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.

Sleepy Don

Posted on December 10, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s health sparks fresh concerns

Joseph Weber

When Ronald Reagan led the nation, the comics at Saturday Night Live had a field day. One of their best skits showed him as a kindly, doddering soul as he met with children, but then as a shrewd, calculating strategist as he plotted governing decisions.

It was only much later – six years after he left office — that we learned that Reagan was, in fact, developing Alzheimer’s that some analysts believe clouded his final years in the White House. Beginning as early as three years into his first term, even his son Ron was alarmed about his father’s mental condition.

Consider Reagan’s performance in an October 1984 debate with Walter Mondale, when the president was 73. “My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words,” Ron Reagan wrote in “My Father at 100,” a memoir. “He looked tired and bewildered.”

And, of course, we all saw similar confusion in Joe Biden. His embarrassing debate with Trump in June 2024, when Biden was 81, drove him to yield the nomination to his vice president, Kamala Harris.

Now, it seems we are seeing similar plunges in Donald J. Trump, 79.

Fresh press accounts are chronicling his tendency to doze, on camera, during Cabinet meetings, along with his shortened workdays. At a Nov. 6 special Oval Office event, for instance, Trump’s “eyelids drooped until his eyes were almost closed, and he appeared to doze on and off for several seconds,” The New York Times reported. “At another point, he opened his eyes and looked toward a line of journalists watching him. He stood up only after a guest who was standing near him fainted and collapsed,” not bothering to go to the man’s aid.

Trump applies makeup to a bruise on the back of his right hand, the Times noted, fueling questions about a medical condition that his physician and aides attribute to aspirin and to shaking so many hands. In September, the bruising, coupled with swollen ankles, prompted observers on the internet to speculate wildly about his health.

Of course, Trump attacked the paper and others for raising doubts about his health. “After all the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES’,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in a lengthy post.

“Seditious,” “treasonous?” Even such terms go beyond his usual hyperbole. Might his fury lead him to press Justice to investigate, as he did with Democratic officials who did little more than cite the law in a video urging military commanders to balk at illegal orders?

As former CBS anchor Dan Rather noted in his Substack, “Steady,” Trump last week slipped into dreamland during a Cabinet meeting as Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised his leadership. And Rather offered a list of other signs of the president’s cognitive decline:

· Inability to remember words and names — Trump called his Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, “Cristie Kerr,” a professional golfer.

· Memory loss — During a September press conference, he said his first term “started around 2015,” then corrected himself to 2016. It began in January 2017.

· Confabulation — He claims his uncle, a professor at MIT, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. His uncle died 11 years before Kaczynski was identified as the Unabomber, and he did not attend MIT.

· Increased aggression — He has posted thousands of all-caps social media rants aimed at everyone from California Governor Gavin Newsom to The New York Times.

· Confusion — He believes giant, energy-producing windmills “are killing us.”

· Verbal incoherence — The White House has removed from its website some of Trump’s inscrutable remarks. “I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out,” he said in one scrubbed speech. “They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet.”

As it happens, dozing off in public is not entirely new for Trump, suggesting he’s been slipping for a while now.

“Sleepy Don” during his trial last May, source: CNBC

“When he repeatedly snoozed during his Manhattan trial, last spring, it was a curiosity—especially for someone who had previously seemed so high-energy,” David Graham noted in “The Enfeebling of the President,” in The Atlantic. “But as I wrote at the time, it was also a warning: Was a man who couldn’t stay awake for his own felony trial, during the middle of the day, prepared for the rigors of the presidency? We now have some sense of the answer (and we might also wonder whether he’s even worse at staying awake during meetings that aren’t public).”

But Trump’s incoherence and rambling, also while not entirely new, appears to have worsened. Reporters have long engaged in sane-washing in writing about Trump’s speeches, and they have struggled anew to find consistent story lines in recent comments. Consider his 90-minute “weave” in Pennsylvania on Dec. 9, in which rambled from attacks on “affordability” to denials of inflation and defenses of his anti-immigration policies.

At one point, the Times noted, he compared the U.S. sealed borders to North Korea’s. He also mistakenly referred to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, as “Susie Trump.”

As he often does, he also repeatedly rode one of his favorite hobbyhorses, blaming Biden for all the nation’s ills while citing no data stats to back up his overwrought claims. For instance, under Biden, he argued, “100 percent of new jobs were going to migrants,” but that “since I took office, 100 percent of all net job creation has gone to American citizens.”

Recent medical tests have done little to clarify Trump’s condition, largely because he and the White House have traded in haziness, keeping the precise results secret. When he was asked about an October MRI in mid-November, Trump insisted both that he didn’t know what it was about and that it had a great result: “I have no idea what they analyzed,” he told reporters, as Graham noted. “But whatever they analyzed, they analyzed it well, and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.”

As Graham reported, this has raised a big question: MRIs aren’t a routine part of annual physicals, and the president had his most recent physical just last April. So why test him again?

The New Republic reported that doctors generally use such tests to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. Moreover, former White House physicians questioned the timeline of Trump’s appointment, pointing out that his four-hour visit to the hospital was far longer than needed for an MRI. Nonetheless, Trump said the tests came back “perfect.”

Trump claims to weigh 224 pounds, Rather wrote, adding that this was “suspiciously just under what is considered obese for someone 6 feet 3 inches tall — especially since he rejects physical exercise as a concept and happily eats Big Macs, plural, in one sitting.” Trump is said to down a dozen Diet Cokes a day.

It’s not unprecedented for presidential administrations to obscure the leader’s health problems. Woodrow Wilson’s incapacitation from a stroke in 1919 was kept secret and his wife, Edith, handled many of his duties, as scholars later learned. FDR, who had suffered from polio, shielded lingering problems from public view, as did JFK, who had chronic back pain and Addison’s Disease. Of course, Biden’s decline was covered up until it came into the open, much as seems the case with Trump now.

What’s more, in some ways Trump seems merely to be a figurehead. He has given free rein to aides such as his anti-immigrant tsar Stephen Miller, his budget manager Russell Vought (architect of Project 2025), the Health and Human Services despoiler Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Pentagon-wrecker and drug-boat assailant Peter Hegseth. Trump seems little more than a rubber-stamp for their efforts.

Still, the stakes are enormously high when the decider-in-chief’s abilities to make rational choices may be impaired. As the oldest American ever to take office in the White House, Trump’s mental acuity is unlikely to improve, making for a rocky remaining three years. The president, who will leave office at 82 if he endures, will provide plenty of grist for SNL. That’s hardly encouraging for the rest of us.

“We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.”

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Joe Weber

Eric Hoffer’s admonition applies in spades to Pete Hegseth

Joseph Weber

Self-styled Secretary of War, source: Instagram

Ah, the dizzying power of self-delusion.

Peter B. “Pete” Hegseth, the former Fox TV host and much tattooed ex-Army National Guard major, styles himself as the “Secretary of War,” even though his official title until Congress decides otherwise is “Secretary of Defense.” Thrice-married, he is fond of looking macho and has buttressed his studly image by paying $50,000 to quash a sexual-assault claim. He also warms to photo-ops of himself doing push-ups with American troops in the snow.

But, lately, Hegseth is adding some big smudges to his escutcheon, even as he seems — or pretends — to be blind to them.

Most recently, of course, is the report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General about how he used a chat app, Signal, to share advance details about a forthcoming bombing operation in Yemen in March. The IG determined that Hegseth “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” In several sections of that heavily redacted report, the IG drove home that point.

“The Secretary sent nonpublic DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the IG report said. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.”

Remember that this all came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, had been added to the Hegseth chat inadvertently. That alone was an astonishing breach of security.

“Signalgate became a shorthand for ineptitude at the highest reaches of the administration,” the magazine recalled in a fresh report. “Foreign allies told us that they felt justified in their earlier reluctance to share their secrets with the United States, given President Donald Trump’s long history of mishandling classified information.”

The IG blasted Hegseth, too, for using his unclassified personal device to share sensitive information via group chat to other top Trump administration officials and for not preserving all associated messages, in violation of federal recordkeeping laws. Notably, he refused to talk with the IG and refused to turn over his phone.

And yet, Hegseth’s public response was, essentially, “no harm, no foul.” His exact words on X were: “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”

And, as The Washington Post reported, Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement that the review was a “TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we all knew — no classified information was shared.” Parnell added: “This matter is resolved and the case is closed.”

It’s one thing for a flack to serve up steaming BS. But one has to wonder whether Hegseth, a Princeton graduate with a postgrad degree from Harvard, can read. Or, as so often seems the case with his master and benefactor, Donald J. Trump, perhaps he just believes he can lie and people will believe it.

Falling in line, other Trumpists seem to be taking the same tack with Hegseth’s early September missile attacks on an alleged drug boat. Those hits killed two men who were struggling in the water after an initial strike, beyond the others initially blown apart.

After watching videos of the hits, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said: “The first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on September 2nd were entirely lawful and needful, and they were exactly what we would expect our military commanders to do.” And Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Arkansas), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, added that there was “no doubt in my mind about the highly professional manner” in which the attack occurred.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who ordered the missile strikes as he followed Hegseth’s commands, considered the survivors to be viable targets, not shipwrecked, defenseless mariners who, by law, should not have been targeted, according to The Washington Post. The pair could have radioed for help and continued their “mission” of shipping drugs to American shores, Cotton told the paper.

Really? Ah, the power of self-delusion. Certainly, Democrats who viewed the videos saw something quite different.

Rep. Jim Himes (Connecticut), the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, described the footage as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service.” The survivors, he said, were “in clear distress” after their boat was “destroyed.”

“The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military,” Himes said in a joint statement with Rep. Adam Smith (Washington), the House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat. “Regardless of what one believes about the legal underpinnings of these operations, and we have been clear we believe they are highly questionable, this was wrong.”

Hegseth has tried to distance himself from the strikes that killed the survivors, backhandedly praising Bradley’s decision for sending the missiles that followed the first one. That compliment nicely sets the admiral up as a fall guy. And the admiral, perhaps falling on his sword, has reportedly denied a Washington Post report that claimed that Hegseth ordered the military to “kill them all.”

That Washington Post report — confirmed by an anonymous source separately to NPR — was that Hegseth gave a spoken directive to kill the surviving occupants of the boat with a second strike. Attacking “wounded, sick or shipwrecked” combatants violates the law of war, according to a Pentagon manual.

Hegseth denied those reports as “fabricated, inflammatory and derogatory,” saying U.S. operations in the Caribbean are “lawful under both U.S. and international law … and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

Recall, though, that Hegseth drove out an earlier area commander who appears to have had reservations about the boat attacks. Adm. Alvin Holsey announced his premature resignation as head of military operations in the Caribbean after raising concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Since that boat attack, Hegseth’s military has bombed at least 20 others, killing more than 80 people – all without trials or proof that they were ferrying drugs and all a bloody departure from prior efforts to capture traffickers alive to face justice. When not defending the killings as part of an alleged “war” between the U.S. and traffickers, Hegseth’s reaction to the killings has been to joke about them, posting an image of a cartoon turtle firing on armed boatmen.

The mockup turtle image drew heat from, among others, the Canadian publisher of the Franklin books. “Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy, and inclusivity,” the publisher Kids Can Press wrote in a statement on X. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent, or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.”

Hegseth’s callousness did not amuse some lawmakers either. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who has openly sparred with the Pentagon in recent weeks, told reporters that the meme is just one reason why the defense secretary should be fired, calling him “not a serious person,” as NPR reported. “He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons and he’s putting out … turtles with rocket-propelled grenades.”

And Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the floor of the Senate, called Hegseth a “national embarrassment,” calling the Franklin meme a “sick parody.”

Whether Hegseth ultimately weathers the storms he generates is an open question. Democrats have vowed to continue to press the case against him. But, while Trump has said he wouldn’t have ordered the follow-on strike that killed the two shipwrecked men, he has also stood by Hegseth – at least for now.

Whether Hegseth should continue in the job, though, seems hardly in question.

Consider the view of conservative columnist George Will. “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement,” he wrote. “The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.”

Focusing particularly on Hegseth’s refusal to sit for an interview with his department’s inspector general and or to turn over his phone, former federal prosecutor and University of Alabama law professor Joyce Vance in her Substack drew a broader lesson. “None of this is what Americans are entitled to expect from a public servant or what a president should demand of his appointees,” she said.

Of course, it’s not clear just what at least some Americans expect from their leaders. Some, perhaps, don’t mind being lied to or maybe they delude themselves as much as Hegseth seems to.

The gauntlet is thrown

Posted on December 2, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s moves on the Somalis of Minnesota will not sit well

Joseph Weber

Somalis celebrate at a naturalization ceremony in 2010; source: MPR News

Somalis have come far in Minneapolis. When I was doing research for a book there nearly a decade ago, I visited professors, college students, restaurateurs, businesspeople, imams and others in a sprawling community – now numbering about 80,000 — that also includes police officers, physicians, politicians and others who run the full gamut of society.

Some of the people I met had fled their homeland in the 1990s after it was engulfed by famine and civil war. They had left a tortured country that had been the product of British and Italian imperialism and U.S.-Soviet Union great power meddling. Others I met included their children, young people who were straddling two cultures as they worked to find their way in the U.S. like so many other generations of immigrants – some succeeding and some not.

But none of the people I met were “garbage,” as Donald J. Trump calls them.

Sadly, though, that is how Trump sees the Somalis who have become mainstays of Minneapolis society. Like any demagogue, he appears to hope that such dehumanizing language will motivate the roughly 100 ICE agents who have descended on Minneapolis and nearby Saint Paul.

Perhaps he hopes this will allow those officers – and much of America — to see these immigrants as less than human. That way, the agents can move forward with roundups of Somalis who they can throw on planes and send outside the U.S., perhaps back to the dysfunctional place they fled.

“I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason,” Trump ranted in a recent Cabinet meeting. “Their country stinks and we don’t want them in our country. I can say that about other countries too. We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage.”

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, source: Justice Democrats

Ignorant of history, deficient in compassion and blind to the gains that have led many Somalis, such as U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, into important roles in the last 30 years, Trump is incapable of seeing the community for what it is. He doesn’t see strivers who are making their way — often overcoming language and cultural challenges in the same ways as Italians, Germans, Poles, Irish and so many others have throughout American history.

Instead, Trump seems to see only threatening legions of unwelcome Black people.

This is not new for him. Nine years ago, then-candidate Trump got his comeuppance from the mayor of Minneapolis for his attacks – just verbal ones then – on the Somalis. On a visit to Minnesota, he had slandered the community, saying such refugees were unwelcome and should not be allowed to “roam our communities.”

Betsy Hodges, then the mayor, responded: “This is America, Donald, and the Somali people of Minnesota and Minneapolis are not *roaming* our communities, they are *building* them …. Your ignorance, your hate, your fear just make me remember how lucky we are to have neighbors who are so great.”

Now, others are damning his renewed efforts.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey blasting Trump’s remarks; source: Reuters

“To our Somali community, we love you and we stand with you. That commitment is rock solid, Minneapolis is proud to be home to the largest Somali community in the entire country,” the current Minneapolis Mayor, Jacob Frey, said. “Targeting Somali people means that due process will be violated, mistakes will be made. It means American citizens will be detained for no other reason than the fact that they look like they are Somali. That is not now and will never be a legitimate reason.”

And Melvin Carter, the first Black man to be elected mayor of nearby Saint Paul, has struck a similar tone.

“We saw, sadly, the President of the United States opened his mouth to take a whole country of people and denigrate just based on where they come from,” Carter said. “America prided itself on being a country of immigrants. It seems the darker skin the immigrants who come to our country are, the more our posture on immigration as a country has shifted. That’s un-American, that’s concerning.”

Carter, who recently lost a bid for reelection to a member of the city’s Hmong community, lambasted the arrival of the ICE agents in racial terms.

“The last thing we need is federal agents coming here pretending we should be afraid of somebody just based on the color of their skin, just based on what they look like, just based on what country their ancestors claim,” Carter said. “The last thing we need is federal agents coming to town attempting to turn us against each other, to create chaos. We stand together.”

But, in the face of armed, masked and roving federal agents, it’s not clear just how much such rhetorical unity will mean. In the city where a Black man, George Floyd, was infamously killed in 2021 by a rogue police officer, leading to rioting and bloodshed, the agents are likely to be aggressive and some may find themselves to be targets. Certainly, they will be dogged by people videoing their actions — and perhaps worse.

Dieu Do, a community organizer with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, told The New York Times that her group and other migrant rights organizations have been preparing for more immigration raids. In recent months, local activists have responded to reports of possible immigration operations in large numbers, often wearing gas masks, kneepads and other protective gear. Activists usually record agents with their phones and chant in protest.

“We have plans in place in case bigger operations come,” the organizer said. “Federal agents should be afraid to come here because we’re not afraid to protect each other.”

As a local newspaper, the Sahan Journal, reported, a Nov. 18 immigration raid in Saint Paul may offer a foretaste of what’s to come.

Protesters and federal agents in Saint Paul, source: Sahan Journal

That morning, the paper reported, protesters clashed with federal agents at a Saint Paul wiper manufacturer and distributor. At least 14 people were arrested. Officers from several agencies, including the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fired pepper balls at protesters blocking vehicles.

Many of the protesters had arrived just minutes after the agents. That quick response was part of a coordinated effort. The activists rely on a response system, the Immigrant Defense Network, to alert them to ICE actions and to guide them on how to respond.

And the federal agents may get little help from Minneapolis police. The force will not collaborate with ICE, officials have said.

“I know how real the fear is in our community,” said the city’s police chief, Brian O’Hara. “People are going to want to speak out, to protest, and to exercise their First Amendment rights. Those are the rights of everyone in our community, and I want to be clear that we will absolutely defend people’s rights to do just that.”

O’Hara pleaded for nonviolence, though, and suggested that police will try to keep things peaceful. An official statement from the city’s communications department, moreover, noted that the police would respond illegal or dangerous conduct, trying to de-escalate any situation that threatens people or property.

As usual, Trump and his minions have pretexts they can point to for their actions – pretexts Trump is pumping up with his usual hyperbole.

As TIME reported, the day after the shooting of the National Guard members by an Afghan near the White House, Trump ordered a review of green cards issued to migrants from 19 countries, including Somalia. And, in a Thanksgiving message posted on Truth Social where he announced that he would “permanently pause” migration from “Third World” countries, he particularly blasted the Somali community in Minnesota. Trump claimed the Somalis are “completely taking over” the state.

More recently, he claimed in a Nov. 21 Truth Social post that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing.” He pointed to fraud among some Somalis in Minnesota over the last five years, in which scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for social services that were never provided. As The New York Times reported, federal prosecutors said 59 people have been convicted so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating.

Trump lambasted the frauds and announced he would end temporary protected statuses for Somalis “effective immediately.” That status had been granted by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and today, according to TIME, losing it puts at least 700 Somalis at risk.

“The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down,” Abdi Mohamed, a filmmaker in Minneapolis, told The New York Times. “The broader Somali community — hardworking, family-oriented, deeply committed to Minnesota — is left carrying that burden.”

For Trump, the actions of a small group are excuse enough to go after an entire community. Nursing rage that has festered in him since at least 2016, he’s thrown down the gauntlet. After infamously lambasting cities across America for imagined violence, even as violence and crime have measurably declined, his moves on the Somali community seem likely to stir up far more of it in the Twin Cities and perhaps beyond.

Callous indifference

Posted on November 28, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump and his enablers seem to exult in it

Joseph Weber

Twenty-six years ago, Holocaust survivor and Nobelist Elie Wiesel gave a speech in the East Room of the White House about indifference. He called it a “strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.”

Today, we have a president who seems the embodiment of Wiesel’s comment. The latest and saddest case in point: a 20-year-old National Guardswoman who was killed on a pointless domestic mission this president ordered up. His reaction: he spoke about his election results in her home state of West Virginia.

When asked if he would go to the funeral for Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, Donald J. Trump’s response was: “I haven’t thought about it yet but it certainly is something I could conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”

So, a woman not even old enough legally to drink is killed while she is far from home on this man’s bizarre orders to install Guardsmen on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Trump’s reaction is to talk about himself. Is that not the personification of a “strange and unnatural state?”

Indeed, is that not just indifference, but callous indifference?

But Trump’s indifference and that of his minions, of course, is deeply rooted. It begins in a wholesale blindness to facts. Consider the facts involved in the admission to the United States of the former Afghan fighter Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who shot Beckstrom and another Guardsman now battling for his life. To Trump and his FBI chief, Kash Patel, it was all the fault of Joe Biden.

So, what actually happened, so far as we know now?

Lakanwal, now 29, was admitted to the U.S. in 2021 after working for the CIA in his homeland. He was part of the Operation Allies Welcome program (which later evolved into the Enduring Welcome program), under which some 190,000 Afghans were admitted to the U.S. In Afghanistan, Lakanwal was a member of a Zero Unit group, one trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members and said to be involved in widespread civilian killings, according to The New York Times.

It’s likely that Lakanwal was one of only 3,300 of those refugees that year who were granted a “special immigrant visa,” ABC News reported. That status would have expedited his entry because of his employment with agency and would have involved vetting.

Quoting an unnamed senior U.S. official, ABC reported that Lakanwal had been vetted at one point by the National Counterterrorism Center and “nothing came up” during that review. The official added that “he was clean on all checks.”

Indeed, the Afghans underwent “rigorous” vetting to ensure they did not pose a national security threat, NPR reported. Some 400 personnel across U.S. agencies conducted checks that involved “biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. “This process includes reviewing fingerprints, photos, and other biometric and biographic data for every single Afghan before they are cleared to travel to the United States.”

After some Republicans charged that the vetting was inadequate, the DHS Office of Inspector General released a report that admitted to some failings, including data inaccuracies in some files of Afghans. But another report, released in June by the Department of Justice, looked at the FBI’s role in the vetting and concluded: “Overall, we found that each of the responsible elements of the FBI effectively communicated and addressed any potential national security risks identified.”

And yet, FBI Director Patel claimed that the Biden administration did “absolutely zero vetting” of this group.

Moreover, Lakanwal would have undergone more review as part of his application for asylum in the U.S., an application that officials in the Trump Administration – not Biden’s – that was approved in April.

Confronted with such information, might Trump have said something sensible, such as saying the tragic situation merited a complete investigation? Might he have said his administration would probe this to see how Lakanwal may have posed a danger? Nope. Instead, Trump’s reaction was indifference to the truth – and hostility to the journalist bringing it up to him.

Nancy Cordes of CBS quizzing Trump, source: People.com

“Your [Department of Justice Inspector General] just reported this year that there was thorough vetting by DHS and by the FBI of these Afghans who were brought into the U.S.,” CBS News reporter Nancy Cordes said. She asked why, then, did Trump blame the Biden administration.

“Because they let him in, are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump responded. “Because they came in on a plane along with thousands of other people that shouldn’t be here and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

Angrily determined to avoid any responsibility? Indifferent to the truth?

Of course, Lakanwal’s actions were reprehensible, horrific, wholly unjustified. Still, initial reports suggest he was mentally ill, perhaps scarred by his experience in the Zero Unit. Did any of that come up in his asylum case just this past spring? Were there failures on the part of either the Biden or Trump Administration officials? Should they be investigated?

There is much we don’t know and that may yet be revealed, particularly about this killer’s mental problems. But we do know one other point: Specialist Beckstrom and her colleagues in the Guard had no business being in harm’s way in Washington, D.C. They were and are part of little more than a stunt by the president to use military forces on American streets, a foolish bit of optics that now has proved deadly.

Trump, of course, cannot see that as a mistake. Instead, his reaction is to boost the number of guards on the streets by another 500, on top of the 2,000 already there. Might that create more opportunities for bloodshed? Might we see more assaults, perhaps even some by understandably edgy Guardsmen who, after all, are not trained police officers?

Remember, too, another case of callous indifference by Trump and his minions. He ordered up attacks on suspected drug smugglers in international waters without proof, without trial and without mercy, killing more than 80 people so far. In the first of such attacks, on Sept. 2, Trump’s Secretary of Defense – who styles himself a Secretary of War – ordered that every one of 11 people on the boat be killed. “The order was to kill everybody,” an official told The Washington Post.

So, in that attack as a couple survivors clung to smoldering wreckage, the commander involved ordered a second missile strike. The survivors were blown apart in the water.

Callous? Indifferent? Seems like the very definition of it.

Because the U.S. is not at war with another nation in the area, killing anyone in such boats “amounts to murder,” a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years told the Post. Even if the U.S. were at war with drug traffickers, an order to kill all of such a boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Todd Huntley, who now directs the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

And yet, Trump shows no remorse, not the barest concern for the loss of life. Instead, he brags about how many Americans he claims to be saving from drug addiction deaths. Is there evidence of that? We haven’t seen it yet.

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza; source: Austin American-Statesman

Of course, still more callous indifference is apparent every day that ICE officers disrupt families by hauling off immigrants. This is often without any due process, sometimes even in contravention of court orders. The latest case: Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old Babson College student who was snatched as she tried to board a plane to visit her family in Texas about a week before Thanksgiving.

It appears that Lopez Belloza, whose family hailed from Honduras, had entered the U.S. about 11 years ago, when she was 7 or 8. ICE officials told The Boston Globe that the woman was subject to a deportation order dating back to 2015, although her lawyer said the family had asylum proceedings underway until 2017, when their application was denied. Still, they were assured that there were no deportation orders in place, the lawyer said.

Moreover, a federal judge on Friday, Nov. 21, ordered that Lopez Belloza not be deported from the U.S. or transferred outside the state of Massachusetts – an order that appears to have meant nothing to ICE. At around that time, according to the Austin American-Statesman, ICE was flying Lopez Belloza to Texas. And by the following Monday, she was in Honduras with her grandparents.

Indifferent to the hopes and dreams of a promising college student? Callous?

Well, consider the comments of Border Patrol Operations Commander Gregory Bovino. His reply to a news report about Lopez Belloza could not have been colder.

“Illegal aliens are just that despite age and educational status,” Bovino wrote on X. “Why even mention this illegal alien was an 18 year old [sic] college student? Completely irrelevant except that an illegal alien may have taken a university slot from an American citizen.”

Wiesel in his 1999 spoke of how such coldness is possible.

“It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair,” he said. “Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.”

By all appearances, Trump and his ilk can deliver pain and even death without losing a moment’s sleep. One wonders at how warped their sense of morality is. More than that, one must wonder how much longer most Americans can tolerate that in their leaders.

Ah, the webs they weave

Posted on November 23, 2025 by Joe Weber

Networks of opportunists betray the meaning of friendship

Joseph Weber

At Mar-A-Lago in 2000, source: The Guardian

So, a couple pieces in The New York Times and The Atlantic set me to thinking about friendship. Just what is it and what is it not?

One thing friendship most certainly is not was membership in the network of the rich and powerful that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein crafted. The NYT piece, by Anand Giriharadas, spells out what that ugly lattice was about.

Giriharadas calls the Epstein network “a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.”

In other words, the people Epstein counted as “friends” were a bipartisan array of movers and shakers at the very top reaches of American society. The bizarrely varied ranks included Donald J. Trump, of course, but also Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard president Larry Summers, Trump plotter Steve Bannon, pseudo-mystic Deepak Chopra, Libertarian and J.D. Vance-backer Peter Thiel, leftie academic Noam Chomsky, former Prince Andrew, top bankers, lawyers, etc., etc.

Just how many of them knew of Epstein’s vileness is hardly clear (except, perhaps, for Prince Andrew and, by the dead Epstein’s account, Trump). Still, so many luminaries were drawn like moths to the loathsome financier – apparently an extraordinarily charming conman – that one has to wonder a) what drew these people, mostly men, in? and b) how could Epstein so easily take in so many seemingly smart folks?

Was it friendship that built this network? Hardly. Instead, point to mutual opportunism, greed and a craving for status as the obvious culprits.

In some ways, some high in the network seemed to be birds of a feather — whether they descended as low as Epstein or not. The sexual escapades of Clinton and Trump are well-known, of course. Lesser known is an attempted misadventure by Summers who, while married, sought Epstein’s advice in 2018 and 2019 on how to persuade a young academic in his orbit into bed. Epstein called himself Summers’s “wingman.”

Fully a decade before, in 2008, Epstein was convicted on felony sex charges involving a minor and got off with a light sentence. The Florida prosecutor in that case later became Secretary of Labor in Trump’s first term. Epstein killed himself in jail in August 2019, awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.

Whatever Epstein’s appeal to powerful men, his knack for collecting friends is reminiscent of at least one other famous network-builder. Long before he took flights on Epstein’s Boeing 727 to places such as Bangkok, Brunei, Rwanda, Russia, China and elsewhere, in 2002 and 2003, Clinton was well-known for his opportunistic friend-collecting.

From his earliest days as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Clinton gathered friends who could help further his lofty ambitions. The F.O.B.s, or Friends of Bill, included such folks as Strobe Talbott, who went on to become a Time Magazine journalist and later a diplomat under Clinton; Robert Reich, who became a distinguished academic and Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and author and health-policy expert Ira Magaziner, a presidential adviser, among others over the years.

Like Epstein, Clinton had a knack for gathering talented and well-placed people he thought could serve him. Such backers helped him get elected first as attorney general in Arkansas and then as the state’s governor and, ultimately, helped him vault to the White House.

But Clinton drew the line on what passed for him as “friendship” if it got in his way.

While he rewarded many of the F.O.B.s with jobs in Washington, the president and his wife, Hillary, were notorious for ruthlessly dropping people no longer useful to them. When Zoe Baird’s failure to pay taxes for a nanny became a liability, Clinton abandoned the well-connected Washington lawyer’s candidacy for U.S. Attorney General, for instance. And when Clinton’s choice to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Yale Law School chum Lani Guinier, stirred up dust for advocating for more minority representation in voting rights, Clinton dumped her.

As seems the case with Trump, loyalty was a one-way street with Clinton. Betrayals were common, according to James B. Stewart, author of the 1996 book “Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries’.’

‘’It was a very consistent theme that I kept hearing,’‘ Stewart, told The New York Times. ‘’The Clintons’ personal advancement took precedence over anything else. There were so many people who were at one point or another considered close to the Clintons who felt betrayed one way or another.’‘

Does this sound anything like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the current president? The soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman – once Trump’s most fierce defender — had the temerity to press for release of the full Epstein files. She was among a trio of Republican women who demanded that, forcing Trump to acquiesce and leading to the vote for such a release. And for her sin, Trump threatened to primary her out of office at his next opportunity.

“I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day,” Trump said on Nov. 14 on his social-media platform. “I understand that wonderful, Conservative people are thinking about primarying Marjorie in her District of Georgia, that they too are fed up with her and her antics and, if the right person runs, they will have my Complete and Unyielding Support.”

As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, Trump called her a “traitor” on camera and shrugged off the death threats she received. Efforts to recruit a primary challenger to her accelerated, the journalist reported, leading to her resignation announcement.

Of course, the network of supporters – “friends,” perhaps – of Trump has long been an easily frayed thing. Those from his first term who turned on him included such boldface names as former Vice President Mike Pence, former Attorney General Bill Barr, former secretaries of defense James Mattis and Mark Esper, his chairman of Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, his presidential transition team leader Chris Christie, and on and on. Before last fall’s election, CNN toted up some 24 people who found him repulsive after once enthusiastically serving him.

Frum’s argument in The Atlantic is cynical about Washington politics in general. He quotes a lobbyist from the 1990s and early 2002 who argued there were two kinds of people in D.C.: those who “got the joke” and those who didn’t. “Those who got the joke understood that all of the city’s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense,” Frum writes. “Those who didn’t, didn’t.”

But he’s particularly sharp about Trump’s extraordinarily self-enriching crowd. Congresswoman Greene, Frum contends, never did get “the joke that MAGA is about anything more than manipulation, exploitation, corruption, lust, and cruelty. She seems to have sincerely believed the lies that shrewder players merely mouthed. She gained her own millions without appreciating that her allies were scheming for billions.”

Giriharadas, in the Times, broadens his scope to damn a whole class of elites, the wealthy who run society and who appear in the Epstein emails released so far. That may not be surprising, since he wrote the 2018 book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”

“The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is,” he argues. “The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers.”

The vast majority of us, of course, don’t move in such gilded circles. Sure, many folks turn to old school chums and professional colleagues to help them advance in mutually beneficial relationships. One would hope that many of the folks in those ranks may be real friends, rather than just helpful cards in power Rolodexes (not that anyone uses those anymore).

Still, it is sobering to think that right now in some of our best universities, in the penthouses of our leading cities and in important corners of Corporate America, young people may be imitating the Clintons, Trumps, Summers, et al. They may be building their own networks of supposed friends to help them reach whatever towering pinnacles they are aiming for.

One wonders: do they recognize that this is not friendship? One hopes that the young opportunists now see the collapsing networks some of their elders have built for the hollow and empty webs they are. Can they build better ones with ends that go beyond mere self-enrichment and political, social or business advances?

The geriatrics who inhabit the Epstein and Trump networks, thankfully, will be gone someday – preferably sooner rather than later. Will what comes after them be more of the same, as Giriharadas and Frum may imply? If so, that’s hardly a friendly thought.

Who is the real swine?

Posted on November 19, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s misogyny may — at last — be catching up with him

Joseph Weber

Nov 19, 2025

Just over a century ago, in 1920, the 19^th Amendment gave women the right to vote in the United States, after an effort that took more than 70 years. And just over half a century ago, in 1963, author Betty Friedan bemoaned the lack of progress for women, writing in “The Feminine Mystique”: “In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens.”

Now, we have a president telling Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, “Quiet, Piggy,” for asking about the Epstein files, the sordid documents that mention Donald J. Trump multiple times. And we have Trump lecturing another woman that she was “a terrible reporter” for asking questions about the savage 2018 murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi and the Epstein papers. The president castigated ABC News journalist Mary Bruce for asking a “horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.”

“Insubordinate?” That’s right up there with other phrases Trump has used in dealing with female journalists, as reported by The Atlantic: “Keep your voice down.” “That’s enough of you.” “Be nice; don’t be threatening.” “There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

All are reminiscent, too, of an infamous comment by another Republican, then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. He silenced Sen. Elizabeth Warren in an argument over and Attorney General nominee in the first Trump term, in 2017, saying: “Nevertheless, she persisted.” That became a rallying cry for feminists.

So, one has to wonder: just how far we have come? And how much are we being set back?

Yes, four of the nine Supreme Court justices are women. And, yes, voters in New Jersey and Virginia installed women as governors earlier this month, for the first time in Virginia. Thirteen states now have women sitting at the same time in their governor’s chairs, something NPR last year celebrated as a new record.

And yet, since 1872 scores of women have sought and been denied the U.S. presidency. This was even after one, Kamala Harris, won the vice presidency and became the second woman, after Hillary Clinton, to carry a major-party banner into elections.

Of course, Trump’s misogyny is an egregious exaggeration. Like so much about the man, it is so extreme as to be aberrant. His history of mistreating women stretches back at least to the 1970s, through the late 1980s when he started palling around with Jeffrey Epstein, into the 1990s, when he assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, and into the 2000s, when he bragged about grabbing women by the genitals at beauty pageants. At least 27 women have publicly complained about Trump over the years.

But he and his minions are having a corrosive effect on society, certainly in some of our institutions.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense who paid a woman $50,000 to keep quiet after she had accused him of sexual assault, has been driving women out of the military, for instance. After Trump removed Linda Fagan, the admiral who ran the U.S. Coast Guard, Hegseth purged another admiral who was the Navy’s first female chief, reassigned the woman vice admiral who ran the U.S. Naval Academy, fired another female vice admiral who worked with NATO, and pushed out a woman lieutenant general who headed of the Defense Health Agency. Hegseth, who has mandated that every combat soldier meet “the highest male standard” for fitness, also quashed the elevation of a woman slated to head the Navy’s SEAL program. That officer, a captain, had been awarded a Purple Heart for her time in Iraq, during which she was injured in an IED attack, and was the first female troop commander to serve with SEAL Team Six.

Organizations such as the National Organization for Women are documenting the numerous ways that the Trump Administration has been setting women back. These have included mandates that gender not be considered in military academy applications, widespread assaults on diversity and equality efforts, the gutting of the Office of Civil Rights, assaults on the rights of transgender people, and much more.

Even before his election, experts warned about the threats Trump posed to women, setting them the context of the rise of authoritarianism generally. In a November 2024 piece headlined “Why Gender Is Central to the Antidemocratic Playbook: Unpacking the Linkages in the United States and Beyond,” a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace set Trump’s sexism in a broader context. Saskia Brechenmacher wrote of how “a significant body of evidence shows that right-wing authoritarian views—which are associated with an embrace of traditional values, submission to authority, and a perception that the world is a dangerous place—are linked to both paternalistic attitudes about women (‘benevolent sexism’) and feelings of antipathy toward women who seek equality (‘hostile sexism’).”

Every month since Trump assumed office, it seems, we have seen fresh examples of authoritarian actions – consider the rampages of ICE, the unilateral dismantling of the Department of Education, the firings of government employees, the persecution of political opponents, the harassment of universities, and on and on. And, not coincidentally, we see Trump’s continuing verbal assaults on women.

We have at least three more years during which we’re likely to see more such outrages. Just how much damage will they do?

Congresswomen Mace, Boebert and Greene; source CNN

Still, it seems significant that some women in the GOP appear to be souring on Trump’s vileness. A New York Times opinion writer, Michelle Cottle, wrote of how much of a difference three Republican House members — Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina – have made. They stood up to others in their party and to the president in demanding release of the full Epstein files, forcing Trump to belatedly echo their call.

“Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made possible Tuesday’s vote to compel the administration to come clean about the web of degeneracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein,” Cottle wrote. “This victory speaks to the value of having women’s voices, and strength, inside the Republican echo chamber, a place that can still be tough for women to navigate.”

Might that signal the start of a feminist rebellion or something even broader? Betty Friedan in 1984 struck an optimistic note, writing: “I cry for all the years of women’s struggle and sacrifice to get to this place. I cry for joy and pride at the power that we women have found in ourselves and given to each other to make this moment possible. And I cry with sheer excitement at the amazing grace of it all – the sense of new political hope, of democracy moving again after all the years of cynicism.”

The setbacks that Trump represents – and foments – make such optimism tough now. But, if the three dissident Republican congresswomen signal anything, it’s that the fight isn’t lost yet.

Is “intellectual diversity” really diverse?

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Joe Weber

An Indiana case tests what intellectual exchange means in the Trump era

Joseph Weber

Nov 14, 2025

Ah, the hypocrisy.

Indiana last year passed an “intellectual diversity” law. It requires its public universities to develop policies that ensure that faculty foster a “culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

As reported by Insider Higher Ed, schools must consider whether faculty members have “introduced students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks” when deciding whether to give bonuses or renew contracts.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

But then, enter Jessica Adams, a lecturer at Indiana University’s School of Social Work. Adams was suspended from teaching a graduate-level class titled “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” after a single student objected to a graphic she showed in class.

The graphic described the phrase “Make America Great Again” as socially acceptable covert white supremacy. The term was listed right up there with Confederate flags and denial of white privilege.

A controversial view? No doubt. The sort of thing that might merit a full-blown discussion, one involving pro and con arguments? One might think so.

But after the student complained to U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, the Trump-allied senator contacted IU. He got Adams barred from the course and landed her in the middle of an investigation of whether she broke the new law. Even though she continues to teach three other courses, she now worries that her job is in jeopardy.

No discussion. No truly diverse viewpoints here, it would seem.

The graphic that Adams used appears to have been updated from one created about 20 years ago by the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence of Boulder, Colorado. Its criticism of the “Make America Great Again” phrase, while something that would certainly offend some folks, is hardly singular.

For years, some critics have seen the term as code for, “Make America White Again.” That’s certainly what former neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini contended in 2017, when he said rightists believe that’s exactly what the phrase means. Indeed, polls have shown that while most Trump supporters see America’s greatest days as in the past, many Blacks disagree.

The “again” part of that phrase seems to evoke far different responses among Blacks and whites, especially at at time when racial resentment seems rampant.

In a 2022 book, “Racial Resentment in the Political Mind,” a dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and a co-author argue that many whites believe Blacks are unfairly advantaged in scholarships and jobs — a view likely not uncommon among Trump supporters. “In that context, any racial progress today is perceived as coming at the expense of whites,” argues the dean, David C. Wilson, a political psychologist.

That’s where the “again” part comes in. Let’s go back to the good old days when any such preferences didn’t exist, it suggests.

What’s more, at least one would-be politician in Tennessee in 2016 ripped off the Trump phrase to explicitly call on voters to “Make America White Again.” That candidate lost, certainly an encouraging sign.

Wouldn’t all of that be worth discussing in a university classroom? Adams certainly thinks so. “I feel this is an important issue to talk about — censorship, stifling of academic freedom and this real overreach through this legislation,” Adams told The New York Times.

But, for his part, Sen. Banks seemed to think that anything that makes even a single student twitchy has no place in a lecture hall. “At least one student in the classroom was uncomfortable, and I’m sure there are more,” the senator argued. “This type of hateful rhetoric has no place in the classroom.”

So, in other words, “intellectual diversity” means no one should be made to feel anxious. No instructor, regardless of any evidence she could cite, should suggest there might be racism in the term “Make America Great Again” or, perhaps, among those who embrace it.

Presumably, however, it would be acceptable to praise the “Make America Great Again” phrase and the movement and president who use the term. Just don’t criticize it.

To be sure, lots of controversial ideas merit discussion. Students such as the lone objector in Adams’s class should be free to air their views and, perhaps, bat them back and forth with others who may disagree. Such disagreement would seem to be just what should go on in a classroom, especially a graduate level one, wouldn’t it?

As it happens, last night I attended a “Clean Speech” discussion in Denver where disagreement was tolerated, even encouraged — so long as we all were civil and respectful. At my table, we discussed one of the most contentious issues around: whether there should be a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Not all of us agreed on everything, but all of us learned things.

Isn’t that the sort of thing that should be promoted in university settings, too?

Not to Trumpists, it seems. To them “intellectual diversity” means firing, cancelling, purging those who disagree with them. As summarized well by U.S. News & World Report, their war on higher education has stretched from attacking Ivy League and other schools financially to trying to dismantle tenure and drive out faculty that offend them, often under the guise of combating antisemitism.

Trump has claimed that college campuses have been “infested with radicalism like never before.” He and his allies aim to purge the “woke” agenda wherever they find it.

Adams is just the most recent faculty member to fall prey to the effort,

When the Indiana “intellectual diversity” law was debated, IU law professor Lea Bishop condemned it as “a blank check to fire any faculty member for any reason, at any time, regardless of tenure.” She added it was “radical” and “un-American.”

Many academics slammed the bill. The faculty senates and American Association of University Professors chapters at Ball State, Indiana, Indiana State, and Purdue Universities opposed it. So, too, did the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association.

But the critics are fighting an uphill battle with powerful opponents.

When the Trump Administration attacked Harvard in the spring, it cited “viewpoint diversity” as one of its goals. Its letter to the university demanded that it hire a federally approved external party to “audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity.”

And it minced no words. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” It called even for admitting “a critical mass” of viewpoint-diverse students, whatever that means.

If the Indiana case is an example, “viewpoint diversity” seems to mean little more than excluding certain views that powerful people don’t like. Is that what universities should be about?

The poor shall always be with us

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Joe Weber

But, in time and with the right change, they could fare better

Joseph Weber

Nov 13, 2025

Deuteronomy 15:11 offers a sobering observation for us all.

“For the poor shall never cease out of the land; therefore, I command thee, saying: ‘Thou shalt surely open thy hand unto thy poor and needy brother, in thy land,” the verse goes. And that idea is later repeated by New Testament authors Matthew, Mark and John, who separately quote Jesus echoing the theme.

Last night, as a group of us packed hundreds of bags of food for the needy in our generally well-off county, I was struck by how many poor folks – especially working poor folks — struggle in some of the most affluent areas of our country. Here, in Summit County, Colorado, where a single-family home just sold for $6.5 million, an interfaith group I’m involved with expects to distribute grocery gift cards to nearly 1,500 families for the coming holiday season, up from just under 1,200 last year.

And the group we worked with last night, Smart Bellies, gives food to needy children in our schools year-round. Last year, it distributed more than 47,000 weekend bags of food, up 39.2 percent from the prior year. It also provided nearly 130,000 snacks for classrooms in 13 schools in Summit and Lake counties, a 44 percent rise from the year before.

So many hungry and needy people.

Fewer than 31,000 people live in Summit County, high in the Rockies in the ski country. Most are well off, able to afford nice mountainside homes with stunning views of some of the most beautiful land in the country. And yet, there are so many folks who can barely get by here.

As our county commissioners reported recently, more than 700 households in the county rely on the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. Nearly one-third of some 1,400 individuals involved are children.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing is how invisible these folks are. It’s easy for many of us to go about our days — hiking, skiing, shopping, etc. – and not realize that many among us too often go hungry. While a handful of people beg on a few street corners at times, they are a minuscule fraction of those on the streets in Denver and other cities.

Our poor, typically, are hard-working people who don’t wear their relative poverty on their sleeves. As a colleague on the Summit Colorado Interfaith Council put it, they are our teachers, ski-lift operators, restaurant workers, caregivers and others. In a place where the median income tops $106,000 and the median cost of a home is $1.3 million, their modest pay levels don’t square the circle.

Nationwide, the situation may be similar. Nearly 42 million Americans — or more than 12 percent of our fellow-citizens — depend on SNAP. That suggests something is systemically awry. It suggests a need for change.

On one level, Scriptural admonitions about the poor, and the need to care for them, are simply truisms. They describe reality as it is, even in the most affluent country in the world. They suggest that the feeding programs we have are essential and always will be.

But, as we see widening gaps nationally between haves and have-nots, the verses offer no comfort. As we see billionaires multiplying their wealth – and attending Gatsby-themed parties in high places — while so many struggle to house and feed themselves, such counsels amount to painful slaps in the face. They seem inadequate when we see a government giving billions in tax breaks to the ultrarich and corporations.

Almost certainly, it will take political change, at levels from the counties on up to the White House, to help bring the poor up the ladder. Encouragingly, our local commissioners stepped in when SNAP benefits became a Republican bargaining chip in recent arguments in Washington. They allocated funds to help people who could have been denied aid.

But, as so many people are not feeling the booming economy the president continues to cite, as he points to our frothy stock markets as proof, needed changes could be on the not-too-distant horizon. The poor may always be with us, but if they and those who help them decide that we’ve all seen far too much neediness, even desperation, their lot could be easier in coming years.

There will always been a need for relief efforts by private groups such as Smart Bellies and the Summit Colorado Interfaith Council. Government can do only so much, and it may be spiritually healthy for groups such as those to lend a hand to those in need. And yet, does anyone doubt that government could do far more than it is?

Unfit to serve

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Joe Weber

Donald J. Trump tarnishes Veterans Day

Joseph Weber

Nov 11, 2025

Draft dodger Donald J. Trump in 1964; source: BusinessInsider

The satirist Andy Borowitz hit just the right note in a post about Veterans Day and Donald J. Trump.

“Reporting” on how the president laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist, Borowitz “recounted” that Trump tearfully thanked “fallen foot specialists” who bravely helped those ducking service in the military. Borowitz “quoted” the president as saying, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”

The piece, of course, was a sendup based on deferments that kept Trump out of Vietnam.

Though he was a healthy and athletic 22-year-old who attended a military-style boarding school from 13 through high school, Trump gave Selective Service officials a podiatrist’s note in 1968, claiming bone spurs disqualified him. He had passed earlier military physicals, but avoided service with four educational deferments before getting a temporary 1-Y medical classification that ultimately was switched to a 4-F.

Recall that this is the same Trump who five decades later, in 2018, called fallen service members “losers” and “suckers” as he refused to enter a military cemetery in France. And it is the same Trump who declined to be seen in the presence of military amputees because he said it didn’t “look good” for him, as recounted by John Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff and a former Marine general.

As we honor the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform – past and present – today, it’s worth noting the deep flaws that mark their current commander-in-chief and his deputies. He has long had those flaws on display.

John McCain after his release from a Vietnamese POW camp

Remember that Trump in 2015 disparaged the late Sen. John McCain, who had spent more than five years in a Hanoi POW camp where he was tortured. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in an Iowa gathering. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

And take note that Trump today is misusing active duty and National Guard troops. He has sought to station them in American cities in bizarre displays of force, aimed variously at supporting roundups of migrants or combatting crime.

So far, Trump has deployed National Guard and/or active-duty soldiers to five major cities across the U.S.: Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon and Memphis, Tennessee. He has threatened future military interventions in several cities including Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Louis.

Encouragingly, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut – a Trump appointee – on Nov. 7 ordered the military out of Portland, Oregon. In her 106-page ruling, the judge noted the concerns of the nation’s founders that have kept presidents from misusing our military. Citing other court cases, she said the Founders “embodied their profound fear and distrust of military power . . . in the Constitution and its Amendments,” … which has lived on through the decades as “a traditional and strong resistance of Americans to any military intrusion into civilian affairs.”

But there has been no check, so far, on Trump’s misuse of the military to attack boats in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela. His administration has killed at least 76 people in such attacks so far while offering no proof that they are involved in the drug trade, as Trump has claimed. The usual practice had been for the Coast Guard to capture such boats and their crews, rather than killing people without evidence or any legal process.

In other words, Trump is ordering our military to murder people in at best dubious circumstances. “There has been no armed attack. There is no organized armed group [and] there is no armed conflict,” Cardozo Law School Professor Rebecca Ingber, a former legal adviser at the State Department, told The Christian Science Monitor. “Under international law, we’d call the targeted killing of suspected criminals an extrajudicial killing, and under U.S. domestic statutes it’s murder.”

When Adm. Alvin Holsey, the head of U.S. Southern Command, raised questions about the deadly military strikes on the boats, he found himself on the wrong side of the Trump Administration. The admiral abruptly announced last month that he was stepping down, less than one year into what is typically a three-year assignment.

Holsey appears to be a casualty of a broad purge of the military by Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He’s far from the only one.

The New York Times reported that Hegseth has fired or sidelined at least two dozen generals and admirals over the past nine months, ranging from Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to top intelligence officers. One senior officer, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey A. Kruse, a 35-year Air Force intelligence officer who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, was forced from his position after his agency cast doubt on Trump’s assertion that U.S. airstrikes in June had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

So much for respect for our military.

Recall, too, that Hegseth, following a Trump executive order, is driving transgender soldiers out of the military. More than 4,000 such soldiers are being forced out, including many with long and distinguished service records. For instance, they include Navy Commander Emily Schilling, a 19-year veteran who told CNN that her two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan included 60 combat missions.

The services will suffer without many of those soldiers, Schilling argued. “We see this with all of the troops that are deployed across the world today, already embedded in combat units,” Schilling said. “We have lawyers, doctors, special forces, rangers, and they’re all there today filling critical roles. If we yank them out, it will take decades to fill.”

Schilling was among plaintiffs who sued early this year to overturn the Trump Administration’s anti-trans policy. The plaintiffs won their argument with a federal judge in Washington state, George W. Bush appointee Benjamin Settle, who found that the administration’s contention that gender dysphoria was a disqualifying medical condition was essentially a ruse motivated by hostility towards transgender people, as reported by NPR.

But the Supreme Court paused Settle’s order against the policy in an emergency decision. It allowed the purge of transgender soldiers to proceed, even though it may revisit the case.

Finally, remember, too, that Trump is shrinking the Veterans Administration, threatening the care our veterans will get. As Newsweek reported, the administration has allowed staff to take voluntary early retirement as part of a plan to reduce VA staff by nearly 30,000 employees by the end of fiscal year 2025, which has sparked concerns about the department’s ability to administer healthcare.

No one should be surprised that some veterans are fighting back. “Vets Say No” protests, organized by About Face, a movement of post 9/11 veterans, and May Day Strong, a self-described anti-authoritarian movement, were scheduled on Nov. 11 in several cities.

Between his disdain for our soldiers and veterans and his misuse and abuses of them, Trump has hardly earned the right to lay wreaths anywhere on Veterans Day. Borowitz got it right.

A harvest of worry

Posted on November 7, 2025 by Joe Weber

Israel’s intractable conflict hits home with a daughter’s visit there

Joseph Weber

Nov 07, 2025

Settlers harass peace activists in the West Bank; source: Times of Israel

What is a parent to do when distant violence gets personal?

For me, the question has not been abstract. My younger daughter, Rabbi Abi Weber, felt a moral duty to join a group of fellow rabbis in Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank. They joined in the annual olive harvest, helping protect Arab farmers facing assaults by Israeli settlers.

So, on Nov. 4, Abi was among about 30 such activists when settlers buzzed them with a drone. After the drone fell and cut one of the women on arm, a couple armed settlers in military fatigues came to retrieve it. They pointed a gun at the activists – at fellow Jews – and then fired into the air.

Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, as happened just a couple weeks before. Then, a settler repeatedly clubbed a 55-year-old Palestinian woman after chasing farmers through olive groves near the West Bank village of Turmus’ayya. The woman was hospitalized with a brain bleed.

And, thankfully for our family, our daughter was not harmed in the drone assault – just appalled. “It was not the most pleasant set of interactions,” she put it in a characteristic bit of understatement.

Earlier, when Abi was visiting shepherds, she explained her reason for being there in a short video. She said the herders had been harassed and sometimes assaulted by settlers. As she provided what she called a protective presence, she said, “I believe as a rabbi that my Judaism calls me to prevent violence and to provide the opportunity for coexistence.”

Well, okay. But, two years after the horrors of Oct. 7 and after tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, peaceful coexistence seems like an impossible dream. Only some 21 percent of Israelis polled by Gallup between June and August believe peace is achievable. Only 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem agree. The figures are up slightly from recent years, but not by much.

Indeed, in the West Bank violence in the annual olive harvest has been growing. As Reuters reported, Palestinian monitors have counted 158 attacks across the Israeli-occupied West Bank since the harvest began in early October. Activists and farmers say the violence has intensified since Hamas triggered the war in Gaza.

The settlers target the harvest because Palestinians depend on it economically and see olive trees as symbols of their connection to the land. As NPR’s Daniel Estrin reported from the West Bank, the U.N. says this season has been the most dangerous in five years, with settler attacks in 70 towns and villages and more than 4,000 olive trees and saplings vandalized.

For us in her family, Abi’s choice to put herself on the line to help the West Bank Arabs was not a welcome one. The danger was obvious and the gain elusive. The effort by her colleagues in Rabbis for Human Rights and the liberal rabbinic group T’ruah seemed at best idealistic and at worst provocative, even though the RHR has been doing this for some 20 years.

But to be a rabbi, perhaps, is to be an idealist. Taking on the role of a religious teacher may demand a certain Utopianism, requiring that one believes he or she can make a difference in the world. So, my daughter is consistent.

Still, she stepped into one of the most fraught arenas in the world. In a sad coincidence, the day of the drone assault, Nov. 4, marked 30 years from the date when a Jewish extremist assassinated then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. As former Mideast negotiator Dennis Ross recently wrote in The Atlantic, Rabin “was the rare Israeli statesman who understood that Israel can advance its interests and address the Palestinian cause at the same time. Indeed, he was killed because of his efforts to broker peace, a prospect his killer couldn’t tolerate.”

The assassin, like many on Israel’s right, was enraged by Rabin’s support of the Oslo Accords. Those agreements were aimed at creating a two-state solution. They called for Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank, which was anathema to rightists who argued that no part of G_d-given lands could be surrendered to non-Jews.

Yitzhak Rabin, source: ReformJudaism.org

While condemnation of Rabin’s assassination was swift and widespread, it was not universal. Some right-wing rabbis contended that Rabin’s death was a legitimate, even a religious goal. They argued that Jew-on-Jew violence could be acceptable, with some rationalizing that a Jew who sought to yield any of the Biblical land of Israel had given up his Judaism.

For instance, the late Rabbi Abraham Hecht, then head of the Rabbinical Alliance of America, held that surrendering any land violated Jewish religious law. Thus, assassinating Rabin and all who assisted him, was “both permissible and necessary.” Hecht in October 1995 told New York Magazine: “Rabin is not a Jew any longer …. According to Jewish law, it says very clearly, if a man kills him, he has done a good deed.”

A decade ago, the American Council for Judaism published a piece that spelled out such sentiments. In a review of the book, “Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel” by journalist Dan Ephron, it reported: “The assassin was not a lone psychotic gunman but, instead, was a young man nurtured within Israel’s far-right religious institutions. After the murder, he was hailed as a hero by many, not only in Israel, but among kindred spirits in the U.S.”

Moreover, since Rabin’s killing, the politics in Israel have moved relentlessly rightward. The settler movement – which Rabin once called “a cancer” — more than doubled in size in the 20 years after the assassination. And the killing of the peace-seeking prime minister set the stage for today’s government.

“Assassination is an unpredictable act,’ journalist Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker. “Yet the killing of Yitzhak Rabin … bids to be one of history’s most effective political murders. Two years earlier, Rabin, setting aside a lifetime of enmity, appeared on the White House lawn with Yasir Arafat … to agree to a framework for limited Palestinian self-rule in the occupied territories … Within months of Rabin’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu was the new prime minister and the prospects for wider-ranging peace … were dead.”

In Rabin’s pocket at the time he was shot was a blood-stained sheet of paper bearing the lyrics of an Israeli song, “Shir LaShalom“ (”Song for Peace”). The song, which had been sung at the rally, focuses on the impossibility of bringing a dead person back to life and, therefore, the need for peace. This reasonable, if idealistic, tune mirrors the efforts of my daughter and her groups.

But, given the realities of Israel today, it would seem that such groups at best are tilting at windmills, at worst courting disaster for themselves. Yes, they garner a few headlines. And, yes, they show both Israelis and Palestinians that some are interested in getting to a meaningful and enduring peace.

Indeed, most Israelis want peace above all else. Some 66 percent of Israelis polled in September wanted an end to the war in Gaza, including 93 percent of Arabs and 60 percent of Jews. And in mid-October, tens of thousands of Israelis celebrated the return of hostages in the deal brokered by President Trump. While my daughter was being harassed by settlers, some 80,000 people attended a memorial rally on Nov. 4 in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

And yet, we’re a long way from peace.

A family murdered at Kibbutz Nir Oz, source: Abi Weber

My daughter’s trip ended with visits to the massacre sites in southern Israel where Hamas killed some 1,200 innocents, taking a couple hundred more hostage in the worst attack on Israel since the 1948 war. As a Jew committed to Israel, she mourned those losses, recounting an emotional tour her group was given by a guide at the Nova concert site whose two best friends were murdered by the terrorists there. At Kibbutz Nir Oz, she saw a photo of a couple and their three young kids, all killed when their home was burned.

Our family rabbi is idealistic, but not naïve. She knows that the ugliness of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has persisted for more than a century, marked at its beginning most starkly by the 1929 Hebron massacre. Nearly 70 Jews were murdered then and dozens more were injured by their Muslim neighbors after the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spread lies that Jews wanted to take over the Al Aqsa Mosque. Many more attacks have occurred since then, which may partly explain the fevers that drive the West Bank settlers.

Soon after the Trump peace plan was signed by many countries in the region experts differed on whether it has a prayer of success.

“This is a deal reluctantly agreed to by still-irreconcilable foes,” noted Shibley Telhami of The Brookings Institution. And the institute’s Hady Amr argued that “seeking peace without equality is an illusion. Israelis today enjoy security, freedom, and one of the world’s strongest economies—wealthier per capita than France, Japan, the UAE, or the U.K. Palestinians live under military control and are 20 times poorer. That immense imbalance in a tiny territory the size of New Jersey is a recipe for recurring conflict.”

But others cautiously applauded the moves. “Trump and his team of real estate wheeler-dealers broke that stalemate with creative and energetic diplomacy,” argued Suzanne Maloney. “For the plan to succeed, Washington will have to invest even more energy and political capital in advancing the next phases of the plan.”

Will Trump and his aides make such investments? The president is fond of photo-ops that make him look good, but does he have a capacity and persistence to see his 20-point plan to fruition?

More recently, with bloodshed continuing anew in Gaza, albeit at lower levels, a resolution seems even more distant. Will Hamas disarm, as the plan demands? “The more likely view is that Hamas is unlikely to fully relinquish its arms, according to people who have studied the group and understand its psychology,” London-based writer Akram Attaallah wrote in The New York Times. “It would cut to the core of its identity. For a movement that built its legitimacy around what it called resistance, giving up its weapons is not just a tactical concession; it is an existential unraveling.”

On the Israeli side, some on the far right want full-scale war on Hamas to resume, especially in light of Hamas dragging its feet on returning Israeli bodies and faking the recovery of at least one of them. “The fact that Hamas continues to play games and does not immediately transfer all the bodies of our fallen, is in itself evidence that the terror organization is still standing,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli security minister. “Now we don’t need to ‘extract a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to exact from it its very existence and destroy it completely, once and for all …”

Recall that Trump’s peace deal was trumpeted just under a month before settlers menaced my daughter and her group. Their goals and that of groups such as my daughter’s still couldn’t be further apart. So, unless miracles occur, I dearly hope she feels no need to return to the West Bank for next year’s harvest.

The Big Picture

Author Archives: Joe Weber

About Joe Weber

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The gauntlet is thrown

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Callous indifference

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Ah, the webs they weave

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An Indiana case tests what intellectual exchange means in the Trump era

The poor shall always be with us

But, in time and with the right change, they could fare better

Unfit to serve

Donald J. Trump tarnishes Veterans Day

A harvest of worry

Israel’s intractable conflict hits home with a daughter’s visit there