Donald Trump kicks off his failed administration with fake priorities, lies and broken promises

Echo opinion letter published in TribLive a Pennsylvania lonline newspaper (Tribune Review): 

Not only are Republicans breaking with a promise to protect social safety nets for the working class, and poor people, but Trump lied about the origin of the New Orleans terrorist, who was an Americn citizen, and had no ties to Mexican, Central American or South Americn migrants.

Trump's promises and (fake) priorities:  Is anyone registering what Donald Trump is now saying about the price of groceries and Social Security?

I watched at least six times as he promised to lower prices of groceries “on Day 1.” Now he is saying it is complicated and won’t be easy (hint, it’s not 😒going to happen).

What about his promise to not touch Social Security❓

We’re already hearing from GOP Congress members that they will be looking at ways to “rein it in,” including raising the retirement age to 70 and adjusting benefits. I think what Trump is doing instead is laying the groundwork for the $4 trillion tax cut for the very wealthy and large corporations.

Speaking of his priorities, how about going after Ann Selzer for releasing a poll that had Kamala Harris in the lead? Revenge and retribution seem to be his priorities, as well as shutting down any media that isn’t his lap dog. And the people cheer, not understanding that freedom of the press is one of the bedrocks of the Constitution. We need journalists reporting on government activities that don’t align with America, not just Trump mouthpieces.

I see letters loving that he is nominating cabinet members who have no credentials or experience for the position❗ I mean, what could go wrong there❓ The absolute wealthiest cabinet group in American history with the majority being billionaires. The rest are just measly millionaires. Surely they understand our pain and problems so they will be looking out for our interests, not their own❓ If you believe that, I have a bridge 🌉 to sell you 😏.

From Karla Thomas in Hempfield, Pennsylvania

The Scopes "monkey trial" in Tennessee is a 1925 non-fiction epic, but themes about science versus faith linger

Evolution remains as a "culture war" issue, in spite of scientific support for Charles Darwin's theories. Obviously, right wing fundamentalists and extremist conservatives have tuned into rampant skepticism. 

In her new book, Brenda Wineapple brings to life one of the most inflamed chapters in the history of America’s culture wars: the Scopes trial of 1925. Echo review published the New York Review of Books, by Adam Hoschschild. 

We’ve seen many skirmishes in America’s culture wars over the decades; one recent round, over abortion, was on the ballot in ten states during the 2024, elections. But the most dramatic battle of them all, between two of the twentieth century’s greatest orators, took place in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, after the high school teacher John Scopes was accused of violating a new state law that forbade teaching the theory of evolution. Time magazine called his trial a “cross between a circus and a holy war.”

The confrontation inspired a 1955, play, Inherit the Wind, which has been widely revived; a film version, with Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly, was released in 1960, and nominated for four Academy Awards. The story remains so resonant that it has been remade for television three times, starring actors ranging from Jason Robards to George C. Scott. The actual trial lacked a romantic angle, so the play added a young woman torn between her love for the teacher and for her father, a fire-and-brimstone preacher.

Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple’s lively new book about the Scopes trial, comes as the culture wars have heated up again. Even though the issues have changed over the past hundred years, it is striking how the two warring sides feel much the same: cosmopolitan urban liberals against small-town white Protestants who value traditional family structure. And hovering in the background but largely unspoken, then and now, are strong feelings about race.

What made the Scopes trial such a spectacle was that this local drama had a national cast. Leading the prosecution was William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time Democratic nominee for president. His legendary oratory, it was said, was always “good for forty acres of parked Fords.” Although he opposed an anti-lynching bill, talked about the “yellow peril” of Asian immigration, and said he was a proud member of the “greatest of all the races, the Caucasian Race,” Bryan was, on most other issues, a progressive. He supported labor unions, women’s suffrage, the income tax, public ownership of utilities, a ban on corporate campaign contributions, and food and drug safety laws. Not for nothing was he known as the “Great Commoner.”

Opposing him as chief counsel for the defense was Clarence Darrow, not merely the country’s best-known criminal defense attorney but its most famous lawyer of any kind. Darrow had argued for a long series of colorful clients, from the Socialist hero Eugene V. Debs to the Wobbly leader “Big Bill” Haywood to the McNamara brothers, accused of bombing the Los Angeles Times building in 1910, to countless labor activists in an era when union organizers risked beatings and death.

From the moment Bryan stepped off a train looking like a Victorian explorer with his white pith helmet in the Tennessee summer heat, the eyes of the world were on Dayton. It was impossible for Americans to imagine a greater clash of celebrities. What might be the equivalent today❓ Maybe a trial in Florida, say, of someone violating that state’s prohibition on towns and cities taking action to fight climate change, with temporary law degrees granted to Donald Trump to argue for the prosecution and Rachel Maddow for the defense. Or perhaps, Maddow would take the role of the columnist H.L. Mencken, who gave the Dayton case the name that stuck—“the Monkey Trial”—and whose stream of caustic commentary set the tone for much of the press coverage while he kibitzed with his friends at the defense table. When the defense team moved into a vacant local mansion, it became known as the Monkey House.

Wineapple describes Dayton’s preparations for a flood of visitors:

"Drinking fountains were installed every fifty feet around the town square, arc lights were strung from the maple trees to accommodate nighttime prayer meetings, and newly painted benches were placed near the courthouse. The interior…was repainted pale yellow, the windows were washed until they sparkled."

The biology textbook at issue quickly sold out; one enterprising citizen told an inquiring reporter he could find a copy “if you are willing to pay the price.” Some urged that Dayton build an outdoor stadium for the trial. Instead, officials ordered forty-five loudspeakers—a new technology—to broadcast the proceedings to the overflow crowd on the courthouse lawn.

Dayton Tennessee Center 1925 site of the Scopes Trial

The townspeople relished their moment of fame with a boosterish enthusiasm that seemed far stronger than any feelings they had for or against evolution. Before the trial began, the defense team tried to get the case transferred to federal court, which would have meant moving it out of town. When a judge turned them down, a jubilant local businessman put a sign in his drugstore’s window: “Dayton Keeps It.”

These were the days of fully staffed newspapers, which sent 160 reporters and columnists to Dayton. Some fifty camera operators shot both still photos and newsreel footage. A microphone near the witness stand brought the trial to a national radio audience. Extra police from Chattanooga directed traffic. Fearing that the crowd packing the courtroom might make its sagging floor collapse (white plaster was starting to crumble out of the ceiling below), the judge moved the trial onto the courthouse lawn, where spectators donned straw hats. Vendors sold ice, cool drinks, sandwiches, and monkey watch fobs; preachers held forth on corners; street performers offered the chance to be photographed with chimpanzees. Hotel and boardinghouse owners made a killing. The local congressman suggested that, if need be, the War Department could provide tents and cots.

Even in Tennessee the anti-evolution law was not without its critics, Wineapple explains: “A group of university students…petitioned the legislature to consider a few more bills” to “amend the law of gravity, for instance, and do something about the excessive speed of light.” Others joined in: the Black journalist George Schuyler interviewed a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo, he said, who was appalled to be related to people 🙊🙉🙈🐵:

Nobody had ever seen us carry on war, lynching each other, filling up jails, or working our little children…. Did you ever hear of monkeys allowing one of their race to appropriate all of the trees in the jungle, and then pay rent to him❓

Two events no one anticipated gave the trial an extraordinary double climax. The judge denied Darrow permission to hear testimony from all but one of a group of eminent scientists he had brought to Dayton to question about evolution. But Darrow found a brilliant alternative. He asked to examine a witness about the Bible—and that witness was a man who proudly believed that it should be taken literally: Bryan, who rose to the bait. If he did not testify, Bryan said, “it will go out to the world that I am afraid to let these atheists and enemies of God’s Word question me.”

Bryan found himself in one awkward spot after another as the two men sweated in the heat of the courthouse lawn. “Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still❓” Darrow asked. Of course, Bryan said, but then he had to concede that the earth went around the sun, not the reverse. Then Darrow turned to the great Flood, from which Noah’s ark rescued the only survivors. The flood, Bryan insisted, according to the calculations of an eminent bishop, had happened 4,262 years earlier. But, Darrow asked, what about civilizations known to be more than six thousand years old❓

Moving on to the story of creation, Darrow asked Bryan: If God made the sun only on the fourth day, how were the days measured up to that point? Bryan got into still deeper water when, surprisingly, he said that the six days of creation might not have been days of twenty-four hours. “Now, if you call those periods, they may have been a very long time,” Darrow prompted. “They might have been,” Bryan conceded, finally acknowledging that creation “might have continued for millions of years.” One such query followed another: If the serpent had been condemned by God to forever slither on its belly, Darrow asked, how had it gotten around before then? On its tail?

Nonetheless, after only nine minutes of deliberation, the jury found Scopes guilty. He had, after all, clearly violated the law against teaching evolution. He was fined $100.

Then came the second dramatic flourish that ensured the trial a place in legend: five days after it ended, Bryan, who had stayed on in Dayton to do some speaking, died in his sleep. “I firmly believe,” a local minister told a crowd of shocked mourners, “that William J. Bryan went to an untimely death as a martyr fallen in the defense of the Son of God.” Mencken took a different view: “God aimed at Darrow, missed him, and hit Bryan.”

Though Darrow lost the legal case, it is tempting to feel satisfied by his brilliant rhetorical triumph over Bryan. But ominously similar divisions still run through our country, deeper than ever. And they have been exploited, as never before, by Donald Trump and a raft of other right-wing politicians.

“There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two centuries ago. “Thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field…. It is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount.” That is certainly one continuity in the American culture wars; another, closely related, is suspicion of science. “Scientific precedents have very little weight with them,” Tocqueville said of Americans; he would not have been surprised to see the Anti-Vaccination Society of America founded less than four decades after he wrote this, and angry arguments about anti-vaxxers in the headlines today.

When Darrow managed to put a single scientist on the witness stand, Bryan mocked him as someone who had “unrolled degree after degree.” What scientists of Bryan’s day saw as the search for truth, in evolutionary biology and much else, fundamentalists saw as contempt for their faith and, by extension, for them.

Another continuity, and a dangerous one, given the disproportionate power rural states have in the Senate and the Electoral College, is that the culture wars are still largely between big cities—what Bryan scornfully referred to as the “cultured crowd”—and the rest of the country. Although Bryan was selling real estate in Florida at the time of the trial, he always portrayed himself as a man of Nebraska, which he had represented in Congress. His opponent had been born in a small town in Ohio, but Bryan pointedly referred to him in court as “my distinguished friend from Chicago,” where Darrow had spent most of his working life. And partly due to Mencken’s acid pen, the public largely viewed the Scopes trial as a clash between educated people and unlettered hicks. Mencken hated organized religion and saw the South as “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert.”

Their dignity profoundly stung, the objects of that scorn resented it. When at one point the courtroom crowd cheered Bryan, Darrow noted contemptuously, “Great applause from the bleachers.” “From those whom you call ‘yokels,’” Bryan replied. “I have never called them yokels,” Darrow said. That may be true, but Mencken and others who followed his lead certainly had, and repeatedly so. Such insults were keenly felt—as they are today. Hillary Clinton’s dismissal of some Trump supporters as “deplorables” may have cost her the 2016, election.

One more continuity in our culture wars is that, one level down, they are often about race. Today right-wing rage is aimed at affirmative action and at school curricula that emphasize the centrality of slavery and racism in American history, like The New York Times’s 1619 Project. A century ago much of the fury provoked by Darwin’s theory of evolution was against the idea that we are all descended from monkeys. Not only was “monkey” a common term of opprobrium for Black people, but for many whites, the thought that we might all have a common ancestor of any sort was horrifying. It was much more comforting to believe that the people on Noah’s ark were white and that Blacks—God’s curse upon Ham’s descendants—came later.

Finally, culture wars are fueled by the fear of losing ground. This was widespread a hundred years ago, and the theory of evolution, overturning centuries of biblical certainty, played into that fear. Many Americans of that era—above all, white Protestant men—felt threatened by the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had flooded into the country in the preceding half-century. Women could now vote, and millions of them had recently come into the labor force—a flow accelerated by World War I—with employers sometimes finding them more reliable than men. Many women no longer included the word “obey” in their wedding vows, and birth control, even when still illegal, was giving them more power over their reproductive lives. Men sensed that their traditional status was menaced. One sign of this is that the American divorce rate, although low by today’s standards, more than tripled between 1890, and 1920.

Further upending tradition, mechanical tractors and harvesters were greatly shrinking the number of Americans on family farms, with their clearly defined male and female roles stretching back centuries. And the giant new plants that produced that machinery, millions of automobiles, and so much more were bringing jobs to industrial centers like Darrow’s Chicago, not to small towns like Dayton, Tennessee.

The Scopes trial was only one sign of these tensions. A much more refined expression of them came five years later from the Southern Agrarians: the dozen writers—all white men—who published the famous essay collection I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Although few if any of them would have contested the theory of evolution, they vigorously defended small-town and farm life and the South, largely ignoring the heritage of slavery.

Today the country is once again roiled by unsettling changes, and the fiercest culture warriors come from the parts of it that have lost out: regions like the Rust Belt, Appalachia, whose coal mines have shut down, and the southern and rural areas that have missed out on the tech boom enriching coastal cities like Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco. And today, again, it is men in these parts of the country who feel most under threat, as the election has just shown us.

The United States of 1925, could be a violent place. Seventeen Black people were lynched that year, and Klan membership was near its peak. However, one surprise for the reader of Wineapple’s book is that for all its drama, the Scopes trial provoked no such violence, even rhetorically. Despite their disagreements, Darrow and Bryan had known each other for years, and Darrow had supported Bryan in two presidential campaigns. Bryan volunteered as prosecutor out of Christian belief, not vindictiveness; he even offered to pay Scopes’s fine. Scopes readily agreed to be arrested and be the defendant in a case testing the new Tennessee law. Local businessmen offered to put up his bail, since no one wanted their children’s teacher in jail.

Despite the impression given by Mencken and other journalists that the townspeople were hillbillies hostile to anything modern and scientific, they welcomed both sides. The Dayton Progressive Club gave banquets for both Darrow and Bryan. Scopes himself attended the one for the Great Commoner, sitting across from the man Mencken had dubbed the “Fundamentalist pope".

“Bryan asked him if he was going to finish his corn and potatoes, and if not, he would,” Wineapple writes. It was all amazingly friendly.

Why the difference in tone between today’s bitter cultural battles and the one that took place in Tennessee in 1925❓ One factor, surely, was that no one was trying to turn the Scopes trial into a political campaign weapon. Bryan had not given up hope of making a final run for president, but he was a fundamentally decent man who was not planning to reach the White House on a wave of venom against his enemies. In today’s Florida, for example, Governor Ron DeSantis clearly hoped to do exactly that. Besides his attacks on any discussion of global warming, he introduced a bill allowing parents to sue school districts that teach “critical race theory” (defined quite broadly), signed a law banning abortions after six weeks, and purged the leadership of the state university system’s honors college. Reporters recently observed a dumpster on campus filled with discarded books from its now-closed Gender and Diversity Center. The governor’s reach for the presidential nomination failed, but all over the country candidates for everything from the presidency to school boards have weaponized culture war issues like trans rights, library books, and vaccines. By comparison, the Scopes trial looks as mannerly as a high school debate tournament.

Wineapple does not take the story past the trial, but it’s notable that this past summer Dayton held its thirty-fifth annual Scopes Festival, a weeklong series of events whose centerpiece is Destiny in Dayton, a play based on the trial and staged at the courthouse. Jurors are chosen from the audience. For extra fees, you can buy T-shirts and “a delicious 1925-style meal” on the courthouse lawn with the cast. Will our current culture wars soon be commemorated in the same cheerful spirit❓ It seems hard to imagine.

Donald Trump begins his campaign of lies on New Year's Day. Continues his campaign to create fear of immigrants

Echo report published in the Daily Beast by Sean Craig

Trump Wrongly Tying New Orleans Attack to Immigration

Donald Trump's Dangerous Immigration obsession

In a Truly Lie-Social post, the president-elect wrongly tried to tie the truck attack on Bourbon Street—which was carried out by a Texas native and U.S. Army veteran, according to authorities—to migrants, who he has long targeted with hate-filled political rhetoric.

🤥🤥👖🔥 (pants on fire❗)

When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true,” Trump wrote.

“The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!”

Trump’s statement followed an erroneous Fox (Fake❗)News report—which the network has since retracted—that claimed the rental truck used by the suspect in the New Year’s Day attack crossed into Texas from Mexico two days earlier.

In fact, the vehicle entered the U.S. from Mexico on Nov.ember 16, driven by a man with no connection to Wednesday’s horrific events.

The FBI identified US-born Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, as the suspect who allegedly drove the truck into a crowd with deliberate intent, killing 15 and injuring dozens more. Authorities say Jabbar was killed after exchanging fire with police.

Officials said Wednesday afternoon there was no evidence tying the attack to the border, though Trump’s inflammatory posts trying to make a link between the two remain up.

He added to his screed at around 9 a.m. Thursday by specifically attacking President Joe Biden. “With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote.

“That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering ‘thugs’ have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA.”

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said the FBI is investigating the incident as “an act of terrorism.”

The FBI said an ISIS flag was located on the vehicle and that the agency is “working to determine the subject’s potential associations and affiliations with terrorist organizations.”

High cost of health care was a missed communications opportunity in the 2024 election

An election 2024 post-mortum has tried to succintly conceptualize how the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was unable to convince enough voters to elect Vice-President Kamala Harris, in spite of her excellent qualifications for the postion of President of the United States. Nevertheless, among the legitimate criticizisms about the campaign communications stratey is the subject of health care costs, This important issue was almost ignored by Democrats and Republicans, even though the issue impacts on all people regardless of socio-economic status and is now a significant sector of the  economy. 

This echo opion is published on the Becker's Hospital Review:

When will healthcare be treated as the economic issue it is?

The 2024, election failed to position healthcare as central to the economy despite representing nearly a fifth of the U.S. GDP. Voters were inundated with debates over the costs of essentials like gas and food while healthcare remained on the sidelines, with neither Democrats nor Republicans making the meaningful connection between healthcare and the financial wellbeing of everyday Americans. (Voters outright said healthcare should have received more attention in the campaign.)

The result? A missed opportunity to mobilize voters around the most urgent economic issue of our time.

It's appalling that it took the assassination of a healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, to spark broader conversations about the broken system. Instead of outrage or reflection, many Americans responded with chilling cynicism and by indulging in dark corners of faceless online commentary. Digital noise and performative outrage grew louder and continued to overshadow any sort of substantive healthcare discussion.

Meanwhile, the stakes are high and growing. Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to be depleted by 2036 — just 11 years from now. Meanwhile, Medicare Advantage enrollment has soared, covering 54% of beneficiaries in 2024, despite glaring issues like prior authorization delays and slow payments that lawmakers themselves have flagged.

2025 offers a chance to reset the conversation. Will any voices finally emerge to frame healthcare as an economic concern directly tied to household budgets and the nation's financial sustainability? Will leaders have the courage to address meaningful changes to Medicare, moving beyond token measures like 2.8% payment cuts — the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Can voters, policymakers and corporate leaders rise to the occasion and prioritize real solutions, or will sound bites and superficial debates continue to create an illusion of progress?

Antisemitism in global athletics cannot be hidden under seemingly obscure sporting events

An echo report published in Commentary/Europe:*

December 31, 2024 Europe

The Lawn Bowling Scandal Is Much More Important Than It Sounds
by Seth Mandel

Sometimes the events most worthy of our outrage can go woefully under-protested simply because they sound silly.

The latest example comes to us from the wide sporting world of bowls. Americans are likely most familiar with Bocce, except for Franco-Americans who play pétanque. But all are versions of the same idea that boils down to a form of lawn bowling: Roll (or toss) the ball as close to the target as you can.

The World Bowls Tour is what it sounds like: a global league for both indoor and outdoor lawn bowling. The WBT has disinvited qualifying Israeli players from the World Indoor Championship based solely on their nationality. Pressure groups bullied the bowls.

Again, from a sporting perspective, Americans may find this more obscure than Cricket. But as an indication of European society’s blithe submission to delirious anti-Semitism, it is deeply worrying. And when Europe succumbs to its Jew-baiting instincts—well, it tends to be bad for everyone.

So, I recommend quickly getting past one’s discomfort with publicly registering outrage over lawn-bowling competitions. The widespread attempts to establish de facto Jew-bans in global athletics and other leisure activities is ominous; we should acknowledge that they have only come for bowls because they’ve already come for soccer, hockey, rugby, and even Ultimate Frisbee.

This isn’t about bowls; it’s about an attempt to have Western social life mimic the ethnic exclusivity of 20th century country clubs.

The WBT was surprisingly forthright about its choice: “as a result of the intensity of the situation, the WBT board, in consultation with our event partners and other relevant stakeholders, has made the difficult decision to withdraw the invitation for Israel to participate in the forthcoming World Indoor Championships. This decision affects Daniel Alonim in the World Singles, as well as Amnon Amar and Itai Rigbi in the World Open Pairs.”

Well, forthright at first, anyway. The next part of the statement is hilariously Orwellian: “This decision was not taken lightly and has been made in the best interests of the event’s success and integrity. Bowls is, and always has been, a sport that unites people and this choice reflects our commitment to protecting the championships and ensuring they run smoothly for everyone involved.”

The sport “unites people,” therefore it must exclude people. The event’s “integrity” was at stake, therefore players who earned their place will no longer be allowed to participate in the competition.

I don’t fully blame them for the phrasing, though: Anyone who would apply a nationality ban to a sport in the year 2024, cannot possibly know what “integrity” means.

The Telegraph reports that the WBT decision was likely influenced by a ramped-up campaign of anti-Semitism aimed at disrupting last month’s Scottish International Open. The anti-Semites were very angry and noisy, and there is no similar constituency in Europe for non-anti-Semitism, so here we are.

In fact, that Scottish campaign seems to have found some success as well, forcing an Israeli competitor out of the Scottish International Open. Scottish Sport for Palestine rejoiced: “Scotland can be proud once again.” (Once again?)

If for no other reason, these leagues should (must❗) refuse to submit to such pressure campaigns because of the campaigns’ sheer dirtbaggery alone. Scottish Sport for Palestine made a poster featuring a now-disinvited Israeli competitor’s name and picture and a description of him as someone who “runs a landscaping business clearing Palestinian land for the occupation.”

In other words, because he is a Jew who lives in the Levant, his existence is illegitimate and his rights are automatically limited. That European sporting leagues are susceptible to overt blood-and-soil Palestinian nationalism is unfortunate. Additionally, I don’t know much about this group Scottish Sport for Palestine, but if it is a coalition of Scottish athletes then I question how much pressure they could possibly put on the WBT.

Last month, a youth Maccabi Berlin soccer team was chased home from the field by attackers wielding knives and clubs. As I noted at the time, Maccabi Berlin is a legacy organization: Prior to the Holocaust, Jews established clubs like Maccabi precisely because they were excluded from mainstream national sports leagues.

So although it may sound unimportant, especially to an American ear, the fuss over lawn bowling is significant. The intent of these campaigners is to sweep Jews out of every corner of nonpolitical social life in Europe, and beyond.

*About Commentary: COMMENTARY is a highly acclaimed monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.Many of COMMENTARY’s articles have been controversial, and more than a few have been hugely influential—touchstones for debate and discussion in universities, among policy analysts in and out of government, within the ranks of professionals and community activists, and in circles of serious thought worldwide. A large number of articles can be counted as landmarks of American letters and intellectual life. Agree with it or disagree with it, COMMENTARY cannot be ignored. To read it is to take part in the great American discussion.