Tag: Trump

Freedom’s Warrior: Timothy Snyder


Chances are you don’t know who Timothy Snyder is, though all who love a free Ukraine should. Snyder is an esteemed centrist Yale historian, graduate of Brown University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (D. Phil).

Snyder specializes in central and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. Fluent in English, German, Polish, and Ukrainian, he reads in ten languages.

He’s also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna. Prolific, Snyder has authored sixteen books to date, translated into forty languages, with a forthcoming book to be published in September, 2024.

Raised by Quaker parents in Ohio with leftist leanings, there’s a moral insistence conveyed in unadorned prose throughout his many books. In his classes, he uses no notes and with ease can blend Plato, Hegel, DuBois, and polymath René Girard to make his point (Baird, The Guardian, March 23, 2023).

His international awards are numerous. They include Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. He was a Marshall scholarship student at Oxford.

I hadn’t anticipated an ardent defense of Ukraine, buttressed from someone at Yale, but there he was, Timothy Snyder, forthright, unapologetic, in his op-ed appearance in the New York Times:

“As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

I’ve been following Snyder ever since.

Snyder has his detractors, of course, some regarding him more as a pundit, offering personal opinion in the guise of expertise. For a good summation, and counterpointing (see LA Review of Books, Unshared History, Oct. 16, 2012).

His Marxist critics principally object to his inclusion of Russia as fascist under Putin, as they like to reserve the term for their right wing opponents. Historically, fascism was a term used by the Soviets to denounce Nazis and other factions opposed to its dictates.

Snyder answers that “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

If you’re curious about Snyder’s political biases, he endorsed Biden in 2020 and in a Guardian interview, shared, “I vote Democrat!” He sees Trump as an autocrat appealing to popular prejudices inimical to American democracy’s survival. Trump’s policies are about making White people feel comfortable.

Snyder’s immediate concern, however, is the war in Ukraine, about to enter its third year, pitting a David against a Goliath, pitiless and unpausing in attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in a crucial struggle presently overshadowed by events in Gaza.

To his credit, Snyder has tried valiantly to keep the Ukrainian conflict center-stage: “If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

Hospitals, churches, shopping centers, apartment dwellings, it’s all fair game to Putin, whose aim is to inflict maximum terror, destroy food supplies, disrupt the electricity grid, and deny water resources to a nation he regards as historically integral to the Russian empire.

Much of Putin’s onslaught comes from not only cruise missiles, but thousands of drones, many of them supplied by North Korea and Iran.

The Biden administration and its NATO allies have been slow to respond. Patriot defense batteries are just now arriving, antiquated, and short of the seven President Zelensky says Ukraine needs to ward off the daily aerial assaults.

In contrast, Israel has 32 up-to-date batteries proven highly effective against Iran’s massive missile and drone response of April 14, 2024 (Defense Express, April 15, 2024).

If Ukrainian skies are safer now, it’s because Timothy Snyder stepped in, not the White House, raising $2,300,000 for Safe Skies, a program allowing Ukraine to install thousands of sensors throughout eight Ukrainian regions.

Safe Skies provides an early-warning alert and rapid response to drones and cruise missiles: “I visited one of the sites and saw some of the technology at work, as well as the impressive cooperation between the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the armed forces,” Snyder said (The Free Press, Substack, August 17, 2024).

Donations were largely individual worldwide, with a few corporations also contributing.

We nearly lost Snyder in 2019 when, feeling ill, he resorted to ER in New Haven, spending seventeen hours there, before being diagnosed with a baseball-sized tumor in his liver along with sepsis. Snyder would subsequently spend the next three months in five hospitals.

But you don’t mess with Snyder, who kept notes on his hospital sojourn, the later basis of a scathing indictment of American healthcare: Our Malady:
Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.

Thankfully, he’s still with us, a boon for freedom lovers everywhere,

–rjoly

The Lights Are Flashing Red

Famed entomologist E. O. Wilson passed into infinity in December, 2021.
He was 92.

I came upon him late in my life, but not too late for him to have left me with a reverence for his boundless intellect, inveterate inquisitiveness, and fervent championing of our fellow creatures, mostly outside human ken, myriad species vital to Man’s survival, yet victims of humanity’s arrogant trespass.

Recently, an extended research project, launched by the World Wildlife Fund, revealed that of the 32,000 species it analyzed, 69% of them are in decline. Shockingly, 2.5% of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds and amphibians have gone extinct just since 1970 (World Wildlife Report).

While species extinction surely is an integral fact of our 4.5 billion old planet’s history, the salient evidence of natural selection favoring those able to adapt to largely inveterate climate distillations, several near-Earth object (NEOs) visitations, volcanic acidification of oceans and acid rain, impacting land chemistry, their repetition has become marginalized by evolution’s new arbiter of destiny, homo sapiens.

“The message is clear and the lights are flashing red,” says WWF International’s Director General Marco Lambertini, one of the report’s authors.

Climate change threatens the next massive die-off, witnessed in every day record breaking temperatures, accelerating violent storms, rising sea levels, droughts, and massive fires.

Meanwhile, we continue to pour heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. All of this affects habitat, destroying the intricate ecological web that sustains us.

It doesn’t make for breaking news headlines, but should, that the Arctic
is warming four times faster than the rest of our planet, threatening the demise of the jet stream, resulting in still more climate instability.

We live our lives addicted to trivia, fingers in our ears, indifferent to the existential challenge that poses our extinction. It seems a human predilection to forfeit the future for indulgence in the ephemeral present. Rome burns while Nero plays his fiddle.

Thus far, efforts to mitigate climate change and restore balance have failed to achieve their targets. We even have a candidate running for the presidency who’s pledged to roll back environmental regulations.

Not to be outdone, we have President Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project (March 1923), allowing ConocoPhillip’s massive oil drilling rights on Alaska’s North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve, despite his campaign promise he’d prohibit drilling on public lands (The Willow Project).

We knew where Trump stood, but we trusted Biden, whose administration has also approved the auctioning off of 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling interests, encompassing an area twice the size of the Willow Project (Common Dreams).

Universal human-induced loss of forest, wetlands, and ecosystems hastens the trajectory of apocalyptic consequence for future generations.

Meanwhile, beleaguered polar bears attempt to adapt, but aren’t succeeding. Given the melting ice, they cannot access their traditional foods, resulting in their numbers declining 30% since 1980 (Polar bear decline).

Penguins haven’t fared any better, their numbers declining up to 10% (Penguins declining).

Truth be known, we’re approaching a tipping point at which the ecosystem collapses.

E. O. Wilson rightly faulted humans for earth’s crisis: “Deeming ourselves rulers of the biosphere and its supreme achievement, we believe ourselves entitled to do anything to the rest of life we wish. Here on Earth our name is Power” (Half-Earth: our Planet’s Fight for Life).

Each species is its own miracle. By the century’s end, most of today’s faltering species will be gone:

No birdsong to greet the new day,
No crickets rubbing their wings;
An absence of croaking frogs at the pond,
Zinging dragonflies but memory.
Amid parched landscape, a wounding silence.

–rjoly

Let’s not change horses in midstream: The case for another Biden term


The news hadn’t bode well for Joe Biden even before his disastrous debate with Trump.

The NYT, tracking 47 polls, shows Biden trailing Democratic senate candidates in the upcoming election in all, but one poll, where he’s tied.

His low polling doesn’t come as a rebuke of his policies, at least among Democrats. If one rightly judges the merits of a presidency by its ability to promote change bettering America, Biden outpaces his predecessors, including Obama, putting him in good company with Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The problem is that most voters view Biden as lacking the physical and mental capacity to carry out the duties of office for another four years.

His ninety minute confrontation with Trump simply buttressed the public’s hesitancy.

Watching the debate was painful for me. Biden seemed laboring to reach the podium, stuttering repeatedly, losing his train of thought on one occasion, digressing in several of his responses, and looking down repeatedly as if searching for a response prepared by his handlers.

It was like watching a boxer, trapped in the ring corner, staggered by repeated blows.

Trump’s best line nailed it: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

A healthy, nimble candidate would have atomized Trump quickly in fact-checking rebuttal. Trump was his usual self, hyperbolizing and mendacious, though to his credit, he exercised discipline in not interrupting his opponent.

Though just four years younger than Biden at 77, Trump came across as consistently energetic. “It seemed like a thirty year difference,” one reporter said.

So where do we go from here?

Despite a groundswell of party cohorts urging his withdrawal from the race, seconded by formerly friendly media, Biden is unlikely to heed their counsel—that is, unless there occurs another stumble, both literally and figuratively.

But here’s my take: With six weeks to the Democratic National Convention, August 19-21, an open convention would produce political chaos with a rush of candidates, inadequately assessed.

Kamala Harris is the likely designee. Biden, of course, could immediately resign, allowing Harris to assume the presidency. Any other choice, say a white male replacement at the convention, would spell unmitigated disaster, and assure a Trump victory.

Black and brown voters would abandon ship. As Areva Martin, a California convention delegate pledged to Biden, put it: “If you pick a white man over Kamala Harris, black women, I can tell you this, we gon’ walk away, we gon’ blow the party up.”

The caveat, however, is the improbability of Harris winning in November, polls indicating she enjoys even less favorability than the president.

I say, better not to panic. I believe Biden can still win. Twenty percent of Republicans distain Trump. In a close election, they could provide the margin of victory for Biden, whether by crossing over or not voting a presidential preference. I think it reasonable they’ll do just that.

As for a future four years, if Biden can’t carry out his duties, he can either resign, with Harris succeeding to office, or the Congress can implement the 25th Amendment, Section Four:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Let’s not change horses in midstream. We can still win and smooth out any winkles. The alternative is unthinkable.

—rj

I Want an America Better Than This


We normally think of gurus in connection with individuals claiming transcendental wisdom, often as emissaries of the Divine. I needn’t recite a roll call of their prodigious presence, past and present, in American life, drawing into their loop numerous devotees, hanging on their every word, willing to drink the Kool-Aid.

But gurus can be political, too, like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. I see danger in my beloved America in the likes of Trump and DeSantis and their “true believer” followers, bent on banning books, subverting free inquiry, racial justice, a woman’s right to choose; its ubiquitous gay-bashing, xenophobia, restricting voter access, and denial of climate change. Unhinged, some are willing to employ violence to achieve their ends.

I want a better America than this. I want America to live up to its promise as a bastion of hope and guardian of liberty. I think you want that too. Indifference won’t win out. We must advocate. We must resist. The liberty you defend is your own. —rj

Trump’s Pending Indictment: Reflections

Donald Trump may be indicted as early as this week by a Manhattan grand jury for alleged $130,000 hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump has indicated its likelihood and urged massive protests, recalling his incendiary efforts to impugn the 2020 election results when he tweeted on December 19, 2020 that his followers march to the Capitol on January 6, when Congress would meet to certify the election results: “Be there. Will be wild.”

It will be difficult to achieve a conviction in a subsequent trial, given the notoriety of the key witnesses, Daniels and convicted felon, Michael Cohen, and the gathering instigation by GOP House leadership of a presiding judge weaponizing his office against the former president. It shouldn’t be presumed that the grand jury will unanimously agree to an indictment. Even more so in an actual trial, creating a loophole for Trump, salvaged by legal expertise.

Regardless of what happens in New York, 22 other court cases or investigations into alleged Trump misdoings are pending in several jurisdictions (justicesecurity.org).

In spite of all of this, current polls indicate Trump’s the widely preferred GOP choice to face Biden once again. I lament that so many are willing, after all his charades, to drink the Kool-Aid once again. —rj

Business as Usual: Lockdown Unenforced

Protestors in Texas

As experts have warned and a rogue president, prioritizing reelection, has ignored, recharging the economy when Covid-19 continues to ravage has exacted a surge in the pandemic’s victims, with a new wave anticipated this fall.

But Americans are its lead cause, a spoiled populace ignoring the laws governing exit from the crisis, wearing a mask in public, practicing social distancing, limiting unnecessary activity. Fifty states, each with its own governance, unequal to enforcing these mandates of public safety, subservient to economic interests, fuel our crisis. Shamefully, we lead the world in the pandemic’s victims.

Meanwhile, climate change exacts its continuing world toll. We tied the record in May for the highest monthly average on record; investment in renewable energy has plummeted; in the next five years, five-hundred species will disappear as humanity continues its assault on Nature, despoiling fauna and flora in a greedy rush for profit. Worse is the meat industry, a virus hotspot, progenitor of the pandemic, not just now, but historically in its previously related strains.

As I write, the Amazon forest continues to burn to make room for cattle ranches, environmentalists have been killed or discredited, indigenous tribes decimated. In Croatia, yesterday, 50 million bees died, suspected victims of pesticides. You think it only happens abroad? It’s happening here. Last year in Texas, someone deliberately set fire to beehives, killing 500,000 bees. Almonds, a prime contributor to California’s agricultural sector, may soon devolve into memory.

Where do we go from here? For the sake of the present we are ravaging our children’s future. I think anew of poet Robinson Jeffers’ credo of “inhumanism,” a summons to abandon a plethora of mass murder and commodification, to simplify our lives, to embrace with stoic discipline those values that both uplift and secure our children’s destiny.

—rjoly

NFL Hypocrisy

The media has been all over this story of Sunday’s NFL response to Trump’s
provocative tweet that NFL team owners should fire players who don’t stand proud when the national anthem is played: “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s fired.”

Even NFL commissioner Roger Goodell got in his licks at Trump, responding that “The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture.”

All fine and good, but the NFL’s last minute conversion to players’ right to freedom of speech reeks with blatant hypocrisy. In July 2016, six Dallas police officers were killed in a sniper ambush. As a symbol of community support for police officers, the Dallas Cowboys asked permission from the NFL to wear a helmet “Arm in Arm” decal. The NFL refused. Where was the “unity” then?

Meanwhile, NFL teams continue to discriminate against free agent Colin Kaepernick, who started the take-a-knee protests during the anthem. Quarterbacks have been subsequently signed without ever having thrown a football in an NFL game.

Now’s the time for NFL teams to walk the talk and return this former Super Bowl quarterback with a 90.3 rating to the playing field. Sooner of later, some team’s going to suffer an injured quarterback. Voila!

–rj

Perhaps Someday We Will Learn How to Live

Every morning I awaken to a country bristling with hate, intolerance, and violence. 

Trump bullied his way to the presidency, exploiting public anxieties, e. g., steel belt resentment of jobs sent abroad, latent fears of a changing demographic replacing White homogeneity, evangelical rancor against abortion, and Islamaphobia, which sees every Muslim as a potential terrorist.

Trump pledged he’d limit Muslim immigration and reduce refugee numbers.   Shortly into his tenure, he attempted a 90-day immigration ban on seven Muslim nations, fortunately curtailed by the courts, though the recent SCOTUS decision suggests he may now have the upper hand.

One of his gallery of appointed rogues includes top advisor Stephen Bannon, known for his misogynist views on women and feminism that plague our nation.

Early on, Trump appointed the now disgraced retired general Mike Flynn as national security advisor, who’d previously depicted Islam as a “malignant cancer.”

Since his election, hate crimes have risen sharply.   Think Progress has mapped their occurrence from the election through February, 2017, recording 261 hate crimes, 41% of which have been linked to Trump’s rhetoric.

But I want to be fair. Much as I dislike Trump, hate in our country has many sources and targets.

Violence comes from the Left as well as the Right. 13% of the 261 incidents included attacks on Trump supporters.

Now comes the June 14 shooting of four Republican congressmen, one of them critically, while practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity in Alexandria, VA by a disgruntled Bernie supporter.

There’s also Black violence, targeting Whites, often police, the abused becoming the abuser, the most notorious being the Dallas sniper ambush of twelve policemen, five of them killed (June 8, 2016).

Even liberals can become intolerant, as one of my favorites, simply because he’s so even-handed, Fareed Zakaria, reminds us: “American universities these days seem to be committed to every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely….Freedom of speech is not just for warm, fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable. It’s for ideas that we find offensive.”

Alarmingly, the number of hate groups in The USA has proliferated, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, increasing from 892 in 2015 to 917 last year. This number doesn’t track, however, widespread cyperspace hate raconteurs, whose venom sometimes seeps into social violence such as Dylan Roof’s heinous murder of nine Black church members:

ACTIVE HATE GROUPS 2016

KU KLUX KLAN ……………….130                  

NEO-NAZI…………… ………… 99

WHITE NATIONALISTS……..100

RACIST SKINHEAD. …………..79             

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY……… ..21

NEO-CONFEDERATE…………..43

BLACK SEPARATIST…………..193

ANTI-LGBT……………………….52

ANTI-MUSLIM………………….101

GENERAL HATE………………..101

Total:   917 Active Hate Groups (“The Year in Hate and Extremism,” Intelligence Report, SPLC, Spring 2017, Issue 162.)

Top five states for hate groups?   This may surprise you!

1.  California……….79
2.  Florida…………..63
3.  Texas…………….55
4.  New York……….47
5.  Pennsylvania…..40

It’s not any better abroad.  Britain’s decision to exit the European Community, which requires open borders of its members, parallels the upset victory of Donald Trump, many of the pro-exit voters older, working class Whites. France has its Le Pen; the Netherlands, its Geert Wilder; Germany its AFD (Alternative for Germany).

All of this comes down to the age old problem of the Other. Unfortunately, for all our supposed sophistication in today’s world of technological prowess, we’re still engulfed in the tribalism of our ancient progenitors, hostile to the outsider. And it’s not likely to get better, given the increasing anachronism of national borders that same technology makes possible.

Still, I am not without hope that the good side of humanity will ultimately prevail.  Or as   gifted Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye puts it,

My father’s hopes travel with me
years after he died.  Someday
we will learn how to live. All of us
surviving without violence
never stop dreaming how to cure it.

–rj

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

?

You have every right to be afraid!

cropsprayingMany of us rightfully fear a Trump presidency for what it may mean for the welfare of our citizenry and nation.

Will Affordable Health Care (AHC) and Medicare be on the chopping block?

If you’re an undocumented immigrant, will Trump carry out his often repeated pledge to deport illegals and build a wall on the border with Mexico?

Will he foreclose on refugees, many of them Muslims?

On the the world stage, will he roll back Obama’s executive order that has restored relations with Cuba?

Will he undo the nuclear treaty with Iran?

While all of these concerns are legitimate, I’d argue that they pale up against the incipient threat posed by climate change, an issue virtually missing from the presidential debates, despite the earth’s very survival being at stake.

Alarmingly, in his October 100-day preview, Trump, who has repeatedly declared global warming a hoax, pledged he’d repeal the Clean Power Plan, withdraw from the historic Paris agreement (signed by 120 nations, setting targets for carbon), and lift restrictions on oil and gas development on public lands.

He’s also told us he’ll revive Keystone XL.

In recent days, the press has been focused on his potential choice for the important Secretary of State position. Nobody’s talking, however, about whom he’ll appoint as Secretary of the Interior.

At the moment, the scenario for environmental disaster looms large in Trump’s choice of Myron Ebell to oversee the transition of the Environmental Protection Agency, ironically founded by Richard Nixon. Ebell doesn’t believe in climate change either.

He’s also associated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (http://SafeChemicalPolicy.org), which underplays the environmental and health consequences of industrial chemicals.

Ebell could also be Trump’s choice to head the EPA. For the record, Ebell opposes government efforts to curb global warming and the Paris Agreement.

As I write, it isn’t far-fetched that Trump might give the nod to Forrest Lucas for Secretary of the Interior. Lukas has contributed mega-bucks to Trump and Pence’s campaigns. An oil executive, he’d be in charge of our national parks and public lands. Native Americans–think North Dakota pipeline–might raise their eyebrows, given that one of the Department’s tasks is to monitor programs relating to Native Americans.

We haven’t heard yet on who’ll fill the Department of Energy either, but if Ebell doesn’t get the EPA or Interior nomination, he’d likely fill this vacancy. This, again, is a pivotal cabinet post, affecting environment in the Department’s mission to research, regulate, and develop energy technology and resources.

In the meantime, climate change isn’t when, but now. Lamentably, we learned just last week that due to the summer melting of Arctic ice, warm waters have swept over the South Pacific, killing coral, and substantially damaging the famed Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s coast.

We ‘re getting more droughts and flooding than the norm..

2016 will go down as our hottest year since we began keeping track of temperatures.

Scientists tell us we’re on pace, despite December’s Paris agreement, for an increase in earth’s average temperature of 3.5 Celsius, if not more, by 2100.

What this means to our children is that coastal cities like NewYork, Míami, and New Orleans will be mere abstracts of memory, or like the Atlantis of ancient myth, lost beneath the sea.

–rj