s United States is an aggressive power that threatens its close allies instead of protecting them. This applies to both Denmark and Greenland, as well as to Canada, with Trump’s plans to force them into his realm, in addition to the rest of us who are being punished or threatened with unpredictable tariffs whenever we refuse to submit to his crazy schemes.

In Norway, we were lucky as long as Trump barely knew that our Arctic Svalbard islands existed.

“A Hostile Actor”

The former Chief of Defence in Norway, General Sverre Diesen, said in an interview published on January 16 in Forsvarets Forum, the paper of military affairs: “Under this administration, we can no longer view America as our ally. The U.S. is now a hostile actor, which in a conflict situation in Europe will be more inclined to ally itself with Russia than with us and other European countries.”

For this reason, General Diesen warned against Norway purchasing American defence equipment, because under its current leadership, the U.S. is a power on which we should be as little dependent as possible.

Diesen can say openly what other Norwegian officials must refrain from saying publicly because he no longer is the chief of defence.

America Has Changed

For my part, as someone who also cannot speak on behalf of anyone other than myself, I experience the world today in the same way that General Diesen described it. Today’s United States is quite different from what it was when I worked as a reporter in America. A security guarantee from Trump’s United States cannot be trusted. Trump has shown that he cares nothing about his country’s NATO allies, but instead acts as an external enemy against their territory, and now also against their foreign trade interests.

The Trump administration’s new national security doctrine confirms these fears. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutter so far has proved to be a powerless sycophant, but then he also has to cope with the dreadful task of keeping the alliance together.

A “Deal” with Putin

Should Russia show an excessive interest in Svalbard or other Norwegian territories, I expect that Trump’s gut reaction would be to make what he calls a “deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin, to the extent that he could profit from it. Some minerals on Svalbard that could give him a return? One might wonder what American soldiers stationed in Norway would be used for in a crisis. We now have leadership in the U.S. that may turn against us instead of coming to our support.

There still are some possibilities for saving the NATO alliance. It would help if a number of Republican members of Congress could muster the courage to stop the President’s behaviour toward his country’s allies. Or if the nation’s highest courts could manage to stop his most reckless advances because they violate the country’s Constitution. Or if the U.S. midterm elections later this year cost the President’s party its majority in Congress.

A new NATO without the U.S.?

Conversely, if Trump and his supporters are allowed to continue without his compatriots managing to stop him, America’s longtime allies may be forced to establish a new Western alliance, a new NATO without the U.S., consisting of the EU, the UK, Canada, Iceland and Norway. I would welcome this as a necessity when it no longer is possible for realistic state leaders and their citizens to trust the U.S..

America’s old allies can hope that Trump’s Republican Party in its present shape will lose the midterm elections in the fall and the next presidential election in just under three years. But the NATO alliance is not of much value if it must depend on which party wins the U.S. elections.

The alliance’s partners can, of course, hope that the Republican leadership in the U.S. will come to its senses when the 79-year-old Trump’s time is up. But the Republican Party has no shortage of like-minded people, supporters and backers who are at least as twisted and obsessed as Trump.

They fought in America’s wars

Denmark sent soldiers to fight in America’s wars, not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, with the stated strategic aim of strengthening its position as a loyal and unbreakable ally, thereby ensuring that the U.S. would come to its aid when needed. Quite a few Danish soldiers sacrificed their lives in that effort. But this sacrifice of young Danish men’s lives proved to be wasted. The country’s strategic intentions were put to shame. The aggressive approach on Greenland is the thanks Denmark received. This despite Denmark having granted the U.S. an unlimited right to establish military bases in Greenland under a bilateral treaty signed in 1951.

Trump confirms that he is a person with no loyalty to anyone but himself, without moral considerations, and, above all, without any shame. That he is throwing the NATO alliance into disarray after 77 years is just part of the package.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Ulf Andenæs is a historian by training and a journalist by profession. He has worked primarily in the fields of national security and foreign affairs as a reporter, editor and commentator for Aftenposten, Norway’s leading newspaper.

He covered political events and conflicts in various parts of the world and was the newspaper’s correspondent in London, Vienna and Washington. In Vienna, he was responsible for the newspaper’s Eastern Europe office during some of the dramatic years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, and the upheavals that followed, in particular the wars in the Balkans.

He received his education at the Universities of Oslo and Oxford and wrote his Master’s thesis on the conflict between the pro-British and pro-German factions in neutral Norway during World War I. Among his special topics, which later became his field of journalistic work, was Norway’s security policy in the 20th Century. He also attended the Norwegian Defence College.

The above, by a Norwegian journalist and historian, is the first of what I hope will be a series of occasional articles about how today’s America looks from different foreign perspectives.

Here, for any miscreants who missed it, is my recent look at the same issue:

In the hour of darkness and peril and need

The people will waken and listen to hear

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed

And the midnight message of Paul Revere”

— Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1860

As masked, armed and ill-trained goons armed with tear gas and badges appear in the nation’s towns and cities and the President threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act, another hour of darkness and peril and need has descended upon America.

Neither Congress nor the courts has summoned the courage to perform their constitutional duties, and military, law enforcement and intelligence officers say they are being forced to define what orders would be legal and which would constitute perfidy, war crimes or felonies.

As there was in 1775, though, there is something American citizens can do to combat what increasingly seems to be a growing effort to instigate more violence to justify deploying the armed forces in the nation’s streets, not to maintain order, but to quell dissent and crush opposition to the President’s domestic or foreign policies du jour.

Fittingly as the nation’s 250th birthday arrives, tearing a page from America’s revolutionary history might be helpful. Americans can meet ICE and the administration’s other enforcers in a way that vaguely resembles how our revolutionary ancestors in Massachusetts met the British troops barracked in Boston — but with cell phones and texts and cameras and Signal messages instead of church bells and muskets.

Indeed, the most important reason to organize peaceful and disciplined local protests is to deny the administration reasons to escalate the violence and free the President from any restrictions except, as he put it, his own morality, if there is any of that.

One way to do that would be to organize local protest companies, town by town, neighborhood by neighborhood. That’s what the townspeople outside Boston did in late 1774, after the British repealed the Massachusetts Charter of 1691 and gave unchecked power to the royal governor appointed by King George III.

The colonists organized small companies of men to “hold themselves on readiness at the shortest notice”. By January of 1775, the town of Concord had raised two companies of minutemen, with 52 men in each who trained for three hours twice a week. Early on the morning of April 19, four militia companies of farmers, carpenters and wheelwrights turned out when the meeting house bell tolled.

So what could today’s ordinary Americans in Minneapolis and elsewhere do in the face of the present danger? Opponents of the administration’s actions in their communities could organize local watch companies to monitor ICE flows 24/7, muster witnesses armed with cameras, music and protest signs and alert local journalists.

Ensuring that monitoring ICE’s and other agencies’ violent actions don’t interfere with law enforcement activities and remain visible, legal and above all peaceful, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and many others are urging, would require organization, communication, principles and leadership.

Nothing that could be called a weapon, however implausibly, belongs at a watch party. Nor do obscenities — those can be left to the President. Watch groups would need volunteers from a broad spectrum of the local population, and political bipartisanship would be especially valuable. So would a variety of experts, especially those experienced in maintaining calm in the face of danger. Think retired military and law enforcement officers, firefighters, clerics and lawyers and medical professionals who could teach a range of skills from deescalation to watching other protesters’ sixes to CPR, audio and video recording and relevant federal, state and local laws.

It might be wise to create a leadership structure and keep membership rolls, as the Revolution’s Minutemen did, and perhaps even make ID badges to minimize the danger of being infiltrated by Proud Boys and others aiming to discredit the protests. Also to hold regular meetings to provide training and fortify the commitment to non-violence and civility.

Perhaps half of each company should attend each meeting, and the other half should remain on hand to witness, record and publicize any efforts to disrupt, discredit or end the gatherings.

At Concord that April morning, the Minutemen assembled in a pasture above the North Bridge, and their descendants, call them Minute Watchers, should also hold the high ground.

More:

https://books.google.com/books/about/Massachusetts_Militia_Companies_and_Offi.html?id=NzdCAAAAIAAJ

https://apple.news/AEZ8vWEgOQqua3Rena166nw

https://apple.news/ANuX3_-lGQMa-y8mSk3atHQ

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He is maybe the highest ranking U.S. intelligence official you’ve never heard of. Yet he’s a key cog in the Trump administration’s controversial campaign to gather and disseminate intelligence on civil liberties activists, anti-ICE protesters, Democratic Party donors and others whom the Trump administration has…

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https://apple.news/AEtRZyya4RwCbsRKt00ew5A

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Three elements, however, have been consistent throughout both his business and political careers:

• Failing to learn from his own and others’ mistakes and consider how an investment or policy might backfire and enlist experts to help do that

• Always following the money, especially in its most glittering forms, as an end in itself

• Always walking away from failures and letting others — banks, contractors, employees — take the fall

The pattern was clear throughout the President’s parade of failed businesses, which successful investor Warren Buffett has attributed to Trump overvaluing his assets and assuming excessive debt. Arguably, the asset he has overvalued the most is his own surname.

Consider the common fates of:

• Trump Airlines, which he bought for $365 million in 1988. When it crashed, he defaulted on his loans and walked away.

• Trump Vodka — he predicted in 2006 that the “T&T”, Trump and tonic, would be the most popular drink in America. It wasn’t, and his vodka evaporated in 2011.

• Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc., which launched three casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., is probably his most famous multi-corp crash, with four bankruptcies and a trail of unpaid contractors.

• Trump Steaks failed, too, and the Trump Steakhouse in Las Vegas was shut down after it received 51 health code violations. In this case, unlike some more recent ones, Trump fought the law, and the law won.

• Trump University lasted four years, until some students filed a lawsuit charging that its courses were just infomercials. Its successor, The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, lasted two semesters.

• Trump Magazine survived a bit longer — about 18 months.

• Trump: The Game disappeared within a year, and a second run for the money, tied to his unreality show The Apprentice, failed, too.

• Trump Mortgage lasted 18 months.

In fairness, the jury is still out on more recent ventures, into cryptocurrency, for example.

What’s troubling now, however, is that Trump is running U.S. policy the same way Buffett said he ran his businesses into the ground — overvaluing his own assets and making excessive investments of the country’s economic, military and political resources with no thought about possible unwelcome outcomes.

So it’s not surprising that the State Department is not running Venezuela but warning Americans to get out, or that U.S. oil companies are not rushing to pump billions into the country. If this investment doesn’t pay off, this time you’re taking the fall, Little Marco.

As for musing about Mexico, some courageous underling might risk their job by trying to introduce the President to Pancho Villa.

Nor is there evidence that the President has given any thought to what might happen if the U.S. bombed Iran again while the Islamic regime is under siege from its own unhappy people. Might he invest in Reza Pahlavi, the ousted Shah’s son who hasn’t set foot in Iran since 1979 and has no base of support in the country? If he is, someone should brief him on the late Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi.

The President would not be talking about taking control of Greenland if he had given any thought to the costs of betraying a longtime ally and dissolving America’s most valuable alliance. It’s hard to declare 76 years of foreign policy bankrupt and walk away from them like a bad loan.

Given another common thread that links the President’s business and political careers — money — both Venezuela and Iran are sitting on oil.

Greenland is harder to explain. It has reserves of strategic minerals that the Chinese are sniffing at, but extracting, refining and shipping them might be more expensive and time consuming than the President assumes. If climate change were real, though, maybe Trump would be dreaming about a resort and casino real estate deal in Nuuk, just as he and his sons just might be contemplating ventures on Gaza’s, Venezuela’s and Cuba’s beaches.

Cuba also might have caught his eye because dreams of Trump Rum and Trump Cohiba cigars are dancing in his head as he stares out the window during meetings and assumes that Calle Ocho in Miami would become the country’s capital until its residents are greeted as liberators.

The pattern appears at home, too, as tariffs rise and fall and confusion multiplies. If the backlash against his administration’s immigration policies grows hot enough, ICE out day might come early this year and if it does, Kristy Noem’s high horse might throw her.

What’s most disturbing is the absence of r any evidence that Trump has learned from his mistakes or hired people to warn him about making new ones. Instead, he’s fired or targeted those such as John Bolton and Jerome Powell who have tried.

Worse, he may think that America can walk away from his policy blunders the same way he’s walked away from his bankrupt businesses.

For more depressing details, see:

https://workandmoney.com/s/trump-business-went-bankrupt

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-18/trump-business-partners-outline-his-failed-deals

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/warren-buffett-exposed-top-reason-101700386.html

https://www.newsweek.com/warren-buffett-blasts-trump-tariffs-can-act-war-2067642

Mr. Secretary of War

Mr. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor:

We have prepared this tour for you and members of the Senate and House Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

Here is your itinerary.

PENSACOLA, FLORIDA

Your first stop will be Pensacola, Florida, where the Spanish military commander Bernardo Vincente de Galvez y Madrid, the Count of Galvez, defeated British forces in the Siege of Pensacola in May 1781. He later drove the British out of the Mississippi Valley, eliminating any potential backdoor threat to American forces from the west.

This stop is also a reminder that Spain contributed substantial monetary and military aid to our American revolutionaries under the 1779 Treaty of Aranjuez.

YORKTOWN, VIRGINIA

Next, we’ll stop at Yorktown, Virginia, where U.S. and French forces under Gen. George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau trapped and defeated Lord Cornwallis’s British troops after the French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Capes and trapped Cornwallis’s forces on the Yorktown peninsula.

OTTAWA, CANADA

Our next stop will be Ottawa, Canada. Mr. President, while you’ve been talking about annexing our northern neighbor, you need to be reminded (or informed) of our country’s eternal debt to Canadian troops who have risked and given their lives in America’s 20th Century wars.

We will visit the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, which is Canada’s capital, and visit Galleries 3 and 4, which remember Canada’s roles in defeating Nazi Germany, and later in supporting our forces in defending North America during the Cold War and later in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

https://www.warmuseum.ca/exhibitions/from-the-cold-war-to-the-present-canadian-experience-gallery-4

NARSARSUAQ, GREENLAND

While you have renewed your interest in seizing control over this vast Arctic island from Denmark, another longtime ally, we’ll make a brief stop at the site of Bluie West 1, a key allied and locally supported airbase and refueling stop during World War II.

(Side note: This writer’s father might owe his life to the Greenlanders who supported Bluie West 1. He served in the Eighth Air Force during World War II and was returning to the U.S. from one of his tours in Europe when the starboard engine of his C-46 transport plane caught fire and the plane was forced to land there.)

We will spare you a visit to Pituffik Air Base, formerly called Thule, farther north, where Danes and Greenlanders serve along with our forces. Vice President Vance has already been there, although he left locals and Danes scratching their heads when he said they “ultimately would partner” with us when we’ve been partners since 1941.

At this time, we see no need to compare Venezuela’s reserves of lithium and other strategic materials to those in Greenland and China’s interest in developing both because you already have been briefed on that, in case you might have forgotten in your busy schedule.

KEFLAVIK, ICELAND

We’ll make a brief stop in Iceland and another key World War II base outside Reykjavik, the capital. (Unlike Greenland, Iceland is an independent country.)

RESISTANCE MUSEUMS

It is worth remembering that as we learned in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as we hope not to be reminded when we are running Venezuela, resistance forces and terrorist groups can inflict serious casualties and foment instability..

For reminders, and to pay tribute to World War II resistance fighters, both men and women, and some of the men bearded and out of shape, and how they played important roles in the defeat of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan. They sabotaged railroads and enemy assets; rescued our downed fliers, shipwrecked sailors and wounded soldiers; carried messages and provided intelligence, just as our CIA’s agents did for us in Venezuela.

We cannot cover them all, but here are the ones we will visit:

• NORWAY RESISTANCE MUSEUM

We’ll stop briefly in Oslo, the capital of Norway, at the Akershus fortress, to remember heroes such as Lena, who carried coded messages through Nazi checkpoints with her groceries.

https://www.forsvarshistoriskmuseum.no/norges-hjemmefrontmuseum/en

• MUSEUM OF DANISH RESISTANCE

Our next step will be the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen, which is pronounced Coubenhavn.

Because we are short on time due to your tee time at the Trump International in Scotland, we’ll be joined by representatives from the Verzets Resistance Museum in Amsterdam — the original one in the Netherlands, which is sometimes called Holland, not New Amsterdam where you were a reality tv star. Someone from the National Museum of the Resistance in Brussels (like in Brussels sprouts that you dislike) will also be there, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has suggested that you and Mr. Miller, if he joins us, ask them about the efforts to rescue Jewish people from the Nazi occupiers.

https://www.verzetsmuseum.org/en/jewish-children-rescued-from-deportation

https://en.natmus.dk/museums-and-palaces/the-tee museum-of-danish-resistance/

https://www.brusselsmuseums.be/en/museums/national-museum-of-the-resistance

FRANCE

We’ll make two stops in France because in addition to providing essential help to American revolutionaries, the French resistance played a critical role in helping American and allied forces free Europe from Nazi tyranny. Some French leaders, it is true, cooperated with the invaders because they were too scared to stand up for their own country and their neighbors, but there are no monuments to them.

First, we will stop at the French Resistance Monument in Sainte Marie du Mont in Normandy. In tribute to the long alliance between the United States and France, it is located at 22 Street of the 101st Airborne Division, whose soldiers parachuted into Normandy during the invasion on June 6, 1944.

https://www.normandybunkers.com/memorials/french-resistance-monument

Then we will visit the beaches where allied forces landed that day. Of course, we will pay homage to the brave Americans who landed on Utah and Omaha Beaches and lay a wreath at the Normandy American Cemetery, where 9,388 of our countrymen are buried.

In a departure from traditional presidential visits (we’re checking to see if you can claim it’s a first, at least since President Eisenhower), we’ll also visit Gold, Juno and Sword Beaches, where our Canadian and British Commonwealth allies stormed ashore. The first wave of Canadians at Juno Beach suffered casualty rates that almost reached 50 percent.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-d-day-beaches

LONDON

Despite our differences over Ukraine and President Putin’s frequent reminders of the enormous sacrifices the Soviet Union made to help win World War II, we’ll make a brief stop in the capital of the United Kingdom (not England) for two reminders.

First, we will tour Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s War Rooms, where we can listen to some of his famous speeches rallying the British people in the dark times before America shook off its America First isolationism and joined the fight against Nazi Germany two years after the war in Europe began. As they say in Britain, CNCO — Churchill Never Chickened Out.

Because another chapter of our joint history is often forgotten or buried because they did not end in the expected victories, we then will visit the Peace and Security, 1945 to 2014 gallery to remember British support for U.S. actions in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/peace-and-security-1945-2014

BEIRUT

If our Embassy deems it safe, we’ll make a very brief stop in the capital of Lebanon (pronounced bayroot) to remember that Britain, France and Italy sent troops to assist our Marines in trying to stabilize Lebanon after Israel invaded in 1982 to defeat terrorists who used Lebanon as a base.

Most Americans have heard that 241 Americans were killed on October 23, 1983; fewer know that a terrorist bombing killed 55 French paratroopers that day.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129760.Best_Laid_Plans

IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN

Our troops readily defeated the Iraqi army and the organized Taliban forces, but we cannot stop in Baghdad or Kabul because the missions there were not accomplished. As we fly over, however, we can remember that 30 countries joined Operation Desert Shield in 1990 and 18 more provided military, humanitarian or economic assistance. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, our troops were joined by forces from Australia, Britain and Poland (yes, the same one Russia is harassing with drones now), and later 42 countries joined Operation Iraqi Freedom.

When we invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 40,000 Canadians, 9,500 Britons and 5,500 Canadians were among some 130,000 NATO troops that joined our air and ground forces. In Helmand Province, Danish troops saw the worst fighting their county’s forces had seen since the Second Schleswig War in 1864.

Of course, as many as 150,000 Afghans, including family members put at risk by their support for our and our allies’ forces, joined the fight against the Taliban. Some are still in hiding there, betrayed by Biden’s reckless withdrawal agreement that you had no choice but to implement.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D114-PURL-gpo18375/pdf/GOVPUB-D114-PURL-gpo18375.pdf

AUSTRALIA and NEW ZEALAND

We have too little time to visit two of our most valuable allies, but you have briefing books on the Museum of the Pacific War in Canberra, Australia and the New Zealand Memorial in Wellington, which is the capital of New Zealand. We stationed some 100,000 of our troops there during World War II,

In 1943, although he lacked any golden battleships, the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, called the alliance of the U.S. and the ANZAC nations — Canada, Australia and New Zealand — “an example to all the world of what can be accomplished by a fraternity of free men”.

THE PHILIPPINES and VIETNAM

Enroute home, we won’t have time to stop and recall the support our forces in Vietnam got from our naval and air bases in the Philippines or the recreational opportunities our hosts provided. It’s also a reminder that South Korea deployed 320,000 troops to South Vietnam and lost 5,000 killed, while Australia sent 60,000 and lost 521 killed, Thailand sent 12,000 and the Philippines 10,000.

Although North Vietnam conquered the south, The People’s Republic of Vietnam is now a valuable trading partner, and you might be interested to know that the country has good beaches and nice people.

SOUTH KOREA

Long before you and Respected Comrade Kim Jong-un began your historic effort to repair relations between two enemies, our country fought to prevent the Communists from seizing all of Korea, much as they now have seized New York City. South Korea deployed double the number of troops that we did, and 15 other nations also contributed to the effort, which ended in a stalemate that would not have happened if you and Secretary Hegseth had been in charge instead of the gun shy President Dwight Eisenhower, who must have been a RINO.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_Allied_Powers_in_the_Korean_War.

With the cooperation of CIA Director Ratcliffe but not DNI Gabbard, we have provided a separate briefing book on foreign cooperation with our intelligence community, including the satellite facilities at Pine Gap in Australia and Akrotiri in Cyprus and human intelligence from Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Taiwan, Colombia and many other nations, although that has diminished significantly since last January 20.

Please do not share this material with Secretary Hegseth or President Putin or take it home to Mar a Lago.

As Daily Show comedian Jon Stewart observed,

some similarities between Iraq and Venezuela are unavoidable. Two authoritarian rulers sitting on large oil reserves. Inflated or imaginary fears about the threat to the United States. Deliberate misstatements and outright lies about aluminum tubes and fentanyl. Weak internal and congressional guardrails.

Some profound differences are equally obvious. Bush rallied the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His current successor has divided the nation, triggered tremors in his own base, lost popular support and raised growing concerns about the condition of his prefrontal cortex.

Bush quickly assembled international support for his misguided Mideast mission. On Substack, the journalist Anne Applebaum aptly described his successor’s excuse for a national security strategy as “the longest suicide note in American history”.

The most significant and troubling difference between earlier misadventures, including those in Nicaragua, Panama, Lebanon, Libya and, way back, Iran in 1953, however, lies not in how the U.S. acted, but in why.

For all their arrogance, ambition, ignorance and incompetence, the President’s predecessors thought they were acting in the best interest of the United States and their target countries.

After retaliating against al Qaeda and its hosts for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the second Bush administration thought it could lift Afghanistan out of the 10th Century and its women out of the grip of the Taliban.

In Iraq, a neoconservative think tank, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their small circle of friends thought they could readily replace Saddam Hussein with a democratic regime that would be a beacon for the Arab world and a friend to Israel, or at least a peaceable neighbor. Neither Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi’s mumblings about reopening a pipeline from Iraq’s oil fields to the Israeli port of Haifa nor the prospect of lucrative oil service contracts played significant roles in the discussions, according to participants at the time.

True, in neither case did the findings, assessments and warnings of veteran intelligence, military and Foreign Service officers steer U.S. policy. Like its predecessor, the current administration prefers lecturing to listening, according to multiple current officials who have self-censored red flags about Venezuela, had them ignored or retired preemptively.

In the end, though, this President is more an actor than a policymaker, so what were his motives in this act? There is his eternal quest to make himself look bigger by surrounding himself with small faces, expanding presidential power, making audacious statements and taking audacious actions. If those distract from afflictions such as health care costs and the remaining 5.2 million pages of Epstein files, what a happy coincidence.

More important, he made it clear Saturday that the stability and governance of Venezuela and the security and wellbeing of its people have not played much part in his administration’s calculations, much less what passed for planning. The U.S., he said, is “going to run the country” until there can be a “safe, proper and judicious” transition, presumably as defined in Washington, not Caracas.

However, it appears that his apparent choice to run the country on behalf of the United States in the meantime, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who has no greater legitimacy than ousted President Nicolas Maduro did, failed to receive her orders or else chose to ignore them. She called the American action “shameful” and demanded the release of Maduro and his wife Celia Flores.

The administration, though, already had dismissed opposition leader Marina Corina Machado as “a very nice woman” who lacks the support and respect needed, an assessment not universally shared. A cynic might wonder if the real reason is that she has a Nobel Peace Prize and the President does not.

Nor, if the administration has anything resembling a foreign policy, are its actions in Venezuela consistent with what officials say it is, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of the President’s remaining America First supporters observed almost immediately.

As for the claim that Venezuela’s fentanyl trade was a clear and present danger to the U.S., what remains of the news media did a better job of debunking that than its predecessors did with bogus claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and support for al Qaeda.

It also is not clear how an action that risks stirring violent unrest in Venezuela, even if National Guard units are not reassigned from Chicago to Caracas, will discourage more people from Venezuela and Colombia from trying the long trek north.

So if securing democracy and stability in Venezuela, avoiding foreign entanglements, securing America’s southern border and shutting down nonexistent fentanyl trafficking are not the administration’s motives, what are?

Vice President J.D. Vance might have edged closer to reality when he called Venezuela’s oil “stolen” and said it “must be returned to the United States”.

His boss made that clear when he pledged to have “our very largest American oil companies” spend billions of dollars to repair the country’s “badly broken infrastructure”.

https://apple.news/TLZKrjVHNQX6EU84bXaUU4w

Gen. Laura Richardson, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, recently put it more bluntly, saying the administration’s policy is driven by oil and critical minerals, not a desire for democracy.

“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela and it also goes to the people of the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damage caused us by that country”.

He did not say how Venezuela’s vast oil wealth will be redistributed, but one can only hope the process will not resemble those used for granting presidential pardons, doling out aid or issuing federal contracts.

In the end, Venezuelan Vice President Rodriguez might have come closest to reality when she said the United States “only had one objective: regime change in Venezuela. And that this regime change allows them to capture our energy resources, mineral resources and natural resources.”

In the end, once again, the question about a transactional president’s latest transaction dates to the Roman consul Lucious Cassius: Cui bono?

Although the current administration’s motives differ from its predecessors’, one can only hope that an eternal truth does not reappear.

As the late, great war correspondent Joe Galloway put it: “When the government fucks up, the soldiers pay the price.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/22/why-did-we-invade-iraq/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592622/to-start-a-war-by-robert-draper/

https://www.ogj.com/home/article/17232358/oil-pipelines-played-role-in-us-invasion-of-iraq

It’s not clear that the authors, whomever they may be, know anything about any of them, but they range from mercantilism to the Munich Agreements and from the Monroe Doctrine to previous malefactors of great wealth. For good measure, throw in the misbegotten Mexican Expedition to capture Pancho Villa.

A great deal has been written about the damage that will be caused by betraying NATO, abandoning Ukraine to appease Vladimir Putin, selling (for a government cut) advanced chips for China to copy and putting the Monroe Doctrine on amphetamine.

What is most disturbing, though, is that while our nation’s greatest presidents have summoned what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”, their current successor’s strategy and policies summon devils that have haunted the nation throughout its history.

Those include the worship of wealth and power, which today trumps other recurring ailments such as ignorance and contempt of the ways of others, intolerance, America First isolationism and the inconsistent belief that imperial America can remake nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most persistent and troubling of these maladies is the nativist notion that a flood of newcomers from “shithole countries” is “poisoning the blood” of America, or at least its white cells. The NSS projects that paranoia onto Europe, or at least Northern and Western Europe, which it declares is facing “civilizational erasure” because its doors are open to immigrants of other cultures, religions and races.

The current U.S. administration’s response to this perceived threat to the motherland has been the mass condemnation, roundup, arrest and deportation of immigrants often identified by skin color or speech, in contrast to preferential treatment of white South Africans.

What has transpired so far falls short of Nazi Germany’s belief that white Aryans constitute a Herrenrasse, a master race, and of the eugenics theory that blossomed like a stinkweed 100 years ago.

Nevertheless, the notion of white (and male) supremacy arrived with the first European settlers’ importation of black slaves and their fear of what Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony called “the ravages of the savages”. So its reappearance as an element of what passes for administration policy should come as no surprise.

American nativism has always had religious roots as well as racial, ethnic and national ones. The first Quakers arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1656, and they were greeted with fines, whippings, imprisonment and in a few cases such as that of Mary Dyer, execution. Two years later the United Colonies of New England — Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, New Haven and Plymouth — declared that Quakers were not welcome and would not be tolerated.

In contrast to today’s self-crowned American monarch, who has declared a “permanent pause” on immigration from the Third World, in 1660 England’s King Charles II ordered his subjects in New England to knock it off.

New England’s early settlers also brought their English prejudice against Irish Catholics with them, and it persisted for more than two centuries, marked by businesses posting signs declaring that “No Irish Need Apply”. Evidently, cheap labor was more readily available in Boston and Beverly then than it is in the farm fields of Kansas and California today.

Although the Declaration of Independence declared that “all men are created equal”, despite significant progress that aspiration has remained just that.

The new republic was only six years old when instead of following the American example, the French Revolution descended into the Terror and triggered the first nativist panic attack. President John Adams of Massachusetts and his fellow Federalists feared that refugees from France would pollute the young and vulnerable fledgling nation with their woke ideas, using Thomas Jefferson’s rival Democratic-Republicans as their tool.

The product of that paranoia was the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which among other things raised the residency requirements to 14 years from five in what Alison O’Leary called “a blatant attempt to disenfranchise Irish and French immigrants who voted for Jefferson’s party”.

A related law was the Alien Enemies Act, which gave the president the power to deport non-citizens from nations at war with the United States and as the current administration well knows, remains on the books today.

The Sedition Act, which thankfully is no longer on the books, at least for now, went a step further, declaring “false, scandalous and malicious writing”, the fake news of its day, to be a crime.

The religious prejudice of 17th Century New England reappeared in force before the United States was 50 years old, triggered by an influx of impoverished refugees, many of them Catholics from Ireland and Germany.

The nativist response was the aptly named Know-Nothing movement, populated by secret white, Anglo-Saxon, populist, Protestant and in some cases violent groups that bear a passing resemblance to some of today’s Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. They called the Catholic Church “the Whore of Babylon” and said its followers were loyal to the Pope, not to the United States.

The brutal Civil War’s endless appetite for soldiers put a brief halt to some nationalist, religious and ethnic, though not racial discrimination. After all, newly arrived Irishmen and Italians could shoot and die, too.

The pause did not last long, and the next major manifestation of American nationalism was racial, and this time the target was Chinese workers who helped build railroads to link the east and west coasts. Their reward was being branded as consumers of vermin, a preview of the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese workers from coming to work in the U.S. and barred Chinese immigrants from becoming American citizens. Entering World War I, aka The Great War, apparently was not enough to fill its agenda, so in 1917 Congress upped the ante by closing America’s doors to immigrants from 19 Asian countries.

The war briefly redirected native American nationalist animosity toward arrivals from Germany, the largest immigrant group, many of whom stopped speaking German and reading the German newspapers in cities such as New York and Cincinnati. German language classes disappeared, cities changed street names, and concerts by Wagner and Mendelssohn were canceled. Aavording to a report from the Library of Congress: “German American businesses and homes were vandalized, and German Americans accused of being ‘pro-German’ were tarred and feathered, and in at least one case, lynched”.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr questioned the ethos of his fellow German-Americans. In 1916, he wrote: “He has unwittingly served the nation through his qualities of prudence and thrift, but he has been rather indifferent to the problems of the nation that did not directly affect him. He has manifested no great interest in a single one of the great moral, political, or religious questions that have agitated the minds of the American people in late years.”

That chapter apparently has been lost on the current occupant of the White House, a descendant of “Krauts” and “Huns” who early in the 20th Century Americanized their surname from Drumpf.

As Karen Tumulty noted in The Washington Post, the nativist frenzy reached a new peak in the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which used the 1890 census to establish quotas for new immigrants based on how many of their countrymen were living in the U.S. 34 years earlier.

In yet another preview of coming distractions, this time the current administration’s preference for white South Africans, the new law largely spared WASPs the bigotry it directed at “wops”, “dagos”, “greasers” and “guineas” from Italy, “polacks” from Eastern Europe, “chinks” from East Asia, and “kikes” for followers of the Jewish faith.

To be sure, the U.S. has no monopoly on ethnic, racial and religious bigotry and slurs — Britain has its “wogs”, for example — but they are part of the foundation on which the present administration’s immigration policies rest.

The next iteration of American bigotry, in the 1950s, was directed not east or west, but southward, and it coincided with the Red Scare political panic, which featured the lawyer Roy Cohn, a mentor to the current president, as a prominent persecutor. (That is a subject for another day.)

“Operation Wetback” used yet another ethic slur to describe a widely publicized effort to corral “spics” from Latin countries, one that bears a considerable resemblance to today’s ICE operations. Then, however, armed officers loaded deportees onto trains and ships rather than spending $140 million to buy jet airliners in which the only class will be steerage.

Those bleak chapters of American history do not exonerate the current administration from reviving them while it tries to erase others and ban books. They are, however, a reminder that today’s theatrical ICE raids, deportations and slamming doors have deep American roots, and that pulling them might prove to be harder than it should be.

Hillsdale College in Michigan, for example, is keeping the malice alive with a course and video box set on “Marxism, Socialism, and Communism”, which claims all three “are still the same Marxism that works to destroy your property and your country” and “seeks to abolish your family and your God”. Presumably, that is the objective of the newly elected mayor of New York and everyone who voted for him.

In short, the current resident of the gilded White House and the true believers, idolaters and sycophants who drafted the National Security Strategy and his administration’s immigration policies are not the causes of the nation’s current ills at home and abroad.

Their policies and pronouncements are only the latest symptoms of ailments that have infected America since before the founding of the United States.

The best quick guide to this topic is A History of American Nativism From the Alien Acts to Trump’s Proposed “Third World Ban” by Alison O’Leary:

https://govfacts.org/immigration/immigration-policy/a-history-of-american-nativism-from-the-alien-acts-to-trumps-proposed-third-world-ban/

The Mexican Expedition in pursuit of Pancho Villa:

https://history.army.mil/Research/Reference-Topics/Army-Campaigns/Brief-Summaries/Mexican-Expedition/

Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:

https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm

Life Story: Mary Dyer:

https://wams.nyhistory.org/early-encounters/english-colonies/mary-dyer/

A nauseating list of ethnic and other slurs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

A Century ago, anti-immigrant backlash almost closed America’s doors, by Matthew Smith:

https://theconversation.com/a-century-ago-anti-immigrant-backlash-almost-closed-americas-doors-228589

Shadows of War, Library of Congress:

https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/german/shadows-of-war/

The Failure of German-Americans: Reinhold Niebuhr Blames German Immigrants for Their Problems During WWI:

https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4971.html

Trump’s Latest Anti-Immigration Push Echoes the Nativism of the 1920s, by Karen Tumulty:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/07/trump-immigration-somalis-afghan-crime/

When CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes asked him why he blamed the Biden administration, the President responded with his customary grace.

“Are you stupid?,” he said. “Are you a stupid person?”

Specialist Beckstrom, her family, her friends and her comrades deserve a better answer. Despite its short attention span and aversion to learning from history, the country that she and her alleged killer both served needs to grow up, acknowledge and understand a long, winding and bipartisan record of misjudgments and mistakes.

They did not cause her death, and avoiding any or even all of them likely would not have prevented it, but learning from and applying them might help teach policymakers to think beyond their next move on the checkerboard, although learning to play chess might be asking too much.

America started stumbling blindly down this trail of tears long before the current resident and architect of the White House and the interloper who interrupted his two-term reign took office. The procession of willful ignorance, American arrogance and political impatience twists through five Democratic and Republican administrations, and it began back in Bill Clinton’s time.

CHAPTER ONE: IGNORING Al QAEDA

As early as 1998, U.S., allied and other intelligence agencies were warning the Clinton administration’s leaders that the terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and its allies were plotting attacks on American targets.

The December 4, 1998, President’s Daily Brief, the PDB, based in part on input from Egyptian and other sources, included a report of a suspected plot to hijack a U.S. airliner. It added that some al Qaeda members had received hijacking training and that “members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport”.

Nevertheless, the Clinton administration made little or no effort to cut the head off al Qaeda, recruit allies and dismember the group, despite what one former U.S. intelligence officer said was a “steady drip of information from diverse sources about bin Laden and his gang”.

The Federal Aviation Administration referred to te 1998 intelligence report in a memo it circulated in the summer of 2001, not long after President George W. Bush took office, but White House officials at the time said the FAA memo was the first they heard of any potential threat.

Richard A. Clarke, the Bush administration’s first White House counterterrorism director, told a presidential commission investigating the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that senior administration officials had showed little interest in the warnings about al Qaeda threats.

Then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza told the Commission the warnings were based on “old information”.

What was old became new again on September 11 at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania and plunged the U.S. into a global war on terror for which it was ill-prepared.

CHAPTER TWO: LOSING BIN LADEN

To its credit, the Bush administration moved quickly to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban government that had hosted bin Laden. Although the partnership between CIA officers and the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance made short work of the terrorist group’s 10,000-strong Afghan infrastructure, including its operations chief Mohammed Atef, it failed to stop bin Laden from escaping across the Tora Bora Mountains into Pakistan in December 2001.

The reasons are still unclear, ranging from refusing a CIA recommendation to move 1,000 Army Rangers into position to an over reliance on Afghan militias. One U.S. intelligence officer who was monitoring the situation said at the time that overhead photographs showed trails through the snow-covered mountains, but senior officials concluded they were made by shepherds and their flocks.

“That was nonsense,” the official said. “Shepards don’t take their sheep through three feet of snow.”

CHAPTER THREE: EYE OFF THE BALL

Another explanation for allowing bin Laden to escape is more damning: The Bush administration was turning its back on Afghanistan and preparing to invade Iraq, which top officials falsely accused of maintaining ties to al Qaeda and harboring secret weapons of mass destruction programs.

Even before the end of 2001, some U.S. intelligence and military officers, some of them deployed in Afghanistan, began lamenting that assets they needed to help secure the country following the collapse of the Taliban regime were MIA. Instead, the Bush administration was delaying or diverting them to prepare for possible action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.

CHAPTER FOUR: DROPPING THE BALL

At the same time, the Bush administration was betting, although gambling might be a more accurate word, that an Afghan Interim Authority installed by a United Nations meeting of opposition leaders in Bonn would lead in constructing a new and improved Afghanistan.

The Bush administration, increasingly focused on Iraq, either never grasped or else ignored the difficulties the new regime, led by Hamid Karzai, faced in trying to forge a population long fractured along ethnic, geographic, tribal and family lines and plagued by blood feuds, not to mention endemic corruption, into a stable nation.

Lacking much knowledge of Afghanistan, the U.S. military, the CIA, the military and the State Department, strangers in a strange land, recruited thousands of Afghans to assist with everything from educating women to killing and in some cases torturing suspected Taliban fighters. Inevitably, mistakes were made, and in many cases America’s Afghan allies never had access to the care and support their U.S. colleagues could seek.

Absent a sustained American and allied commitment to finish off the Taliban and support a long term nation-building effort, Karzai’s interim government was doomed. The Bush administration never even included a request for reconstruction funds in its 2002 budget request, and then preemptively declared the end of major combat operations in May 2003, two months after the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The Taliban survived, and to fight them the U.S. dispatched more troops along with more than $150 billion to support an uphill nation-building effort Bush never wanted.

Democratic President Barack Obama did no better. In a speech in December 2009, he announced a surge of 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but at the same time declared that American forces would start leaving the country for good in 18 months.

If Bush had bet on Karzai’s interim government, Obama was betting on Afghanistan’s security forces, despite repeated warnings from U.S. and allied political, military and intelligence officials that the Afghan Security Forces were nowhere near up to the job.

Obama’s successor did no better. In a pattern that was to be repeated many times, in August 2017 he promised a dramatic new nation-building effort, one that a presidential adviser at the time said was made “with one eye on Afghanistan’s mineral resources”, then abandoned it within a year.

Instead, the administration negotiated the February 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban without the Afghan government’s participation. Pay attention, Ukraine: It promised a 37 percent reduction in U.S. forces within 135 days and a full withdrawal by May 1, 2021, which ended any hope of maintaining a secure base at Bagram Airfield outside Kabul.

CHAPTER FIVE: RUNNING ON EMPTY

The final and fatal mistake was President Joe Biden’s 2021 decision to honor his predecessor’s deal and abandon Afghanistan and with it the Afghans and other allies who had supported the on-again, off-again American efforts to help build a stable new Afghanistan.

Biden and his top advisers ignored repeated warnings from Pentagon and other officials that a precipitous exit would leave behind as many as 150,000 Afghans and their families at the mercy of the Taliban.

As American and allied forces departed, thousands of panicked Afghans rushed to the gates of the Kabul airport. One family hid for weeks in a metal storage locker near the airport. CIA officers secretly escorted Afghans they had employed past Taliban forces and through the Agency’s airport gate. An unlikely coalition of intelligence, State Department and military officers, a few journalists and others who shall remain nameless mounted a quiet effort to sneak other Afghan allies and their families to safety.

The rushed and belated scramble to save tens of thousands of Afghans from the Taliban’s hunger for revenge, dubbed Operation Allies Welcome, was a chaotic mess led by the Department of Homeland Security.

While DHS carried out extensive biographic and biometric screening of Afghans entering the U.S., an agency Inspector General’s report in 2024 found that “the process for identifying and resolving derogatory information” was “fragmented”.

Perhaps worse, conceded a Biden administration official familiar with the program, the process included little or no provision for continued monitoring and support for Afghans who had been admitted to the U.S.. “In some cases,” this official said, “We were yanking them out of the 10th Century and dumping them in the 21st.”

One of them was Rahmanullah Rakanwal, who served with a CIA counterterrorism “kill squad” in Afghanistan, and according to a AP report struggled with “dark isolation” at his new home in the unfamiliar Pacific Northwest. He now stands accused of killing Sarah Beckstrom.

Finally, of course, is the question of why members of the West Virginia Army National Guard were assigned to protect the entrance to a Metro stop in one of the safest parts of Washington at one of the safest times of day.

That is not to say that averting any of these mistakes would have averted the tragedy at that Metro stop.

But the least the current U.S. administration can do for the victims, for all those who served in Afghanistan and who are serving at home and abroad today, for America and for its increasingly wary allies, for Ukraine and Venezuela and for itself is to abandon political posturing and reexamine why as the world moves faster, it is more important than ever to try to look beyond tomorrow.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58615-2004Jul17.html

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/08/timeline-of-u-s-withdrawal-from-afghanistan/

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4152144-six-strategic-mistakes-the-u-s-made-in-afghanistan/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58615-2004Jul17.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html

Making Sense of a Mad Mad World

No Surprise

While the State Department is to be commended for owning up to its abject failure to plan for the hasty U.S. exodus from Afghanistan, many American and other Foreign Service, intelligence and military officers, as well as an uncounted number of others, predicted it. After speaking to a number of them, I wrote what follows two years ago, in mid-June of 2…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · John Walcott

https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-milley-taliban-biden-620fd2ca8187389da38ddcf3f9466fbd

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/28/us/politics/trump-affirmative-asylum.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/27/nx-s1-5622991/afghan-refugee-program-national-guard-shooting-suspect

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2024-05/OIG-24-24-May24.pdf

https://apnews.com/article/lakanwal-national-guard-shooting-suspect-afghan-5e5e9567d95a5d0ef806b714bb3ee3b7

“That measure what we’ve lost . . . .”

The Dangling Conversation, written by Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, 1966

The white marble headstones in Arlington National Cemetery in the hills overlooking Washington measure far more than lives honored, risked, ruined and lost.

Looking out from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier across the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument to the hollowed halls of Congress an even greater loss appears. Dollars, hubris and cupidity are overtaking duty, honor and country.

In these hills lie the remains of warriors and others who risked and gave their lives and health to reunite a nation torn asunder by slavery. Now politicians in both major parties and their acolytes are tearing it apart again in shameless quests for political power, online clicks and campaign contributions.

So what lessons might a visit to Arlington teach?

The current successor to Honest Abe Lincoln, whose memorial lies just across the river, has given white South Africans preferential treatment for immigration. What might Arlington’s Union veterans of Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg make of that?

What would Maj. Gen. George Crook in Section 2, Grave 974 or Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny, Jr. in Section 2, Grave S-2, who was killed in the 1862 Battle of Chantilly, think of restoring, under transparent cover, the names of Confederate generals to American military bases?

The present resident of the Oval Office, now a tacky gilded cage, is sending $20 billion to beef up an authoritarian ruler in Argentina while millions of Americans, some of them military, intelligence and law enforcement veterans and their families, wait for meager rations on bread lines.

George Washington, whose monument stands erect across the river, chose to spend the winter of 1777 with his troops at Valley Forge rather than retreating south to host lavish parties — yes, served by black slaves — in his plantation home just downriver at Mt. Vernon.

Or imagine a conversation between General Washington, who that miserable winter ordered his troops to be inoculated against smallpox, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. Lt. Col. Albert Sabin, Section 3, Grave 1885-RH, might have some thoughts to add.

Perhaps Washington and successors such as Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Section 2, Grave 478, the first African-American general in the U.S. Army; his son Brig. Gen Benjamin O. Davis, Jr, the first African-American Air Force general, nearby in Section 2, Grave E 321-RH; and Gen. Colin Powell, Section 60, Grave 11917, might have a Chat with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about the military virtues of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Washington’s Continentals included black freemen and fugitive slaves in the First Rhode Island Regiment, as well as the Second Canadian Regiment, native Americans and immigrants from nearly every country in Europe. The Union Army included some 180,000 black soldiers, the Irishmen of the Fighting 69th, a German Brigade and as many as 20,000 native Americans.

Much later came the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo “code talkers” who played an important role in the defeat of the Japanese Empire by using their native language as an unbreakable code.

While he’s at it, Secretary Hegseth might school himself on the role women have played throughout America’s military history, for 250 years as nurses, supply clerks, seamstresses, spies and secretaries and finally — until now — as combat soldiers and fighter pilots. A stop at Section 21, the “Nurses Section”, home to the tombs of 653 women military veterans, might be in order. A tour of the Women’s Military Memorial to the more than 3 million women who have served the nation since the Revolution is mandatory, sir.

Or perhaps the self-styled Secretary of War might visit Arlington’s Section 2, Grave S-1 and ask Gen. Philip Sheridan about the wisdom of purging the military of “beardos” like him, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.

If he did, perhaps Sherman’s voice might echo down to the Pentagon and across the Potomac to the newly amputated White House: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Maybe, too, amid the talk of annexing Canada, Hegseth might ask the President to join him at the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice, first constructed “in honour of the residents of the United States who served in the Canadian Army and gave their lives in the Great War, 1914-1917”. More than 35,000 of the 40,000 remembered there were U.S. citizens, and the Cross now also honours the Americans who served in Canadian forces in World War II and in Korea.

While the current administration has reduced the NATO alliance that emerged from the ruins of World War II to a series of financial transactions, there is no record of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower summoning French Gen. Charles de Gaulle to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and demanding that the Free French contribute more to the cost of their country’s liberation.

In contrast to today’s transactional diplomacy, President Harry S Truman said in words etched in the wall of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall: “The heroism of our own troops . . . was matched by that of the armed forces of the nations that fought by our side. They absorbed the blows and they shared to the full in the destruction of the enemy.”

Now many of those nations are absorbing the blows of new tariffs and reluctant to share what their intelligence agencies are collecting, not only about drug smuggling in Latin America, but also about Russia and other nations that were long considered common enemies.

If the nation really is FUBAR, though, what has changed is more than a Commander in Chief who seems more comfortable with authoritarian rulers than he is with the leaders of America’s allies.

Not so long ago, many of the heirs to those buried in Arlington’s hills lived by a motto that began in the Marine Corps: “Officers eat last”. For them, ranks’ responsibilities outranked their privileges.

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both,” Eisenhower warned.

By that measure, today’s top heavy nation is in danger. In the private sector, as well as in government, officers too often eat everything and leave only table scraps. According to the Economic Policy Institute, top CEO pay rose by 1,094 percent between 1978 and 2024, while typical workers’ compensation grew 26 percent.

None of those who rest at Arlington were saints. Even without judging those who lived a century ago by today’s standards, their ranks include racists and anti-Semites, at least one rabid anti-Communist and others whose conduct was unbecoming.

But what might they think of today’s America? Is it still the country they devoted and too often gave their lives to serve, save and protect? Perhaps like good soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, they would look beyond Washington, beyond the polls and the off-year election headlines, beyond those hollowed halls on Capitol Hill, beyond the parts of the White House that remain intact, beyond the mediocrities, miscreants and malefactors of great wealth that now populate the Capital.

In the distance, past the debacles in Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu, Iraq and Afghanistan, for which soldiers in the ranks bear too much of the blame that belongs to their superiors and to the politicians who deployed them, perhaps they could still see the America they remember.

It is easy to be cynical, but at times such as this, to be cynical is to surrender, and those among the hills of Arlington did not give up after the defeats they suffered at First Bull Run, in their first encounter with the enemy at Kasserine Pass or after Task Force Smith in Korea.

“Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Section 3, Grave 856-A. “People grow old only by deserting their ideals.”

Amid the darkness, those ideals still shine. You can see them in the outpouring of support for local food pantries when millions lost their SNAP benefits. In Americans rushing to support their neighbors after floods and fires. In others and Catholic bishops and even some judges protesting and halting ICEy violence. In soldiers and law enforcement and intelligence officers warily asking what might constitute an illegal order. In a new generation of social media protest singers such as Jesse Welles, Mon Rovia and Jensen McCrea (Hat tip: NPR and Isabella Gomez Sarmiento). In a new generation of politicians in both parties seeking solutions rather than scapegoats. In the survivors of the news media still speaking truth to power in the face of threats and intimidation and economic starvation and abandonment by their corporate masters.

In the end, perhaps, looking beyond the barren capital, the veterans of America’s toughest trials can still see an America that remains what Bruce Springsteen called it in 2001 — a Land of Hope and Dreams.

“I said this train, dreams will not be thwarted

“This train, faith will be rewarded

“This train, hear the steel wheels singing

“This train, bells of freedom ringing”

THE SOUNDTRACK;

The Dangling Conversation:

Land of Hope and Dreams:

FURTHER READING:

If you are curious, the image is of my great uncle, Lt. Cdr. Tracy Lay McCauley, USN, Section 33, Grave 8934.

https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/#/

https://womensmemorial.org/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/13/democrat-jason-crow-midterms-veterans-colorado/?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/shutdown-trump-rich-poor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/11/nx-s1-5600024/folk-protest-singers-jesse-welles-mon-rovia

https://www.cantonrep.com/story/opinion/columns/2025/11/09/remembering-why-veterans-day-matters-charita-goshay/87062791007/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/13/democrat-jason-crow-midterms-veterans-colorado/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzYzMDk2NDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzY0NDc4Nzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3NjMwOTY0MDAsImp0aSI6IjI3YTc5YTM3LTBiMjQtNGM3Zi1iYzVhLThhMjcyZmQ1MTZkYiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDI1LzExLzEzL2RlbW9jcmF0LWphc29uLWNyb3ctbWlkdGVybXMtdmV0ZXJhbnMtY29sb3JhZG8vIn0.vBp-kY_Hmxc2Bnjs4ZyR1y5WrzAuj7GIBVKgR_vKTDw&itid=gfta

https://acousticguitar.com/meet-jesse-welles-fiery-folksinger-on-the-rise/

https://www.rescue.org/article/inspiring-journey-mon-rovia-refugee-rising-music-star

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-06-18/jensen-mcrae-justin-bieber-noah-kahan-interview

https://www.history.com/articles/smallpox-george-washington-revolutionary-war

It is questionable whether Donald Trump or his courtiers ever read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but they appear to be capitalizing on real or imagined turmoil, rigging or discrediting elections, discouraging debate, controlling information, fomenting hate and promising prosperity in an effort to establish what the visiting Frenchman called a “tyranny of the majority”.

Tocqueville warned that “a very disordered love for order” can encourage citizens to hand over their rights to governments that promise to maintain order and promote economic gains.

“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” he observed.

Such “democratic despotism”, as Tocqueville called it, can escalate into outright tyranny, he warned.

“The omnipotence of the majority, and the rapid as well as absolute manner in which its decisions are executed in the United States has not only the effect of rendering the law unstable, but it exercises the same influence upon the execution of the law and the conduct of the public administration,” Tocqueville wrote in 1840.

“. . . the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy,” he added.

In one footnote, Tocqueville even offered two early 19th Century examples of the ugly turns that tyranny of the majority can take — a Baltimore mob’s attacks on journalists who opposed the War of 1812 and race riots in Philadelphia.

Many of democracy’s defenses that Tocqueville identified have been co-opted, corrupted or corroded, and the rest are either intimidated or under siege as immoral and un-American.

Long before voters elected a candidate whose Project 2025 playbook included costly tariffs, the elimination of immigrant labor and cuts to government health and nutritional support, Tocqueville argued that people have “little understanding of the way in which the fate of the state can influence his own lot”.

Citizens band together and use their freedom, he argued, when they have control of local affairs. Today, however, local and state governments’ and agencies’ ability to decentralize power has been undercut by the need for local and state governments to rely on federal support for education, infrastructure, public safety, disaster relief and other essential services.

“Now, when the same power is already vested with all the attributes of government, it is highly difficult for it not to try to get into the details of administration” and finds ways to do that.

That was nearly 200 years before the ICE Age, National Guard gardening tours, vaccination relaxation and other innovations began.

The current U.S. Supreme Court, which belatedly upheld Richard Nixon’s claim that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”, already has failed to be the independent barrier to despotism that Tocqueville hoped it would be.

Similarly, the current Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, intimidated by Trump, is no barrier to despotism, either. The short terms of members of the House of Representatives, now thanks in part to the high Court’s Citizens United decision coupled with the reliance on big money, is what Tocqueville called “a mediocre body of representatives” whose members are unable to act “in accordance to their best judgment, since they must constantly be worrying about public opinion”.

A free press, another barrier to despotism that Tocqueville identified, has been corroded by economic and technological forces that are eliminating local news outlets, rewarding sensationalism, encouraging bias as a way to establish loyal audiences and rendering even the largest and most prestigious news organizations vulnerable to political pressure and outright threats.

Freedom of association, which Tocqueville argued was a means for people to organize themselves and participate in politics, is also under attack. The administration is vowing to crack down on what officials now claim — without a shred of evidence — is a network of leftist organizations that is inciting and funding political violence.

Finally, Tocqueville argued that freedom cannot do without religious faith that counters both government claims of infallibility and the inherent materialism he found in his travels through America. According to the latest Pew Research Center report, though, only 40 percent of all U.S. adults attend religious services of any faith or watch them online or on television at least once a month.

That has benefited Team Trump in two ways, first by weakening a potential source of resistance to actions that violate religious and moral principles and then by amplifying the voices of organizations that promote Christian Nationalism, despite the fact that the term is an oxymoron.

Toqueville did not foresee the extent of the Trump’s efforts to bend democracy to his will, but it is still so prescient that Stephen Miller might have read it:

“Having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded them as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute and uniform rules, which the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break rules, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy; it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Given this danger, the Frenchman almost 200 years ago declared that to prevent the tyranny of the majority from taking root, what he called “the true friends of liberty” must “constantly, stand up and to be ready to prevent the social power from sacrificing lightly the particular rights of some individuals to the general executions of its designs”.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. (Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans., ed.; Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000)

ISBN 0226805328

Bierre, James, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, June 19, 2025 https://www.forthewriters.com/post/democracy-in-america-alexis-de-tocqueville

— Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

The American Revolution began a year and eight months before Thomas Paine crystallized it for all time. In these times that try the souls of men, women and children, it is worth remembering that the Revolution did not begin in New York or Philadelphia, or at Harvard or Princeton or William and Mary, but in two rural Massachusetts villages where ordinary farmers and carpenters and wheelwrights stood up to face the British Army.

If there is to be a peaceable uprising against Donald Trump’s attempt to resurrect the monarchy, it is more likely to begin not in Washington’s polarized and paralyzed halls of power, but in places such as Sullivan, Maine and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Eau Claire, Wisconsin and Moore Township, Pennsylvania.

There and in other flyover towns, the descendants of the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord are rebelling not just against Trump’s quest for the unchecked power that once belonged to King George III, but also against a Democratic Party they think represents them no better than Parliament did.

In time, the Epstein files may catch up with Trump, at least among anyone who has a daughter or calls themselves a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim or a follower of just about any religious faith. His dictatorial misuse of the military, his jealous affinity for authoritarian rulers such as Vladimir Putin and his apparent interest in a real estate deal in Gaza might come to cost him, too.

Today, though, as the 2026 midterm elections draw closer, what commands the news isn’t what’s commanding the attention of most Americans. Their interests are closer to home — rising prices, export markets shrunken by tariffs, vanishing jobs and stagnant wages, the costs and availability of housing and health care.

Children are going hungry without their school lunches while the president; the sycophants and cowards in Congress, the Supreme Court and state houses; and the billionaires who court him feast on tax cuts and shrinking regulations.

But as members of both parties bathe like the proverbial frog in hot water, bubbles of anger are starting to surface.

In Downeast Maine, the website of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, an oysterman and Army and Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan is about as straightforward as a platoon sergeant’s orders:

“While my platform spans many issues, I view most of my new job as a US senator as to do two things. One, to ban billionaires buying elections; two to dismantle the ‘billionaire economy’ in favor of an economy that works for the American worker, for small businesses, for the vast majority of Americans.”

In his speech launching his campaign, Platner was blunter. “The enemy,” he said, “is the oligarchy.”

While his shot hasn’t been heard around the world, the oligarchy appears to have heard it. Fox News and other right-leaning outlets are calling Platner a socialist, highlighting his opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza and linking him to New York Democratic Socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Other anti-establishment candidates are sounding similar alarms.

On his website, Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Nathan Sage, a mechanic and Marine veteran of the Iraq war, says:“Family farms and independent businesses are getting screwed over. Veterans return home and are abandoned. People are working longer hours for fewer dollars. The economy is rigged. And those in power don’t give a damn.”

In Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, firefighter Bob Brooks, who says his single mother was a bartender “to keep food on the table”, is running on a vaguer populist platform of affordable housing and health care, protecting and expanding union rights and economic opportunities for the middle class.

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke, whose website says she is waitressing while campaigning seven days a week, sounds a moderate note: “. . . we need more working class voices in Congress — folks who aren’t so far left or so far right but want to work across the aisle to deliver for working families.”

“It is a fitting message for a moment when the high cost of living continues to top the list of issues voters say they care about, and after a devastating election cycle that caused Democrats to spend months soul-searching about how they got it all so wrong,” wrote Annie Karni in The New York Times, reporting alas from Washington. “But it is one that party leaders have not fully embraced as they try to take on Republicans in astronomically expensive campaigns for the closely divided House.

“Even though low-wage workers make up almost half the U.S. economy, the halls of Congress are still, by and large, populated by career politicians, lawyers and wealthy businessmen,” she wrote. “About 78 percent of senators currently serving in office hold an advanced degree, according to Congressional Quarterly. More than 30 percent of House members and 47 percent of senators hold a law degree.”

In short, too much of Congress, virtually all of Trump’s executive branch and a majority of the Supreme Court are as distant from Eau Claire and Sullivan and Bethlehem and Mason City as Lexington and Concord were from the Court of St. James.

In a new book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, columnist Osita Nwanevu argues that faith in democracy itself, not just control of the next Congress, is at stake.

The stakes might not be as high as they were in 1776, but with Trump extinguishing the lights in what in 1630 John Winthrop hoped would be “a city upon a hill”, they are pretty damn high.

Further reading:

Bob Brooks’ campaign website: https://brooksforcongress.com/

Rebecca Cooke’s campaign website:

https://cookeforwisconsin.com/meet-rebecca-cookel

Graham Platner’s campaign website: https://www.grahamforsenate.com/about

Nathan Sage’s campaign website: https://www.sageforsenate.com/

Karni, Annie, In the Battle for Congress, Working-Class Democrats Try a Hardscrabble Pitch. The New York Times, September 7, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/us/politics/in-the-battle-for-congress-working-class-democrats-try-a-hardscrabble-pitch.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Hook, Janet, Back to Basics: A new book makes the case for a multigenerational commitment to rebuilding democracy. The American Prospect, August 12, 2025. https://prospect.org/culture/books/2025-08-12-back-to-basics-nwanevu-review/

Nwanevu, Osita, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704686/the-right-of-the-people-by-osita-nwanevu/

Paine, Thomas, The American Crisis I. https://www.thomaspaine.org/writings/1776/the-crisis-i

Walcott, John. Forty years of Democratic deafness, April 23, 2023. https://open.substack.com/pub/johnwalcott/p/listen-to-the-music?r=zhhc&utm_medium=ios

Walcott, John. The legacy of Lexington and Concord, April 16, 2025. https://open.substack.com/pub/johnwalcott/p/lessons-from-lexington-and-concord?r=zhhc&utm_medium=ios

Finally, in a replay of my penchant for soundtracks, here’s an oldie about clashes between young people and the police. It was written by Steven Stills in 1966, 59 years before the ICE age began, and performed by Buffalo Springfield:

“There’s something happening here,

“But what it is ain’t exactly clear.

“There’s a man with a gun over there,

“Tellin’ me I got to beware.”

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=1eD-8NTwP9I&feature=shared

Last, a 1964 reminder from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel that lasting change often comes from the bottom up, not from the top down, and that listening to those who are silent can be more important than remaining tuned to the loudest voices:

“. . . The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls

In tenement halls . . . .”

Memorandum to:

Anthea M. Hartig, PhD

Elizabeth MacMillan Director Smithsonian National Museum of American History

cc: Lonnie G. Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Re: A fair and balanced account of how America became great and how it declined until the three elections of Donald J. Trump

Introduction:

The Museum persists in presenting a negative view of the history of OUR GREAT NATION, for example by misrepresenting the colonists’ and their descendants’ courageous efforts to acquire land necessary for farming and industry from what Massachusetts Bay Colony Governor William Bradford, one of the white settlers AND NOT WOKE like that crime-ridden sewer’s current so-called politicians, called “the ravages of the savages”.

Therefore, I President Donald J. Trump, direct the Museum to draft a plan to present a new and balanced account of American history, for example:

• An account of the first colonial settlements and our nation’s westward expansion must include the legitimate need for arable land to feed a growing population and provide goods such as cotton and tobacco for valuable exports, control of rivers and roads to promote profitable business and later secure telegraph and other lines of communication to facilitate commerce.

• The prevailing history of the Puritan colonists’ campaign to root out and punish the witches they found in their midst paints young girls such as Mary Walcott who exposed witches in their midst were performing a public service — THE LIKES OF WITCH WE NEED TODAY. MAGA! The fact that few witches were discovered after those the girls uncovered were punished proved the merit of their efforts.

• Next, the Museum’s and other Smithsonian presentations ignore the expenses in blood and money that King George III and his royal predecessors expended to support and defend their American colonies, for example in the French and Indian War. In so doing, the Museum now ignores the many merits of monarchical rule. The prevailing account of the Boston Tea Party, for example, ignores the fact that the King and a duly subservient Parliament had every right to impose taxes on the colonists to help defray the costs of that war.

• In addition to celebrating that and other illegal acts, the Museum and the Smithsonian have celebrated the American Revolution while ignoring the crimes and chaos created by rabble in arms who sought to overthrow a King whose right to rule LIKE MINE was divine. More attention also should be paid to the fate of those patriotic Loyalists whose defense of their sacred honor cost them their lives and fortunes.

• A new exhibit must be created to celebrate the failed American effort to invade Canada in 1812, which has left ME with unfinished business. That effort must also include the unfinished business of the American invasion of Mexico, which has forced ME to take action to protect a southern border that is not as far south as it should be. An ancillary exhibit should celebrate the American pursuit of the CRIMINAL ALIEN Pancho Villa in 1916, which established the right of the U.S. to deploy military forces in Mexico.

• In addition to renaming many military bases and returning some monuments to Confederate heroes, the Museum’s and other versions of the War of Northern Aggression must be revised to include how the defeat of the Southern states (incidentally crucial to my rule) raised the costs of cotton, tobacco, whiskey and other staples by increasing labor costs.

• Next, the prevailing accounts of the rise of American industrial might have dwelt too much on labor practices, public health and housing conditions. These exhibits must now include portraits of the wealthy merchants and bankers who MADE AMERICA GREAT by building railroads, overseeing financial institutions to support those efforts and above all giving birth to a GILDED AGE of American architecture that I am resurrecting after 130 years of neglect.

• You may continue to celebrate the contributions of scientists and other immigrants from Germany and other civilized nations. But fair and balanced accounts of immigration must also include the crime, rodent infestations, pollution, housing and public health crises, factory fires, union uprisings and other costs of allowing uneducated, unskilled and often criminal immigrants to enter America without proper scrutiny. (I have asked the National Park Service to add a blindfold to the Statue of Liberty, and ICE is exploring the cost of repurposing Ellis Island as a detention center.)

• Too often, Museum and other accounts of the introduction of an income tax (WHICH I AM UNWINDING FOR THOSE WHO ARE MAGA), the so-called New Deal and America’s reluctant entry into two world wars ignore the costs of both and of how expanding the federal government and intervening in foreign wars helped undermine the greatness that was built with the steel, copper and coal of my Gilded Age forebears.

• You are directed to provide a more balanced account of the great Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to expose Woke Communist sympathizers. If he had been allowed to finish his work, I would have less to do today and more time to help make my cryptocurrency the foundation of another Gilded Age. Ignoring slanderous charges that at long last I have no decency, I have asked my lackeys in Congress to draft legislation to rename the Rayburn House Office Building the McCarthy House Office Building.

• Finally, I have asked the architects designing my big, beautiful White House ballroom to draft plans for a new Donald J. Trump Wing of the Museum to document my heroic efforts to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, regardless of whether that might take as long as it took a woke New Dealer to bring America to the Eve of Destruction.

Signed,

President Donald J. Trump

(Full disclosure: I have a little kin in this game. Mary Walcott was the sister of one of my ancestors, and a more distant relation, Charles Doolittle Walcott, was the 4th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.)

This class had been scheduled for the Spring semester, but in light of current events in the United States and elsewhere, it is being offered now. Despite the last-minute change, it is oversubscribed, and as a result, it will meet in two sections.

INTRODUCTION

These questions will be at the heart of each week’s discussion:

• Are government bodies subject to Newton’s First Law? Sir Isaac Newton posited that a body at rest or moving in a straight line at a constant speed will remain at rest or continue to move in the same direction at the same speed unless it is acted on by an outside force.

• Are there natural, moral, religious or other laws that transcend those of governments, even democratic ones?

• If there are, should individuals and groups be obligated to follow such laws and their own consciences, even if that means breaking the laws of governments?

• Is violence against people or property ever justified, and does it discredit the cause it is meant to support?

Each class will begin with a discussion of the week’s readings, which are below, but will include their application to contemporary issues in the United States and elsewhere, including but not limited to the deployment of armed members of the military on domestic soil, the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants with no criminal record and Israeli action and inaction in Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

In that respect, we are fortunate to have a diverse and multinational class that can bring varied perspectives to our discussions. We’re especially fortunate to have three veterans of U.S. military service with us, and they can expect to be asked about their obligation to disobey illegal orders.

Feel free to use AI tools in your research, but you must write your papers yourselves. Hint: In addition to non-existent and unverified sources, poor grammar and sloppy writing can be AI giveaways because AI still relies on public sources, and when it comes to English (and other) grammar and syntax, it’s garbage in, garbage out. I encourage you to consult a grammar textbook, and if you want to aim higher, I suggest Stephen King’s On Writing. Hint: One valuable sentence is: “The adverb is not your friend.”. It really isn’t. Brevity is.

In-class quizzes will take place now and then.

READING LIST

CLASS 1

Our introductory reading will be Civil Disobedience in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 2, 2021 revision. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/

To get the ball rolling, we’ll discuss the definition of civil disobedience, ask whether civil means nonviolent and examine some contemporary examples. Sample question: Were the Jan. 6 efforts to overturn the U.S. presidential election an example of civil disobedience?

CLASS 2

In our America-centric way, the concept of civil disobedience is often attributed to the transcendentalist philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau. While his work is influential, the idea of natural laws that supersede those of kings and congresses is much older.

Sophocles: Antigone.

Pay special attention to this exchange between the ruler Creon and Antigone:

Creon, accusing Antigone of breaking the law by burying her brother: “The state is his who rules it, so ‘tis held.”

Antigone: “Yea, for those laws were not ordained of Zeus,

“Nor did I dream that thou, a mortal man

“Could’st by a breath annul and override

“The immutable unwritten laws of heaven . . . “

On a lighter note, consider the possibility that another passage from Antigone is relevant today:

“For Zeus who hates the braggart’s boast

“Behold that gold-bespangled host

“As at the goal the paean they upraise,

“He struck them with his forked lightning blaze”

Aristophanes: Lysistrata. This one speaks for itself.

The Bible, including but not limited to:

Exodus 1: 15-22

Exodus 2: 1-2

1 Kings: 18

Esther 3: 1-6

Esther 4

Daniel 3 Here King Nebuchadnezzar has a large golden image made and demands that all fall down and worship it. Three Jews, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, refuse.

Matthew 2: 1-12

Mark 2: 23-28

Acts 4: 1-22

Acts 16: 16-40

In this class we’ll ask whether Christian and Jewish support for some American, Israeli and other policies and practices are consistent with the principles in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

CLASS 3

Hasan, Muhammed Haniff: Civil Disobedience in Islam. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-981-10-3274-1 (ebook)

Anjum, Ovamir: Speaking Truth to Power: Islamic Rules for Protests, Civil Disobedience and Encampments for Gaza. https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/post/speaking-truth-to-power-islamic-rules-for-protests-civil-disobedience-and-encampments-for-gaza

This week, with particular emphasis on nonviolent versus violent action, we’ll ask the same questions about protests and other forms of civil disobedience in predominantly Muslim regions and countries, for example Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Malaysia and predominately Muslim parts of India.

CLASS 4

Warne, Nathaniel: The Reformation and Civil Disobedience, https://www.thetwocities.com/theology/historic-theology/the-reformation-and-civil-disobedience-guest-post/

The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320.

https://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesBritain/Medieval_TextArbroath01.htm

Pettegree, Andrew: Brand Luther. Penguin, ISBN 9780399563232

This week’s discussion will compare the German monk Martin Luther’s use of the printing press, a relatively new and heretofore little used technology, to distribute his criticism of corruption in the Roman Catholic Church to the roles of photography, motion pictures, television, the Internet, social media and now AI. Additional research and reading is required.

CLASS 5

Gandhi, Mohandas and Ronald Duncan, ed.: Selected Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, https://archive.org/details/selectedwritings0000rona

This class also requires additional research and reading so we can discuss Gandhi’s work in South Africa and India, with emphasis on the Salt March and on the influence he and his philosophy of satyagraha, or Truth Force, had on Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Tibet’s Dalai Lama and others.

FALL BREAK

CLASS 6

Young, Ralph: Dissent: The History of an American Idea, New York University Press. ISBN 978-1-4798-0

Our discussion will cover the roots and evolution of the American concept of government. Despite the length of the main text, additional reading is required. A suggestion: Talk among yourselves and divide the work by topic, timeframe or some other metric.

CLASS 7

Thoreau, Henry David: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/uprising1313/files/2017/10/Civil-Disobedience-by-Henry-David-Thoreau.pdf

This is the foundational text on civil disobedience in the United States, and lest anyone get the idea that the author was another WOKE Massachusetts liberal, Thoreau in some respects more closely resembled traditional pre-Trump Republican conservatives. He refused to pay his taxes not only to protest slavery, but also to avoid supporting the Mexican War, which he called “the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing army as their tool . . . .” Long before Ronald Reagan, he also heartily accepted the motto: “That government governs best which governs least”.

CLASS 8

King, Jr., Martin Luther: Letter from Birmingham Jail. https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/general/Letter%20from%20Birmingham%20Jail%20MLK.pdfhttps://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/general/Letter%20from%20Birmingham%20Jail%20MLK.pdf

Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community? Beacon Press, Boston. ISBN 978-0-8070-0076-2

The discussion will cover the U.S. civil rights movement up until the present day, so a good deal of independent research is required. For example, to what extent did the civil rights movement inspire and influence other campaigns for political and social change, for example those on the environment, women’s rights and opposition to the Vietnam and other wars.

CLASS 9

Predota, Georg: Civil Disobedience in Music. Interlude.

https://interlude.hk/civil-disobedience-in-music/

Ross, Danny: 8 Protest Songs Since 2000 That Inspired Change (All the Way to the Bank). Forbes,

July 30, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dannyross1/2017/01/30/8-protest-songs-since-2000-that-inspired-change-all-the-way-to-the-bank/

Civil Society Crackdowns and Underground Sound Movements: Authoritarian Suppression Catalyzing Clandestine Music Scenes. Diverse Daily. https://diversedaily.com/civil-society-crackdowns-and-underground-sound-movements-authoritarian-suppression-catalyzing-clandestine-music-scenes/

One of the few — perhaps the only — benefit of having a teacher who came of age back in the 1960s is memories of the role popular music played in the civil disobedience movements in those days. I admit, however, that I did not know until recently that the William Tell Overture was a tribute to a legendary Swiss hero, albeit one known not just for not saluting a tyrant’s hat (arguably an act of civil disobedience), but for later assassinating him, an act difficult to consider civil.

Music is a powerful tool for calling attention to issues, uniting people behind movements for change and inspiring hope, for example in San Cooke’s 1964 A Change is Gonna Come.

Your final assignment is to pick one civil disobedience movement during any time period and bring to class a YouTube or other playlist.

FINAL CLASS

The class will end with a oral final exam in the classroom without mobile phones or other Internet connections. (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/back-pens-paper-how-us-universities-are-ditching-tech-beat-chatgpt-old-school-exams-1734491)

National Weather Service. “Phony science forecast rain on three of my big, beautiful golf courses this weekend and they said Hurricane Erin might brush Mar a Lago. I’m grabbing my black marker and changing that!”

Bureau of Labor Statistics. “They are doing a lousy job. They failed to report that the number of women going into labor is up 327% since I took office — my doctor said it’s probably because young women are seeing my picture so frequently!!!

National Institutes of Health. “THEIR PHONY SCIENCE says cheeseburgers are bad for your heart.”

White House Historical Association. “How dare one of their WOKE flunkies compare sending our brave soldiers to Mexico to fight drug lords to chasing some guy named Pancho Villa? Why would I want Pancho’s villa when I have Mar a Lago?!”

U.S. Census Bureau. “These disloyal libtards refused to honor my order to restore our Founding Father’s agreement that people that aren’t white are three-fifths of a real American!”

FIRED:

Oval Office Butler. “He said they were out of Diet Coke — UNACCEPTABLE”!

White House head cook. “WHO THE HELL RUNS OUT OF AMERICAN CHEESE? MAGA!!!”

Personal hairdresser. “How can ANYBODY not know the difference between tangerine, sunflower and orange mango?!! Especially when they were singing ‘Hey Mr. Tangerine Man’!!!

Makeup specialist. “Idiot used NARS Finland concealer when I told Bezos I would thank him for his gold tribute by buying my Groenländ makeup from Amazon until I buy the place. Vlad wants Finland, anyhow!” (These are real products.)

White House Architect. “Too bad about the big, beautiful ballroom deal, but Bezos and the other tech suckups said they’d pay for Cyber Gold paint, not just plain Gold! Who doesn’t know the difference between FFD330 and FFD700?? AND WHY DON’T THEY MAKE CRYPTO GOLD?!!” Now I have to find a new architect — Is that Gaudy guy in Spain available?”

White House gardener. “Of course goldenrod is the perfect plant for my one, big beautiful paved pavilion instead of more roses named after some liberal Democrat president’s mother. Goldenrod is a symbol of my rule — and more. I’m adding Lynn Anderson to the Trump Center Awards list because I never promised you a rose garden!”

Further suggestions welcome, but act fast before reality overtakes further attempts at satire.

For a serious look at Trump’s allergy to unwelcome news and facts see: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/briefing/trump-administration-data.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare