Immigration reform is essential to improve the American human condition

Waves of immigrants are common in history:

Echo opinions reflect on the reality about American immigration published in The Roanoke Times, in Virginia: 

James Rosen wrote about how lawmakers play partisan politics that are intended to confuse you. Democrats and Republicans regularly warned of a "border crisis" during the previous guy's Donald Trump administration, although for different reasons. Trump used the bully pulpit to amplify the shrill cry. His core campaign all to "build the wall!" withered in the hot desert sun after he became president. 

Former Trump adviser, the right wing extremist Steve Bannon, faces charges of running a "We Build the Wall" crowdfunding scam to enrich himself and associates. The 11 million or 12 million figures, often reported as the number of undocumented workers in the United States, is just a guess.

No one knows, partly because the businesses that employ "illegal aliens" help to shield them, because of their willingness to do manual jobs for low wages.  The notion of a "border crisis" is almost as old as our nation. What it really means is ethnic prejudice and fear of foreigners.

Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, New York, on May 27, 1920.

In “Waves of immigrants are common in history”, the author James Rosen reminds us about some of the many migrations to the U.S. borders, throughout history.

He referred to the Irish migration starting in 1845, by those that could afford to leave Ireland during the potato famine. Some of their sons served in the Union armies during the Civil War. The Chinese immigrants of the 1850s, arrived in California fleeing turmoil at home and hoping for a find of gold. These folks provided much of the labor for the most dangerous jobs during construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The U.S. has been the beneficiary of many more migrations.

Nevertheless, there are differences in the “border crisis” of the 21st century and earlier times. We now have deadly fentanyl flowing across our borders — much more deadly than any powdered opium carried by Asians of the past.

We now have deadly drug cartels inflicting our cities with more dangerous results than any opium den of long ago.

This is beyond politics and late-night TV hosts laughing about old white guys alarmed by the “browning of America.” It does not matter if whites of European ancestry are a minority here in the last half of this century. 

But, it does matter that we leave our grandchildren a civilized society, just as the “greatest generation” left us a prosperous culture after winning World War II.

Border security should unite all concerned Americans of every race and political opinion.  “The test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves for the children.” - D. Bonhoeffer. (German theologian and anti-Nazi activist, died April 9, 1945, in Flossenbürg concentration camp, Germany.)

J.H. Woolwine, in Salem, Virginia

Voters must remove Congressional representatives who refuse to end gun violence

Weapons of War: 

Three echo opinion letters published in The News&Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

How many more innocent men, women and children must die because a certain group of people are fixated on having unlimited access to assault weapons? 

Granted, it is partially a mental health issue. However, those who commit mass murders would have a much more difficult time committing these atrocities without unlimited availability of weapons of war. Congress is to blame for the continuation of this easy access to assault weapons. One day of congressional action could potentially save thousands of lives. Our votes to oust supposed “representatives of the people “ could stimulate action. We are supposedly a country that is envied across the world. Let’s start acting like it. Stop the killing of innocent people. 

From Mel Sage, in Garner, North Carolina

A memorial for Joshua Barrick on display Monday, April 10, 2023 at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Louisville, Ky. Barrick, a senior vice president at Old National Bank in Louisville, was one of five people killed Monday in a mass shooting at the bank. It was the 146th mass shooting in the U.S. this year. CLAIRE GALOFARO AP

Stand up against the National Rifle Association- Dear Editor,

I appreciate the work Senator Thom Tillis has done to get the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed, but much more can be done. As the father of two students and the husband of a teacher, I worry about my family’s safety every day. Along with the BSCA, there must be gun reform — universal background checks, red flag laws, outlawing weapons of war in civilian hands.

As my representative, I expect Tillis to do what he knows is right and help stop the senseless slaughter of our innocent children, teachers and civilians. I do not believe the senator, one of the top 5 recipients of NRA donations, can represent the needs of his constituents while still accepting NRA money. It’s an inherent conflict of interest that even the uneducated can understand. 

From Michael P. Trew, Boone 

SEN. TED BUDD In a letter, I urged Sen. Ted Budd to support an assault weapons ban. He said such a ban is overly broad. Please, senator, propose something that will keep our citizens, particularly our children, safe. Your silence is deafening. 

From Janice Woychik, Chapel Hill

God did not create politics!

Echo opinion letter published in The Daily News in the state of Washington:

Christian nationalism is on the rise in some Republican campaigns.

As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone (including LGBTQIA2s+ people) is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another.

As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, I am concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy, racial subjugation and most recently transphobia. It is also at the base of the fear mongering over gun “rights,” even in the face of the never-ceasing school shootings plaguing our nation. It is important that Christians reject this damaging political ideology and I invite my Christian brothers and sisters to join me in opposing this threat to our faith and our nation.

Reverend Nic Mather,  Longview in the state of Washington

America's gun culture ignores the first Ten Commandment- Thou Shalt Not Have Strange Gods..."

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times:

Gun Idolatry Is Destroying the Case for Guns

On June 26, 2018, our family experienced one of the most terrifying nights of our lives. It began with a strange and chilling direct message to our son — an image of three Klan hoods. That was strange enough, but sadly not all that surprising. From the moment that I’d first expressed opposition to Donald Trump and Trumpism, our multiracial family (my youngest daughter, who is adopted, is Black) had faced an avalanche of threats, doxxing and vile racism.

Alt-right trolls had photoshopped images of my daughter into gas chambers and of her face onto old pictures of slaves. They had placed images of dead and mutilated Black Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. The threats had not stopped after Trump won. If anything, by 2018 they had escalated once again. So the Klan hoods sent to my son — which would have been chilling under any circumstances — were particularly ominous. What happened next was worse.

Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.

This was not the first such incident. A few years earlier, a man had driven to our house, positioned his car to block our driveway, confronted my wife and kids and demanded to see me (I wasn’t home). He was later seen driving slowly around the parking lot of my kids’ school.

I was born in Alabama and grew up in Tennessee and Kentucky. As a son of the South, I was no stranger to firearms. We had a gun in our home. I learned to shoot at a young age. So did my wife. After the episode of the man demanding to see me, she not only bought a handgun, she attended multiple classes to train in armed self-defense.

So, yes, we had guns. And when my son received the Klan hood messages — as well as in other similar situations — we were glad we did. While we scrambled to determine whether the Klan hoods and street sign images were truly threatening or intended to be merely harassing, and while we considered whether to call the police (we did), I knew that we would not be defenseless if the threat were real and if our stalkers arrived before the police.

Thankfully, no one came to our house. It was likely just more harassment, but the presence of a police car outside our home may have deterred something more serious. I share this story to make two disclosures: Yes, we own guns. And yes, I support gun rights, not just for hunting or shooting sports, but for the purpose of self-defense. I’ve written in support of gun rights for years. I grew up in a culture that approached firearms responsibly, safely and with a sober mind. They were a tool — a dangerous tool, to be sure — but nothing more. In a fallen and dangerous world, a responsible, trained gun owner could help keep his or her family safe.

But the gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. 

As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values. At the edges, gun owners have gone from defending the rights of people to own semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s to openly brandishing them in protests, even to the point of, for example, staging an armed occupation of parts of the Michigan Capitol during anti-lockdown protests.

But we’re now facing something worse than gun idolatry. Too many armed citizens are jittery at best, spoiling for a fight at worst. In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.

All of these episodes occurred over the course of just six days.

Yet even worse than such shootings, which occurred because of fear or sudden rage, is the phenomenon that begins with a person who seems to want to fight, who deliberately places himself in harm’s way, uses deadly force and then is celebrated for his bloody recklessness. Take Kyle Rittenhouse. At age 17, Rittenhouse took an AR-15-style weapon to a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to, he said, “protect” a Kenosha business.

When you travel, armed, to a riot, you’re courting violent conflict, and he found it. He used his semiautomatic weapon to kill two people who attacked him at the protest, and a jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. But the jury’s narrow inquiry into the moment of the shooting doesn’t excuse the young man’s eagerness to deliberately place himself in a situation where he might have cause to use lethal violence.

And what has been the right’s response? Rittenhouse has gone from defendant to folk hero, a minor celebrity in populist America.

Or take Daniel Perry, the Army sergeant who was just convicted of murdering an armed Black Lives Matter protester named Garrett Foster. Shortly after the conviction, Tucker Carlson effectively demanded a pardon ❗ (now Carlson is FINALLY fired by Fox!). 

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas responded the next day, tweeting that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

Yet Abbott ignored — or did not care — about the facts exposed at trial. Perry had run a red light and driven straight into the protest, nearly striking Foster’s wife with his car. Witnesses said Foster never pointed his gun at Perry. Even Perry initially told the police he opened fire before Foster pointed his gun at him, saying, “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”

But the story gets worse. In social media messages before the shooting, it was plain that Perry was spoiling for an opportunity to shoot someone. His messages included, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex” and “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

That is not a man you want anywhere near a gun. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a man you want anywhere near a gun.

Our nation’s gun debate is understandably dominated by discussions of gun rights. But it needs to feature more accountability for gun culture. Every single feasible and constitutional gun control proposal — including the red flag laws that I’ve long advocated (which allow law enforcement to remove weapons from people who broadcast deadly intent or profound instability) — will still leave hundreds of millions of American guns in tens of millions of American hands.

I shared the account at the beginning of this piece to help explain to opponents of gun rights that there are times when a firearm can be the only thing that stands between profound evil and the people you love. I also share it to tell my gun-owning friends that I get it. I understand. I’ve faced more threats in the last few years than they might experience in 10 lifetimes.

But this I also know: Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, is likely to spill innocent blood.

Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion over gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.

Tennessee Three defy the super Republican majority in the state legislature

• On March 27, 2023, a mass school shooting occurred at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian Church in America parochial elementary school in the Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville, Tennessee, left six people, including three children dead.
• Two dead in shooting, including the DJ, at South Nashville lounge on April 23, 2023.

First Lady Dr. Jill Biden attended  memorial for the victims of the Tennessee Covenant Christian School shootings.

Echo opinion letter to the editor of Tuscon.com in Arizona:

It is bad enough that the Republican super majority of the Tennessee Legislature intended to expel members for voicing their opinion that the Legislature should do something about gun violence in the wake of the horrible, but sadly routine, Nashville shooting where . How could the Republican Legislature make that position any worse? Yet they found a way - only expelling the two young black males members while sparing the one white female member. 

Now, the three are proudly labeled "The Tennessee Three!"

(From Left) Rep. Justin Pearson, Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Gloria Johnson "The Tennessee Three"

Ideological differences were not enough for the Republican majority. They had to stoop to overt racism. Is uppityness a word?

From Rick Jones in Downtown Tucson, AZ

Gun violence makes all Americans less safe- Red Flag Laws Now!

In most of the world, going to the wrong house is not a deadly risk.
Echo opinion by Nickolas Kristof in The New York Times:

Delusional to Think Having a Gun in the Home Makes Us Safer

But in the United States it is, because we’re awash in an estimated 450 million guns and suffer from a mass delusion that a gun in the home makes us safer.

We’re caught in a spiral in which perceptions of rising crime lead more people to purchase firearms — about 60 million guns have been sold in the United States just since 2020 — and this in turn leads to more gun violence, which leads to more fear and gun purchases …. You get the idea.

So we have recent tragedies:

— In Kansas City, Mo., a Black 16-year-old was shot twice, in the forehead and an arm, when he went to the wrong house to pick up his younger brothers; he is recovering from a traumatic brain injury. The 84-year-old white man who, according to the prosecutor, shot him through a glass front door has been charged with first-degree assault; the man said he thought the boy was breaking into his home.

— In upstate New York, a 20-year-old woman was killed when she and several friends drove to the wrong address. As their car was turning around to leave, the homeowner allegedly fired his gun and struck her.

— In Texas, two cheerleaders were shot after one of them mistakenly got into the wrong car in a parking lot. One of the girls, age 18, was hit in the back and a leg and taken by helicopter to a hospital; she was initially reported to be in critical condition.

Elsewhere, brutes send their victims to the E.R.; in America, they send them to their graves.

Foreigners admire our popular culture, our technology, our lifestyle, but are bewildered by our refusal to rein in guns.

In the 1990s when I was Tokyo bureau chief of The Times, Japanese people regularly spoke to me about a 1992 incident in which a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, Yoshihiro Hattori, was shot dead in Louisiana after knocking on the wrong door. The homeowner said he thought the boy was a burglar and ordered him to “freeze”; Hattori perhaps didn’t understand “freeze” or misheard the man as saying “please.” In any case, the boy moved, and the man shot him with a .44 magnum.

In Japan, where fewer people are murdered with guns in a typical year than sometimes in a single mass shooting in America, the government later prepared a booklet for Japanese people traveling to the United States with helpful English travel phrases like “freeze” and “hands in the air.”

“We are more civilized,” a Japanese professor told The Times after the incident, and she had a point.

We’re not going to ban guns or eliminate gun deaths in America. But I’ve argued in a longer essay that common-sense gun measures could plausibly reduce the toll of gun deaths by one-third or more.

We can adopt universal background checks, safe storage requirements, a minimum age of 21 for private gun sales and an enforced ban on possession of guns by people with a history of stalking or violent misdemeanors. 

All states should adopt California’s successful experiment with background checks for buying ammunition- and, 

having instituted a number of smart gun measures, California now has a gun death rate 38 percent below the national average.

As I write this, I happen to be in Mississippi, which has a much more rigorous process to adopt a dog than to acquire a gun. Should it really be easier to buy an AR-15-style rifle than to adopt a Chihuahua?

Above all, we must challenge the misperception that a gun in the home makes people safer. Yes, on rare occasions, a gun can avert a crime. But researchers have found repeatedly that a gun in the house makes people more likely to be murdered, not less. “People living in homes with firearms have higher risks for dying by homicide,” according to a 2022 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

People may choose to have firearms for hunting or target practice or to protect livestock from predators (I live on a farm with guns), but given the elevated risk, personal safety is not a good reason to acquire a gun.

We might encourage homeowners who feel unsafe to get bear spray instead of a gun. As a backpacker, I carry bear spray in grizzly country because it’s more effective than a handgun at stopping one of these bears if it charges; the same may be true of stopping a home invader, and certainly the consequences of a mistake aren’t deadly.
Because of our complacency, the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the United States is now gun violence, eclipsing vehicle crashes. In 2020, more than 4,300 young people died in America from firearms; the figure in the Netherlands for 2019 was two. At this rate, it will take a couple of millenniums for the Netherlands to lose as many kids to guns as we do annually.

We accept inconveniences when driving vehicles — seatbelts, infant seats, no one in the back of pickup trucks — because these can help us save lives. Why aren’t we similarly willing to accept safe storage or universal background checks for ammunition for the same reason?

I think of these young people shot simply because they went to the wrong place, and I think: If only we loved our children as much as we love our guns.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy obviously not interested in paying for America's obligations

Echo editorial opinion published in the Las Vegas Sun news:
McCarthy, Republican Party not serious about nation’s debt limit.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party don’t give two cents about fiscal responsibility or reining in spending. What McCarthy cares about is distracting the American people from the reality that the GOP has saddled middle-class taxpayers with footing the bill for trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy's plan to keep the rich "richer"!

McCarthy’s own words all but admit it.

McCarthy strolled down to Wall Street on Monday to rally his corporate overlords about next year’s federal budget. He asserted that his support for raising the debt ceiling is dependent on concessions Democrats must make regarding future spending.

McCarthy conveniently forgot to explain one simple fact: The debt ceiling has nothing to do with the upcoming federal budget or future spending.

The only impact of the debt limit debate on future spending is whether the GOP’s refusal to raise the limit will tank the U.S. good faith and credit, leading to skyrocketing interest rates and permanent inflation. The result? A trashed economy and America vandalized by political zealots.

This bears further explanation.

Contrary to the manipulative GOP narrative that tries to draw a connection between the current debt limit and future spending, the debt limit debate is not a debate about how much money the U.S. is going to spend moving forward. It is a debate about whether the U.S. is going to pay back the money we already borrowed and spent.

In 2017, when then-President Donald Trump proposed welfare for the wealthy in the form of massive tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations, the U.S. was forced to borrow $2.289 trillion over the next 10 years to finance the tax cuts. We’re currently in Year 6 of paying for that Trump borrowing spree to support his rich friends.

Yet, now that Joe Biden is president, the same members of the GOP who kissed Trump’s ring and passed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, are suddenly concerned that the U.S. is borrowing too much and don’t want to pay back the loans we already took out and spent.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is asleep when it comes to caring about helping the middle class.

The GOP is quite literally advocating that the U.S. become a freeloading nation, borrowing from creditors around the world and then running away from our debts and refusing to pay them back. This shouldn’t come as a surprise given that this is exactly how Trump financed many of his biggest real estate development projects, using bankruptcy court to leave contractors, architects and more holding the bag for Trump’s woefully bad business leadership and inept management.

What is a surprise, however, is just how openly deceitful and two-faced the GOP is being about its plan to turn the United States into the largest freeloading grifter nation the world has ever known.

It was less than a year ago, when President Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan, that Republican legislators couldn’t stop talking about the need for borrowers to take responsibility for the debt they signed up for and pay back their creditors. As recently as Wednesday, McCarthy bragged about blocking Biden’s “student loan giveaway for the wealthy.”

Yet, somehow, McCarthy is completely comfortable with the government borrowing money for Trump’s tax giveaways for the wealthy and then refusing to pay them back. He’s also surprisingly comfortable telegraphing to the world that the U.S. government is led by a collection of deadbeat swindlers who can’t be trusted to pay back their debts.

McCarthy and the GOP are putting on a show designed to feign interest in federal spending and good governance while distracting from the reality that they are the ones who keep upping the ante on the cycle of federal debt. 

The GOP is the party that keeps borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and then refusing to take responsibility for its borrowing and spending, let alone pay it back. It has also raided the formerly stable Social Security trust fund to pay for previous tax cuts — a way of shifting the burden to other generations.

Remember, when Trump was in office Republicans voted to raise the debt ceiling three times without so much as a peep about the need to control spending. Not one word.

Worst of all, some Democrats are falling for the Republican dog and pony show.

While Biden has held firm in his conviction that the U.S. must be a nation that can be trusted to repay our debts on the international stage, Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., told Axios, “I respect the White House position, but not in perpetuity. Because negotiation, that’s what this whole institution is about.” Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich., echoed that sentiment, saying, “We’re going to have to negotiate. We obviously want to move away from just legislating by crisis ... I’m encouraging continued negotiations.”

Both legislators are missing the point that the time for negotiation regarding this spending has already passed. The U.S. already spent the money. The only possible thing to negotiate is whether we’re going to default on our debt and tank our national creditworthiness, which shouldn’t be up for negotiation at all.

In other words, arguing that the federal government shouldn’t raise the debt ceiling without first making major cuts is backwards.

McCarthy knows it, but it scores him political points so he doesn’t care. He’s bald-faced lying to the American people, trading the full faith and credit of the United States of America and trading the economic health of our children and grandchildren so he can win a game of political chess. It’s shameful.

If Republicans want to argue about future spending cuts, they are welcome to do so — after they raise the debt ceiling and actually work cooperatively to figure out how to pay for the money they already spent.

Naziism and Fascism in the trial of Adolf Eichmann

An echo essay published in The New York Times by Tom Hurwitz
Mr. Hurwitz is an award-winning documentary cinematographer and director.

Shoah 💀

Adolf Eichmann * Was Ready for His Close-Up. My Father Gave It to Him.

Film evidence is shown during the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Jerusalem, Israel, June 8, 1961.

I first saw Adolf Eichmann in person when I was only 14 years old. 

He wore an ill-fitting suit and had tortoise shell glasses, with the bearing of a nervous accountant. He did not seem at all like someone who had engineered the deaths of millions of people, except of course that I was at his trial for genocide.

My father, Leo Hurwitz, directed the television coverage of the Eichmann trial, which was held in Jerusalem and broadcast all over the world in 1961. 

My dad was chosen for the position after the producer convinced both Capital Cities Broadcasting, then a small network that organized the pool coverage, and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of Israel, that the trial needed to be seen live. In the 1930s, my father had been one of the pioneers of the American social documentary film. In later years, he had directed two films about the Holocaust and had helped to invent many of the techniques used by live television while director of production in the early days of the CBS network. Also, as a Socialist, he had been blacklisted from all work in television for the previous decade, so he came cheap.

My mother and I joined my father in Jerusalem. Each day I stood in the control room and watched my father call the coverage — “Ready Camera 2, take 2!” For perhaps the first time in history, a trial was being recorded, not in the style of a newsreel, with its neutrally positioned single camera, but more like a feature film, with concealed cameras placed to cover several points of view — the witnesses’, the judges’, the attorneys’, the public’s, and of course, Eichmann’s. These were cut, one against the other, often in close-up, so that the drama became vastly more personal. The style of my father’s work would come to define this trial, and its place in historical memory, even more than Eichmann’s confession.

The Iron Road of Death Holocaust art by a teacher in Romania

The prosecutor confronted Eichmann with his own words: “The fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” The writer and Holocaust survivor Yehiel Di-nur testified from the witness box about the lines of people selected for death in the different “planet” of Auschwitz. 

Suddenly, Di-nur collapsed with a stroke. Through it all, Eichmann’s face, as revealed in my father’s close-ups, showed no feeling except the occasional tic.

Each night my father’s work was air-shipped, on two-inch videotape, to be broadcast in Europe and the United States. It sharpened the way the world saw the antisemitic depredations of the Nazis. 

Meanwhile, my father was plagued by the question of how fascism had risen in the first place, how educated and progressive working classes had left their unions to fall into the lock step of a militarized, authoritarian regime.

It was a question that the West all but ignored. With the end of World War II, the prospect of justice for war criminals quickly dissolved, replaced by the need to build the postwar alliance against Communism. Leaders and thinkers were occupied with rearming for a nuclear future and rooting out leftists, the trend that had made my father unemployable.

He thought that he might use the trial to gather social scientists for a discussion of how fascism took root. 

During preproduction for the broadcast, he began to cast around for an Israeli institution that could host it. He said he asked a former classmate who was editor of a major Israeli newspaper, but they were not interested. Another outlet, the Israeli equivalent of the BBC, said it was not the place for it. A prestigious university couldn’t see the relevance. As the trial began and his production ramped up, he had to let the idea drop.

Though he did not know it at the time, these institutions showed no interest in the sources of fascism because the trial was not a trial of fascism. Instead, it was an opportunity for Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency to rebrand the Zionist movement. While the early days of Zionism extolled muscular, self-sufficient pioneers in a new, empty and promised land, that image had not aged well in the postwar world. In addition, many Israeli Jews looked down on the Jews of “old Europe,” whom they saw as trembling in their shtetls and walking helplessly to their deaths. Certainly, they grieved the Holocaust, and their diplomats used its memory to persuade the United Nations to recognize the State of Israel. Still, the ring of shame had settled around the survivors, many of whom had been traumatized to the point of dysfunction.

As witnesses at the trial spoke of crimes and suffering that had never been heard before, Israeli attitudes changed. The survivors of the Nazis — once seen as tattooed strangers, muttering to themselves on street corners in Tel Aviv — now began to be looked upon with more compassion. Their deaths and suffering, the crimes of the Shoah, were moved to the heart of Zionism. It helped point to Israel as the safe haven for the persecuted, with “never again!” as their rallying cry.

As Hannah Arendt famously noted, the aim of the prosecutor was to frame the trial as justice for crimes against Jews. 

The slaughter of Roma, gay people, labor leaders, Socialists, Communists, the disabled, and any opposition was hardly mentioned.

Without meaning to, my father helped to reinforce the emotional aspect of the trial and in so doing weaken its political implications. Though his previous films included a fuller view of the crimes and victims of Nazism, the way he shot the trial did the opposite: His brilliant coverage individualized Eichmann and steered viewers away from a more historical view. The work of studying fascism could not compete with the satisfaction of blaming a villain and imagining that the problems could be solved with his sentencing.

My father helped to make this Nazi into a character in a drama of cinematic confrontation, not of real understanding. It was now the Jewish state against the murderer of Jews. Crimes against other groups were not germane to the purpose to which the State of Israel and its head prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, sought to turn the trial.

The question of how fascism gains power is no less urgent today. 

As nationalisms multiply around the globe, lies gain supremacy as political weapons and scapegoating minorities proves itself a powerful mobilizing force, danger is burgeoning, here and in Israel itself. What I witnessed as a 14-year-old in that control room, I am witnessing again. The fascination with individual people’s guilt or innocence is obscuring the society-wide re-emergence of fascism. And we appear to be no more interested in viewing the full picture.

* Adolf Eichmann (b-19 March 1906 – d- 1 June 1962) was a German-Austrian official of the Nazi Party, an officer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.

Mifepristone is safe and must remain legal

ICYMI: Governor Moore announced plan in partnership with University of Maryland Medical System to ensure access to Mifepristone in Maryland.

BALTIMORE, Maryland -- Gov. Wes Moore said on Sunday that Maryland plans to pave the way forward on abortion rights. 

Moore made the remark during an interview with ABC News.

"My thinking is that Maryland is going to lead with this," he said. "This is the first time that we've actually seen a Supreme Court actively working to take rights away from people. Maryland is going to be a state where we are going to protect reproductive health and reproductive rights."

Moore noted that in addition to stockpiling the abortion pill mifepristone "upwards of three years," state lawmakers have been taking steps toward protecting abortion rights by passing legislation.

"If you look at the legislative session that we just had, we passed three bills that was focusing on things like increasing access and increasing privacy, and also making sure that when people are coming to Maryland they're not being criminalized," he said.

Gun! They are the cause of America's high rate of murder by firearms

Echo opinion letter published in Valley Roadrunner news in California:

America has the highest rate of murder and manslaughter by firearms in the developed world and a high rate of mass shootings, yet even moderate reform of gun laws has been blocked for 25 years.

Australia experienced a massacre and changed its laws. New Zealand has had its experience and changed its laws. Mass shootings in both countries disappeared when guns were taken off the streets.

It’s no secret that the rate of gun incidents in the US outstrips that of any other developed country.

Since the start of 2023, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting per day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The Gun Violence Archive recorded 647 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2022.

With guns of all sorts easily available in the US it is just a matter of time before gun violence comes to San Diego County.

Easy access to guns facilitates mass shootings. This is not what Californians, San Diego County residents and Americans want❗

From Jon Vick, in Valley Center, California

My "thoughts and prayers" are for the Republicans to stop supporting gun violence!

Gun-Loving Republicans Offer Condolences After Latest School Shooting: Thoughts and prayers and not much else, reports Rolling Stone.

Echo opinion letter published in the Summit Daily in Frisco, Colorado: Republicans offer prayers.

Right wing pundits try blaming Hollywood and the left leaning media for the gun violence — how crazy.

In answer to the gun violence, Republicans offer thoughts and prayers and then pass laws to allow for open carry, concealed weapons and for teachers to be armed — oh my!

Instead, look to the right social media which promotes and supports violence. Fox Noise — it is not a news station but an entertainment station, check their license. Look to where so much of the violence is coming from: far right and white nationalists. And look to Trump who wouldn’t know the truth if it kicked him in the shins.

When will we vote out everyone who takes money from the National Rifle Association and vote to stop the sale of automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines that are appropriate for military use but not civilian use. Republicans that support AR-15s should be required to spend time — a lot of time — with the mutilated bodies of the poor children and adults who have been shot by these weapons that were designed only for use by the military.

From: Kari Kronborg in Frisco, Colorado

Right wing Republicans that support the National Rifle Association are morally corrupt!

Letter to the Editor: It’s time to stand up to the National Rifle Association: The U.S. Republican Party is morally corrupt.

Echo opinion published in the Daily Journal in California:

Dear Editor:  At one time it was a proud political party that believed in honest government, conservatism, support and a strong education system of our children. It was a country that loved our children, and promoted the safety and education of our children.

No More. So....what happened❓ Tragically, the former guy Donald Trump is what happened❗😟

Trumpzi took over the right wing Republican party with an lies, corruption, insurrection and attack on our democracy. There is not much more you can say about how this ultra-(Fake!) rich man is destroying our country day by day, lie by lie. His hatred of people who do not look like him is disgusting.

Did we ever have a ruling government that promoted war on our young children by accepting huge sums of money from the NRA to openly promote and sell weapons of war to the mentally sick so the mentally sick could attack grade schools and kill hundreds of our

Enough is Enough! Stop gun violence now!

This is not “rocket science.” This is common sense. This is love 💝for our families. This is 💖love for our children!

Wake up Republicans! The next time you vote, you must vote for your children first. Not some poor soul who has millions of dollars in wealth and is begging for you to pay his bills❗

Pray for those Republicans who are brave enough to rise to the challenge to vote and vote intelligently.

Pray for our country’s democracy, for the safety of our children, please, please pray for our children to go to school safe and return home safe, every day.

From Richard DeTorre in Greenwood, California

Youth voters must unite to protect future generations from gun violence

An important echo opinion written by Jennifer Rubin published in The Washington Post: 

Youth driven anti-gun violence protests against school shootings will energize young voters!

Tennessee Republican state representatives’ outlandish recent expulsion of two Black Democratic lawmakers brought shame on the GOP and on a state with a dismal history of voter repression. 

But the attempt to silence the lawmakers, for leading a youth-driven gun protest at the Capitol following the March 27 Nashville school slaughter, might also have accelerated two key developments: (1) awareness that social change is inextricably linked to democracy’s defense, and (2) engagement of young voters, who have lately been showing their muscle.

Although Democrats quickly reappointed the ousted lawmakers, the Tennessee travesty is a reminder that a largely White Republican Party increasingly resorts to antidemocratic means to squelch Black voting power and maintain policies (on guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights) that most voters reject. As Democracy Docket’s Caroline Sullivan and Madeleine Greenberg point out, the expulsion was not an isolated event in Tennessee, but rather part of a widespread attack on democracy that includes 470,000 people affected by felony disenfranchisement, egregious gerrymandering and barriers to mail-in voting.

If their representatives cannot be heard, voters will find that their interests — on matters such as gun safety, education and health care — can be quashed. The effort to muzzle the majority reflects the MAGA movement’s heightened panic.

“Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out,” evangelical Christian and conservative writer Peter Wehner wrote in an Atlantic article headlined “An Acute Attack of Trumpism in Tennessee.”  (IMO Maine Writer says this "acute attack" should become a chronic condition! Trumpziism = Fascism.)

In this case, the entire country witnessed a temper tantrum that tried to block progress on guns by quashing free speech and representative democracy.

This is a party frantic to hold back the tide of social change. As long as a narrow subsection of mostly White officials can gerrymander districts, erect obstacles to voting and appoint partisan ideologues to the bench (as well as maintain antidemocratic mechanisms such as the Senate filibuster), social change might be impossible. Voters and their representatives cannot address gun safety (favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans) or preserve abortion rights (favored by a 2-1 majority) unless democratic values are secured and fortified.

While Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and four other Senate Democrats, alarmed by the Tennessee Republicans’ punitive move, plead with Attorney General Merrick Garland to use “all available legal authorities to investigate the expulsions,” activists for issues such as gun safety, abortion rights and LGBTQ rights must connect the dots: (Trumpziism!) MAGA forces’ attack on democracy poses the greatest barrier to obtaining progressive policy goals. The public is with them on guns, abortion rights and LGBTQ rights; but proponents might never achieve their aims so long as reactionary Republicans block the will of the people. The return to office by the expelled Democrats known as the Tennessee Two might help Americans appreciate that racial and social change depend on a strengthened democracy.

Lighting a fire under young voters

The temporarily ousted Tennessee state representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, both under 30, had stood shoulder to shoulder with students who poured out of Nashville schools protesting inaction on gun safety. They garnered national attention at a time younger voters are drawing attention as a decisive voting bloc. Republicans are noticing.

In Wisconsin, a Republican former governor, Scott Walker, viewing the results of Democrats’ recent win in the state Supreme Court election, declared on Twitter, “Younger voters are the issue.” Although he bizarrely blamed “radical indoctrination,” Walker’s conclusion was sound: “We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

In a similar vein, GOP pollster and strategist Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News that Republicans have “got work to do on the young people who think differently on abortion, perhaps, or guns or climate change.” She’s worried that Democrats can create a “turnout machine with young people.”

These Republicans understand that young voters, as in the 1960s, and 1970s, can play a critical role in igniting social change and dislodging right-wing powerholders.

Youth voters united!  VOTE for change!

Current data debunks the conventional wisdom that younger Americans don’t vote (and therefore can be ignored). Young voters turned out where it mattered most in 2022, namely in swing states with competitive races. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tuft University’s post-2022, election study found that youth turnout in Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and Pennsylvania exceeded 32 percent. Atrocious turnout rates below 20 percent in states such as Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and West Virginia dragged down the national youth turnout rate.

The significance of the youth vote shouldn’t be underestimated. “If the elections had been decided by voters 45 and older, Republicans would have won the House by an even greater margin and likely taken the Senate,” polling analyst John Della Volpe wrote in the New York Times after the election.

The implications for 2024 are eye-opening, according to Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic pollster who pre-bunked the 2022 red wave. “Projecting forward,” he writes on Substack, “keeping the 2020, vote constant, but now [adjusting] upward for the growth of [Gen Z and Millennial] generations into the electorate,” he found, these two segments could rise to 37 percent of all voters. 😃😃

Therefore, the result would be a national margin for Democrats of 6 percent.

If youth activism and Democratic Party outreach to younger voters increase in the run-up to 2024, the two young Tennessee lawmakers will deserve plenty of credit. Indeed, that pair and the students they championed might one day be regarded in a light similar to that of the 1963 Children’s Crusade, when hundreds of young people — braving attack dogs and fire hoses turned on them by racist official Bull Connor in Birmingham, Ala. — alerted the nation that democracy needs foot soldiers.