"He's very angry and should not really surprise anybody," Haberman said of Trump. "I don't think that means that he's throwing staplers, but I think he's really angry. Everything that you were saying in his statement about how this is a political persecution or a political prosecution, I think, is something that he genuinely believes. And I expect that it is going to be said with greater degrees of intensity."
She also shared that they expect Trump to surrender on Tuesday, but that they're not sure how that's going to look.
"This is not an ordinary defendant," Haberman cautioned. "He comes with a phalanx of Secret Service. This is going to require multi-agency protection. He's not just any other defendant in reality."
But this much is clearly true: Michael Cohen went to prison in part because of the payment to Stormy Daniels (he was convicted more on tax evasion, but campaign finance violations—the payment to Daniels—were one count in his indictment). If it was illegal for Cohen to make the payment, then surely it’s illegal to have ordered the payment, which is what Trump is alleged to have done. That’s all pretty simple.
"Trump doesn't do subtle; dog-whistle messages are not his style. The more apt metaphor is the blaring air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10," the board wrote, adding: "The GOP-friendly city of Waco — Trump won McLennan County by more than 20 percentage points in 2020 — has every right, of course, to host a former president, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but 'Waco,' the symbol... means something else entirely. Waco' has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists."
The apocalypse part was even worse. Get this: “Our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and break our will. But they’ve failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle. That’s gonna be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over, and America will be a free nation once again.”
The final battle. What? So now the Dark Lord is dragging us into his science fiction movie. Except this isn’t fiction. He means it. A man who wanted a mob to kill his own vice president also wants—hungers for, lusts for—a Book of Revelations–level battle, fought, of course, in his name and for his greater glory.
The truth is that I like to hang around the shopping area in Birmingham called "The Summit." There I was yesterday doing sociological research for the good of all humankind. There were all of these "young people" (loosely defined as anyone born after 1990) lined up at the movie theatre to see "The Hunger Games" with showings starting every 15 minutes. I observed them closely, and I must admit... they all looked "normal." I asked one of them "what's the big deal?" She responded, "Oh, it's such a good story." Okay, I'll buy that. The truth is that I had never heard of this hunger games thing until this week. (I was born BEFORE 1990). You young people have at it, but leave me alone. I am not THAT hungry. Then there was a group of 4 nuns in front of the B & N Bookstore in flowing dress. I wanted to talk to them (what brings you fine ladies to the bookstore on this fine spring day?), but they had an audience already and so I just smiled as I walked by. When I came back out of the store they were driving off in a Toyota van. Then at PF Changs I'm talking to Jeff who used to be in the steel fabricating business. Geez, if you think you've got problems, you oughta learn something about steel fabricating and you won't feel so bad. Such was my day of sociological research.
Why are so many Republicans soft on Russia and tough on China? 1. China is an economic threat; Russia isn’t. (Both parties blame China for the loss of U.S. jobs while ignoring all the jobs created by U.S.-China trade.) 2. China is nominally a Communist country; Russia isn’t. (In practice, however, both combine capitalism with authoritarianism.) 3. Putin has made a play for right-wing support by posing as a defender of Christianity and traditional values. 4. There is growing anti-Asian racism in America. 5. Many Republicans will oppose anything Democrats support (and vice versa), and Democrats are backing Ukraine.
Whatever the explanations, the return of so many Republicans to a quasi-isolationist, Asia First foreign policy is an ominous development. If the GOP succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid to Ukraine, it could allow Putin to win the war despite his battlefield blunders, and that would make him a greater threat to NATO. If Trump were to return to office, of course, he would be likely to pull out of NATO altogether. DeSantis might not be too far behind. And then we would be back to the pre-Pearl Harbor world.
My discussion group today talked about temperament and personality, the difference between them, focusing on the work of legendary psychologist Jerome Kagan, with our guest for guidance being a clinical psychologist from UAB, my pre-session prep being the Susan Cain book. Jerome Kagan was the author of my general psych text in 1969.I have read one of his scholarly books. Human temperament is a fascinating psychological subjec
A multiple choice survey. You are a) tired b ) very tired or c) sick and tired. You are a)ready to go to work today b) ready to go back to sleep or c) what difference does it make? You love a) everybody b) some people but not others or c) you don't love anybody. You are a) in a good mood b) a bad mood or c) you mind is far, far away on something that happened in 1983. You have a) big plans for today b) no plans for today or c) You haven't planned anything of consequence in the last 5 years.
In his career as a New York real-estate shyster and tabloid denizen, then as the forty-fifth President of the United States, Trump has been the most transparent of public figures. He does little to conceal his most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty, narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless. That is the never-apologize-never-explain core of him. Trump is hardly the first dishonest President, the first incurious President, the first liar. But he is the most shameless. His contrition is impossible to conceive. He is insensible to disgrace.
I have signed up for an online refresher course in economics from Yale. The first half of the course covers macroeconomics: the law of supply and demand, Say's Law, inflation vs. unemployment, government bailouts, and the coefficient equation. The second half of the course covers microeconomics: balancing your checkbook, proper check writing techniques, making change, welching and embezzling, and how to keep a neat wallet. I wonder which half of the course will be the most helpful.
"Big-league baseball is subtle; cloaked in summer languor, moving with the slow, supple grace of a ballerina practicing backstage, yet taut and technical in its skills. To view a baseball game and appreciate it takes concentration.”
-Ira Berkow
Is it any wonder that in this age of distraction and 8-second attention spans that some people cannot understand baseball?
Donald Trump's principal personality trait has always been crippling narcissism, and he's always had trouble distinguishing between his own interests and those of his followers. He obviously thinks the MAGA movement exists because he has some magical hold on his supporters, but that's exactly backward. His followers they have a set of political goals and desires — white supremacy, male dominance and "owning" the liberals — and Trump molded himself into their perfect leader by reflecting those desires back at them.
But Trump yearns to believe that his followers are so infatuated with him personally that they'll be willing to give up their own lives and freedom just to keep him out of jail. His latest Truth Social post proves, yet again, how much contempt he feels toward his own followers. He really does seem to think there's a wellspring of Trump-loving patriots who'll risk everything for him — and not in hopes of seizing political power, but just to stop a private citizen from going to jail. He doesn't care, quite obviously, how many people he induces to get arrested, hurt or even killed, just so he can avoid consequences for his lengthy career of criminal activity.
To date, roughly 1,000 people have been charged for their alleged roles in the events of that day. The total could grow above 2,000, and a federal courthouse strains to handle what may be years more of trials. WaPost
C. Vann Woodward is arguably American's greatest historian of the 20th Century. For sure he is the most acclaimed and recognized Southern historian of the 20th Century. This is the first full blown biography of which I am aware. James C. Cobb, Univ. of Georgia, is a great historian in his own right.
In the preface the author says that Woodward's star somewhat dimmed in his latter years as he seemed to get more conservative Also, Woodward did not warm to multiculturalism. I wonder if he approved of Black History Month. He was a strong integrationist. We are all one in America.
His early interest was literature, not history. He slowly ambled his way into becoming an historian. He was a good writer from the get-to, but not a good public speaker.
A native of Arkansas, Woodward began his academic career at a small Methodist college Henderson-Brown in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. From there he migrated to Emory. He was a voracious reader, a real book-worm. His father was not an intellectual, but his uncle was and the uncle was the reason he moved from Arkansas to Emory University. At a young age he visited Europe. His horizons were broad early: No way he was going to stay in Arkansas.
C. Vann Woodward was a legendary historian up there with the greats of the 20th Century. P. 1
His Phd was ubdifferenrtly acquired at UNC. P. 3
Comer Vann Woodward was born in Vandal, Cross County, Arkansas, on November 13, 1908. P. 9
Details of his family history do not really interest me.
From Henderson-Brown in Arkansas to Emory to UNC.
Woodward was involved in issues and politics in Georgia while at Emory. The author's details are confusing and not worth my reading time to follow. P. 28
I am mostly interested in this book for commentary and evaluation of his work within the historical community.
How Woodward came to write a biography of Tom Watson. P. 32
To Chapel Hill. P. 37
This book is loosely written.
As he began his graduate work at UNC the fall of 1934 he was discouraged to discover stale Southern thinking in Chapel Hill as if the faculty were only interested in traditional Southern historical defense. P. 39
As Woodward began his graduate work at UNC the Dunning School was in full control in the South.
The author does a good job of describing the hold the Dunning School had over Southern historiography in the 30's. He sort of insinuates that Woodward disagreed but I am not sure if did disagree in fact.
Woodward was an ideas person, not a nuts and bolts person. P. 45
Despite being a Southerner and literature being his first love, he could not finish Faulkner's Sound and Fury. Nor Margaret Mitchell though he adored Thomas Wolfe. P. 46
It seems that Woodward barely passed his PHD oral exams as if he were almost indifferent to it. He was not perhaps an historian's historian. P. 50
He seems to have ignored and/or confused great swaths of history. P. 50
In his Phd exams he was long on promise and long on generalizations but short on details. He did not know many facts. P 50
His dissertation on Tom Watson was supervised by Howard K. Beale.
Fascinating that he started preferring literature over history which to me explains his carelessness over historical facts. Perhaps he put some literature storytelling in the Watson book.
Philosophers like to explain their ideas by telling little stories about experiments they conduct in their heads, like the time Descartes tried to convince himself that he didn’t exist, and found that he couldn’t, thereby proving that he did. Such deductive logic leads me to point out that I once tried to convince myself that I was descended from a Mother Lion, but having found that I could not so convince myself, I concluded that I sometimes confuse fantasy and reality. Maybe I don't really know from whence I came. Call me Freddy X.
Pointing to the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, some Democrats and activists have also dismissed the former president as an autocrat and authoritarian who must be stopped at all costs.
But much of the rhetoric from the declared and potential Republican candidates so far is remarkable for its dystopian tone. In many high-profile moments, these Republicans portray the nation as locked in an existential battle, where the stark combat lines denote not just policy disagreements but warring camps of saviors vs. villains, and where political opponents are regularly demonized.
They warn that Biden and a “radical,” “woke mob” of liberals are determined to “destroy” and “ruin” the nation.
Frank Luntz, a pollster and communication analyst who said he “came of age in the days of Ronald Reagan,” said that in the current Republican Party, gone is the era of Reagan’s sanguine optimism.
“Trump has turned Republican politics on its head, ” Luntz said. “We were so much more positive and hopeful, and it was Republicans who looked to the future with excitement and energy, but those days are long gone.”
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I was sad and unconsolable. Today I am merely dizzy and confused. Yesterday I saw the human race going down for the count. Today I am at least reconsidering my position from yesterday but no promises. Yesterday you were there and I was here. Today you are here and I am there. Maybe not progress, but at least some movement.
"Woke" is currently the favorite word of the right. Republican politicians can't go more that 5 or 6 words without peppering "woke" into their sentences. Turning on Fox News, you'll hear the word "woke" repeated ad nauseam, like a record skipping, but for hours at a time: "woke woke woke woke woke." Everything is "woke": Banks.Children's books.The military.Disney.M&Ms.Super Bowl performances. To be a Republican in the year 2023 is to spend every waking moment outraged and terrified by "woke," certain its wokey tendrils will snake their wokeness into your brain and woke-ify you into wokeitude.
But the funny thing about "woke" is that, while all Republicans hate it, they don't seem to have any idea how to define it. That was hilariously demonstrated in a viral video clip of conservative author Bethany Mandel falling completely apart when asked in an interview to define "woke," a concept she wrote an entire book denouncing. Mandel couldn't do it.
I laugh when I hear white people talk about people of color playing "the race card." In this country founded on pure white supremacy and settler colonialism white people have been playing the race card since 1619. The white race card was baked into the Constitution from the beginning, loosened only with the passage of the post-Civil War Amendments. Multiracial democracy is still a goal, not a total reality. If you are opposed to multiracial democracy, just be honest and say so.
A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them.
Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”. Many of the laws also target Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential 1619 Project.
These laws have already started to take effect. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.
These laws have been represented by many as a “culture war”. This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators’ speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP’s recent turn has no place in a democracy. To understand why, consider their consequences.
The concepts these laws centrally target include addressing structural racism, intersectionality and critical race theory.
Structural racism is the view that certain persisting structures and practices have resulted in unjust racial outcomes, for example the American racial wealth gap, where Black Americans have 10% of the wealth of white Americans.
Finally, critical race theory is, in essence, the study of these concepts: the ways practices in various domains – in housing, schooling, banking, policing, and the criminal legal system – entrench persisting racial disparities and inequalities (such as the racial wealth gap, or segregated schools), even when there is no individual racist intent.
The laws are manifestly incoherent. The failure to teach about structural racism will make Blackchildren born into poverty feel that their parents and grandparents are responsible for their own impoverished position relative to white children, and so will make Black children feel “anguish or other forms of psychological distress” because of “actions … committed in the past by other members of the same race”. The “anguish” and “psychological distress” these laws forbid are only anguish felt by the dominant racial group, white Americans.
In other national contexts, everyone would clearly recognize the problematic nature of laws of this sort. Germany’s teaching of its Nazi past creates clear anguish and guilt in German children (and perhaps for this reason, Germany is the world’s most stable liberal democracy). If the German far right passed laws forbidding schools from teaching about the sins of Nazism, on the grounds that such teaching does in fact quite obviously cause anguish and guilt in German children, the world would not stand for it for one moment. Even Israel’s far-right government strenuously objected when Poland drafted a law that would make it illegal to suggest that Poland had any responsibility for Nazi atrocities on its soil. Why isn’t there greater outcry when such laws are passed to protect the innocence of white Americans?
It is frequently claimed by proponents of such laws that banning discussion of structural racism and intersectionality is freeing schools of indoctrination. And yet indoctrination rarely takes place by allowing the free flow of ideas. Indoctrination instead rather takes places by banning ideas. Celebrating the banning of authors and concepts as “freedom from indoctrination” is as Orwellian as politics gets.
Rabbi Walter Rotschild speaks to schoolchildren attending the unveiling of a memorial of tiles dedicated to Jewish children who died in the Holocaust at a primary school in Cottbus, Germany, in 2019. Photograph: Michele Tantussi/Getty Images
So what is the ultimate goal of these bans? In the first instance, these laws are there to protect white innocence – that is why they are so popular with many white parents, who carry their own burdens of guilt (similar laws would be popular with many Germans, for the same reason). But there are deeper and more problematic aims of these laws.
Democracy involves informed decision-making about policy. These laws are intended to render such deliberation impossible when it comes to minority groups. The United States suffers from immense racial disparities, which result in periodic outbreaks of political protest. Without an understanding of the structural factors that keep schools and cities segregated, and certain populations impoverished, Americans will not be able to react to these outbreaks with understanding – they will find them befuddling. These laws eliminate the knowledge and understanding required to react democratically to Black political protest to structural injustice.
The authors targeted by these laws do not just theorize about problematic structures – their work is also essential for understanding solutions. For example, Roderick Ferguson writes about social movements for liberation, including student movements. These laws make it illegal to teach students about the history and strategy of social movements targeting structural injustice. More generally, these laws make it illegal to teach students about how to form social movements to challenge dominant interests and structures.
Most frighteningly, these laws are meant to intimidate educators, to punish them for speaking freely by threatening their jobs, their teaching licenses, and more. The passing of these laws signals the dawn of a new authoritarian age in the United States, where the state uses laws restricting speech to intimidate, bully and punish educators, forcing them to submit to the ideology of the dominant majority or lose their livelihoods, and even their freedom.
It is clear that the chief agenda of the GOP is to advance a set of speech laws that criminalize discussion in schools of anything but the white heterosexual majority’s perspective. The media’s portrayal of these laws as moves in the “culture wars” is an unconscionable misrepresentation of fascism.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the Guardian’s journalism.
From Elon Musk to Rupert Murdoch, a small number of billionaire owners have a powerful hold on so much of the information that reaches the public about what’s happening in the world. The Guardian is different. We have no billionaire owner or shareholders to consider. Our journalism is produced to serve the public interest – not profit motives.
And we avoid the trap that befalls much US media – the tendency, born of a desire to please all sides, to engage in false equivalence in the name of neutrality. While fairness guides everything we do, we know there is a right and a wrong position in the fight against racism and for reproductive justice. When we report on issues like the climate crisis, we’re not afraid to name who is responsible. And as a global news organization, we’re able to provide a fresh, outsider perspective on US politics – one so often missing from the insular American media bubble.
Around the world, readers can access the Guardian’s paywall-free journalism because of our unique reader-supported model. That’s because of people like you. Our readers keep us independent, beholden to no outside influence and accessible to everyone – whether they can afford to pay for news, or not.
America is not mired in a culture war. In reality, today's Republican Party and larger "conservative" movement are waging a fascist war against multiracial pluralist democracy and human freedom. Ultimately, to not understand how the so-called culture war is actually a fascist war against American democracy is to almost ensure being rolled over by those evil forces.
Many political observers point to Pat Buchanan's infamous 1992 speech at the GOP national convention as the beginning of the so-called culture war in America. However, the roots of this fascist and authoritarian campaign are much older: Jim and Jane Crow and white-on-black chattel slavery, genocide against First Nations peoples and white settler colonialism are America's native forms of fascism. When located in the proper historical context, neofascism and the Age of Trump are properly understood as being but the most current manifestation of much older birth defects in American democracy and society.
These laws have been represented by many as a "culture war". This framing is a dangerous falsification of reality. A culture war is a conflict of values between different groups. In a diverse, pluralistic democracy, one should expect frequent conflicts. Yet laws criminalizing educators' speech are no such thing – unlike a culture war, the GOP's recent turn has no place in a democracy. To understand why, consider their consequences. [emphasis added].
Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis and the other Republican-fascists are using the myth of American Exceptionalism and what sociologists describe as "the white racial frame" to erase the country's real history and its challenges and complexities to advance an anti-democracy project that eliminates critical thinking and free speech.
No one should be mistaken about what unfolded over the past few days in the U.S. banking system: These recent bank failures are the direct result of leaders in Washington weakening the financial rules.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to protect consumers and ensure that big banks could never again take down the economy and destroy millions of lives. Wall Street chief executives and their armies of lawyers and lobbyists hated this law. They spent millions trying to defeat it, and, when they lost, spent millions more trying to weaken it.
Greg Becker, the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, was one of the many high-powered executives who lobbied Congress to weaken the law. In 2018, the big banks won. With support from both parties, President Donald Trump signed a law to roll back critical parts of Dodd-Frank. Regulators, including the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, then made a bad situation worse, letting financial institutions load up on risk.
Did ever explain the title? Atticus Finch says that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, but he gives his kids permission to shoot at Blue Jays. Should it also be a sin to kill a Blue Jay? What did they ever do to deserve being shot at and mockingbirds not deserve to be shot at?
If it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, then does the title signify "to sin?"
Is the Tom Robinson case, the heart of the story, based on a real event in Lee's life or did she make it up entirely?
I always thought that Boo killed Ewing, but apparently Ewell fell on his own knife and accidentally killed himself. Is this right?
Why is Killing a Mockingbird a sin? From Google
In this story of innocence destroyed by evil, the 'mockingbird' comes to represent the idea of innocence. Thus, to kill a mockingbird is to destroy innocence." The longest quotation about the book's title appears in Chapter 10, when Scout explains: "'Remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
