About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

In my little town?

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Joe Weber

Yes, ICE seems to be everywhere nowadays, including in small Colorado towns

Federal agents outside a Frisco, Colorado, restaurant; source: CBS

A half-century ago, Paul Simon wrote a few lines that may forever bounce about in the heads of many of us. The opening: “In my little town/I grew up believing/God keeps his eye on us all/And he used to lean upon me/As I pledged allegiance to the wall.”

Up here in Summit County, Colorado, many of us feel as divinely blessed as Simon might once have. High in the Rockies, ours is a place of mountains, streams, a stunning lake, ski resorts and the prettiest valleys of anywhere. Frisco, a little town in the county, has an Old West feel about it, even as its restaurants, shops and ski-and-bike outlets serve thousands of modern visitors each year.

So, are Frisco (pop. 3,100) and Summit County (pop. 31,000) places where one might expect brown-shirted armed government agents to show up at a local favorite eatery for a midday raid? Might we expect them to shut the business down by grabbing up its computers and other vital gear, putting the place out of business for an undetermined time? Is another smaller town nearby, Dillon (pop. under 1000), a place where a raid at a home is worrisome enough for administrators in an elementary school to put students into lockdown?

And are the towns places where we would see an uproar by residents, an outpouring of condemnation? Where even the county sheriff disavows any role in the federal actions? Where the county education superintendent bemoans them?

Sadly, in Donald J. Trump’s America, it’s not God who is keeping an eye on us all these days, it seems. Instead, it’s the FBI and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies that are doing so, even in little Summit County and even smaller Frisco and Dillon. Those agencies slipped into the area yesterday to pursue a restaurant that has served locals for over two decades, Hacienda Real, after a tipster claimed the place was employing undocumented workers.

“For several months we have been collaborating with the authorities and delivered all the documentation requested by ICE, fulfilling every requirement,” the restaurant said in a post on its Facebook site. “Unfortunately, this process has led to a broader inspection of the entire restaurant. As part of this investigation, our work team was removed, including the computers we use day to day, so we find ourselves in the need to keep the restaurant temporarily closed while everything is being reviewed.”

The statement added: “Thankfully, we have peace of mind in knowing that for over 22 years we have worked honestly, serving this much-loved community … We’re confident that we’ll soon be able to get back to doing what we do best: working and sharing our food with all of you.”

The raid even took local law enforcement authorities by surprise. As our county newspaper, the Summit Daily News, reported, county Sheriff Jaime FitzSimons said he learned of the operations through a dispatch when the agents arrived. The agents were serving “targeted, federal, criminal” search warrants, FitzSimons told the paper. He added that he knew no details.

Precious little information came from a spokesman for Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit involved in the raids. Talking with a reporter at the scene of some of the action, the spokesman said only that the agents were serving a criminal search warrant as part of “authorized law enforcement activity,” adding that the agency would issue a press release with more information at a later time. He declined to answer questions.

But the splashy headline-grabbing raid by the agents, some hiding behind masks, did not surprise some folks. Rumors of impending ICE actions made the front page of the Summit Daily News last week, so when the agents swarmed into Hacienda Real, people showed up with their phones to video the operation. Some blocked the authorities from moving through the parking lot, to no avail.

“Video of the confrontation shared with 9NEWS shows members of the public shouting at agents, telling them to take off their masks and pick up the excess caution tape they had left on the ground,” a Denver TV station reported. “Footage also shows people standing in front of the agents’ cars, blocking their ability to leave, a woman snapping the license plate frame on one of the vehicles, and what appears to be a man spitting in the direction of an agent getting into a vehicle.”

Spitting at law enforcement agents or interfering with them is a sorry reflection on the state of things nowadays. But it’s also not surprising in our very blue Summit County. Democrats swept all federal, state and county races last year, with Kamala Harris besting Trump by 11,762 votes to 5,244. Our sheriff is elected, so it’s not surprising that, as his office reported, he “did not provide any support or assistance” to the federal authorities, nor did those authorities request it.

Local residents who gathered at the restaurant during the ICE action included the county education superintendent, Tony Byrd. “People are going to live in worry, they were living in worry last week, the week before, pretty much forever and now more,” he told a reporter for the Denver CBS News affiliate. Byrd told one of the officials that they were disrupting the community, adding, “We have a lot of crying kids and families right now.”

Raid at the Dillon home; source: Summit Daily

During the raid at the Dillon home — presumably that of restaurant owner Luis Flores — officials at nearby Dillon Valley Elementary School kept children inside and planned “a controlled release” of them at the end of the day. While the reported immigrant population of the county is small – only about 15 percent of the number overall – the Spanish-speaking student population in the schools is much larger, over 41 percent compared with less than 54 percent white non-Hispanic.

This is a county, moreover, where some local churches have pledged to protect immigrants under threat of arrest, even to the point of breaking the law by giving them sanctuary from agents. With an unemployment rate last reported at 2.8 percent, it’s also a place that economically would be devastated without immigrants to work in the restaurants, stores, building industry and various other services.

The initial news reports said no arrests had been made at either the restaurant or the owner’s home. But a Colorado immigrant advocacy group, Voces Unidas, has since reported that a cook and a waiter were arrested, among others, basing its report on information in the ICE system. The group asked people with more details to contact it.

So, this raid leaves us with a lot of questions. First, was the owner of Hacienda Real, Luis Flores, guilty of anything? Did he hire undocumented workers? Did he underpay them, as sometimes happens with under-the-table staff? Did he treat them well or poorly?

We have no answers to those questions now. Indeed, the restaurant has a sterling reputation, repeatedly winning top honors in the Summit Daily News “Best Of Summit” contests. Its burritos and margaritas are top-notch, according to the paper’s readers.

And, among some 50 recent commenters on its website, condemnation of the ICE actions was universal.

“The last time I was at the restaurant they were donating a ton of food for a fundraiser at Silverthorne elementary,” one said. Another said: “You are loved by the community! For the anonymous caller, may karma get them!” And a third said: “The entire team at Hacienda Real is amazing and you are fully supported!!!! I’m so sorry some bigot racist made a false claim against your business and the livelihood of not only your family but the families of all of your employees.” Yet another vowed: “The community will support you and your restaurant!”

But let’s assume that Hacienda Real did hire undocumented Latin American workers. First, the chances are the food will be authentic. Second, and more important, these workers would be supporting their families and contributing to the economy. Are these bad things? If they are arrested – and if Hacienda Real is driven out of business – is this good for our town and county?

And let’s turn to economics for some insight, too. If the restaurant hired under-the-table workers and underpaid or overworked them, just how long would such workers stay at the place? The average wage level in the county tops $56,000 a year and, with the low jobless rate, help-wanted signs are common. Poorly treated workers would have plenty of other options.

The bottom line, of course, is that ICE isn’t welcome in Summit, Frisco or Dillon. By contrast, hardworking migrants are.

But, given these troubled times, we can only hope that other lines from the Paul Simon song are not apt. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town,” he sang. “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.”

If ICE and its masters in the Trump Administration expand their immigrant roundups, as they plan to, and if they continue to do so in facilities that even ICE says violate dozens of federal standards, lyrics like those may only slightly overstate things all across America.

“The past always looks better than it was.”

Posted on September 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Downton Abbey lets us escape for a while, but real history won’t.

Downton Abbey’s cast, source: tom’s guide

After feeling oppressed by all the ugly sturm und drang of our American life in the last week or so, it was a relief this weekend to enter a world where, as one character put it, the past is a far more comfortable place than the present.

I refer, of course, to a telling comment by character Harold Levinson, an American relative visiting Downton Abbey in that delightful bit of Anglophilic fluff that aired on our local movie screen.

What a glorious escape it was for a couple hours.

Oh, to live in a world of glittering silver place settings, gracious conversation with men in tuxes and women with gloved hands in stunning open-backed gowns, all in a stone behemoth of a home that one’s family has owned for centuries. Oh, to sport top hats and cravats at Ascot, where one could chat amiably – if deferentially – with royalty, with whom one might be related in some distant way. Oh, to be tended by manservants and ladies’ maids with meals served on strenuously polished platters in wondrous halls bedecked with old family portraits and marvelous tapestries.

Of course, it was only a privileged few – relatively speaking – who enjoyed such delights in real life. Their servants lived in far less cozy quarters and, simply by accidents of birth, were fated to call their “betters” m’lady or m’lord. And the vast majority of their countrymen lived in various states of unpleasantness or worse— sometimes grinding poverty—while they organized their oh-so-tiring visits to the great and glorious homes of London for the whirl of the social season.

To enjoy “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” and the earlier installments, one just has to put reality on a shelf. One must imagine that he or she was part of that upper crust, not the downstairs folks. Not that their lives in the fictional kitchens and stables were all that bad. The lord and lady, naturally, were kindly sorts who had at heart the best interests of all in the county, the domain they were born to oversee.

Downton, of course, is a lovely bit of cotton candy. It paints an England that is fading, being dragged into the middle of a 20^th century that is a far less pleasant place. “They say America is the future and England is the past,” the Levinson character says. “Sometimes it’s more comfortable in the past.”

Judging by the ample amount of gray hair in our surprisingly crowded theater at our afternoon matinee, many of the movie’s fans might second that thought. “Downton” offers a cozy world beloved by those of a certain demographic, a group of which many of us, reluctantly perhaps, are part. The series aired for six seasons on TV in the U.S., beginning in early 2011, a time before the Trump era, a time when for many of us the past was indeed far more comfortable than the present. There were also movies in 2019 and 2022 that could remind us of the halcyon days before 2016.

As it happens, this installment of the Crawley family saga is set in 1930. The Depression hasn’t done its nastiest work yet (though the family’s American branch did lose a bundle to a con man after the crash) and the stunning Lady Mary (heartthrob Michelle Dockery) and her father, Lord Grantham, are a bit stressed at how to keep the estate together without selling off too much. And, of course, the next world war is a long way off. Still, change is afoot for the royals and that does give the Crawleys a lot of worry.

As The New York Times put it: “.., the movie delivers exactly what ‘Downton’ fans want: yummy photography … stunning set pieces and Lady Mary trying on as many fabulous frocks as possible. It will be another 15 years before the rise of socialism pierces the aspic of aristocracy; for now, the worst that can happen to the Crawleys is being ousted from a ball.”

Highclere Castle, setting for Downton Abbey, source: Golden Tours Travel Blog

For longtime fans, it’s a delight to immerse oneself in this world, a place facing plenty of threats but still a realm of comfort and warmth where social roles are rigid but, in this imagined reality at least, are not all that constricting. The upstairs and downstairs folks look after one another in a mutual way. And there’s much reassuring about that old stone pile of a family manse, which had stood through centuries of turmoil. Yes, divorce among the upper classes is intolerably scandalous, but even that proves surmountable for our redoubtable Lady Mary.

“With its mix of old characters and new, worldly upheaval and small-town drama, [writer Julian] Fellowes illustrates what ‘Downton’ has always done best, which is a social examination of how much things have changed and how they haven’t changed at all,” the Los Angeles Times says.

Fluffy, unrealistic and comically so, yes. But what a delightful ride it is, what a sweet fantasy.

“It’s no surprise that ‘The Grand Finale’ is thoroughly fun, stunning to look at … and aptly emotional as the iconic brand’s swan song,” Variety’s reviewer wrote. “There are expected doses of fan service throughout (including a playful wink to one of Dame Smith’s most unforgettable lines, ‘What’s a weekend?’) and a neatly achieved final sequence that says a lovely and memorable farewell to all those for whom the show has meant so much. But what lingers most after ‘The Grand Finale’ is its handle on the end of an era, which inherently comprehends that big ideas matter more than massive estates.”

Those big ideas, of course, touch on matters of equality, democracy, feminism, gay rights, the end of hereditary privilege. These things, in real life, are far more important than a wistful look at aristocracy. And, tragically, in our time these things are under merciless assault.

Today, we Yanks contend with leaders who appear to live in a world in which such modern values must be stamped out. Indeed, our president and his colleagues are determined to stamp out our history, to recast it in terms almost as glossy as those in Downton Abbey. Signs and exhibits related to slavery, for instance, are being pulled from our national parks, as The Washington Post reported.

The Smithsonian is under pressure to remove all unflattering elements, evoking only a gauzy celebratory past. Of course, that institution and so many others should be recording and educating about reality as it was, not as some corrupt political regime thinks it should be.

It’s fine, of course, to go to movies that paint happier pictures — so long as one knows they are false. What lingers most about the gently challenged world of Downton for me is that it’s so much warmer and more pleasant than the too-often ugly and unhappy world we now inhabit.

In Downton’s universe, no one is being assassinated by disturbed Internet- and video-game-obsessed young men. No one is fielding military forces in our cities or hauling people off to detention camps for deportation to frightening Third World countries. No one is courting the rebirth of polio and other dread diseases with a disdain for the science that all but eliminated those things years after the fictional Crawleys lived. And no one is erasing the past, even as they mourn its passing.

The more class-conscious (and, perhaps, more reality-focused) British paper, The Guardian, perhaps not surprisingly mostly mocked the new movie, though it couldn’t pan it altogether. Its reviewer referred to the film’s “gibbering, wittering, blithering and surreally enjoyable nonsense,” saying it was “very silly and always watchable in its weird way.” But he hoped the latest was not in fact the finale for the abbey.

Yes, the past can be far nicer than many parts of the present, at least in the confines of a theater. Our very real danger today is that we will forgo the real past for some self-deluding demagogue’s version. That would be an all-too-real tragedy.

Cleansing the past

Posted on September 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Will Charlie Kirk’s death — and life — be remembered in full?

Young, good-looking and charismatic enough to impress his party’s elders while rallying lots of other young people to their cause, this passionate true believer was gunned down by people he had long attacked as enemies. As he lay dying, a backer released a statement saying he had been assaulted by “degenerate communist subhumans.”

In death, however, the assassinated man – the son of a Christian minister and a woman whose family included ministers — proved especially useful to his party. His funeral was filmed and turned into a major propaganda event as he was declared a martyr. The party’s top leader called his sacrifice to the “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.”

The man was Horst Wessel, a Nazi party enthusiast who was killed in Berlin in 1930, as his party was beginning its ascent into infamy. Are we now seeing what happened to Wessel take place with a modern right-wing firebrand, Charlie Kirk?

Wessel was embraced by Nazi propagandist leader Joseph Goebbels and party organs. A wartime article in the Nazi-owned Völkischer Beobachter newspaper called Wessel “the hero of the Brown Revolution” and referred to his “sacrificial death” as one that “passionately inflamed millions who followed.”

Today, in Kirk’s honor, flags are being lowered to half-staff around the country by order of President Trump. That’s a distinction usually reserved for deceased presidents and other leaders. Also, the president, without evidence of what drove Kirk’s assassin, was quick to decry the “radical left” for his killing.

So, are we seeing political martyrdom opportunistically bestowed on this polarizing young figure? Are we seeing a nobility bestowed on him in death that many say wasn’t deserved in his life?

Social media, cable TV and other outlets lately have been filled with praise for Kirk, leader of the campus-focused Turning Point USA organization. Vice president JD Vance called him “a true friend. The kind of guy you could say something to and know it would always stay with him.” A tearful CNN commentator, Scott Jennings, called him “one of the most unique and special people in the conservative movement today. What he was able to build, the people he was able to organize, was just so large and powerful.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan called Kirk “a presence in the life of a whole generation of young conservatives” adding that “he set a kind of template for how to discuss politics—with good cheer and confidence, with sincerity and a marshaling of facts.” Over at The Washington Post, George Will compared Kirk with William F. Buckley, that eloquent lion of the right, saying: “Kirk was killed at the beginning of what was to have been a Buckley-like tour of political evangelism among the unconverted: college students. He also was probably killed because, unlike Buckley when he was 31 in 1956, Kirk was advocating a powerful and ascendant politics.”

Even at The New York Times, Ezra Klein celebrated Kirk. “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein held. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

When any young person – and Kirk, the father of a 1-year-old son and a 3-year-old girl, was just 31 – is killed, it is monstrous. And when the murdered person is an influential political figure, it is even worse. Such assassinations must be decried anywhere and at any time by everyone on any end of the political spectrum. Such a killing is anathema to the free discourse that is a pillar of American culture or should be.

“There is no place in our country for this kind of violence,” former President Joe Biden said. “It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.” And his predecessor, Barack Obama, similarly said: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.”

Also, I concede that it seems churlish to speak ill of the dead person, especially so soon after his passing.

But I also fear that in the lionizing of Kirk, we are seeing a far-too-convenient beatification of sorts that serves Trump and Trumpism too well. Will Kirk’s death be used to further justify outrages that go even beyond anti-immigrant roundups, the placement of troops in cities? Will we now see further rollbacks of reproductive rights and the freedom to marry a person of one’s choosing?

Erin Reed, source: Sociologists 4 Trans Justice

We do ill to ourselves as a society to forget or downplay many of the things that Kirk stood for and built his organization around. As journalist and blogger Erin Reed has written, Kirk in 2023 called transgender people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God.” Do such sentiments reflect a compassionate and goodhearted man?

In one interview, Reed wrote, he said the first thing he thinks when he sees a Black pilot is, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.” In another, Kirk called for the man who assaulted Nancy Pelosi’s husband to be bailed out of jail. He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964— and infamously said a few gun deaths were worth his Second Amendment rights in the aftermath of a school shooting. He even derided empathy itself as worthless, a sentiment that Reed wrote has since metastasized into a broader far-right project to strip empathy education from schools.

In another interview, Reed noted, Kirk mocked fellow Christians who followed scripture about loving their neighbor. He scoffed that God also “calls for the stoning of gay people,” which he described as “God’s perfect law.”

As the Anti-Defamation League has written, Kirk promoted conspiracy theories about election fraud and Covid-19. He was an enthusiastic backer of Christian nationalism, “the idea that Christians should dominate government and other areas of life in America,” the ADL reported. His TPUSA organization, the league said, has been a magnet for racists and white supremacists.

“Kirk has created a vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists, who speak and attend his annual AmericaFest and other events sponsored by TPUSA,” the ADL reported. “AmericaFest has showcased extreme rhetoric from speakers and attendees and has attracted white supremacists.”

Will his death legitimize even the worst of his views? And was this really the sort of person young Americans should admire and emulate?

Certainly, Trump thinks so: he plans to bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on him. “Charlie was a giant of his generation, a champion of liberty and an inspiration to millions and millions of people,” the president said. “The date of the ceremony will be announced,” he said, adding, “and I can only guarantee you one thing, that we will have a very big crowd.”

Crowds, of course, are important to Trump. And with Kirk’s death offering him a golden chance to draw an audience, this is an opportunity the president will not pass up. We don’t know how and when he’ll commemorate Kirk, but he’s almost certain to make a big show of it.

Recall that Trump has said little about other killings of Democratic leaders. In a Sept. 10 video, USA Today noted, the president did not mention the June shooting of Minnesota House of Representatives speaker emerita Melissa Hortman, though he alluded to his own survived assassination attempts and the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana in 2017. He offered no presidential medal or flag lowering for Hortman.

The president also did not mention other attacks on Democrats, including an arson attack at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house, a kidnapping plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or an assault on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their home.

Those events apparently don’t serve Trump’s agenda as well as Kirk’s death does.

As former President Obama said, we don’t know what motivated Kirk’s assassin, and it’s possible we never will learn that. Will it prove to be a “leftist” assault, as Trump suggested? In two attempts on Trump’s life, the would-be killers – Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh — seemed to have been driven more by mental illness, anti-government beliefs or antisemitism.

Back in pre-Nazi Germany, Wessel was killed by Communist assassins. His death helped galvanize and further drive the Nazi movement. Kirk’s life certainly helped do the same for Trumpism. Will his death now do even more to advance that cause? And will his life be remembered in its fullest and most honest way, or as something to be sanitized, a martyrdom Trump can market?

The last bulwark

Posted on September 4, 2025 by Joe Weber

Some courts stand tall against Trump’s depredations

Judge Allison D. Burroughs, source: The Boston Globe

Judge Allison D. Burroughs was unequivocal.

Harvard has been plagued by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to combat it, she wrote in her 84-page decision in the university suit against the Trump Administration. “Defendants and the President are right to combat antisemitism and to use all lawful means to do so,” she wrote. “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

But antisemitism on the campus – which she suggested the university has gone far to defeat since the upheavals of 2023-24 — was not what is really driving Donald J. Trump and his administration in their campaign against the university. It was not the reason for the government to cancel billions in research grants to the university last spring, a full year after pro-Palestinian actions at the school had all but faded away.

“… [T]here is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism,” the judge said. “In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA [the federal Administrative Procedure Act], the First Amendment and Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act].”

Judge Burroughs’s blunt ruling came amid a flurry of other recent court setbacks for Trump. A federal appeals court shot down many of his tariffs, another court ruled his use of troops in Los Angeles was illegal, and still another harshly ruled that Trump had no standing to sue federal judges in Maryland over immigration rulings they made.

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Judge Thomas Cullen, a Trump appointee, wrote in the Maryland case.

Such losses by Trump suggest that even as his overreaches grow, critics and clear-thinking judges are not sitting still for them. The court actions offer hope amid a seemingly nonstop parade of outrages.

Let’s consider Burroughs’s order closely. Along with being notable for even stronger language than Cullen’s, the clarity and airtight logic of her ruling is exceptional. It is an outstanding example of how the courts remain our last bastion of resistance to a would-be tyrant’s vindictive assaults.

To many critics, it has long been obvious that Trump has used antisemitism as a club with which to batter Harvard and other schools. But the judge’s decision ripped any shred of a veneer off that claim.

“There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” wrote Burroughs, an Obama appointee. “By way of example (although by no means an exhaustive list), Defendants have ordered immunologists overseeing a multi-school tuberculosis consortium to immediately stop research, … a researcher at the Wyss Institute to halt his development of an advanced chip designed to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure during the upcoming Artemis II mission to the moon … and another Wyss Institute scientist, a recipient of the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement, to cease his research into Lou Gehrig’s disease ….”

She continued: “Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs have begun the process of cutting funding for research into, among other life-saving measures, ‘a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized.’” Yet another project involved a defense program aimed “at increasing awareness of emerging biological threats.”

Going beyond the irrelevance of the defunded research to the antisemitism claim, the judge also laid bare Trump’s true motivations. Using his own language on social media, she left no question that the assault on Harvard was driven by his longstanding and broad attack on “wokeism.”

Among Trump’s posts: “[p]erhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Then there was his slam at Harvard for “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots,” followed by his denunciation of the university as “a Liberal mess.”

Her order also shone a light on Trump’s vindictiveness, his rage at the university for having the temerity to oppose him, unlike schools such as Columbia and Brown, which rolled over under his attacks. To placate Trump Columbia agreed to pay $221 million, while Brown agreed to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations. Trump has sought $500 million from Harvard.

At one point, Trump said he was considering taking away $3 billion from “a very antisemitic Harvard,” which he would then give to “TRADE SCHOOLS,” the judge noted. Then, during an interview in the Oval Office, Trump said that Harvard is “hurting [itself]” by “fighting,” adding that “Columbia has been, really, and they were very, very bad . . . . But they’re working with us on finding a solution.” He further stated that Harvard “wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked”; “every time [Harvard] fight[s], they lose another $250 million”; and “[a]ll they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

Recall that Trump, far from “smart,” was a middling transfer student at Penn’s Wharton School, where one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Perhaps he still suffers still from an insecure man’s resentment at all those folks who were far brighter than he?

Certainly, there’s little doubt that these were the infuriated reactions of a martinet offended at a school that refused to genuflect to him, as so many other institutions have. Sadly, yet another university president — Northwestern’s Michael Schill — just quit, a few months after Trump’s minions froze $790 million in funding for the school — providing another scalp among many that Trumpists have claimed in recent years.

As for Harvard, Burroughs invalidated the administration’s freeze on billions of dollars in federal research funding for a broad array of projects. But it’s not clear when or whether the school will get any of the money back.

The administration will drag out the matter with appeals as a White House spokeswoman argued that the university “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, by using agencies across the federal government, Trump has threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, tried to block its ability to enroll international students and probed money it receives from foreign sources. Harvard will also owe higher taxes on its $53 billion endowment under the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Source: Supreme Court Historical Society

Trump’s assault on academia continues, of course. And, in the end, many of his attacks will be adjudicated in the Supreme Court. Good outcomes are far from a sure thing there, given the deference the body has shown to Trump.

But, at least in some quarters, smart people such as Burroughs are seeing the assault for the petty and destructive effort it is. The fight is far from over, but this round has gone to the better side.

Can “going high” work again?

Posted on August 25, 2025 by Joe Weber

Gutter level politics has a long history, but we seem to hit new lows daily

For much of early American history, politics at the highest levels was a bloodsport.

Just consider how our founding fathers spoke of one another. To John Adams, Alexander Hamilton was “a bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” and Thomas Jefferson had “a mind, soured… and eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” For his part, Jefferson saw Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” And, as all fans of the musical know, Hamiton died after Aaron Burr shot him in a duel.

So, is it inconsistent for Gavin Newsom to troll Donald J. Trump by mimicking his tweeting style?

“DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER ‘HOT,’” the California governor’s press office tweeted. “FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS ‘STEP.’ MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE ‘BIG STAIRS’ ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW.”

The governor, a likely 2028 presidential contender, is even hawking merchandise à la Trump. His red caps proclaim “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!” And he mocks Trump’s bombastic self-promotion in an X post that says “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THIS IS THE GREATEST MERCHANDISE EVER MADE.”

And is it in keeping for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, another possible presidential candidate, to refer on X to Trump as “President Bone Spurs” who “will do anything to get out of walking” and to offer him a golf cart? As The Wall Street Journal reported, Trump had criticized Moore over “out of control, crime ridden, Baltimore” on Truth Social after Moore had invited the president to walk the streets. “I would much prefer that he clean up this Crime disaster before I go there,” Trump said, and floated the idea of sending the National Guard to the streets of Baltimore, as he has in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, source: Johns Hopkins Magazine

The bone spurs reference, of course, was to Trump dodging the draft during the Vietnam War by getting a doctor’s note about foot problems. For his part, Moore served as a captain in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Afghanistan, belatedly getting a Bronze Star.

And then there’s Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s jibe at the Democratic National Convention last year.

“Donald Trump thinks we should trust him on the economy because he claims to be very rich,” said Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune. “Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.” More recently, in response to Trump floating the idea of sending troops to Chicago, the governor said: “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families.”

Of course, with his combative and bullying style, Trump years ago triggered the insultathon that American politics has become. Slinging the mud, however inartfully, works for him among his underschooled supporters, who often say he “tells it like it is,” unlike the polished politicians of most of the last decades.

It’s not clear when vulgarity and coarseness became synonymous with seeming truthfulness, but neither truth nor simple good manners are things Trump is well-acquainted with, of course. Some of his more juvenile nicknames for people who offend him include Allison Cooper (Anderson Cooper), Maggot Hagerman (Maggie Haberman), Tampon Tim (Tim Walz), Little Marco (Marco Rubio, his own Secretary of State) and, of course, Governor Newscum.

But does it need to be this way? Aside from winning splashy headlines, does it really help a potential president to imitate Trump’s buffoonery? Or would grace and class sell better to those in the electorate who find the schoolyard taunts and WWE-style crudeness tiresome and unworthy of anyone in – or prospectively in – the White House?

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, source: Politico

Consider Andy Beshear, another potential White House occupant. After spring storms clobbered much of Kentucky, Trump belatedly approved emergency aid for the state. Beshear, the state’s popular Democratic governor, was gracious about the president. When asked about a call he got from Trump, Beshear said he and Trump had “good, positive conversation that was only about emergency assistance,” adding that “he was nothing but polite, and positive, and I was nothing but polite and positive.”

Beshear, the son of a former Kentucky governor, was elected to the state’s highest office in 2019 and reelected in 2023. A former attorney general in the state, he is also a deacon in his Christian church, as is his wife. Beshear claims to strive “each day to live out the values of faith and public service,” though right-wing religious figures have attacked what one called Beshear’s “radically progressive political ideology,” mainly blasting the governor’s defense of LGBTQ rights. Beshear riled them with an executive order banning “conversion therapy” on minors.

Beshear in many respects is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, albeit with far better morals. Clinton governed a red state, Arkansas, espoused moderate positions that many in our center-right country could tolerate. Clinton also for the most part avoided gutter-level insults, preferring a gentle jab to a schoolyard slur. Clinton last year poked fun at Trump’s penchant for talking mostly about himself. “So the next time you hear him, don’t count the lies, count the I’s,” he said.

Compared to the way Trump and some Democratic presidential aspirants are talking, that’s mild stuff, little more than blunt observation of the facts. It’s akin to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, another possible presidential contender, calling Trump a “pathological liar” after a debate with President Biden that was, in fact, marked by falsehoods from Trump. Similarly, it was fair game for Shapiro to say that Trump was “obsessed with continuing to spew hate and division in our politics” after Trump called him “the highly overrated Jewish Governor,” a phrase calculated to whip up Trump’s antisemitic followers.

Of course, Trump’s baiting approach drives responses that, even when they are factually on target, seem like descents to his level.

As for Clinton’s stab at Trump’s egocentricity, the president has done little in office but prove how self-aggrandizing he is. A huge image of him now draping the Labor Department not only reflects his megalomania, but evokes the propagandistic self-adulation of the world’s worst despots, men who ruled countries such as North Korean, Romania, Iraq and, of course, Germany.

Self-adulation at the Labor Dept., source: Meidastouch Network

Can someone such as Beshear bring the Democratic Party and the nation back to some sense of civility? Some sense of personal modesty and integrity? Has that boat sailed forever, throwing us back to the days when national leaders vied for who could be more vicious?

“When they go low, we go high,” is how Michelle Obama put it in an address at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Sadly, she took a sharper tack at last year’s convention, accusing Trump of “going small.” The former first lady said: “Going small is petty, it’s unhealthy, and, quite frankly, it’s unpresidential… It’s his same old con: doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.”

Still, it’s entirely proper to attack misogyny, racism and con artistry, along with the savagery Trump and his minions have brought to bear against immigrants. His conduct and that of his Justice Department and ICE against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for instance, is despicable. So, too, must we condemn his dictatorial aspirations, as shown by his troop deployments in American cities, along with the sheer vindictiveness of his actions against critics. Consider the FBI raid on the home of John Bolton, a former Trump ally who has his old boss’s number all too well and often lays that out in TV appearances, infuriating the president.

“The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas,” the often Trump-friendly editorialists at The Wall Street Journal said. “We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”

Lambasting loathsome policies in virile and sharp terms is different from calling someone “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” Or, as Trump labeled Bolton, calling someone “a lowlife” and a “sleazebag” — terms he applied to the Yale lawyer who served under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush before becoming a once-trusted adviser in the first Trump White House. We need bold and sharp criticisms of what Trump does, as well as smart insights into his character or lack of it.

But how much longer will all this ugliness last? Will it end in 2029? Or has Trump so polluted the atmosphere that it will take a generation to clear the foul air? Can a Beshear or someone like him win against Trumpist toadies such as JD Vance by going high? In time, we’ll find out.

Are there really coincidences?

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Joe Weber

Synchronicity at a time of loss makes one wonder

Five Weber siblings, years ago. Madeline is in the front middle.

Some say there are no such things as coincidences. Instead, they are messages of a sort, pointing us toward some purpose or path.

For me, such pseudo-mystical notions are almost always poppycock. They’re up there in the Twilight Zone with crystals, Sedona vortexes and Tarot cards. But now that I am grieving the loss of a beloved sister and have been confronted with a few such coincidences, I wonder what I am to make of them.

Consider these episodes of what psychologist Carl Jung called “synchronicity:”

First, before she passed a couple weeks ago, my sister Madeline told me she was unafraid to die. Indeed, she badly wanted to end the suffering that cancer had inflicted on her and all of us who loved her. She said she wanted to just go to sleep, with the help of drugs, and not wake up.

That was tough for me and all of us to hear, of course. Very tough. I had to bite my tongue from saying, “But Madeline, none of us can bear you leaving.”

Still, in coincidence number one, a friend just handed me a powerful book about death, “The Beauty of What Remains” by Rabbi Steve Leder. “After more than thirty years, I have visited nearly a thousand dying people, and so far not one – not one single person who is really, actively dying – has told me he or she is afraid,” the rabbi writes. “A family sometimes asks me to visit with their dying loved one because they are afraid of life without them or they assume their loved one is panicked, but the agenda of the dying is not one of fear, it is one of peace.”

The ill people the rabbi dealt with didn’t want to cause pain to their survivors by departing, but they felt their time had come. And they were okay with that, just as Madeline was.

A second coincidence is my sitting here now, writing in a coffeeshop in Frisco, Colorado, with “Badlands” playing in the background. That song, of course, is a classic from Bruce Springsteen, and includes the lyric “Well, I believe in the love that you gave me/I believe in the faith that could save me/I believe in the hope/And I pray that someday/It may raise me above these/Badlands …”

Madeline, who lived not far from the Boss, was a devoted Springsteen fan, having seen more than 100 of his shows. All of us who are missing my sister are living in the badlands at the moment. We’re likely to be here for a long, long time, I expect.

But I ask you also to consider coincidence No. 3. Just today, the new issue of “The Atlantic” just arrived. It carries a long piece about assisted death in Canada. Euthanasia – or, as the Canadians call it, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAID – has been surging in the country ever since it was legalized in 2016. Today, it accounts for about one in 20 deaths in the country, with more than 60,000 MAID demises reported since legalization.

Can these three things be accidental? Can it be just coincidence that for the last several days, as friends and I marked Madeline’s passing by gathering in prayer, that I’ve told them about a) her enthusiasm for Springsteen and b) her lack of fear about dying, her wish to end her life on her terms?

After battling cancer for too many years, Madeline wanted only for the pain to end. But when she told a hospice nurse she wanted to just fall asleep — with the help of a lethal drug – she was told that was not legal in New Jersey. She could have pain medication, but nothing that would hasten her passing.

Sadly, then, my sister’s suffering lasted too many days longer than it should have because assisted death is under a legal cloud in New Jersey. That would not have been the case in Canada or in eight U.S. states where medically aided death is fully legal. While the Jersey legislature legalized the process in New Jersey in 2019, opponents have apparently put it on ice with a bill rendering it illegal. That bill is sitting in committee, vying with another that would make such a process easier. With such legislative confusion, it seems, my sister’s hospice nurses would not give her the option she wanted.

It’s hard to know why the two legislators behind the anti-euthanasia bill, Republicans Bob Auth and John DiMaio, oppose medically assisted dying because there is little in the press about their effort. But generally opponents fear the potential of abuse and coercion, particularly for vulnerable individuals including the elderly, disabled, or those lacking adequate access to healthcare. They don’t want to normalize suicide, as apparently the Canadians have.

Also, religions including Judaism and Catholicism, my sister’s devoutly held faith, oppose euthanasia. They hold that our bodies are divine gifts that we don’t have the right to eliminate. While some religious authorities permit the withholding of life-preserving treatment, they don’t allow for drugs that would end life.

But who should make the call here? If a person with a terminal disease wants to bring the suffering to an end, should he or she have the right to demand help for that? If such a person has made all his or her goodbyes and come to terms with the inevitability of their death, should outsiders nullify their choice?

And, if one believes that G-d chooses one’s time to pass, could it not be true that the moment of assisted death is the chosen time?

Some believe that assisted suicide amounts to murder, even if people taking their lives administer the fatal drugs themselves, albeit with others providing the toxins. But do those people have the right to, in effect, prolong another’s agony now that medicine has the ability to eliminate it?

I would have wanted much more time with Madeline, many more years, in fact. She was just 65, younger than three of us in the family.

I will long mourn her. I will also long remember the good times she gave all of us, the way Madeline – the middle child of seven of us — was an anchor for us. I will recall how she helped each of my siblings whenever and however they needed it. I will think fondly of her intelligent and compassionate politics, a subject of many a phone conversation between us, along with talk of family. And I will think fondly of our visits to one another, the too-few times our busy lives intersected.

I’m reminded of other lyrics in Springsteen’s song. He sings: “Badlands, you gotta live it everyday/Let the broken hearts stand/As the price you’ve gotta pay/Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood/These badlands start treating us good.”

Madeline’s death broke the hearts of all of us, most of all her wonderful husband and three devoted sons, all of whom were with her in the final days. That heartbreak was inevitable as cancer took her away from us. But it shouldn’t have made her suffer even a minute longer than she would have wanted, the time she needed to make her farewells.

A final note on synchronicity, which fascinated Jung. He told of a famous case in which a beetle , a golden scarab, appears in a patient’s dream and then, just as she’s telling Jung about it, a similar bug taps on the window near them.

Could such a thing be accidental, one must wonder? Or was the universe telling Jung and his patient something? And, if so, what could that possibly be? Was it a reminder that not everything in our world can be rationally explained?

Rationalist as I am, I am nonetheless sure that not everything can be explained. But for Jung, the important thing about synchronicity was not that it appeared to be a blast of paranormality, something from the great beyond or the collective unconscious. Instead, what fascinated him was how people found meaning in coincidences, how what was going on within their minds or lives gave meaning to external things that seemed to echo those internal events.

I will long hear echoes of my beloved sister and that is a great comfort.

Entering the reality-distortion zone

Posted on August 12, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s truth-scrapping efforts reach deep

Big Brother, source: Michael Radford’s film,’1984;’ source: El País

George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in “1984” had a peculiar mission. Its job was not to spread truth at all, but rather to insure that history and current information aligned with the views and goals of the infallible Big Brother and his ruling party. When reality differed, the descriptions and accounts had to be bent accordingly.

Echoes of that approach abound today, it seems.

Take, for instance, what Washington, D.C. looks like. The district that Donald J. Trump sees is a dystopian spectacle of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” The capital, he tells us, has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” along with “drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

Presumably, the president is not referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob he incited at the Capitol or to the current mostly supine GOP members of Congress and the Senate. Certainly, he’s not referring to the district crime rates as reported by its police.

If one looks at the D.C. police reports, violent crime in the capital is dropping. Homicides fell 32 percent in the district between 2023 and 2024, to 187 last year, the lowest tally since 2019. And the murder rate is down again about 11 percent this year, with 100 recorded so far. Indeed, per capita, D.C. doesn’t even crack the list of the 30 most dangerous cities in the U.S.

To Trump, as with Big Brother and other would-be tyrants, however, reality is not what data tells us. It is, instead, what Trump conjures up in his own mind. Indeed, independently developed data is, to him, an inconvenience that should be suppressed. And incendiary language must reflect the reality of his fevered imagination.

Independent information gets in the way of Trump’s efforts to dispatch federal troops to whatever scene he deems appropriate, for instance. Thus, immigration is an “invasion” a term that justifies the development of detention camps and roundups on the streets by masked authorities. Thus, military forces can be stationed on Los Angeles streets to suppress a “rebellion,” even if a major general involved doesn’t seem to see that.

And independently generated data gets in the way of Trump’s vision of an economy now on the way to a “golden age.” When a Bureau of Labor Statistics report suggested that hiring slowed in July and was weaker than expected in the prior two months, Trump took umbrage at the figures and so fired the bureau director. He moved to install a Heritage Foundation lackey who has suggested deep-sixing monthly jobs reports and presumably will generate shinier numbers.

When people outside of government, moreover, don’t sing his tune, Trump argues for finding new crooners. Thus, he now is pressuring Goldman Sachs to can Jan Hatzius, the firm’s longtime chief economist whose views on the economy-draining effects of tariffs mirror those of many other economists. Trump took to Truth Social to say that firm chief executive David Solomon should “go out and get himself a new Economist.”

Reality bending by Trump and his minions entered a new realm with the president’s deployment of 800 National Guards in D.C. and his seizure of the police department there, as well as his attack on the nation’s preeminent Wall Street firm. These big stretches by Trump could amount in the end to little more than headline-grabbing stunts designed to distract us from the ways his staffers are burying Epstein scandal information.

But Trump’s deflection and misinformation efforts aren’t all that new. Consider the administration’s moves to rewrite American history in national parks and historic sites with a March executive order mandating that such sites not “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history,” but instead emphasize the “progress of the American people” and the “grandeur of the American landscape.”

No matter whether it’s true or not, unflattering information is not welcome in the America Trump is making great again.

And this reality-twisting, whether economic or cultural, seems likely only to deepen. The White House now plans to review exhibits by the Smithsonian Institution to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” as one lickspittle wrote. The effort will “support a broader vision of excellence that highlights historically accurate, uplifting, and inclusive portrayals of America’s heritage.”

Propaganda, in other words.

National Museum of African American History; source: Washington, D.C.

One can only wonder how this will play out in a couple Smithsonian facilities that have been more thorough in efforts to fully describe our history, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian. Administrators may be hard-pressed to find a lot uplifting about the nation’s earliest years regarding Blacks and Native Americans, though they will surely be pushed to do so.

Of course, reality distortion is a familiar tack for many Trump toadies. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claims that Trump’s White House is the “most transparent in history.” So why, one wonders, is that White House removing transcripts of Trump’s comments from an official database – which would allow historians and others to easily check his tortured words against reality — and instead is posting limited numbers of videos?

Writing as Orwell, BBC producer Eric Arthur Blair published “1984” in 1949. Blair was appalled by the totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But his fictional “Oceania,” the superstate that was home of the Ministry of Truth, included the Americas and the British isles.

Some 76 years on, at least one political leader seems to be doing his best to make Orwell’s vision a reality — of sorts.

“Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

Posted on August 8, 2025 by Joe Weber

But Malcolm Forbes’s famous admonition holds no brief in Trumpworld

J.B. Milliken, source: University of California

Talk about a baptism by fire. Only a week into his job as president of the sprawling University of California system, James (J.B.) Milliken, has been plunged into a risky battle with Donald J. Trump. Milliken has had to be unequivocal about a $1 billion extortion demand Trump’s minions are trying to impose on UCLA, one of the pillars of the 10-campus system.

“As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians,” said Milliken, a son and grandson of small-town Nebraska bankers. “Americans across this great nation rely on the vital work of UCLA and the UC system for technologies and medical therapies that save lives, grow the U.S. economy, and protect our national security.”

Ostensibly, the federal demand is being made to settle claims that university officials tolerated antisemitism in demonstrations against the Gaza War in the 2023-24 academic year and that its diversity polices breached anti-discrimination laws. The demand is being accompanied by requirements for policy changes dealing with admissions and gender identity in sports and housing, as well as the abolition of scholarships for racial or ethnic groups.

In fact, however, the diktat is the biggest yet in a campaign inspired by authors of a Project 2025 effort, Project Esther, which nominally targets antisemitism on campuses, but more broadly assaults “wokeism” in the academic world. The project was developed largely by Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Trump and vice president at The Heritage Foundation. Coates, a self-described committed Christian, holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on an academic career until she grew alienated by what she called a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, according to The New York Times.

Columbia University, source: the university

The $1 billion demand ratchets up the stakes in the longstanding Trumpist and Heritage Foundation assault on major universities. The administration forced Columbia University into a $200 million deal and Brown University into a $50 million settlement. Negotiations are under way for a resolution with Harvard, with a $500 million figure being bandied about. Still more extortions could well be on the way from other schools under the gun by Trump.

But these deals beg several enormous questions. How will extracting the hefty sums of cash advance education at these schools, for instance? Sure, policy changes that could include cuts in pro-Palestinian academic departments could help foster a balance in curricular offerings, but does cutting diversity efforts have anything but a negative impact? If the administration truly aimed to improve higher education, wouldn’t it be making more money available, perhaps supporting educational efforts more sympathetic to Israel, not imposing brutal penalties?

Already, the University of California has overhauled practices in some areas called for by the Trump administration — including a ban on protest encampments and the abolition of diversity statements in hiring, as the Los Angeles Times reported. So, why does Trump want to humble the system financially? What really underlays his animus toward these schools?

Certainly, part of this must be longstanding Republican animosity to California and perhaps to the likelihood that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom could be a presidential candidate in the 2028 election. The $1 billion proposal came just a day after Newsom said UC should not bend “on their knees” to President Trump, as the other schools have.

“We’re not Brown, we’re not Columbia, and I’m not going to be governor if we act like that,” Newsom said. “Period. Full stop. I will fight like hell to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Even more personally, however, one must wonder at the motivations of a disgruntled former academic such as Coates, or of the middling transfer student into Penn’s Wharton School, Trump. Are they driven by grudges, by a need to punish those by whom they feel wronged or who shunned them? Recall that one of Trump’s former professors called him “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Certainly, the rarely articulate Trump’s feelings about schooling are clear from his plans to eliminate the Department of Education.

Explorations of Trump’s motivations are legion. Perhaps one of the best, however, is a new offering by The New Yorker’s David Remnick. As a child, Remnick writes, “Little Donny” was “a pigtail puller, an unruly loudmouth who tormented his teachers and hurled insults and rocks at other kids. When Trump was thirteen, his father, Fred, shipped him off to a military school, in Cornwall, New York.” There, “Trump made it plain that his delight in domination was the immutable core of him.”

Remnick tells us that Marc Fisher, who co-authored “Trump Revealed,” an early biography and character analysis, once told PBS that, as a cadet, Trump “used a broomstick as a weapon against classmates who didn’t listen to him when he told them what to do. He was in part enforcing the rules of the academy, but he was equally so enforcing the rules of Donald Trump.”

There’s no doubt that Trump exults in having powerful people and institutions quake at his feet. “They’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir, thank you very much,’ ” he bragged, after certain law firms started making their pitiful arrangements with the White House. “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’”

But, even beyond Trump’s need to force schools to quiver before him, other worrisome trends may cloud our national future long after the would-be tyrant is gone. Where we were once a country that built great universities — private and public — because we realized they were essential to national growth, much popular sentiment is against expansion — at least as reflected by rightist politicians. Hostility to higher education is widespread.

California may be case story No. 1. Growth was long the mainstay of the system, which now serves more than 295,000 students. Before he landed in the cauldron he’s now in, Milliken ran other university systems, getting an early start as president of the University of Nebraska, from which he had graduated in 1979. When he led the NU system, from 2004 to 2014, the university was punching far above its weight, so much so that its flagship campus in Lincoln joined the Big Ten athletic and academic conference in 2011.

Milliken, a lawyer, got his post at Nebraska in part because he had worked as the legislative assistant to an influential Republican congresswoman from the state, Virginia D. Smith, the only woman to serve in the House from the state. Republicans such as Smith had long championed higher education and she served on the House Education Committee.

Enthusiastic backing for higher education among Nebraska Republicans for decades allowed officials to build a university where nearly 50,000 students now attend, most hailing from a statewide population barely topping 2 million. Without such crucial support, the school’s flagship campus in Lincoln could never be good enough to rub shoulders with the likes of the University of Michigan, Northwestern, the University of Southern California and Rutgers in the Big Ten.

And yet, some MAGA-inspired state leaders today are now pulling in their horns in ways that threaten the university’s health and prospects. At the flagship campus alone, legislative trims are forcing the chancellor to direct officials to come up with $27.5 million in cuts to a $1.67 billion budget for the coming year, atop several years of smaller budget trims. Thus, the campus and the university overall are offering deals for veteran tenured faculty to quit early, a move that will reduce the school’s vitality, and officials may shrink or consolidate departments that took decades to build.

“I suspect there will be programs, majors, units, departments, all of those things will change,” said journalism professor and faculty senate president John Shrader, a former colleague of mine in UNL’s journalism school. He said the faculty expected some cuts, but the sheer scale—$27.5 million compared to last year’s $5 million—is staggering. “Not one part of this campus will be unaffected.”

Oh, how times have changed. Some time ago, I was privileged to write a biography of an influential Republican leader, Clayton Yeutter, a Nebraska-born statesman who headed the Republican National Committee along with taking on many other crucial government roles. When Yeutter testified at his confirmation hearing to become the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in 1989, he spoke passionately about the importance of education.

“We should not aspire to competing with the rest of the world on wage rates, in agriculture or anywhere else,” Yeutter argued. “We must compete on the basis of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, institutional flexibility and personal and institutional freedoms. All those are built on education!”

Certainly, Yeutter knew first-hand about the power of schooling. His training at the University of Nebraska, from his undergraduate years through a law degree and doctorate in agricultural economics, lifted him from the life as the son of a small-town immigrant farmer into some of the nation’s most important jobs. Along with Ag Secretary and RNC head, he served as Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, where he opened the U.S. and the world to freer global trade.

Long before his Washington achievements, however, as a governor’s top aide he had championed funding for the University of Nebraska. His efforts laid the groundwork for the school to expand into its current four-campus system, which now includes membership in the Big Ten for its flagship campus.

The growth in the NU system has been breathtaking. The system’s nearly 50,000 students, spread across Lincoln and campuses in Kearney and Omaha, are a far cry from the fewer than 7,000 when Yeutter graduated in 1952. The university’s growth far outstrips gains in the state’s population, which was below 1.37 million in Yeutter’s time and still barely tops 2 million.

No doubt that story has been echoed all around the country, at least in states where education has been a priority. At least for now, however, the era of growth has been brought to a grinding halt by today’s Republicans. Will they or their successors someday look back on this time with shame, seeing it as a period when they shortchanged the nation?

One can only hope that Milliken and his like can prevail or, at least, show up the Trumpist forces for the damage they are causing and its effect on our young. As a Nebraskan might say, the seed corn must be kept healthy. Today, it’s at great risk.

Whose history is it?

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trumpists try to rewrite the American story, but plenty of smart folks stand in the way

Six years ago, in the thick of Trump I, Heidi Schreck’s Obie Award-winning and Pulitzer-nominated play, “What the Constitution Means to Me” opened on Broadway. The work dealt with immigration, sexual assault, domestic abuse, women’s rights and abortion.

Schreck’s viewpoint was clear: our nation’s founding guide was a flawed document, rooted in its time, that at first mainly enshrined the rights of propertied white men. As history and the play suggested, the Constitution regularly needed — and got — updating and broadening to include more Americans (thus, its many amendments over the decades).

Reviewed widely and well, “Constitution” was perfect for the time. The play suited a period when women and minorities worried about their rights becoming narrowed after many years of expansion. As The New York Times put it, Schreck’s work was a “paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.”

Smithsonian magazine in 2019 reported that Schreck’s play “talks about the marginalization of women and other demographic groups, about domestic violence and sexual abuse. She calls out the founders and later interpreters of the Constitution for their male-centric view of the world, in her groundbreaking analysis of what she sees as a living document that can evolve with our times.”

And now, with revivals of the play popping up in places as far-flung as Bethesda, Maryland, and New York City, Boston and Los Angeles, “Constitution” seems more timely than ever. We recently saw a production in our town, Silverthorne, Colorado, that was by turns inspiring, unsettling and discouraging.

The play was inspiring because one could see how far we’ve come, but unsettling because one also sees how recent the gains have been. And it was discouraging because we now seem to be turning the clock backward. Wife beating, for instance, was legal in many states until the 1870s and after that it was widely ignored by authorities or treated as a private family matter until the 1970s. And it wasn’t until 1994 that the Violence Against Women Act was passed, treating domestic assault as a crime. All astonishingly recent.

All, perhaps, fragile in light of the horrendous and persisting rates of what experts call “intimate partner violence.” IPV, the experts say, kills 1,300 women in the U.S. each year and injures 2 million.

And then there’s the matter of a woman’s right to choose. In the U.S., abortion was criminalized in the 1880s and not legalized until the 1970s, and it has been systematically been restricted in many jurisdictions since. In all, 41 states now have restrictions on choice, including a dozen states with complete bans. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also took more than a century for women to get the right to vote, enshrined in the 19^th Amendment in 1920. And now, we see widespread efforts to suppress voting by everyone, especially by people of color.

That troubled history – that long and clawing struggle to broaden the rights of so many Americans – is essential knowledge for all of us. Not only does it put our freedoms into perspective, but it casts into bold relief today’s efforts to dismantle or restrict such rights. And that throttling effort is being led, it must be said, by a relatively small group of privileged white men who are riding on the resentments of a larger group of such men (and some women) who feel threatened by the social changes of recent decades.

“The way certain developments in the economy, in politics and in the social world have gone in the last 40 years has led to working-class white men … feeling like their authority has been undermined,” sociologist Raka Ray, dean of social sciences at UC Berkeley, said in a 2022 university publication. “When you get strong feelings of anger and despair in a group or a population, that can turn very quickly into giving encouragement to the politics of resentment or the politics of revenge.”

A broad range of Berkeley scholars quoted in the piece, “Loss, fear and rage: Are white men rebelling against democracy?,” contended that millions of American men — most of them white, many of them working-class — have seen recent years as “a time of unravelling.” Their industries have been dying, their wages stagnating and their political power and cultural status diminished. Moreover, the scholars suggested, “core ideas about manhood and masculinity” have been in flux.

These disenfranchised folks, of course, constitute much of the MAGA base. Donald J. Trump didn’t invent them, but he has become their avatar. Shrewd marketer that he is, Trump has cast himself brilliantly as the voice of their anger and resentment, wrapping his act in the flag even as he so ignores the history – flawed and otherwise – that Old Glory represents.

Indeed, ignoring, denying or simply forgetting the flaws in our history of the kind the play so painfully depicts is a key part of the Trump project. He and right-wing government officials around the country seem determined to erase unflattering information about the American past, perhaps because they owe their successes to the ignorance of their supporters and want to perpetuate it at every turn.

A few years ago, when I taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, state leaders shut down a university-wide scholarly effort to investigate the treatment of minorities historically by the university and the state, for instance. They even drove out the chancellor, a religious Republican and an honest and fair scholar, who had pressed for the effort.

One enterprise slipped through the ban, however, because it was commissioned by The Omaha World-Herald and supported by the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. The results were eye-opening for the class’s 21 students, as they found widespread mistreatment and poor newspaper coverage of groups ranging from Greek immigrants and Native Americans to Blacks over decades.

It’s questionable whether such an academic undertaking would be tolerated nowadays, as UNL – much like many schools across the country – is under pressure to purge efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion, critical race theory and “wokeism.” As The New York Times reported, Trump and his top aides are “exerting control of huge sums of federal research money to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which they see as hostile to conservatives and intent on perpetuating liberalism.” That drive has extended from the Ivies, including Harvard and Columbia, to state universities such as the University of Virginia.

A collage of Putin invoking Stalin; source: Smithsonian

This Orwellian attack on education – reminiscent of the Soviet and later Russian rewriting of history – at times has been absurd. The most recent nonsensical example is the Interior Department’s plans to remove or cover up all “inappropriate content” at national parks and sites by mid-September, as well as the request for park visitors to report any “negative” information about past or living Americans, as reported by The Times. This mirrors an executive order Trump signed in March entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that directed the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution museums.

Trump’s propagandistic move drew heat from plenty of academics. The American Historical Association, joined by a bevy of other organizations, issued a statement that said his order “egregiously misrepresents the work of the Smithsonian Institution.” It held that “The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history. No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all—as individuals and as nations—learn from our imperfections.”

“Patriotic history celebrates our nation’s many great achievements,” the AHA said. “It also helps us grapple with the less grand and more painful parts of our history. Both are part of a shared past that is fundamentally America. We learn from the past to inform how we can best shape our future.”

For his part, the president unleashed a review of whether monuments, memorials and other Interior Department information and content “perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”

Of course, the “false reconstruction” that Trump and his partisans claim is really the view of historians far more versed in the facts – uncomfortable as they may be — than the president and his toadies ever could be. Recall that Trump was a middling transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania whom a former prof called “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had!”

The efforts by the right to rewrite American history will likely go little further than various institutions than Trumpists can influence – regrettably perhaps including the Smithsonian and our national parks. They may rename military bases for Confederates such as Robert E. Lee. They may even get statues of rebel heroes restored in some places.

But too many historians have written too much over too many years for Trump’s anti-historical crusade to have an enduring effect. Indeed, it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how historians will cast Trump over time. A 2024 survey of historians, the “Presidential Greatness Project,” put Trump dead last among all presidents after his first term. How might a post-2028 survey rank him?

Happily, we will always have the talented likes of Heidi Schreck to make sure our past isn’t forgotten, especially when a troublesome present makes it more important than ever to keep true facts alive, as “living” as the Constitution.

“The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Joe Weber

So says Hamlet. And the bellowing in Trump’s Washington is loud.

In 1938, Joseph Stalin ordered the executions of scores of Russian officials as he consolidated his grip on power. Figures as important as Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik theoretician and former chairman of the Communist International, and former premier Alexei Rykov were killed side by side. Scores of others were murdered or exiled in Stalin’s Great Purge, as the vindictive and paranoid leader sought to vanquish anyone he felt deserved punishment or seemed threatening.

Is history repeating itself, albeit in a bloodless way, in the United States? Is another power-obsessed leader hellbent on punishing anyone who has slighted him? Is this modern headman flouting traditions of political civility in a quest to quash any opposition and assert his authority?

Consider the actions of Donald J. Trump and his minions against such figures as former FBI director James B. Comey and former CIA director John O. Brennan. Both are being put under the gun, metaphorically, for their roles in the 2016 investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.

As The New York Times reported, CIA director John Ratcliffe has made a criminal referral of Brennan to the FBI, accusing Brennan of lying to Congress. And law enforcement officials hounded Comey and his wife, following them in unmarked cars in May, as his cellphone was tracked after he posted a photo on social media of seashells he said he had found while walking on a beach during a vacation.

The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47.” That, of course, is common shorthand for dismissing or removing Trump, the 47^th president; it’s a slang reference that can be found on T shirts. (“86 46” was used in the same way for former President Biden). When Comey’s Instagram post triggered a furor in Trumpist circles, the former FBI chief deleted it. But Trump put the Secret Service up to “interviewing” Comey about what the easily slighted president claimed was an exhortation to assassination.

And then there’s the pursuit of Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who was hauled up before the House Oversight Committee in its investigation of the former president’s mental acuity. O’Connor cited doctor-patient privilege and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to testify. As Politico reported, the doctor’s lawyers pointed to a Justice Department investigation into the same subject, saying it raised the risk of potential incrimination, even though they insisted his claim of the right did not imply that O’Connor had broken the law.

So great is the fear of persecution in Trump’s Washington that a physician can’t open up about a matter that should be more one of historical rather than partisan interest. Remember that little more than Trump’s viciousness against his predecessor is driving the congressional probe.

Recall, too, that Trump’s Justice Department has sued all 15 federal judges in Maryland, including the chief judge, over an order that blocked the immediate removal of immigrants. While the only thing at risk for the judges is reputational, the extraordinary move undercuts the authority of such courts, especially since the suit will be heard by a Trump-appointed judge in the western part of Virginia.

As The New York Times reported, Georgetown University Law Professor Stephen I. Vladeck said the suit was in keeping with the Trump administration’s efforts to delegitimize the federal bench. “I think we are seeing an unprecedented attempt by the federal government to portray district judges not as a coordinate branch of government,” he said, “but as nothing more than political opposition.”

Trump’s toadies have similarly targeted scores of others who offended their dear leader or had the temerity to object to administration policies. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, recently put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent,” arguing that the agency no longer is living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment, as reported by the Associated Press. The agency, in a statement, said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.

Earlier, Trump revoked the security clearances of prominent Democrats. Among them: Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Hillary Clinton and former diplomat Norman Eisen. He even denied security protection to former officials in his first term, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting them physically at risk and in need of hiring their own bodyguards.

Trump also fired FBI officials and senior Justice Department career lawyers, especially those who worked with former special counsel Jack Smith on a pair of criminal investigations into Trump. He revoked the security clearances of 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter suggesting that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could have been Russian disinformation. And he revoked the clearances of top lawyers at major law firms he felt had worked against him, denying them the ability to work.

No one should be surprised by the often-vindictive Trump’s actions, even if they fall well beyond the pale of normal presidencies. While addressing a crowd in 2023 at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Of course, especially after he was convicted of 34 felonies, Trump feels deeply wronged. And grace against opponents has never been a calling card for the former New York developer who is still punishing Columbia University for refusing years ago to buy a parcel of overpriced land from him. When he was interviewed by TV psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw in 2024, he said: “Well, revenge does take time. I will say that… And sometimes revenge can be justified, Phil, I have to be honest. You know, sometimes it can.”

Stalin’s purges were far more deadly than Trump’s, of course. The Russian seized power in a bloody revolution, after all, not an election. And yet, much as Stalin was able to muster the power of the state – legions of servile bureaucrats — against his enemies, so is Trump able through his lackeys to exercise his vengeful will against anyone who has triggered his pique.

Are we dealing here in a difference in degree, but not in kind? It took years for Stalin to build the power he exercised. At 79, Trump almost certainly won’t have as much time, though his lapdog followers will. We have yet to see just how far his and their virulence will go.

The Big Picture

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