Raw antisemitism in the academy

Posted on August 31, 2026 by Joe Weber

An attack on a business-school dean lays it bare

Albert Einstein, source: Library of Congress

In April 1933, less than four months after taking power in Germany, the Nazi Party passed a bland sounding law that ended the careers of some 1,200 Jewish academics. The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” – the Berufsbeamtengesetz — provided that non-Aryans – Jews – could be fired or forced into retirement from their university posts.

Many fled the country, including 14 Nobel laureates and 26 of Germany’s 60 professors of theoretical physics. One theoretical physicist – vocal anti-Nazi Albert Einstein – turned in his German passport and renounced his citizenship shortly before the law was enacted. Einstein, who had been a professor at the University of Berlin and directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, at the time was teaching at the California Institute of Technology.

“When the Nazis came to power, I looked to the universities that prided themselves upon their intellectual freedom, and they failed me,” Einstein said.

Today, it’s not the government that is assailing Jewish academics in the United States. Rather, the assaults come from within the universities. They are led by students, faculty, staff, and organized faculty-led or endorsed campus groups, including unions.

Dean Yael Grushka-Cockayne, source: Poets&Quants

The most glaring case in point now is an effort to oust a much-decorated scholar from the deanship at the University of Virginia’s prestigious Darden School of Business. Yael Grushka-Cockayne’s offense, according to the shadowy campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, is that she is an Israeli who in the 1990s served in the Israel Defense Forces. Then, a few years later, she worked in San Francisco for an Israeli software company. And in 2018, she took students and current UVA President Scott Beardsley, a business administration professor, to Israel.

In other words, Grushka-Cockayne is a Jew who, like many other Jews in America and elsewhere, has supported her ancestral homeland.

That’s enough to void a doctorate from the London Business School and master’s degrees from that school and the London School of Economics. It’s enough to make meaningless 17 years of service at Darden marked by a string of awards that include the Darden Morton Leadership Faculty Award in 2011, the University of Virginia’s Mead-Colley Award in 2012 and the Darden Outstanding Faculty Award in 2013 and 2022, the Faculty Diversity Award in 2013 and 2018, and the University of Virginia All University Teaching Award in 2015. More recently, she was named among the Executive MBA Transformational Faculty in 2024 and the Part-Time MBA Transformational Faculty in 2025.

Despite such distinctions, the SJP chapter at UVA has set out to fire Grushka-Cockayne, who was named dean on Aug. 1, by way of a petition drive on Instagram. The group, which doesn’t name any of its leaders and which may amount to little more than a thinly populated Instagram site, calls the new dean “UVA’s newest feat in legitimizing genocide.”

Never mind that Grushka-Cockayne has not publicly discussed her feelings about Israel’s policies. And never mind that most Israeli young people serve in the IDF or that when she left the forces, in 1996, she was in her early 20s. And never mind that she has zero influence on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

As John Byrne, the founder of the Poets&Quants business-school website, writes, it’s one thing to criticize the Israeli government. But “holding an Israeli-born professor personally responsible for the actions of that government is something else entirely.”

Indeed, the petition the pro-Palestinian group is pushing defies the sort of basic logic that even the rawest business-school student would know.

“Would we hold an American professor personally responsible for Abu Ghraib because he once served in the U.S. military?” Byrne asks. “Would we demand that a Russian professor resign because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine? Would we question whether a Chinese-born academic should lead a university program because of Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs?”

Of course not. Unless, that is, we apply the same sort of logic the Nazis did in destroying the careers of so many brilliant academics nearly a century ago. If they were Jews, they had to go. In Grushka-Cockayne’s case, that means if she’s an Israeli, she has to go.

But the call to end the Darden dean’s role is not occurring in a vacuum. It is of a piece with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which the Anti-Defamation League reports forbids people-to-people exchanges, dialogue opportunities for Israelis and Palestinians or even interactions between “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestine” groups and advocates unless the parties involved first recognize Israelis as “oppressors” and “colonizers.”

It also comes amid growing antisemitism – often dressed up as anti-Israeli sentiment – on many campuses. Nearly three-quarters (73.2 percent) of 209 Jewish academics surveyed last year by the Anti-Defamation League and the Academic Engagement Network reported anti-Jewish activities or statements from faculty, administrators, or staff on their campuses.

While much of such activity is focused on Israel, some respondents told of events organized by another group, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine, that “were billed as being anti-Zionist but … posted tropes about Jews and Israel that were clearly antisemitic.”

Half (50.2 percent) of the respondents believed that their campuses have been affected by “soft” or “shadow” boycotts. Of them, 55.2 percent noted that departments avoided co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent reported that partnerships with Israeli institutions and/or academics were discouraged or blocked, the ADL-AEN study reported.

“In their open-ended responses, faculty described being publicly maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed, with repercussions including canceled academic talks, denied professional opportunities, reputational damage, and even withdrawal from the academy,” the report added.

More recently, according to another ADL-AEN report, academic organizations have been hijacked by anti-Israel members.

“Jewish members report hostility from leaders and fellow members for raising concerns about antisemitism, expressing views related to Israel or Zionism, or challenging anti-Israel advocacy within their unions,” the report noted. It quoted one academic as saying, “the term ‘Zionist’ is applied as a slur if you express an opinion other than full condemnation of Israel.”

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a national union of faculty and other academic professionals, in 2024 reversed its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, particularly of Israel. It now claims efforts such as the BDS movement are “legitimate” tactics. It even hosted a webinar on “scholasticide in Palestine,” and, according to ADL-AEN, did not respond to requests from Jewish organizations to include different perspectives.

And other groups, coopted by anti-Israeli members, have mirrored such efforts.

In 2025, the California Faculty Association, which represents faculty across 23 California State University (CSU) campuses, urged CSU to cut academic ties with Israeli universities. It invoked claims of “scholasticide,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” according to the ADL-AEN report. The Santa Cruz Faculty Association took similar action by co-authoring resolutions that raised allegations of “scholasticide” in Palestine and supported anti-Zionist departmental statements on the grounds of “academic freedom.”

So, the SJP demand for the Darden dean’s head is consistent. It’s just more of the same, though it puts a face, an individual target, on the antisemitic and anti-Israeli campaign. Tellingly, its proponents are too cowardly to let their own faces be seen or their names known.

“Unfortunately, SJP seems eager to raise a five-alarm fire over anything remotely affiliated with Israel,” a student writing in the UVA newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, noted. “This July, the organization went as far as to call for the cancellation of an event in Tel Aviv, Israel designed to connect with prospective Israeli students — an event having nothing to do with Israeli military action in Iran, Gaza or elsewhere. Rather than advancing any substantive concerns, SJP appears to harbor a personal vendetta against all things Israeli.”

But can there be a “substantive concern” here? Just as was the case in Germany in 1933, the only one here is raw and undiluted antisemitism.

Fear and loathing in Trumpworld

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Joe Weber

Why do a couple conservatives want to limit their daughter’s intellectual growth?

Joseph Weber

In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner’s Gothic short story, the character Emily Grierson can’t accept the social changes the end of the Civil War brings to her southern town. Once a hopeful and vibrant young girl, she shuts herself off from the outside world, becoming a recluse who clings to dying traditions until she herself dies.

The 1930 story, which ends in a macabre tragedy, makes a bold statement about the heavy costs of rigidity and intellectual and social isolation.

I’m reminded of the tale now because I wonder whether U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and his wife, Fox TV personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, are setting their daughter Paloma up for a similar fate. Certainly, it’s not physical isolation they have in mind, but instead an intellectual and social quarantine.

And it seems their fears speak volumes about the state of Trump-era conservatism.

Recall that Duffy and his family have their own reality-TV show, a YouTube series called The Great American Road Trip. One episode has been getting a lot of attention because in it Paloma tells her devoutly Catholic and very conservative folks that she’d like to go to Harvard – much to their dismay. Mom would prefer a small Catholic university, certainly not Harvard.

“If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds,” says dad, a graduate of St. Mary’s University of Minnesota and what is now called the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul.

As New York Times columnist David French notes, young Paloma offers a “remarkably mature” response.

“But I went to an extremely conservative school in high school,” she says, “and I’m part of an extremely conservative family, and then if I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more well-rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school and then go to a conservative college.”

Duffy’s retort: “But they’re so good at it. You’ll see young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted.”

As French argues, in urging Duffy to let Paloma go to that supposed bastion of radical-liberalism, the experience would be good both for Paloma and Harvard. After attending Lipscomb University in Nashville, the Alabama-born and Kentucky-raised French himself went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1994.

David French, source: The New York Times

Back then – perhaps like now – French tells us, Harvard was “in the midst of intense ideological battles, in which conservative students were sometimes ruthlessly booed, hissed and heckled, merely for stating their views.” Nonetheless, at such a school, he contends, conservatives “will make liberal friends, including some who last a lifetime. My three years at Harvard were also three of the best years of my life, in part because they were so challenging.”

The writer says his ideas are stronger now because of the arguments he considered back then.

“We learned from one another, and we still learn from one another. There are times when my friends and classmates can even hear the echoes of our longtime debates and disagreements in my columns,” French writes. “I was a conservative and a Christian when I met them. I’m a conservative and a Christian now, but I’m a better Christian and a better conservative because they tested me. In the absence of that testing, I shudder to think what I’d be like today. To see what right-wing bubbles can do to the Christian mind, one need only look at the strident, conspiratorial — and often downright dumb — discourse in so many parts of the religious right today.”

Perhaps the Duffys prefer the “downright dumb” discourse one hears in Trumpworld now?

Certainly, students like Paloma would find their convictions tested and challenged at a school such as Harvard, but if their ideas are sound and they can back them up, would they not find themselves even more sure of those ideas? French argues that “every person — especially those of us who live in the world of ideas — should spend time in a place where he or she is a distinct religious or ideological minority, even when it’s hard. It can be among the most clarifying and rewarding experiences in life.”

I suggest that the very real problem for her parents, however, is that some of those ideas may be unsound. Harvard, it’s likely, would make Paloma reasonably question them.

The clip doesn’t detail what insidious liberal ideas she might be “perverted” by, but one can conjecture. They could involve topics such as personal sexual diversity, traditional women’s roles, minority rights, systemic racism, religious dogma and a basket full of other modern matters whose investigation would mortify Trumpists.

It’s entirely possible that a seemingly sheltered Paloma would bring home a lot of notions that would upset mom and dad. She could come back at Christmas break with arguments that, maybe, the Duffys would be hard-pressed to rebut, given their narrower intellectual upbringings. (Paloma’s mother is a product of Arizona State University and the University of California, San Diego).

To get personal about this, I attended a religious high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time of social and political upheaval that in some ways was worse than today’s. Occasionally, I also went to evening sessions at Rutgers College in a program called “Liberation High School,” in which my ideas — most of which were received wisdom, of course — were challenged. Everything from abortion and capitalism to military service was up for grabs (recall that this was while the Vietnam War raged).

Somehow, I managed to get through all that. Over time and, perhaps surprisingly, thanks to schooling in a graduate program at a different Ivy League school, Columbia, some of those leftish ideas dissipated for me. Liberal values such as fairness, equity and justice remained, but my sense of how to achieve those changed. (Hint: the DSA is anathema to me).

Of course, society changed a lot in the ‘60s and ‘70s – much as post-Civil War society in Faulkner’s story did. Faulkner’s intellectually isolated Rose couldn’t accept the changes the South wrestled with. Perhaps, she has a lot in common with the Duffy parents in this regard.

To get a bit more personal — and more recent — when I was teaching in the journalism school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln just a few years ago, I gave a college tour to a high school boy who was considering attending UNL. Like Paloma, he was a student at a conservative religious high school. And, like the Duffy parents in their attitude about Paloma, he was nervous about going to the big university.

He told me he was afraid of having his values and beliefs threatened in the big school. He wondered whether he would be better off going to a small religious college, where his values would be reinforced, not questioned. He didn’t want to have to defend his ideas but rather to simply have them reaffirmed.

The irony was that UNL – perhaps like the schools the Duffy parents attended – was a fairly conservative place. Catholics had a major presence on campus, with lots of supportive organizations. Indeed, I taught students who proudly spoke of attending annual Right to Life antiabortion marches in Washington. And other denominations had churches and youth organizations for the young and faithful. For better or worse, fraternities and sororities made up a big part of campus life.

Though I don’t know what decision that young man made, I suspect he ran away from UNL as fast as the Duffys would like Paloma to flee any notion of Harvard. As it happens, it appears that Paloma could wind up attending the University of Chicago, instead of heading north to Cambridge. We learn in the Duffy reality show that she’s been accepted there.

The University of Chicago, source: Facebook

If Paloma does opt for Chicago, though, the Duffys might find themselves just as hard-pressed as if she went to Harvard.

“The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading,” New York Times columnist and Trump loather Bret Stephens has said. “Chicago taught me… never to be satisfied with a first, second, third, or even a fourth opinion. Learning and thinking and progress take place through a continual process of intellectual challenge.”

Could the Duffys’s Trumpism — and perhaps some of their other views — stand up to such a challenge? Their first post-enrollment Christmas dinner could be a doozy.

A different sort of war

Posted on August 24, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s trade battle with Canada will cost us all

Joseph Weber

Forty-one years ago, during another sweltering August, Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Trade Representative, Clayton Yeutter, delivered a public address at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Toyko aimed at the overly protective Japanese government. His words could speak loudly today to the trade wars that Donald J. Trump is so fond of having.

“Our trading relationship is not a zero-sum game. For us to win, it is not necessary for you to lose,” the Ph.D. economist and free marketer said. “And for Japan to win, it is not necessary that the U.S. lose. If we handle these issues and disputes properly, we can both win!”

Ah, if only Yeutter (and Reagan) were running things in U.S. trade nowadays.

Instead, we have a president who believes that only one side can win in commerce – or virtually anything else. Worse, he behaves as if he thinks bravado, coercion (and, in tragic instances, bombs), will make him such a victor.

Call it toxic machismo run amuck. It is costing us most visibly in Iran and, less tangibly, in lots of other places.

So, we now have a trade war with Canada, a close long-term ally in commercial and political terms. This battle is, as The Wall Street Journal has repeatedly editorialized, “The Dumbest Trade War.” Not only is Trump damaging American industries, but he is hurting his own party’s fortunes.

“Mr. Trump’s latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials and manufacturing components,” the newspaper warned. “Republicans are already getting pounded on the campaign trail over his tariffs and inflation. One reason for Mr. Trump’s frigid approval rating is that voters believe Mr. Trump is waging blunderbuss wars without a strategy, and on trade they’re right.”

But Trump, who often perversely casts himself and the country as victims, seems to be singing the old South Park song, “Blame Canada.” Recall one key verse: “It seems that everything’s gone wrong/Since Canada came along.” Trump’s less lyrical version, as Time noted, is: “They feel entitled, and yet, we don’t need Canada, they need us!” He repeated his accusation that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years.”

That message came as he announced that U.S. tariffs on all Canadian cars and trucks, automotive parts, and steel will increase to 50 percent starting Jan. 1, 2027. “Build in the U.S. and there are zero tariffs. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst nations in the world to deal with,” he said on social media.

Recall, too, that Trump has long argued that he’d like to annex Canada, making it the U.S.’s 51^st state, something that hasn’t played well in a country long bothered by its sometimes vassal-like relationship to the U.S. Canada’s economy in gross domestic product terms is less than one-tenth the size of the U.S.’s and smaller than the economies of Texas and California and about equal to New York’s.

As he has pushed for annexation, Trump has steadily turned up the pressure on Canada in escalating tariffs. Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, was elected in March 2025 because he stood up to Trump. At the time, he said: “There’s someone who’s trying to weaken our economy,” spurring loud boos at a Liberal party gathering. “He’s attacking Canadian workers, families, and businesses. We can’t let him succeed.”

Trump Administration officials have even fueled a separatist effort in the oil-rich province of Alberta. At secessionist rallies, Politico reported, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, waved “we’re done” banners and worn “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps.

In January, the news outlet noted, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner for the U.S.,” while referring to the province’s energy resources. “People are talking,” Bessent told conservative podcaster Jack Posobiec, nodding to the separatist movement. “People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”

In October, Alberta voters will decide whether to launch the legal process toward a referendum on seceding from Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, source: Instagram

But, as Trump has long been beating the war drums – in trade and political terms — Carney has been having none of it.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us,” the prime minister said in a national address on Aug. 22, when he suspended the latest trade talks with the U.S. “And I promised that that will never, ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.”

Accounts of the negotiations have detailed finger-pointing by both sides, saying each was upping the ante on demands.

“U.S. officials blamed Canada for introducing new asks late in the talks, including seeking lower tariffs on heavy trucks, while Canadian leaders — including Prime Minister Mark Carney — pointed the finger at turf wars within the Trump administration over who controlled key pieces of the deal,” Politico reported.

The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Canada walked away from the table and had made unspecified new demands. But Carney said Canadian officials worked in good faith on a deal, claiming the U.S. proposed new, unfair terms.

Whatever the case, as a result, tariffs of 50 percent on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, or about 5 percent of its U.S.-bound exports, went into force after midnight on Aug. 21. And, in retaliation, Canada planned to slap dollar-for-dollar countertariffs on U.S. goods such as steel, dairy and appliances on Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day.

Trump’s move to double the duties charged on Canadian cars and car parts to 50 percent on Jan. 1 will hurt on both sides of the border. As CNN noted, with the war in Iran already driving up energy and transportation costs, at least some of the financial pain will land on American consumers, even as the levies more directly punish Canadians.

“The new U.S. tariffs are designed to hurt and divide us,” Carney told his countrymen. “They’re a miscalculation. They’re a miscalculation because Canadians will always take care of each other. We know we’re stronger together.”

It’s not clear who will cry uncle first in this trade war.

Roughly 87,000 Canadian jobs could be at risk as the 50 per cent tariffs cut sales of Canadian goods to the U.S., according to an analysis by University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe. As Canada’s CTV News reported, he estimated that about 52,000 jobs are directly vulnerable, while indirect effects on Canadian suppliers and service providers could put another 35,000 in danger.

Carney’s government is setting aside $25 billion (Canadian) to protect Canadian workers and businesses hurt by the tariffs. “We’re helping our small and medium-sized businesses respond by investing in equipment, productivity, and supply chain resilience,” he said. “And we’re financing large companies to keep large employers operating and retain their workers.”

The Canadians, moreover, are reaching out to other markets around the world to boost trade – something that also appears to be irking Trump.

“Over the last year we have signed more than 20 trade and security deals across five continents,” Carney said. “We completed our most recent deal, with the UAE, in a record 47 days. Canadian businesses now enjoy tariff-free access to 1.5 billion consumers. Over the next six months, we will double that number through new trade deals from ASEAN to India. This fall, we will begin discussions with the European Union—the world’s second-largest economy—to deepen and strengthen our security and economic partnership.”

Essentially, Canada is declaring its independence from the U.S. just at a time when Trump is trying to make it more compliant with his whims.

As for the impact of the trade war on the U.S., most analysts point to modest job effects – mainly in areas directly related to cross-border trade. But they say Canadian goods will either become less available or more costly.

“The specificity of the tariffs means that different sectors of the economy — and your everyday purchases — will get hit unevenly,” Business Insider reported. “The tariffs affect alcohol, milk, plywood, and more. For consumers craving Canadian whisky or finally getting around to home renovations, that might mean a bigger bite out of their wallets.”

Canadian lumber near Vancouver, source: Wikipedia

Some areas of the U.S. – such as auto trade-oriented Michigan – and some sectors, such as homebuilding, will especially feel the heat, the outlet noted. “Canada is also a major supplier of lumber, a key material in homebuilding. A tariff impacting lumber prices would increase construction costs for new homes, just as cities like New York, Austin, and Raleigh, North Carolina, double down on policies to boost housing supply.”

Beyond the economic effects, though, Trump’s trade war with our northern neighbor – like his other global trade battles – is having a more pernicious effect. All have cost American credibility dearly.

“We recognized from the start that America has changed,” the Canadian leader told his fellow citizens. “Early last year, in this room, I observed that the decades-long process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was over. Our government understood, before many, that America would transform all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies and use economic integration as a weapon. We recognized that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.”

“Written in pencil.” Indeed.

All of this has been a far cry from when two men whose word meant something were in charge of such things in Washington four decades ago. Philosophically, it’s leagues away from the borderless trade that Yeutter and his president, Reagan, espoused. Both America and the rest of the world are already poorer for it and, sadly, are likely to become more so.

Spit but no polish

Posted on August 22, 2026 by Joe Weber

Hegseth’s boot has landed heavily on Stars on Stripes

Joseph Weber

A bit more than 80 years ago, Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin really pissed off General George S. Patton.

The young cartoonist’s signature characters, Willie and Joe, were unshaven, unkempt and thoroughly loved by GIs in World War II. To the spit-and-polish Patton, who ordered front-line fighters to shave daily and even wear ties, the scruffy cartoon GIs looked “like goddamn bums,” were “unsoldierly” and would undermine morale.

Patton threatened to jail Mauldin, a sergeant in the Army, and pushed to get the cartoon banned. But Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened, seemingly persuaded that if rank-and-file soldiers loved the strip Mauldin was doing something right. Mauldin went on to win a Pulitzer Prize at age 23.

Stars and Stripes, which dates back to the Civil War and has long valued its editorial independence, is again in the middle of a Patton-like fight. Only this time, there’s no Eisenhower to bring some sense to bear. Instead, the self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, and his underlings in the Pentagon are determined to squash any degree of autonomy.

As the newspaper itself reported, the Pentagon in March outlined an overhaul effort for Stars and Stripes that barred it from using some news wire services and running comics and other syndicated features. It said content must be consistent with “good order and discipline,” a phrase borrowed from the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Then, in April, the Pentagon fired its ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, someone with 40 years of experience in journalism. In her final column, she wrote: “Apparently the Pentagon also doesn’t want you to hear from me anymore about threats to the editorial independence of Stars and Stripes.”

As Smith also wrote, Hegseth killed Sunday comics in the paper, a twist that likely would send Mauldin spinning in his grave at the Arlington National Cemetery. That prompted one reader to write Smith: “As a retired Navy veteran, [I] feel the DOD directive smells like censorship…. We fought for the Constitution and freedom. That includes transparency of our government and freedom of the press. As an American, I have a right to decide what I read.”

Lederer, Slavin and Korte; source: Stars and Stripes

But apparently in Hegseth’s view, only he has the right to decide what soldiers read and see. His Pentagon on Aug. 21 fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte after the pair appeared in a CBS interview. In that interview, Slavin said “I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies.”

The paper’s longtime publisher, Max Lederer, was also canned, even after he had announced his retirement. As the Associated Press reported, Lederer made his resignation announcement on Aug. 18, shortly after the Pentagon installed a new deputy publisher under him without his prior knowledge. Lederer planned to leave in late September, but felt Hegseth’s boot weeks earlier instead.

To be sure, the brouhaha at the newspaper has been a long time coming. In January, Hegseth’s PR man, Sean Parnell, wrote on X that “Stars and Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters… It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability and ALL THINGS MILITARY. No more repurposed DC gossip columns; no more Associated Press reprints.”

But Lederer, who served at the newspaper for 30 years and as the second fulltime civilian publisher since 2007, soon made it obvious that he and Hegseth’s Pentagon were on different pages. He wrote in a staff memo that it had “become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leadership of the Department of Defense has for the organization.”

The deputy publisher the Pentagon installed under Lederer, Navy Capt. William Urban, is a PR man, a flack, who bragged that he has been “a spokesman for some of the hardest Public Affairs assignments in the Navy and Department of War for more than 20 years.” As AP noted, he admitted he has “no formal journalism experience.” It’s unclear whether he will rise to publisher.

It is telling, however, that Lederer refers to the Department of Defense by its proper legal name, while Hegseth’s Navy toady calls it the Department of War. Despite an executive order by Donald J. Trump and changes in logos around the Pentagon, the department remains the DoD until Congress replaces the title set in place by statute in 1949.

Urban’s appointment did not sit well with some legislators.

“The placement of an active-duty Public Affairs officer in the senior leadership of an organization whose credibility depends on its independence from the military chain of command raises serious questions,” Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen of the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote Hegseth on Aug. 20. “Mr. Lederer’s abrupt departure only heightens those concerns, particularly as the Department determines who will assume leadership of Stars and Stripes. This is particularly troubling in light of the Department’s recent actions affecting Stars and Stripes, including the April firing of independent Ombudsman Jacqueline Smith after she publicly defended the newspaper’s editorial independence and communicated concerns to Congress.”

Thumbing their noses at the senators, Hegseth and his Pentagon minions fired the newspaper’s leaders the day after that.

Perhaps as an Orwellian joke, flack Parnell last April wrote a letter to troubled Congressional lawmakers insisting that “Stripes will remain editorially independent of the U.S. military chain of command, military political affairs activities, or other internal influences, and without censorship and propaganda.” As noted by The Hill, the newspaper has been editorially independent since the 1990s by Congressional mandate.

National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. told AP that Slavin’s firing was “another brazen attempt by the Pentagon to dictate coverage of the military.” He added that “firing a newspaper editor after he publicly defended his newsroom’s editorial independence is deeply troubling, and it should concern every journalist and every member of the U.S. military who depends on independent reporting.”

For some legislators, the recent changes just underscore longstanding fears. “While America is at war, the Trump administration is hellbent on silencing our key military newspaper and attacking service members’ access to the free press. Every American should be concerned about this blatant censorship,” Sen. Warren said in May.

As The New York Times reported with typical understatement, the recent firings “raised questions about the Pentagon’s willingness to ensure the editorial integrity of the publication that has reported extensively on difficulties faced by military communities as the war in Iran has dragged on.”

Really, NYT, it just “raised questions?”

Indeed, the Stars and Stripes trio was fired about 10 days after the paper reported on hardships that Navy sailors were facing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose deployment was extended to nine months amid the war.

One can only wonder what will happen to the newspaper’s credibility in the eyes of the military folks who – at least until now – have read it. Somehow, having one DoD flack assure everyone that the paper will be free of propaganda only to have a military flack undermine the place a few months later might strike many as a contradiction.

Gotta wonder what Mauldin would have thought.

“Without fear or favor”

Posted on August 19, 2026 by Joe Weber

Haley Van Erem has been seeking justice for a long time

Joseph Weber

Haley Van Erem as a student, Source: FSU College of Law

Fourteen years ago, an idealistic Florida State University law student saw something very wrong and, with the help of colleagues, set out to set it right. State authorities blocked her at every turn.

Now that she’s a far more seasoned lawyer, Haley Van Erem is doing the same thing again. But this time, it’s the Trump Administration that she’s tangling with.

Van Erem in 2012 was part of a project at FSU’s Public Interest Law Center that brought suit against Florida to try to get children with complex medical needs out of nursing homes and back into their homes with proper support. The children – who numbered more than 200 back then – were “medically fragile.” Some required 24/7 care that included ventilators.

Still, many of their caregivers wanted them home.

“The saddest part of all is not that these children have nowhere to go. That’s what a lot of people would assume,” Van Erem told the Florida Bar News. “A lot of families are asking for support and want their children at home. Our goal is to get these children back with their families, with adequate support.”

It took more than a decade of litigation, but in 2023 a federal court ruled that the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by institutionalizing the children. The court ordered Florida to ensure that the youngsters – then numbering about 140 –get access to needed services while at home and in their communities, as the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division reported.

As it happened, Van Erem was working at the time in that division, where she had served as a career DOJ attorney for nearly a decade. While there, she racked up a slew of honors, including Special Commendations in 2019 and 2023, Distinguished Service Awards in 2019, 2022, and 2023, and a Cooperative Achievement Award in 2017 for interagency work.

None of that seems surprising, in light of her work at FSU and her earlier days as a Phi Beta Kappa student at Arizona State University. As a junior studying social work, she won a grant to study in Spain. For years, Van Erem has been a proven achiever, as well as someone with a keen eye for right and wrong.

But her tenure in the once-distinguished Civil Rights Division was upended by Donald J. Trump and his minions at the department. And the demands put on Van Erem and her colleagues have led to an exceptional whistleblower complaint that claims there was no legal or factual basis for probes into antisemitism at Brown, Columbia and Harvard. Recall that those allegations have wreaked havoc at the schools.

Recall, too, that Brown and Columbia settled their disputes with the Trump Administration by agreeing to pay $50 million and $200 million, respectively, mainly because Trump had cut off far larger amounts of federal funding to the schools. Harvard has been fighting, however, and the Trump administration was ordered last year to reverse more than $2.6 billion funding cuts to the school, with a federal judge saying the government “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

More recently, a different judge dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students. This was a major setback in Trump’s war on academia.

As PBS reported, Van Erem’s complaint alleges that investigations into the schools were designed to strong-arm them into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.

In other words, rather than undertake good-faith probes and charge offenses based on the facts, Justice’s lawyers were using the department as a cudgel to achieve Trump’s political end – humbling the schools.

The complaint makes for fascinating reading.

In March 2025, for instance, it says Van Erem and some of her colleagues were reassigned to a task force investigating alleged antisemitism in medical schools at Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard. The lawyers got a memo informing them that the investigations were “based on a New York Post article that alleged anti-Semitic activities at numerous medical school commencement ceremonies.”

Some students, according to the newspaper, had shouted “Free Palestine” and worn Palestinian flags or keffiyehs at the graduation ceremonies – repulsive expressions, perhaps, but protected speech, according to the complaint. “It was not unheard of for news reporting coupled with additional evidence to lead the DOJ to initiate further scrutiny of potential statutory violations, but opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual,” the complaint notes.

Still, the lawyers expected rigorous investigation, the complaint says. Instead, they were told that the probe at Columbia – a particular bête noire for Trump — had widened to seek out antisemitism at the entire university.

The staff, it seemed, had found no evidence of liability at the medical schools but, together with the funding cuts, the DOJ was determined to pound the schools into settlements. The efforts “reflected a predetermined, outcome‑driven approach to enforcement rather than a fact‑based investigative process,” the complaint says, “… staff were encouraged to invert the standard sequence of investigation, compliance review, and legal analysis and instead work backward from desired settlement terms, including provisions not directly tied to substantiated Title VI anti‑harassment or antisemitism violations, to generate proposed findings that would support those terms.”

Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in institutions receiving federal funds.

At Brown, in particular, Van Erem and her colleagues were told to interview Middle East Studies professors, particularly Muslims, to try to elicit antisemitic statements, according to the complaint. She and her colleagues felt it was an “attempt to intimidate those professors and was rooted in Islamophobic assumptions that Middle East Studies professors would harbor antisemitic viewpoints rather than any actual evidence of complaints about antisemitism.”

But, to the consternation of their superiors, Van Erem and her colleagues found insufficient evidence to support allegations of Title VI violations.

At Columbia, investigators found evidence of discrimination, but Van Erem and her colleagues argued the investigation was a rush job done before “adequate factual development and legal review were completed” and relied on allegations that “were unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings, or that implicated protected First Amendment activity.”

DOJ’s representatives on the task force were given only hours to review claims that officials hoped to cite to justify an administration finding that the university had violated Jewish students’ civil rights, as The Washington Post noted. As the newspaper reported, in some cases the claims involved little more than activists’ expressions of support for Palestinians.

“My main concern is that a lot of these [examples] involve protected speech and this document should not imply that those incidents are the basis of a Title VI violations,” Van Erem wrote.

When the pressure from her supervisors persisted, the career DOJ lawyer decided her days in the department were over. Van Erem “was unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” She quit on May 30, 2025.

As Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin put it in a letter to Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division, “your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”

Raskin added that “the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”

Like many other career prosecutors who don’t toe the Trumpist line, Van Erem last fall moved into state prosecution. She signed on as a unit chief at the Office of the Attorney General for Maryland. And, on Aug. 17, she brought the complaint against the feds, with the help of lawyers at the Government Accountability Project. In it, she asks the inspector generals of the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to investigate “without fear or favor” the abuses she has reported.

Will that request go anywhere? That seems difficult to imagine, now that the Justice Department under Todd Blanche appears overtly to be a vehicle for Trump to pursue institutions and individuals he dislikes. Still, the disclosure of Van Erem’s experiences sheds light on just how perverse the department has become.

It took years, but Van Erem prevailed in Florida. That may again happen in D.C., though it may require that someone new occupy the White House and that the Department of Justice be led by someone independent, fair-minded and truthful — in other words, someone as interested in justice as Van Erem is.

“Drest in a little brief authority”

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s disdain for anyone checking him just gets worse and worse

Joseph Weber

In Shakespeare’s classic play “The Merchant of Venice,” Portia saves the life of her friend Antonio with a clever legal dodge. Even though the lender Shylock has the right to take a pound of flesh from the man because he defaulted on a loan, Portia convinces a court that their contract does not allow Shylock to take any blood:

“This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;/The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh:’/Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;/But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed/One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods/Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate/Unto the state of Venice.”

Ah, such a wonderful loophole. No doubt, lawyers have exploited terms such as that for centuries, finding ways to wiggle out of a contract or sidestep a judge’s orders or stated law.

But is it seemly when a president tries this?

Donald J. Trump and his toadies on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts are aiming to do just that with a move to add to that title the phrase “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump,” as well as by renaming the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” and by prominently etching the words “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

The idea is that Judge Christopher R. Cooper, in his May 29 order requiring Trump’s name to be stripped from the center’s facade, spoke only to the proper name of the building, not to phrases – or names — that might otherwise adorn it, even if they appear as prominently as the place’s name itself.

“The Court has concluded that the Board overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump. In 1964, Congress deliberately rechristened the ‘National Cultural Center’ the ‘John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,’” the judge ruled. “[So] the Kennedy Center Board’s decision to rename the Center, along with its decision to affix President Trump’s name to the building’s façade, violate Congress’s unequivocal mandate. As stated at the outset, Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

It’s likely that Judge Cooper will be asked to rule on the new proposed changes again. Ohio Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member of the center’s board who was one of three nays on the “Renovated By” resolution, called the group’s action “a transparent effort to circumvent the Court’s ruling,” adding that it “flies in the face of the statutes that Congress passed.” She vowed to fight.

The move by the board, which Trump heads, not merely flies in the face of law, but spits in the eye of the judge, a Barack Obama appointee. Recall that Trump had accused Cooper of ruling against him “because his wife probably told him to do so,” arguing that Cooper’s wife, former federal prosecutor Amy Jeffress, was “a Radical Left Democrat” and that the judge should be brought up on charges because that amounted to a conflict of interest.

Good luck, Donald, with getting a charitable decision now from that judge.

This all amounts to an egomaniac’s childish temper tantrum, of course. One imagines him stamping his feet and saying: “So there.” But it represents something much bigger – Trump’s inability to recognize that no means no, at least when a court declares that.

At times, the consequences of Trump’s refusal to countenance any check on his power can be far more dire than just a few letters etched into marble on a Washington landmark. To cite some recent examples, the Supreme Court has ruled against him on three major fronts – on tariffs, on an appointee to the Federal Reserve Trump dislikes and on birthright citizenship – and on all three Trump and his minions are making efforts to sidestep the rulings.

The administration’s loophole-hunting efforts, detailed in a New York Times newsletter, amount to what an article in The Duke Law Journal called “legalistic noncompliance.” The article’s authors called the sidestepping “deploying the language of the law to shroud what are, in fact, bad faith efforts to evade judicial orders.” Trump’s acolytes insist they are following the letter of the law, as judges interpret that, but they seek to slip around its spirit in whatever ways they can.

Portia would have been proud.

Justices Barrett, Gorsuch and Roberts; source: Slate

But let’s look further. What does Trump say of the judges in some of those cases? He called his appointees Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett “weak, stupid, and bad” and an embarrassment to their families.” Worse, the justices were “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.”

Presidential language, for sure.

So, will Trump and his Justice Department bootlickers now accept another federal judge’s recent dismissal of an antisemitism case against Harvard? “We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps,” Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement.

In other words, no won’t mean no, if the Trumpies can come up with a legal dodge or loophole.

At times, the administration’s arrogance is so deep that it hasn’t bothered to even come up with some workaround. It has just defied the courts. Most infamously, Trump’s lackeys in the spring of 2025 defied an order by Judge James E. Boasberg to not deport 200 migrants without a hearing. Three planes shipped the people out to El Salvador anyway.

Recall that Trump called Boasberg “a Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached, earning a rare rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Boasberg was appointed to separate judicial posts by George W. Bush and Barack Obama and served on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Perhaps someone who deserves a modicum of presidential respect?

But Trump’s disrespect for judges and defiance of their orders goes far further. Between February of 2025 and last spring, district court judges ruled that the administration violated orders in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including cuts in federal funding, mass layoffs, deportations, and immigration practices, as reported by The Associated Press. These violations followed more than 250 instances of noncompliance that judges highlighted in individual immigration petitions — from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates. The AP called it “an extraordinary record of defiance.”

Let’s think about Shakespeare again. He often wrote about arrogance.

In “Measure for Measure,” another of his plays, a character bemoans another character’s hubris, saying: “… man, proud man,/Drest in a little brief authority,/Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,/His glassy essence, like an angry ape,/Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/As make the angels weep.”

Donald J. Trump and his minions likely are making many weep now, but someday their “little brief authority” and their deceptions and legal sideslipping will fade away. Perhaps the midterm elections will mark the beginning of their end.

President Donald Trump has called for a federal judge to face charges after a ruling that will temporarily halt his renovations at the center and force his name to be removed from the structure (Reuters)

Do Jews have a political home anymore?

Posted on August 5, 2026 by Joe Weber

The Democratic Party may be driving them out

Joseph Weber

Six years after running unsuccessfully for the vice presidency as the Democratic party nominee, Joe Lieberman in 2006 lost a Democratic primary race in Connecticut for reelection to the U.S. Senate. So, he ran and won as an independent, taking his fourth term, which wrapped up in 2013. In an interview a decade later, he recalled an old quote: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”

Lieberman stopped himself before repeating the line. Instead, he laughed and, remembering that Ronald Reagan had used the line in 1962, said: “So maybe that’s not a good person to quote to extend a bridge to my fellow Democrats.”

The 24-year senator at that time had kept his Democratic party registration but was working with No Labels, a centrist group that wanted to find an alternative to both Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump in the 2024 election. He said the anger Americans felt toward both parties was unprecedented.

As often happens with third parties, the No Labels group fell apart, unable to find a suitable candidate. Then, months before the election, Lieberman died in March 2024 at 82.

More than anything, the Connecticut senator – an observant Jew who had faulted Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1999 for his “immoral” relationship with an intern — wanted the party to return to its traditional center. He was so turned off by the directions the party was taking that he backed his friend, Sen. John McCain, for president in 2008 and, of course, sought a middle-ground alternative in the year he died.

Now, anti-Israel “progressives” have notched high-profile wins in Democratic primaries in Michigan and Colorado, along with Zohran Mamdani’s rout in New York City, as well as wins by other left-wing candidates there. And many Jews are wondering the same sort of thing as Lieberman did.

Has the party that so many have long supported deserted them?

And it’s not just a matter of the victories in Michigan by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a Senate candidate, and House candidate William Lawrence, as well as Colorado House candidate Melat Kiros. Nor is it just the New York primary triumphs of House hopeful Brad Lander, a nuanced critic of Israel, or the more strident Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

As The New York Times reported, the Democratic Party’s rapid retreat from support for Israel has shown up in polls, election results and votes in Congress. Some 49 percent of Democratic voters quizzed in a May New York Times/Sienna poll strongly oppose providing more economic and military support to the country (while 42 percent of Republicans strongly back such aid). Almost half the Democrats in the House voted in July to end aid to Israel, though the measure failed.

The elections and the opinion shift almost surely will weaken the already wobbling support among many Jews for the Democratic Party. A poll from last year showed that some 68 percent of American Jews backed the party in 2019, but the share dropped to 55 percent by last year. By contrast, roughly just one in four such Jews backed the Republican Party from 2008 to 2020, but the share rose to nearly one in three (32 percent) by last year.

Of course, not all Jews have switched parties. The CES poll shows a rise in the share considering themselves as independents (or backers of others) to 13 percent, up from just below 10 percent in 2024. It’s possible that share includes folks who might be as mad at both parties as Lieberman said many were in 2024.

And any analysis of the changes has to be loaded with caveats. For one, while the Israel critics grabbed the headlines, plenty of moderate Democrats also won their contests. As The Week noted, the recent winners in the party’s moderate faction include Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), who fended off a leftist challenger; former Rep. Elaine Luria (Va.) and Richmond-area prosecutor Shannon Taylor, who won swing-district primaries; and Rep. Wesley Bell (Mo.), who bested democratic socialist former Rep. Cori Bush.

Earlier, plenty of pro-Israel candidates won their races elsewhere. These include House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (who ran unopposed in New York) and Adrian Boafo in Maryland, as well as New Yorkers Yvette Clark, Laura Gillen, Gregory Meeks, Tim Kennedy and others, along with several other incumbents from Maryland, all backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

What’s more, it may be risky to make too much of El-Sayed’s victory. It was a narrow one, about a single percentage point higher than pro-Israel candidate Haley Stevens, and he prevailed with less than a majority at just under 48.5 percent, according to the most recent count. Moreover, it’s typically the most committed partisans – call some of them extremists– who vote in primaries, so the epidemiologist’s backers may not represent the party faithful overall.

Still, as the Times suggested, El-Sayed’s triumph was “maybe the biggest setback for pro-Israel Democrats.” And, perhaps more than anything, El-Sayed’s victory was a sharp slap in the face to AIPAC, which had spent a stunning $32 million trying to defeat him. The group, instead, gave El-Sayed ammunition, as he made attacking spending by outside groups a key part of his campaign.

Similarly, AIPAC spent heavily a few months ago to try to tarnish a Jewish Democrat in Illinois, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, in his race for the House. Biss considers himself a liberal Zionist who is critical of Israel’s current government, a position that is increasingly common among Democrats. AIPAC’s spending backfired when Biss made the group’s opposition a central part of his race.

Whether American Jews will turn against the Democrats overall in the midterms and later in the next presidential race is a tough call to make now. As the political science site Good Authority noted, most Jewish Democrats quizzed in 2025 said they still intended to vote Democratic in House races this year, even as their party support was weakening – though much could change yet.

“The two signals do not point in the same direction,” the site reported. “Jewish American identification with the Democratic Party has dropped to its lowest level in nearly two decades. Jewish Democratic voters’ stated vote intention has remained much the same. Both of those things can be true at once, and the needle on either gauge can move again between now and November.”

The late Connecticut senator may have been onto something years ago. Soon enough, we’ll find out whether his insights are even more relevant now.

If ignorance is bliss, why are so many miserable?

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Joe Weber

But Trump’s funhouse mirrors may be shattering

Joseph Webe

After Jeanine Pirro, his handpicked U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., contradicted Donald J. Trump in a court filing about the Reflecting Pool, the president insisted she was wrong. On social media he blasted “the major damage was caused by VANDALS.”

As a review of the 20-page motion seeking the dismissal of charges against former Olympian David Hearn shows, Pirro offered substantial evidence to the contrary. “[I]nformation show[s] that the damage” to the Reflecting Pool “was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism as initially represented” by the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Attorney and an assistant told the court in their July 31 filing.

Quite the turnabout.

Pirro and a colleague added that “additional documents” provided by the department “indicat[ed] that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (‘AIC’), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”

Despite the detailed, photo-laden filing, Trump insisted that his appointee was wrong. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” he said in a post on Truth SociaI. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM ….”

Recall that Trump picked Pirro to serve in the D.C. jurisdiction because of her work as a legal analyst and program host for Fox, as well as her experience as a county judge in Westchester, N.Y., and three-term district attorney. Her credits also include working as a writer and producer for TV’s “Law & Order,” along with some acting experience.

Clearly Trumpworthy.

Certainly, Pirro played her part well on July 2, when she announced the indictment against Hearn, who had dipped his hand in the Reflecting Pool while on a bike ride. She called the vandalism “an affront to the dignity of our shared history.” Insisting it was a day of “accountability,” Pirro said Hearn made “a deliberate act to damage the Reflecting Pool” and alleged that he did so “forcefully and violently,” adding that “we can state and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he caused damage and that damage is over $1,000.”

My, how her script changed. No more shooting from the lip.

In the dismissal motion, she said new information from the Department of the Interior made it clear that “[t]he rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed.” Perhaps the even hastier work, though, was Pirro’s Trump-pleasing indictment of Hearn less than two weeks after the 67-year-old cyclist touched a loose piece of the pool’s liner on his June 19 ride.

But Pirro’s pirouette wasn’t the most disconcerting thing about the episode. Rather, that was Trump’s inability to admit that Hearn was wrongfully charged. Psychologists have a term for that: it’s “willful ignorance.” This is a state in which people realize at some level that their beliefs are probably false OR they refuse to attend to information that would establish their falsity.

No matter how much information contradicts the willfully ignorant, they just can’t see things any other way but their distorted – or simply wrong – way, seeing the world in a funhouse mirror. Or, if they are just liars, they will stick to their guns, even while knowing they’ve misfired.

We see this repeatedly with Trump, whose penchant for lying is well-established. He does so convincingly – at least to his MAGA devotees – perhaps because he believes his own lies. Self-deception is a key part of Trump’s flawed psyche, according to his niece clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump.

And this has had tragic consequences.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump that an attack on Iran would be swiftly followed by public uprisings to oust the mullahs, Trump disregarded the views of American intelligence agencies. In February, about a week before the men launched their attacks, the U.S. National Intelligence Council had concluded that neither limited airstrikes nor a larger, prolonged military campaign would be likely to result in a new government taking over in Iran.

The prospect of Iran’s fragmented opposition taking control of the country was described as “unlikely,” according to sources quoted anonymously by several outlets including The Washington Post. As the paper reported, the council is composed of veteran analysts who produce classified assessments meant to represent the collective wisdom of Washington’s 18 intelligence agencies.

American military leaders also waved the yellow caution flag. During a Feb. 18 meeting, General John “Dan” Caine listed options including a) a limited strike as a way to push Iran in the negotiations or b) larger campaign with the goal of toppling the government, as The New York Times reported. The second option, the general warned, carried high risk of American casualties, could destabilize the region and significantly deplete stocks of American munitions.

Since Trump chose option B, at least 14 American soldiers have been killed and 624 wounded. And those figures may understate the tallies because the Pentagon has changed the way it counts and reports such numbers.

And now, of course, the five-month-old war drags on with Iranian leaders playing Trump like a fiddle. Recall that Trump claimed the U.S. and Israel “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but now his administration is still trying to cut a deal to keep nukes out of Iranian hands. And he has repeatedly threatened massive attacks, even while saying Iranians were begging for a deal.

Trump has often asserted that the U.S. and Israel destroyed Iran’s military capabilities. And yet the country still has the power to send missiles and drones into the territory of U.S. allies.

At the moment, Trump says he is holding off on a major assault he threatened, saying allies pleaded for diplomacy. But experts say he backed down because Iran now has the upper hand, mainly because it can use proxies such as the Houthis to threaten ships in the Red Sea and can bombard U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.

Is willful ignorance driving him again? The most charitable face one can put on it is to blame disastrous miscalculation fueled by arrogance. And yet, with so many smart folks tapping the brakes, should he not have listened?

Then there’s the economy. At his recent very public Cabinet meeting, Trump bragged anew about his economic achievements, saying “… today, there are more people working in the United States than at any time in the history of our country” and that “… without the election, you wouldn’t have what I’ve done economically. So, we have the most successful environment that we’ve ever had.”

Never mind that in the second quarter of this year, growth in the economy slowed to a 1.5 percent rate, sharply down from the already modest 2.1 percent annual rate clocked in the year’s opening quarter. Or that the consumer price index rose 3.5 percent in June, compared with the same month last year. While that’s down from 4.2 percent in May, it still reflects inflation that is clipping along faster than the 2 percent rate the Federal Reserve wants.

That’s why the Fed is keeping interest rates as they are, not dropping them as Trump wants. And, even as the central bank has taken that stance, three regional bank presidents dissented, pressing for higher lending rates to rein in inflation.

But what do we and Trump hear from his key economic operator, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent? That sycophant, flattering the president along with the other Cabinet toadies, said “…we’re pulling away from the rest of the world because of your leadership, the policies that you did from day one in terms of digital assets, in terms of technology and bringing back American manufacturing. You’ve done it again.You had the incredible economy during your first term, and we are seeing that carry over here and it is in stark contrast to the Biden economy …”

Nary a word about the slowdown or the Fed concerns, which had made news nationwide. No mention of the decline in consumer spending or rising gas prices. Nothing about how a recent CNN poll found that 65 percent of Americans believe Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, or that the president’s approval rating had fallen to 34 percent.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, a recent Pew Research Center survey found most Americans aren’t feeling great about the economy — with 24 percent rating economic conditions as excellent or good, 41 percent rating them as “only fair,” and 35 percent rating them as poor.

Combine willful ignorance with Trump’s astonishingly successful effort to surround himself with opportunistic yes-men, and you get suck-up Cabinet meetings like this past one.

Finally, consider the president’s fight with the Smithsonian Institution and other outfits that tell our national story. The president doesn’t want the best judgments of historians and experts to guide the national self-image, but rather his blinkered and ignorant views.

As a New York Times writer recalled, two months into his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, directing officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Since then, the National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian. The signs warn visitors “about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”

The Times writer, Moscow-born M. Gessen, compared the political effort to rewrite history to the constant rewrites of Russian history her countrymen have long endured.

“Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement,” Gessen wrote. “What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance.”

The bliss, perhaps, of willful ignorance.

A humorless spectacle

Posted on July 27, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s correspondents’ dinner schtick was a bomb

Joseph Weber

The Lion King, source: the New York Times

Twenty-two years ago, as the Iraq War raged and George W. Bush came under fire for wrongly claiming Iraqi weapons threatened the U.S. and the world, he appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He aired images of himself looking under Oval Office furniture and out the windows, while asking “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere.”

Seven years later, as rightists claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, the president told the assembled reporters he was going to clarify it all. “Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video,” Obama deadpanned, before showing the opening scene of Disney’s “The Lion King,” when the royal cub Simba is presented on the savanna.

This year was different.

Donald J. Trump made fat jokes about his former acolyte Chris Christie and about Rep. Jerry Nadler and potential presidential contender J.B. Pritzker (”Don’t call him a fat pig, okay? I’m sticking up for him.”) He repeatedly insulted Joe Biden (“So, just remember, before I came along, if you wanted to see someone lose consciousness on the South Lawn of the White House, all you had to do is ask Joe Biden a question.”) He mocked Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar, saying she “and her brother are thinking about moving together. Very much in love.”

Trump also took potshots at the July 24 affair at Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He called CNN’s Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper.” After the cable channel’s Kaitlan Collins got an award for excellence in presidential news coverage, Trump slammed her “fake” stories and faulted her for not smiling.

Kaitlan Collins, source: Sullivan’s “American Crisis”

If Trump’s appearance had been a Broadway show, the night would have been its sole performance – maybe even shuttered halfway through. The notices, as the old term goes, were not good.

“Moments of presidential self-deprecation were few and far between,” The New York Times reported. “There was little laughter in the room as the president’s speech took on a harder edge. Not many people chuckled when he compared the ‘really beat-up faces’ of UFC fighters with those of Bette Midler, Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen.”

Jem Bartholomew of the Columbia Journalism Review was far less measured:

Calling it a “farcical spectacle,” he wrote: “In our current moment, the dinner feels especially incoherent and misguided—seven hundred journalists, dressed in their finest clothes, agreeing to break bread and drink wine with administration figures who are aggressively and systematically cracking down on journalism and free speech.”

And, likewise, former White House Correspondent Jim Acosta pulled no punches:

“Trump delivered an unhinged, hateful speech that was written for the sole purpose of celebrating his undemocratic assault on news outlets in America and settling scores with his political enemies,” Acosta wrote. “He called people fat. He told racist and anti-gay jokes. He delighted in his oligarch friends taking over the networks. It was thoroughly disgraceful.”

Similarly, longtime press critic Margaret Sullivan skewered the president. Trump’s “hate-filled rant,” she wrote, “… was aimed at journalists, at his political enemies and at anybody else who has failed to suck up to him at every moment or to support his lawless regime.”

But, as the jokes fell flat, Trump also managed to be something he often derides. CNN’s Brian Stelter suggested that “more than anything, the speech was just … boring.”

Many have long criticized the annual correspondents’ dinner for the seeming hypocrisy of the press schmoozing with the officials they are supposed to cover, usually adversarially. How can tuxedoed and begowned journalists grin and toast people during one glittery night when for the rest of the year they hold those same people to account for professional or policy slipups? It all just has seemed smarmy, insincere and too insidey, all a sort of Inside the Beltway self-promoting boastfulness.

Defenders of the affair say it’s really a celebration of the First Amendment and some note that rubbing shoulders with officials can help journalists build sources. Sharing a drink can lubricate relationships, leading to better coverage – in theory.

But this year marks a new low. While many White Houses have been hostile to the press (think Nixon), Trump is not only as humorless as his dinner speech demonstrated, but vicious.

Just this month, the administration issued subpoenas seeking phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times journalists who wrote articles revealing security concerns about Air Force One. After a federal judge in Manhattan scolded the Justice Department for its handling of the matter, the government withdrew the subpoenas. At the dinner, one Times reporter who was a subject of the subpoenas, Tyler Pager, accepted an award.

At another point, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.” Blitzer then noted that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against The Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

The dinner reflected how the Washington press – and the media generally – face a seemingly impossible job in covering this administration. As the media report on its many outrages in a fair and balanced way, they risk alienating both readers and viewers who are Trumpers and those who loathe the man. And, as they work to maintain access to officials, they risk being accused of being too chummy.

Moreover, critics often deride “sane-washing” by media outlets that struggle to find reasonable through-lines and news in Trump’s usually rambling speeches. They “render [Trump’s] most bizarre and incoherent statements into cogent English, shearing off the crazy in a misleading manner,” as a writer for The Atlantic put it in 2024.

Such efforts are all part of a process of normalizing a White House that couldn’t be further from normal, say critics. Many would rather the Washington press corps dump their annual fete, at least while Trump is in office.

“It is the very essence of normalizing an extremely abnormal and dangerous president,” wrote Sullivan, adding that the press should have risen in unison and walked out on Trump’s speech. “It’s so far past the time when this normalization should have ended that it seems almost absurd to make the argument once again.”

While such arguments carry a lot of weight, reporters need to keep in mind a few realities. First, 77.3 million Americans voted for Trump in 2024 and, while they shouldn’t get cheerleading coverage for that, the media can’t afford to simply turn them all off by showing disrespect, at least for the office. Second, if journalists behave like the enemies Trump has repeatedly called them, they will just make his case for him.

Report critically, report thoroughly and report fairly. Some will buy it. Others won’t. But the facts on everything from Trump’s grifting to his mismanagement of the war in Iran and mishandling of the economy will be out there.

To be clear, the president’s performance at the dinner was despicable and typical. But, in a way, we should be glad it happened. It’ll go down in the history books in all its ugliness, humorlessness and egomania, representative of so much of this presidency. And, more immediately, it helps sets the stage for the midterm election less than 100 days hence, when – perhaps – some of those 77 million will have second thoughts.

Trump and the press

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

We’re getting a master class in would-be autocracy

Joseph Weber

Nearly a decade ago, during his first presidential term, Donald J. Trump infamously tweeted that major media outlets were “the enemy of the American people.” That drew an intriguing response from a fellow Republican, Sen. John McCain.

“I hate the press,” the Arizona war hero sarcastically told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital.”

And McCain – whom Trump had derided as “a loser” — made the risks of losing an unfettered press all too clear.

“If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain said. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”

So, now – after he has coopted Congress, the Senate and much of the Judiciary, and weaponized parts of the military against Americans – Trump and his minions are going after the press anew. The administration subpoenaed five New York Times reporters after they reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked advanced security features, including antimissile capabilities. The journalists cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, a common technique when sensitive matters are involved.

Chillingly, federal agents showed up at the homes of some of the reporters to serve the documents on them. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

The administration will likely try to force the reporters to name their sources, who presumably would be prosecuted for divulging information this leak-wary White House seeks to suppress. The DOJ insisted that the reporters are not the targets, but rather those leaking classified information are.

What seems more likely is that l’affaire Air Force One is simply embarrassing to Trump, one of a string of incidents that have been leaving the president red-faced. After all, how could his much-adored “flying palace” be ill-equipped? The reports coincide with his repeated failures to resolve the ill-conceived Iran War, the Reflecting Pool “Algaegate,” and his bizarre misstatements during a NATO meeting (for the record, there’s no “Islamic Republic of Japan.”)

The New York Times is expected in the first instance to fight the subpoenas in court. Taking such a stance paid off earlier this year when the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The feds withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

As the Times reported, the Justice Department had sought information from three reporters at The Journal about an article detailing how top officials warned Trump of the risks of a military campaign against Iran. It also sought information from a reporter at The Post about reporting related to U.S. military action in Venezuela.

Whether Justice is on firmer legal ground in the Air Force One case could prove to be a crucial matter for journalists. The stakes are every bit as high as McCain suggested they could be so many years ago, as several journalism organizations have contended:

“The National Press Club calls on the Justice Department to immediately withdraw these subpoenas and reaffirm a principle that has long distinguished the United States: a free and independent press serves the people, not the government,” National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. said in a statement.

White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang said the organization stands with the Times reporters, saying they were “targeted for doing their jobs to uphold the public’s right to know how its government operates.”

“The WHCA condemns any act of intimidation against journalists, including attempts to pressure them into revealing sources,” Jiang added.

And Stephen J. Adler, chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said, “When the public’s right to know is crushed, as the Trump Administration is trying to do with its subpoenas against The New York Times, all of us suffer irreparable harm, as does the freedom upon which this nation is built.”

Of course, if the journalists do get hauled up to testify before a grand jury, they likely would refuse to disclose their sources. That could set up a painful and costly time for those reporters, as several cases over the last quarter-century have shown.

In 2001, a Houston-based author writing a book about a local murder spent 168 days in jail because she would not identify sources or give her notes to law enforcement. Four years later, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to jail because she refused to reveal who told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent and Miller served 85 days, testifying ultimately because her source gave his permission. Then, in 2008, a subpoenaed USA Today reporter in an anthrax-by-mail case was held in contempt of court and ordered to pay $500 per day for the first seven days in which she refused to comply, $1,000 per day for the next seven days, and $5,000 a day for the next seven days after that – all from her own pocket, not her employer’s. That contempt charge was later thrown out.

The orders for the Times journalists to testify could put the DOJ official who issued them into interesting political crosshairs. Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who issued the subpoenas, was recently nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard. Clayton, who had chaired the federal Securities & Exchange Commission in Trump’s first term, appears to be one of Trump’s most devoted toadies.

For instance, Clayton did not object when the Trump Administration fired Maurene Comey as a prosecutor in the Southern District office in 2025 in a vindictive political move. Comey’s main problem: she is a daughter of James B. Comey, the former FBI director who is one of Trump’s most prominent adversaries. She also handled cases against Trump’s longtime friend, child molester Jeffrey Epstein.

Clayton is to testify on July 15 before the Senate Intelligence Committee and journalism advocates are calling on committee members to press him on the administration’s latest assault on journalists.

“Donald Trump’s war on the press is looking for another victim, this time the storied federal prosecutors office in Manhattan,” Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement. “The subpoenas it issued to journalists at The New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted. When Jay Clayton appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, members of both parties must not let him escape accountability.”

Thankfully for journalists and the public, Trump and his minions have been set back on some of their anti-press efforts.

In January, FBI agents descended on the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant.

But, in the following month, a federal judge ruled that he – not Justice – would review her materials.

“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Magistrate Judge William B. Porter wrote in his opinion.

Not surprisingly in this appeals-happy administration, the judge’s order is under appeal.

Of course, Trump and his lapdogs have also scored some victories in high-profile assaults on the press. They’ve sued TV networks that have produced critical coverage of Trump’s actions, including ABC, they’ve made them the target of regulatory pressure from the once-independent Federal Communications Commission; and they’ve cut press access or significantly curtailed it at both the White House and Pentagon.

Under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, “60 Minutes” bowed to Trumpian pressure in killing a story involving deportation. The network also heavily edited an interview with Trump on the program, including omitting comments about whether the 2020 election was rigged. Weiss was hired by David Ellison and his father, Larry, the Trump-backing billionaires who own CBS parent Paramount. Trump praised her as “a great new leader.”

Trump’s administration has even used labor law to pressure The New York Times via an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that was decried by the newspaper as “politically motivated.”

As Trump continues to try to cow the press, the work of the Times, the Journal, the Post and other outlets has grown more important than ever. And, given the largely supine Congress, courts have emerged as the last bastions in helping them fight on behalf of the public.

Ultimately, however, the largely Trump-friendly Supreme Court will likely have to weigh in on some of the press cases. And, so far, the prospects look poor for the press.

For instance, the Supreme Court recently declined to intervene to halt an $800-a-day fine imposed on former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge involving her coverage in 2017 of a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged. The issue: Herridge has refused to disclose a confidential source.

If Sen. McCain were around today, he would likely be appalled at how the system lately is ill-serving the press and, by extension, the public. Of course, he was onto Trump long before many others. He once excoriated the president for “naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats.”

Lately, the last charge seems the most resonant.