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.

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 Loser

Posted on November 5, 2025 by Joe Weber

As Dems sweep the election, a red-faced president proves indecorous

When George W. Bush’s Republicans took big hits in the 2006 midterms, the president acknowledged that the election was a “thumping” for the GOP. He said he wasn’t about to hold grudges for it but would work with Democrats “to get things done.”

Four years later, Barack Obama felt chastened by Democratic setbacks in that year’s midterms. He called GOP victories a “shellacking,” and added: “The responsibilities of this office are so enormous [that] sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place.”

So, now that Democrats in at least seven states gave Donald J. Trump and his party a bright blue middle finger in this year’s off-year pre-midterm races, how does he react? Humbled? Contrite, as he looks toward the fall Congressional midterms? Accepting responsibility, as prior presidents have?

Fuhgeddaboutit.

“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” the president wrote on Truth Social. And, even before the California redistricting vote went against him, the president called it a “GIANT SCAM” and “rigged,” promising a “legal and criminal review.” After the results came in – which could help Democrats flip the House next fall – he mysteriously threatened: “…AND SO IT BEGINS!”

Of course, we could have expected no better from Trump, who still insists his 2020 defeat was invalid. Just recently, he has been pressuring the Justice Department to find the fraud he insists cost him the White House that year.

Still, none of his absurd rhetoric could outweigh the anti-Trumpist results in California, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. And, despite the president’s claim that he wasn’t on the ballot, he and his party surely were on voters’ minds – certainly on the minds of the political victors.

Promising to “usher in a generation of change,” for example, self-proclaimed Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in his victory speech as the next mayor of New York City called on supporters to “respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

Even as Trump has threatened to withhold federal funds from the city, Mamdani looked beyond the 79-year-old president.

“This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one,” Mamdani said. “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up. We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks.”

Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill; source: People

Echoing the view that the elections were a mandate on Trumpism, Democratic Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said voters sent a clear message. “We sent a message to the whole world that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” she said. “We chose our commonwealth over chaos.” Then, she laughed when a supporter urged her to run for president.

In New Jersey, Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill pointed to the Trump administration’s moves to cut federal food assistance to 42 million Americans, halt federal subsidies for Obamacare, and cancel the Gateway tunnel project. She promised to “fight for a different future in New Jersey.”

Throughout her campaign, the New Jersey Monitor noted, Sherrill worked to nationalize the race, painting it as a choice between democracy and the MAGA movement, reminding voters that Trump endorsed her Republican opponent. She echoed that in her victory speech, saying New Jersey residents “take oaths to the Constitution, not a king.”

The repudiation of Trump spread deep and wide including in a couple Trump bastions, as NPR reported. In Georgia, a couple Democrats were tapped to serve on the state’s five-person public utility regulator after earning roughly 60 percent of the vote. It’s the first time Democrats have won a nonfederal statewide office there since 2006.

Pennsylvania voters chose to retain three state Supreme Court judges who were first elected as Democrats, despite millions of dollars in spending driven by conservative billionaire Jeff Yass‘ efforts to reshape the state court’s politics. Democrats also won special elections for a seat on Pennsylvania’s Superior Court and a seat on its Commonwealth Court.

Also in Pennsylvania, Democrats swept the top “row offices” in Bucks County, electing the county’s first-ever Democratic District Attorney and defeating an incumbent Republican sheriff a year after Trump narrowly won there. As NPR noted, Democrats similarly notched commanding victories in county executive races in Erie, Lehigh and Northampton counties, all bellwether counties in recent presidential elections.

And in Mississippi, Democrats broke a GOP supermajority in the state Senate after flipping two seats there and picked up another state House.

Now, of course, as it prepares for the fall midterms and beyond, the Democratic Party has to figure out what course it will rally around. Does it go mainstream, embracing the center as Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden did?

Or does the party embrace the policies of the 34-year-old naif, Mamdani, as GOP pundits and right-wing media enthusiasts hope? The incoming mayor has promised to freeze rents in rent-controlled housing, raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour, eliminate fares on buses, create government-run grocery stores, offer free child care and pay for it all with stiff hikes in corporate taxes. Will the party endorse the Muslim mayor’s denial of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and accept his reluctant repudiation of the term “globalize the intifada?”

The party could, instead, move toward the self-proclaimed moderate stances of Spanberger and Sherrill, women with powerhouse resumes far more substantial than that of the incoming New York mayor. Mamdani, a Bowdoin College graduate, worked as a foreclosure prevention housing counselor for an advocacy group, as a community organizer and then on several political campaigns before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020.

For their part, Spanberger and Sherrill lived together as members of the U.S. House, beginning in 2018, and were part of a group of Congresswomen who called themselves the “Mod Squad.” That was a centrist alternative to the leftist “Squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

Certainly, their backgrounds scream “Establishment” and “accomplishment.” Spanberger, 46, attended the U.S. Capitol Page School, has a B.A., from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Purdue University, and worked as a teacher and postal inspector, and, for eight years served as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. In her agency work she dealt with foreign nationals, meeting people undercover at times, and she carried five different passports at one point. She then served three terms as a Representative in Congress.

Sherrill, 53, is a Naval Academy graduate and former helicopter pilot who served nearly a decade in the military. She earned a master’s degree in global history from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a law degree from Georgetown University. After serving as a federal prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, Sherrill served four terms as a Congressional representative.

States breaking Democrat or Republican in redistricting; source: Democracy Docket

As for the GOP efforts to undermine elections and redraw maps to lock Republicans in safe districts, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insisted to reporters on Election Day that it was “absolutely true that there are [sic] fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact,” Leavitt told them. “Fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in, in the names of other people, in the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections. There’s countless examples, and we’d be happy to provide them.”

She provided no evidence and, when asked for it, Leavitt again responded, “it’s just a fact.” She also said Trump is mulling over an executive order “to strengthen our elections in this country, and to ensure that there cannot be blatant fraud, as we’ve seen in California, with their universal mail-in voting system.”

Already, the California GOP has filed suit to block the redistricting, despite the nearly 64 percent approval vote state residents delivered. Trump’s party alleges that the maps were redrawn in a racist fashion, an argument apparently designed to meet Fourteenth Amendment concerns regarding racial gerrymandering.

Never mind that Trump got the gerrymandering ball rolling by ordering redistricting in Texas. He got it there and from GOP leaders and in Missouri and North Carolina. He’s likely to get his wish, too, in Indiana, which is planning a redistricting special session.

As Democracy Docket reported, two other GOP-led states have passed gerrymanders, but not solely at Trump’s request. Utah’s redraw was court ordered, and the new map, which is still being fought over in court, doesn’t net any gains for the GOP and could allow Democrats to pick up one seat. In Ohio, lawmakers were required to do a redraw and a new map passed last week could flip two out of five seats currently held by Democrats.

To be sure, the GOP gerrymandering efforts face legal and other challenges. Virginia Democrats plan to put the matter before voters next year and Missouri voters are organizing a citizen-led vote referendum on the matter. Overall, however, pundits say the battles could boost the number of GOP seats to entrench Trump’s party in the House, even as the map mischief disenfranchises minority voters and unfairly advantages one side or the other.

Much will happen between now and next November, of course. The economy could thrive or tank, inflation could rise or fall, international relations could improve or decline. If Trump were more of a rational actor and could take a lesson from this year’s vote, he could scale back on his overreaches — though that would hardly be in character. His inclination would likely be to double down and count on his party’s electoral map manipulations to bail it out.

For now, however, it seems clear that this election reflects disgust with Trump’s nine-month stint so far, which has earned him a 63 percent disapproval rating. As his niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, put it in a post on X: “Raging narcissist claims that an election that rejected everything he stands for wasn’t about him. Good try, Donald. Loser.”

An era passes

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Joe Weber

The death of a brilliant colleague highlights our losses in media

In the opening issue of The Pennsylvania Magazine, a monthly published from January 1775 until July 1776 in Philadelphia, editor Thomas Paine wrote: “A magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius; and by constantly accumulating new matter, becomes a kind of market for wit and utility.”

As a modern nursery of genius, there were few equals to BusinessWeek in its heyday, a couple centuries after Paine’s words were published. BW garnered National Magazine Awards four times between 1973 and 1996. From 1958 to 2004, it picked up nine Gerald Loeb Awards, regarded as the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism, including five in the glory days between 1987 and 2004. Since being sold to Bloomberg News in 2009 and rechristened as Bloomberg Businessweek, it has picked up another couple NMAs and several Loeb Awards, including two this year.

Alums of BW – graduates of that “nursery” — have gone on to illustrious stints at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and The New Yorker, as well as online outfits including Poets and Quants, and elsewhere, including Bloomberg, of course. Some moved into substantial academic careers, including longtime editor Stephen B. Shepard, who founded and led a journalism graduate school at the City University of New York. Others have become novelists or gifted nonfiction authors. All of their work has been filled with wit and utility, indeed.

As someone privileged to work for the magazine for 22 years, until 2009, I was reminded recently of the place’s unique culture, sadly, by the death of a colleague there. Chris Power, a BW stalwart and international editor for most of the best years, died on Oct. 13 at 68. His passing drew more than 120 comments on a BW Friends site, most celebrating his wit, his skills, his easy way with people and his remarkable intellect. Some referred to his short stature – something he joked about – which reminded me of how a colleague once described Chris to me: “5-foot-3-inches of brain.”

Another coworker, a man I succeeded as Chief of Correspondents, described Chris as “an excellent editor who knew when to push fellow journalists to do their best work,” adding “he was always the gentleman.” Saying he was blessed to work with 35-year BW veteran Chris for decades, he added that “a key piece of what BusinessWeek was is now missing.” Yet another workmate called him “smart, fast and unflappable, no matter how tough the story or tight the deadline; all around one of the best.” Still another called him “the kindest, gentlest and cleverest editor I had.”

As Chris guided stories that a copydesk veteran called beautifully edited, he did so with style. “But most of all, I’ll remember Chris dropping by the desk and doing his soft shoe,” she wrote. “Even under the tightest of deadlines, he could lighten a heart.” At a goodbye party for a former top editor bound for Texas, another colleague reminisced about how the folks were all given hats. “When it was Chris’ turn to talk, he came up hatless and said, ‘When you’re 5’3”, you know better than to wear a cowboy hat,’” he wrote. Yet another former workmate wrote of Chris’s recipe for an extra-dry martini: “pour the gin, wave the vermouth bottle over the glass.”

Stephen Shepard, source: The Virtual Memories Show

The extraordinary outpouring of respect, affection and admiration for Chris reflected well on him, of course. But it also said a lot about the collegial and high-powered culture at BW, something that our top editor – Steve Shepard – fostered.

Sure, people brought a lot of brain power to the job. Our chief economist had a Ph.D. from Harvard, our finance editor earned his from The New School, others there had taught at Columbia, and the staff was filled with Ivy Leaguers of all sorts. As a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who had been trained by Jesuits at Boston College High School, Chris fit in. He “was one of the gifted minds that made BusinessWeek BusinessWeek,” as one commenter put it.

But brains weren’t enough. To work at BW, you also had to be able to get on well, to work in a group, to produce the best damn stuff we could. When candidates interviewed for jobs, they would sit down with as many as a half-dozen people, I recall. The book, as we called it, was a team effort. “Chris was always smart, funny and – most vital to a young reporter trying to find her footing – helpful,” one former colleague wrote. “Farewell to a true gentleman!”

It was no wonder that BW won so many awards. It’s no wonder that it produced such good work.

Sadly, as veterans of the glory days are aging, we are seeing our numbers decline. The man who hired me (Keith Felcyn) died last year, as did a former assistant managing editor (Dave Wallace) and a former Tokyo bureau chief (Robert Neff). Earlier, we lost a former science editor (Emily Thompson Smith), a former managing editor (Jack Dierdorff), a much-respected Washington bureau chief (Lee Walczak) and a finance editor (Chris Welles). Such things are inevitable, of course, as the clock ticks on us all.

But, more than just the passing of such admired and often beloved people, these losses say something about the declines we are seeing all around in journalism. I can’t speak to the culture of Bloomberg Businessweek, but I suspect it’s rather different than the old BW (for one thing, Bloomberg let go or reassigned much of the staff and, for another, the magazine is entirely online now, so we don’t see the powerful blend of imagery and text that helped tell stories so well).

On a more troubling point, even with the exceptional journalism machine of Bloomberg News behind it, BBW and other magazines have lost the extraordinary power and reach they once had. It’s been a long time since they could make big-name CEOs and politicians alike anxious when that was appropriate, and their influence on public attitudes is dubious at best (as is the case with many newspapers).

Thanks to the Net and political changes, so many big-name publications in journalism have seen their influence shrivel. Organizations for which credibility, fairness and thoroughness were core values have lost subscribers and seen their staffs shrink, their economic wellbeing eroded. Today, lies from those at the top levels of politics gain traction because on the Net all voices seem equal and the loudest and least credible don’t even bother going through the responsible media. Instead, they take their distortions and distractions directly to the public.

Consider the appalling list of media outlets that have bent the knee to Donald J. Trump and whose inclination will be to pull punches. Paramount agreed to pay $16 million for a Trump library to settle an absurd CBS case and now the company and network are owned by Trumper David Ellison. He installed rightwing opinion journalist Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief at CBS News and is now pursuing an acquisition of CNN, jeopardizing its independence. ABC similarly agreed to pay $16 million to settle another dubious Trump lawsuit.

The broader media have similarly acquiesced. Facebook parent Meta agreed to pay $25 million and X $10 million, both related to lawsuits over the post-Jan. 6, 2021, suspensions of Trump accounts. Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube, agreed to pay $24.5 million to Trump and others over a similar suspension.

Encouragingly, Trump’s legal assaults on some media outlets have gone nowhere. This year, he sued The Wall Street Journal, a Fox property, in July over his 2003 letter to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a longtime friend of Trump’s. He’s seeking $10 billion. The president also sued The New York Times, demanding $15 billion for allegedly undermining his reputation with stories raising questions about his business acumen.

While he filed the defamation suits in federal court in Trump-friendly Florida, he’s been set back in both. Lawyers for the WSJ have filed for dismissal of that case, while Trump was forced to refile the Times case after a judge threw out his original 85-page complaint, saying it was laden with “florid and enervating” prose. The judge wrote: “A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective.”

But Trump has a long history of using the courts – or trying to do so – to intimidate the press. In 1992, a colleague at BW, Larry Light, got hold of financial information about Trump that showed he had a negative net worth. As recounted by another colleague, Light’s inquiries drove Trump to march into Shepard’s office at BusinessWeek. There, the future president (whose companies went through six bankruptcies) launched into a three-hour tirade that included an anti-Semitic gibe about Light (who was, in fact, Episcopalian). Trump also threatened to sue but backed off after our lawyer told him his finances would then be opened to public disclosure in court.

After Trump objected, Time changed a cover photo; source: Deadline

Our editors at BusinessWeek and its owners at McGraw-Hill were not cowed or beholden to Trump. Shamefully, some of today’s media leaders are. Consider, for instance, Time owner and billionaire Trump backer Marc Benioff, under whose leadership the magazine recently replaced a jowly cover photo of the president that offended him with a more complimentary one. Benioff, who acquired Time in 2018, recently flip-flopped on backing Trump’s since-abandoned plans to deploy National Guard troops to San Francisco.

Much has changed in the media since Chris Power and leaders of his caliber set a demanding standard at BusinessWeek. Some magazines – The Atlantic and The New Yorker, for instance – and newspapers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal continue to prize careful and thorough, if critical, journalism. Indeed, I am indebted to The Atlantic for the Paine comment, which appears in its wonderful November issue, which is devoted to the founding of the United States 250 years ago next year.

But the ability of such outlets to act as a check on unbridled power-seeking and self-dealing by Trump and his minions has been gravely diminished as much of the public and GOP politicians seemingly turns a blind eye on the excesses. In their war on the press, the rightists have sadly succeeded in defunding NPR, a key source of independent news. And the marketplace has savaged the economics of so many other media outlets.

Will some magazines – whether online or in print – remain or ever again become nurseries of genius? Some may. But Chris’s passing is yet another troubling sign of the passing of an era.

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.

The Big Picture

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