Learning about the evils of slavery in America from the inside outl- two book reviews in one essay

The Slave's Power published in The New York Review of Books reviews by Drew Gillpin Faust

Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive left by those who defended and benefited from human bondage.

Black teamsters guiding a group of fugitives to safety in northern Virginia, 1862 (Library of Congress)

Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans
by Susan Eva O’Donovan
Penguin Press, 369 pp., $35.00

A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
by Melvin Patrick Ely
Henry Holt, 352 pp., $31.99

For nearly two decades now, historians have been debating whether it is even possible to write the history of American slavery. 

Can an accurate story of a system of oppression be derived from sources created and preserved by the oppressors❓ In many ways it is a surprising controversy. For the generation of American historians working after the emergence of the mainstream civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, slavery studies represented perhaps the most exciting field of American historical scholarship, attracting an audience of general readers as well as the attention of prominent academics. Books about slavery were discussed in popular magazines and featured on the nightly news. Innovative methodologies, including demography and quantitative analysis, folklore, material culture, oral history, and family reconstitution opened new windows into the past. At the same time, changed assumptions about racial equality made the “moonlight and magnolias” South of Gone with the Wind and most earlier studies of slavery obsolete. Historians began to construct a rich and sobering narrative of the lives of both enslavers and enslaved, as well as a portrait of the system that bound them together.

It seems even odder to be having this debate now, when attacks on history by the right demand that such matters as chattel slavery be erased altogether or reconfigured to ensure an adequately “patriotic” account of the national past. Last year, several weeks after President Donald Trump instructed the Smithsonian Institution that it would have to adjust anything his administration took issue with regarding “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals,” he complained that the Smithsonian’s museums focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” The National Park Service is revising interpretations at its sites to offer an upbeat rendering of human bondage, if slavery is mentioned at all. In January, the Park Service workers took crowbars to signage memorializing the nine enslaved people who worked in George Washington’s presidential house in Philadelphia.

We have never needed more to believe in—and defend—the possibility of a rigorous, fact-based telling of slavery’s history. Our nation’s future requires a clear-eyed understanding of how its aspirations for freedom and democracy coexisted with an institution defined by violence and injustice. We cannot overcome our past if we fail to document and confront it, and so we must strive to make the realities of American slavery ever more visible and undeniable.

But can we adequately document an institution whose records were overwhelmingly produced by those who built and benefited from it? In her presidential address to the American Historical Association in January 2025, Thavolia Glymph, a professor of history at Duke, insisted that this is not just a possibility but a necessity. She challenged those who assail what historians have come to call the “archive” of slavery—the manuscripts and books left by our forebears—as too compromised to be useful. Critics have argued that this record, the creation of enslavers and white supremacists, reflects the interests of the empowered and silences the enslaved, who were mostly prohibited from reading and writing and thus left unable to tell their side of the story.

Glymph readily admitted that this is the “damaged space that we historians have to work with.” Yet even with its biases she said she finds it “boisterous” and “noisy,” full of unruly voices of the subjugated, awaiting the historian’s discerning eye. Every encounter with power, she insisted, “also captures the agitation of the enslaved that led to the encounter.” In their effort to control the archive, enslavers did “a pretty bad job; indeed, they failed miserably.” Glymph’s own deeply researched work on enslaved and formerly enslaved women is testimony to her argument.
“Millions of paper tracings,” she said, “are there in which enslaved people claim for themselves more than a trace in history.”

Two recent books represent the remarkable discoveries that this archive of slavery can yield. Both recognize the distortions inherent in a record kept by those who defended human bondage and believed that Black people are inferior. Yet both employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the nineteenth-century materials available to them. And each is clearly caught up in the spirit of the hunt and the joy of searching for hidden treasures that inspire the best historical researchers.

A professor at the University of Memphis, Susan Eva O’Donovan has immersed herself in what she embraces as “slavery’s vast archive,” exploring “correspondence, ledgers, diaries, logs, receipts, reports, contracts, complaints, bills, court cases, police blotters, and ship manifests” in order to reconstruct the experience of human bondage. At the outset of her career, more than thirty years ago, O’Donovan served as an assistant editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, a pathbreaking initiative established in 1976 to identify materials relevant to the coming of freedom, chiefly in the voluminous holdings of the National Archives. No one had systematically looked for such documents before or asked the questions about the African American past that by the 1970s had come to be seen as essential. The FSSP has in the years since published six doorstop volumes of evidence about slavery and emancipation. 

O’Donovan is a coeditor of two (and Glymph coeditor of two others). Few historians are more familiar with the records of American slavery and the opportunities for writing its history.

Her purpose in Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans is to demonstrate that even before emancipation the enslaved had carved out spaces of independence from their enslavers. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Black southerners were not simply victims of oppression but also a people in motion—literally across land and water and figuratively toward freedom, even when an end to slavery seemed all but unimaginable. Masters’ control was never absolute, and slaves exploited these limitations, readying themselves to take advantage of their eventual legal emancipation. Theirs was, she insists, the work of politics, an assertion of power not at a ballot box but through the events and arrangements of everyday life. O’Donovan’s arguments build on earlier work by a number of other scholars who identified a Black politics that emerged even under slavery, perhaps most notably Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2004. But the richness of her examples and her use of the lens of motion and travel succeed in deepening our understanding.

The balance of oppression and resistance in slavery is complex, O’Donovan stresses. To overemphasize the agency of the enslaved would be to “ignore the violent character of American slavery, an institution forged to steal the labor of millions for white people’s gain.” But to minimize the influence of slaves within the system of constraints imposed on them would be yet another subjugation. The enslaved were, to borrow the parlance of the civil rights movement, “making a way out of no way.”

O’Donovan centers her analysis on examples of slaves moving beyond their places of bondage in the regular course of doing their owners’ business. The tension between freedom and total control, she shows, lies at the very heart of what southerners called “the peculiar institution.” Using unfree workers optimally and efficiently often required granting them some modicum of autonomy, some reprieve from constant scrutiny, some access to the world beyond the master’s direct purview. “To leash their laborers too tightly,” she writes, “would be to strangle themselves and their great golden goose.” Enslaved men worked as crews and as skilled pilots and stewards on steamboats, and as loggers and “wooders” providing fuel along inland waterways. On land, enslaved teamsters hauled goods—for example, cotton to market—similarly escaping the “suffocating surveillance” of the plantation. Their travels put them in contact with people from other parts of the nation and beyond, often in situations in which sharp social and racial distinctions were difficult to uphold and new ideas, including those that might challenge slavery, difficult to suppress. As the Missouri Supreme Court wrote in an 1835 case involving an enslaved drayman, “He acts as a freeman all the day.”

The movement of enslaved women tended to have a different character. Many traveled as domestic servants for the convenience of their mistresses, visiting spas like Saratoga Springs in New York or cities like Philadelphia or even London where slavery did not exist. O’Donovan ingeniously uses a federal record of all enslaved people who left or entered United States’ seaports, a register kept after 1808 to monitor possible violations of the law banning the international slave trade. She finds that such travelers were overwhelmingly female—in most cases, she argues, the attendants of elite southerners visiting abroad or embarking on the grand tour. Their journeys introduced them to new worlds. On a transatlantic steamship voyage, Frederick Douglass remarked that “all color distinctions were flung to the winds.” Enslaved workers who had witnessed free societies and seen the place of free African Americans within them no longer understood their own situation as unalterable. Travel helped produce a contagion of liberty.

Over the course of the antebellum era, boom and bust could accelerate or diminish mobility. In the 1820s and 1830s, expansion into the cotton kingdom of the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other states—relocated hundreds of thousands of Black southerners who were transported or sold to cultivate rich virgin soils. In the 1850s, high cotton prices drove productivity, which in turn required more marketing and hauling, more teamsters and enslaved workers interacting with towns and cities beyond their plantations.

Moments of genuine activism emerged out of growing political awareness among the enslaved as sectional hostilities and attacks on slavery intensified. Anxious slaveholders worried about the “great meetings” of their unfree laborers that began during John C. Frémont’s Free Soil campaign for the presidency in 1856. O’Donovan describes protests that erupted along a canal in Rockbridge, Virginia, and along a railroad under construction in Alabama, as well as a rebellion plotted in a plantation district near Memphis. In South Carolina, a committee of slaves sent a delegation to the governor to petition for “redress of certain grievances.” As one Black southerner later recalled, in the years after the 1856 election “a great anger arose among the colored people,” and they “began to study how they would get free.”

When Union armies advanced into the South in 1861, enslaved people knew what was at stake. Some hundreds of thousands fled to Union lines because, O’Donovan argues, they had been “laying the foundations for liberation for decades.” They were ready, and they understood, in the words of an 1865 petition of the Black residents of Nashville, “the burdens of citizenship” as well as its promises. As a gathering of freedpeople declared to Union general Joseph Fullerton in July 1865, “We is come to the law now.”

In A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, Melvin Patrick Ely, a professor at William and Mary, makes clear that Black southerners had in fact been touched by the law throughout the antebellum period. Unlike O’Donovan’s sweeping study, Ely’s book is sharply focused, delving into six criminal cases in one Virginia community—the notorious Prince Edward County, which achieved an enduring place in history by closing its public schools from 1959 until 1964 rather than integrating them after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Yet like O’Donovan, Ely relishes the relentless quest for sources, and his excitement is evident in discoveries like the “sheaf of bluish-brown tissue-thin pages” recording the testimony at an 1854 rape trial or the rare court minute book he found in a little-used archival warehouse near the Richmond airport. He offers the reader a you-are-there approach both to his own work as a scholar and to the proceedings of a nineteenth-century courtroom.

Ely seeks to particularize the history of slavery, to embed it in the stories of individual men and women, white and Black, whose testimony, “not verbatim but very detailed,” was recorded by court clerks. Such sources have often been dismissed as partial and unreliable evidence because of laws that prohibited Black people from testifying against white defendants in southern states. But Ely shows us how much was said in spite of this prohibition, citing examples of white people on the stand relating stories they had heard from African Americans—a confounding judicial circumstance in which the admission of hearsay in some measure compensated for the limits on Black testimony. And Black people, both free and enslaved, who were not themselves on trial were frequent witnesses (if the defendant was not white) and were recorded speaking at length.

Ely, too, emphasizes the complexity of slavery as a system and as a web of human relationships. In Prince Edward County, three quarters of white households owned slaves, but in small numbers, not in large plantation-scale holdings. It was, Ely writes, “a little republic of middle-level slaveholding men” that thrust people together across class and race and condition—even in court. The “terrible intimacy” of his title refers to the closeness of Black and white people in nearly every aspect of daily life, including sexual ties across the color line and blurred family links that defied notions of racial purity. But this was, as he describes it, a “deformed” intimacy produced by a society “that exploited and abused” Black people.

To enable his readers to engage directly with the past themselves, Ely organizes his book around the reports of witness testimony for the six cases he uses to capture his slice of nineteenth-century southern life. His earlier works, he explains, simply presented his interpretation of his sources from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; he effectively asked the reader to “trust me.” But this time “I want you to walk through these stories with me—to see them unfold as they did in the community and then in the courtroom.” He adopts a familiar, conversational tone, assessing what he sees, acknowledging where he finds the record “biased and riddled with blind spots,” and using his extensive knowledge of the place and the period to help make sense of materials that might otherwise seem puzzling. Each trial unfolds step by step, often revealing surprising twists that underscore the contradictory forces of humanity and inhumanity in the everyday life of a slave society.

An enslaved man named George is acquitted of rape in an 1854 trial in which his white accuser’s lower-class status and dubious reputation sway the jury to credit the supportive testimony of white witnesses. Mary Tatum was regarded by her neighbors with contempt; George seemed always appropriately “straight-forward humble & obedient.” As one elderly white woman explained, “I thought the negro ought not to be hung for nothing.” 

In a murder trial in 1861, after the outbreak of the Civil War, witnesses tell a sickening tale of cruelty inflicted on William, a man accused of killing his enslaver. The prisoner is not executed but instead convicted of second-degree murder, with his sentence commuted by the governor to life at labor on public works. Yet in the course of testimony it becomes evident that many white members of the community had long known of this owner’s “very barbarous” behavior—extracting teeth as punishment, beating William so frequently that his back became a giant scab. Yet they did nothing until their neighbor was dead and William on trial.

The southern system of slavery hid under the veneer of law, but Ely illustrates the elusiveness of genuine justice or mercy within its structures of repression. Human beings both Black and white nevertheless pushed the limits of control, motivated by a wide range of factors—pure self-interest in the case of enslavers who did not want to lose their valuable slave property to the gallows, human sympathy from individuals connected to one another even across racial lines, as well as Black Virginians’ anticipation that white people might somehow, someday be called to account as Christians and Americans.

O’Donovan notes that more than two hundred Black men and women who had been taken outside the South for a period of time by their enslavers sued for freedom in the same court that heard the famous case of Dred Scott, all arguing that once they had set foot on free soil they were legally free. Ely offers no example of such direct use of the law by African Americans in Prince Edward County. But even as the enslaved people who came into that Virginia courtroom were subjected to the display of white supremacy, they also confronted some of its weaknesses, likely emboldening them to seize their freedom when the moment arrived. Rife with the contradictions inherent in defining human beings as chattel property, slavery contained the germs of its own destruction, and both authors let us understand how those seeds might have taken root.

Did William, sentenced in 1861, labor on the public works for life? Or did he run to Union lines when Northern troops advanced and provided an opportunity? Even Ely’s prodigious research gives us no answer to these questions. The archive of slavery cannot tell us all we would like to know. But it can tell us a great deal, and it can continue to challenge us to reckon with a national past that represents human failures as well as human triumphs. We today are the products of all of those. A crowbar cannot change that.

Donald Trump uses surrogate Marco Rubio to spread horrible lies about Democrats by using rants about "isms" of unknown origin

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe, by 

Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.  
Marco Rubio got it wrong❗
How the secretary of state warped the meaning of a proud American tradition.

In a fire-and-brimstone speech last month that often bordered on the bizarre, Secretary of State Marco Rubio identified “a distinctive and unique evil.” Rubio ranted and called it “far-left terrorism” and asserted that it poses a “serious threat” to the United States.

“It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves,” Rubio told an audience at the State Department, “to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight for what is ours.”

Much of Rubio’s speech was a boiler-plate rant reflecting Donald Trump’s cultist obsessions. Its central premise is dubious at best, since “far-left terrorism” is in fact quite low on the list of dangers that face the United States and the world. The oddest piece of this speech, though, was Rubio’s mention of anti-imperialists as part of the evil coalition.

“They can call themselves 🤥anti-capitalist or 🤥anti-imperialist or 🤥communist or 🤥anarchist or 🤥Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same,” he asserted. “It is a 🤥poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation.”  💩💩💩❗

TRUTH❗ Anti-imperialism has no relation to communism, anarchism, or Marxism. In fact, anti-imperialism is a rich American tradition. Especially at this point in our American history, it should be taken seriously. Rubio has every right to embrace the imperial idea. Other Americans, however, have an equal right to oppose it without being demonized as allies of communists or anarchists.

Debate over imperialism is as old as our Republic. It addresses a profound question: Should the United States seek to impose its will on foreign nations or allow them to go their own way❓

George Washington warned future generations of Americans not to become involved in “obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.” John Quincy Adams declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” 

Abraham Lincoln opposed the American invasion of Mexico in the 1840s, and Ulysses Grant called it “a wicked war.”

The widest-ranging debate over imperialism exploded in 1898, when the United States set out to crush Spanish power in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. 

Massachusetts was the epicenter of opposition.

Headquartered in an office near what is now Liberty Square in Boston’s financial district, the Anti-Imperialist League became a major force in American life. It was headed by George Boutwell, a former Massachusetts governor. Its eminent supporters included Andrew Carnegie, the richest man in the United States; Samuel Gompers, the country’s most prominent labor leader; former president Grover Cleveland, who had unsuccessfully opposed the annexation of Hawaii; and Mark Twain, who forthrightly declared: “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

In the debate over whether the United States should begin imposing its will abroad, the most powerful arguments were presented by the two US senators from Massachusetts. George Frisbie Hoar called it “the greatest question ever discussed in this Chamber from the beginning of the Government” and colorfully denounced the rising imperialists: “You have no right at the cannon’s mouth to impose on an unwilling people your Declaration of Independence and your Constitution and your notions of freedom and notions of what is good!”

To this, the silver-tongued internationalist Henry Cabot Lodge had an equally powerful response. The United States, he said, “has a great mission in the world — a mission of good, a mission of freedom. I would have it fulfill what I think is its manifest destiny.”

Senators voted narrowly to ratify the treaty by which the United States turned the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico into American colonies. Anti-imperialists appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the Constitution gives the government no power to impose its will on foreign lands. The Court rejected their argument by a 5-4 margin. In a ringing dissent, Chief Justice Melvin Fuller wrote that overseas military expeditions are “wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genius, as well as with the words, of the Constitution.”

This debate reemerged repeatedly. Following World War II, Senator Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” opposed the creation of NATO because “the building up of a great army surrounding Russia” would set off “an inevitable arms race.” Debates over US intervention in Vietnam and Iraq also echoed those of the late 19th century.

Anarchism and Marxism are ideas that came to the United States from Europe. Neither ever found much support. Anti-imperialism is the opposite: a homegrown ideology that has long been embraced by a significant minority of Americans. 

Rather than a “far-left” idea, it is essentially a conservative one. It argues for humility, restraint, and limits on America’s role in the world. Liberal utopianism is what drives the idea that American intervention in other countries will ultimately lead to peace and prosperity for all.

Lumping anti-imperialism with communism also reflects a deep misunderstanding of history. Countries that have proclaimed themselves Communist, notably China and the Soviet Union, were built on imperial conquest at least as fully as the United States was.

Whether “far-left terrorism” is truly the deep threat that Secretary Rubio perceives may be debated. So may the question of whether the United States should seek to project military power around the world. To describe anti-imperialism as a form of 🤥 “far-left terrorism,” however, is a slander that ignores American history.

Donald Trump is a terrible leader his incendiary rhetoric is stirring up the entire nation when his job is to call for healing- God Bless Erika Kirk

Editorial echo published by the Baltimore Sun newspaper:

If the Charlie Kirk memorial last Sunday in Arizona was a test of faith — if all those in assembly wanted to demonstrate their support for the slain conservative activist, for his religious beliefs he held, for the causes he espoused and for his grieving family — then it was mission accomplished. 

HELLO❗With one notable exception❗ 💥When the final speaker took the podium to eulogize the 31-year-old head of Turning Point USA and father of two young children, the man so many before him had praised for his commitment to his family and his Christian faith, that individual was clear and unambiguous in his views on forgiveness and redemption and second chances.

He was having none of it.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first fill with hate.

“He did not hate his opponents,” Donald Trump said of Kirk. “He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. 🙄I’m sorry.”😕😠

Hate, as Captain Ahab discovered in Moby Dick, is ruinous. It metastasizes like cancer, reproducing itself at warp speed. And to hear Trump embrace it, even as thousands prayed, sang to Christian contemporary music and spoke of better days ahead at the combination religious service and political rally, was deeply disappointing. Not entirely surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.
What a contrast to Kirk’s widow. Erika Kirk 😢echoed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in expressing forgiveness, not hate, for her husband’s assassin. Tearful, sometimes shaking and looking upward as if to meet her late husband’s gaze from heaven, she spoke with the magnanimous spirit of Jesus in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

It was jarring, appalling and churlishly rude (add "sinful") that Trump would reject that spirit of the moment — and the will of the Kirks — in celebrating hate. So unabashedly. So myopically. 

So narcissistically. Trump fulminated at Charlie’s funeral. Given this remarkable opportunity to bind the nation’s wounds, as a certain president once sought to do, he instead spoke of hate.

Such hatred is unbefitting of anyone. It is especially unbefitting for a president who is supposed to be a role model for the country.

Do many of Trump’s opponents reciprocate his hate? Absolutely, but that is no excuse. President Abraham Lincoln was reviled unmercifully by many during the Civil War. Yet in his second inaugural address, the great man preached, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Hate engendered the climate that provoked Kirk’s assassin. Continuing down that path risks more of the same. 

Where is the adult in the living room who will tell Trump, “No,” even with the high risk of provoking retribution❓ No nation can survive without courage. It occupies the summit of virtues because it makes all others possible.

We strongly urge Donald Trump to retract his embrace of hate. His stated ambition is to surpass George Washington as the greatest U.S. president. He can start by following Washington’s admonition at the constitutional convention: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest may repair.” Let us at least attempt to have a civil conversation about our disagreements — or at least not boast about our hatred for each other.

Baltimore Sun editorial writers offer opinions and analysis on news and issues relevant to readers. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an idiot who has no prescription for disease prevention in an age when vaccines have saved lives for nearly 200 years

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has zero health care experience other than the myths he invents in his worm infested brain.  In my opinion, Americans should declare him to be a public health danger!

Echo opinion letters published in the Boston Globe:

"Does RFK Jr. have a prescription (Rx) for the times we live in?

In fact George Washington ordered the inoculation of the Continental Army against smallpox during the Revolutionary War. This decision, made in 1777, was a bold and controversial, but widely credited with helping the Americans win the war by preventing the devastating effects of a smallpox epidemic on their troops.

So, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if I eat my veggies and avoid stress, I will not need a vaccine from Moderna or any other drug maker to fight any new bird flu mutations."

Eat right, get exercise … tell that to the Mayans

Five hundred years ago, a thriving Aztec civilization of 16 million people in Mexico was devastated within a short time by Hernán Cortés and his 500 men from Spain. A primary cause was smallpox, a virus unknown to the Aztecs. Similarly, the Mayan and Incan civilizations were also felled by epidemics of foreign diseases such as smallpox, measles, and mumps.

Europeans also brought their diseases to what is now the United States, including reportedly deliberately infecting Indigenous people, with the same devastating results.

World history would have been very different if only these people in the Americas had eaten the right foods, exercised sufficiently, and promoted better sanitation practices.

From Marilyn Levin in Arlington (Boston) Massachusetts

Does RFK Jr. have a prescription (Rx) for the times we live in?

So, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if I eat my veggies and avoid stress, I will not need a vaccine from Moderna or any other drugmaker to fight any new bird flu mutations. Regular exercise, three salads a day, and abstinence from exposure to news of atrocities from the Trump administration should keep me and my octogenarian friends in good health? Sorry, I’m not buying that bridge.

From Rosemary Jones in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts

Donald Trump is using the military for public relations propaganda using the Joseph Goebbels model

Donald Trump is creating a MAGA politicized military.  This is a degradation of our veterans who have served every president since George Washington, regardless of their political party.  

Military.com reports the Bragg Soldiers "Who (inappropriately❗) Cheered Trump's Political Attacks While in Uniform" were checked for allegiance, appearance. In other words, a Hitler style (Joseph Goebbels) Public Relations dangerous propaganda, staged for TV.

(Shame on the Fort Bragg military officers for allowing this disgusting use of military personnel.)

(Check the opinion letter published in the Laconia Daily Sun, New Hampshire:  "watching a very power-hungry narcissist as he tries to model what happened in Germany in the 1930s. He wants to be king, not only of the USA but the world. He seems to think whatever he says is the truth, and I am dumfounded that many of the MAGA world believe every word out of his mouth. I can come up with a few words that describe my emotions ... disgust, disgust, disgust.

How in the heck this space-shot was elected on promises he cannot keep, and has not kept, is beyond me. I am not sure we can survive four years under this guy. He is a living, breathing disaster. For our country, and the world as a whole"

It was supposed to be a routine appearance, a visit from the commander in chief to rally the troops, boost morale and celebrate the Army's 250th-birthday week, which culminates with a Washington, D.C., parade slated for Saturday.

Instead, what unfolded Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, bore little resemblance to the customary visit from a president and defense secretary. There, President Donald Trump unleashed a speech laced with partisan invective, goading jeers from a crowd of soldiers positioned behind his podium -- blurring the long-standing and sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics.

Article reported by Konstantin Toropin, a reporter for Military.com, where he serves as the publication's Pentagon correspondent while also specializing in coverage of the Navy. His coverage focuses on the quality of life for service members in the military.

Marine Corporal JD Vance, "This is fine mess you've gotten GOP into"

Laurel and Hardy comedy line "Another fine mess..."

Echo report published in the Columbus Dispatch by Amelia Robinson.

Former Marine Corporal JD Vance thinks Jennifer Aniston's vote should count less. Actress Jennifer Aniston said, "I am a childless cat lady, but I respect Martha and George's decision to love dogs, birds and her biological children and grandchildren. They had a right to their choice."

https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2024/07/26/jd-vance-cat-lady-comments-jennifer-aniston-ivf/74543387007/

#PresidentGeorgeWashington did not have biological children but they were partners when raising Martha's children at Mount Vernon.

U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and his disdain for the childless — cat ladies in particular — has me thinking about the talented actress Jennifer Aniston and the two things America's first president George Washington and I have in common.

Vance's supporters say his words at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 202, were taken out of context, but they are not.

Here is what he said. “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” the Republican nominee for vice president (IOW a Presient in Waiting) said, reported in the Washington Post and a resurfaced in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter. 

“You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

“When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power,” the Republican nominee for vice president said according to the Washington Post and a resurfaced video posted on X, formerly Twitter. “You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality. If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”

Like George Washington, I am childless. Like George Washington, I am invested in this nation's future.

I am not sure when George Washington accepted he'd never have children of his own, but the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon has records that indicate it was something that eventually happened.

I don't know exactly when I completely accepted the fact either.

The roller coaster that was my infertility hit its last hill eight years ago when an ultrasound revealed 70 fibroid tumors in my uterus. 

My kind and compassionate fertility doctor urged me to get a hysterectomy immediately, worrying that the sheer number may have indicated a rare cancer. It thankfully did not.

Vance called Harris childless cat lady.Where does he stand on family issues?

I speak so freely about infertility, a subject once never spoke about in polite society, for four simple reasons.

1. It was a medical issue.
2. There's nothing taboo about the female body.
3. Men like Vance have made it their business to control women's reproduction while criticizing women who can't or don't want to reproduce.
4. Silence is deadly.

I am a selfish, childless cat lady.🐱😸😻😲😳

Freedom of speech means tolerance against dangerous bigotry

Maine Writer opinion: Students who are demonstrating in support of the Palastinians are not providing equal free speech forums for a Jewish response.

NYTimes opinion.....the sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

Columnist David French opinion in the New York Times:

On Monday, March 11, roughly 200 Jewish students and supporters marched through the campus at the University of California, Berkeley, but what was newsworthy is that they were not attacked. Local news hailed that they were able to, as one headline noted, “successfully march without confrontation.”

The march came two weeks after violent protests forced the cancellation of an event that was to feature an Israeli speaker and was organized by Jewish students. The event — which had already been moved from another location because of safety concerns — was canceled, and the building evacuated by police, after protesters broke through doors and reportedly assaulted Jewish students. There was no way to ensure safety, universityadministrators explained, “given the size of the crowd and the threat of violence.”

At the time that I read accounts about the violence at Berkeley, I was also reading two legal complaints against Harvard and the other against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both complaints make for horrifying reading, detailing a cascading series of antisemitic incidents, including acts of violence and physical intimidation. 

The moral and legal injury is compounded by blatant double standards on the part of the universities. As the complaint filed against Harvard states, “Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world. 

Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism (discrimination on the grounds of a person's size), fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.”

My entire legal career has defended free speech💬  on campus, including the free speech of Muslim students and staff members. 

I’ve also walked through metal detectors at a tense and volatile Columbia University to defend the academic freedom of Jewish students challenging antisemitic statements made by university professors.

And during those decades of litigation and my subsequent years in journalism, I have never seen such comprehensive abuse directed against a vulnerable campus minority group as I’ve seen directed at Jewish students and faculty, since Hamas’s terror attack on October 7, 2023.

Obviously antisemitism isn’t the only hatred afoot in America. Since October 7, there have also been horrifying incidents of anti-Muslim violence. Shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel, the chancellor of the state university system of Florida ordered the deactivation of chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine based on the absurd idea that its written materials provided “material support” for a designated terrorist entity in violation of federal law. (The order has not been enforced.) But what’s happening to Jewish students and faculty at several elite campuses is so comprehensive and all-consuming that it can only be described as systemic antisemitism.

Which brings me to the complaints against M.I.T. and Harvard. 

One should always use caution when evaluating such documents. They represent the allegations of one side. There are times when litigation ultimately proves the accuracy of a complaint’s claims and times when the allegations fall apart under scrutiny. (There are also times when the case grows stronger as the plaintiffs obtain discovery, read internal communications and depose witnesses under oath.) 

Complaints against M.I.T. and Harvard, however, don’t simply ask us to trust them. Time and again they provide screenshots, quotes from emails and photographs that offer visual evidence of their claims.  And make no mistake, the claims are dreadful. At M.I.T., for example, the plaintiffs claim not only that the university allowed pro-Palestinian protesters to hold protests that violated university rules, but, also, that those protests were so threatening that Jewish students were afraid to get near them. M.I.T. Hillel warned students to “not directly engage protesters for your physical safety and well-being” and ideally to avoid the area. This resulted in parts of campus being effectively closed to Jewish students.

The complaint also charges protesters with literally putting a bounty on a Jewish student who had engaged in a physical altercation at a protest, promising an $800 award for identifying the student. According to the complaint, “The student stayed locked up in their dorms for weeks with their friends bringing food, check-ins from the police, and their family terrified for their safety.”

The plaintiffs also claimed that protesters engaged in “targeted protests outside the offices of Jewish professors and the office of M.I.T.’s Israel internship program,” a part of the university’s global experiences program known as MISTI. The complaint quotes a professor who said, “They insistently rattled the door handles of offices that were closed with staff inside …. Their chants included:‘From the river to the sea…’, ‘MISTI, MISTI, you can’t hide,’ and others associating MISTI with genocide.” 

Maine Writer opinion here- It is the Hamas terrorists in Gaza that intends to eliminate the Jews! 

Blood libel*❓ ❗also makes its dreadful appearance.😡💀 The complaint quotes an M.I.T. postdoctoral student (as the complaint notes, postdocs are both students and employees of the university) posting on X, “Zionists not only steal our lands, food, and culture, but our dead bodies as well for organ harvesting.”

*blood libel- the accusation that Jewish people used blood from Christians in rituals....

These incidents represent only a fraction of the claims against M.I.T. The complaint against Harvard likewise details protests that shut down parts of campus, physical assaults against Jewish students and disruptions of classroom instruction so frightening that one caused “Jewish students to flee for their safety, with some removing identifying garb to avoid attack.”

Pervasive fear is a theme of the Harvard complaint. It details an incident at Harvard Law School where campus police allegedly observed passively as a mob of protesters “stormed Harvard Law’s main building, marched down the length of the building’s primary first-floor hallway, and blocked the hallway outside the study room where [Students Against Anti-Semitism and a visiting speaker] were hiding. Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks.”

Pause and think about that for a moment. In the year 2024, at one of the most prestigious and powerful academic institutions in the world, the plaintiffs claim that Jewish students felt the need to hide under their desks for their physical safety.

Just after I finished reading the complaints against Harvard and M.I.T., I read Franklin Foer’s gut-punch cover story in The Atlantic. Titled “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” it begins like this: “Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: ‘I’m scared,’ she wrote.” In the days following October 7, her classmates were staging a walkout to protest Israel, and the atmosphere was tense. “Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide,” Foer wrote. “Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.”

I urge you to read Foer’s entire story, just as I urge you to read both of the legal complaints I’ve described. If you do, you’ll see that there is a certain dreadful sameness to all these stories: Universities and schools demonstrate far greater tolerance for antisemitic speech and behavior than for virtually any other kind of offensive speech or behavior. They bend or break the rules to accommodate pro-Palestinian protests. Jewish students then face intimidation and even assaults.

To defeat systemic antisemitism, universities don’t have to stifle free speech. They simply need to uphold their legal obligations to Jewish students. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires universities that receive public funding to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination, and a leading indicator of discrimination is blatantly disparate treatment. If you permit protesters who target Jewish students to break university rules, you’re asking for a lawsuit. If you’ve permitted the campus environment to deteriorate to such a degree that Jewish students reportedly hide under their desks for safety, then you should face catastrophic monetary penalties.

Moreover, no one should excuse the targeting of Jewish students in America as mere “anti-Zionism.” When American Muslims are targeted or persecuted because of the actions of Muslims overseas, we rightly see that as pure, undistilled Islamophobia. The same principle applies to American Jews✡️. When you see the radical left target Jews and then claim they’re merely anti-Zionist, they give the game away — to them, Judaism is Zionism.

I’ve focused on the radical campus left in this newsletter. I know full well that antisemitism is bursting out on the right as well. Foer’s concerns that the hard right and hard left are rendering America less safe for Jews are very well founded. And that should grieve us all.

The story of American Judaism is inseparable from the American story. I think often of the famous exchange between George Washington and the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I. 

We know the soaring promises of the Declaration of Independence, but we also know that the early American republic did not live up to those ideals. Our nation’s slow progress toward fulfilling its promise began in part with that exchange in Newport.

The congregation wrote Washington with both a clear text and a clear subtext. Here is the key sentence: “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.”

George Washington's text was written in 1790, in response to a letter from the Jews in Newport Rhode Island. The letter conveys a deep gratitude for the opportunity to live in a free nation. But, the subtext is equally clear. It’s a question: Do these high values apply to us, your Jewish neighbors? Washington’s response was clear and unequivocal: “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham,” he wrote, “who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

This letter was an indispensable early step in the long and painful process of extending the blessings of liberty to America’s most marginalized and persecuted communities. It would be a grim irony indeed if breaking Washington’s promise to American Jews signaled the beginning of a different kind of American migration, back into the darkness of ancient bigotries.

There is no excuse for hypocrisy. There is no excuse for harassment. It seems clear that M.I.T., Harvard and other campuses have failed to uphold their moral and legal responsibilities. Now it falls upon the engine of American justice to impose its consequences and to prove — to this generation and the ones that follow — that this truly is a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

Donald Trump owns chaos he created and supported during his administration

Trump’s final year in office proves incompetence an echo opinion letter published in Florida's Orlando Sentinel: 

We don’t examine the effectiveness of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln by excluding the Civil War. We don’t look at George W. Bush’s effectiveness by excluding the financial market meltdown in 2008. Why do supporters of Donald Trump disregard his (chaotic!) fourth year in office?

Since George Washington’s time in office, we have judged a president’s effectiveness based on what shape they left the country in upon exiting the Oval office. Bottom line is, virtually no one was better off four years ago than they are today.

Whether you believe that Trump was a victim of circumstances or a poor administrator, he owns everything that occurred under his presidency. The tax cuts for the rich, the riots, the pandemic. He owns it all. That is what you sign up for when you choose to run for this country’s highest office.

In 1993 (after George H.W. Bush), 2009 (after George W. Bush), and in 2021 (after Trump) the elected presidents (Clinton, Obama and Biden) inherited a country in economic shambles and each of these Democratic presidents had to focus their first years of service restoring the economic wellbeing of this country.

Trump inherited a robust economy but couldn’t successfully drive the car for four short years.  #Vote Blue 2024  #VoteBidenHarris2024

Dan McGarvey in Orlando, Florida

Evil white supremacy and the January 6th insurrection

Echo essay published in the History News Network and The Guardian, written by Carol Anderson.

American democracy’s most dangerous adversary is white supremacy. 

The January 6, 2021, horrific insurrectionist attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed.’ Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Throughout American nation’s history, white supremacy has undermined, twisted and attacked the viability of the United States. What makes white supremacy so lethal, however, is not just its presence but also the refusal to hold its adherents fully accountable for the damage they have done and continue to do to the nation. 

The insurrection on 6th January and the weak response are only the latest example.

During the war for independence, after the British captured Savannah, the king’s forces set out to capture a wholly unprepared South Carolina. John Laurens, an aide-de-camp of George Washington, pleaded with the South Carolina government to arm the enslaved because the state didn’t have enough available white men to fight the 8,000-strong British force barreling toward Charleston. This was a crisis born of South Carolina’s decision to divert most of the state’s white men from the Continental Army to fight the Redcoats and, instead, enlist them in the militia to control the enslaved population, whom they defined as the primary threat.

The response to Laurens’ plan was, therefore, “horror” and “alarm”. Umbrage even. The state’s political leaders were so appalled that they questioned whether “this union was worth fighting for at all”. The United States of America was not nearly as important as maintaining slavery. They, therefore, toyed with the idea of surrendering to the British, making a separate peace. For that flat-out refusal to fight with every resource at its command, and clear willingness to sacrifice the United States simply to maintain slavery, South Carolina suffered no consequences. It wasn’t ostracized. It wasn’t penalized. Instead, the state’s leaders were fully embraced as Founding Fathers and welcomed into the new nation’s halls of power.

Several years later, at the 1787, constitutional convention, the south once again put white supremacy above the viability of the United States. In tough negotiations, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia’s representatives were willing to hold the nation hostage and risk its destruction unless protection of slavery and the empowering of enslavers was embedded in the constitution. The negotiators acknowledged exactly what was going on and even, sometimes, how reprehensible it was. When, for example, the delegates bowed down to the south’s demands for 20 additional years of the Atlantic slave trade, James Madison admitted that without that concession, “the southern states would not have entered into the union of America”. And, therefore, as “great as the evil is” he added “the dismemberment of the Union would be worse”.

The same refrain played after the infamous three-fifths clause passed under the southern threat to walk away and, thus, scuttle the constitution and the United States. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King called the nefarious formula to determine representation in Congress one of the constitution’s “greatest blemishes” while lamenting that it “was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution”.

Holding those accountable who lied for The Former Guy on January 6, 2021. They are guilty for protecting the liar-in-chief.

The enslavers’ extortionist threats – white supremacy as the price for the nation to come into being – should have created a massive backlash. But it didn’t. There was no retribution, only compliance and acquiescence. The demonstrated lack of accountability for threatening the viability of the United States served only to embolden the slaveholders, who bullied, harangued and pummeled other congressional leaders, including the brutal 1856 beating of Senator Charles Sumner by southerner Preston Brooks on the Senate floor, to get their way.

When the bullying and beatings no longer worked, and the nation dared elect a president opposed to slavery spreading any further, the slaveholders launched a military attack against the United States. They wanted, according to Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederate States of America, the “disintegration” of the Union. He said that the United States had to be destroyed because, unlike the US, the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition”.

To wage its war for white supremacy, the Confederates killed and wounded more than 646,000 American soldiers. In addition to the loss of life, fending off the CSA’s devastating military assault cost the United States billions of dollars. The CSA also tried to badger and entice the British and French to ally with the Confederacy and attack the United States.

For doing so much to destroy this nation, after the Confederate's defeat, the consequences were disproportionately minimal. President Andrew Johnson granted many of the Confederacy’s leaders amnesty and allowed them to resume positions of power in the government. The entrée into American society for the traitors was also paved by the way the US supreme court dismantled many of the protections put in place by Congress for post-civil war Black citizenship – the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as laws banning racial segregation and white domestic terrorism – and allowed the bureaucratic and lynching violence of Jim Crow to eviscerate the “self-evident” principles of equality. And to ensure that a narrative of white supremacy’s innocence permeated the nation’s textbooks, the Confederacy’s treachery became the “war of Northern aggression” and the south’s “Lost Cause” became nothing less than noble. The forgiveness tour continued as the states, not just in the south, allowed the erection of statues in the public square honoring those who committed treason.

The 6th January invasion of the US Capitol, provoked by the lie that cities with sizable minority populations, such as Atlanta, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, “stole” the 2020, election is, at its core, white supremacists’ anger that African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans not only voted but did so decisively against Donald Trump. The invaders constructed gallows, stormed the US Capitol, wanted to hang Vice-President Mike Pence, who would not hand the election to Trump, and hunted for the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They beat police officers, yelled “nigger” at others, carried the Confederate flag through the halls of the building and decided that those defending the Capitol were the actual “traitors” who needed to be killed.

This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to walk away virtually unscathed. US senators and representatives who were at the rally inciting the invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office. And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged with misdemeanors, being allowed to go on vacations out of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light sentences.

It also took months to establish a congressional committee to investigate 6th January, but it’s already clear that its subpoenas, as Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Clark so brazenly demonstrated, can be violated and mocked at will with no consequences. And, like the Lost Cause, its adherents have tried to rewrite this assault on America as “a normal tourist visit” or simply “law-abiding, patriotic, mom and pop, young adults pushing baby carriages”.

In other words, America has a really bad habit of letting white supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy. It’s time to break that habit. If we don’t, they just might succeed next time.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. 

Republican vaccine myths obviously choose to accept death rather than science

Pandemic hysteria! Ani-vax paranoia!

Echo opinion by Jonah Goldberg, published in The Baltimore Sun.

#SIASD

On a recent flight from Texas to North Carolina, a woman came so unglued that she tried to open the airplane’s door. 

Unbelievable! The flight crew had to bind and gag her with duct tape. This was an extreme example of a disturbing trend in air travel: People are becoming unruly or even hysterical.

I think this phenomenon is attributable to the mental health toll of the pandemic. And it’s not just affecting air travel. 

In fact, it’s contributing to spikes in road rage, crime and crazy politics. Which brings me to the reaction to President Biden’s comments last week. He explained that we’ve moved out of the wholesale approach to vaccination — mass vaccination centers — and must try retail.

“Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors — to get help to the remaining people,” Mr. Biden said.

This triggered a geyser of paranoia and asininity (aka, meaning "assholeitis"!) from much of the right. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said this amounted to “illegal” intrusions into American privacy. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) called it a “gross abuse of power,” adding: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, ‘The federal government shall go door to door pushing Americans into vaccine trials.”

Even after the White House explained that federal workers would not be enlisted for this effort, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) warned that this could lay the groundwork to “go door to door and take your guns. They could go door-to-door and take your Bibles.” 

Now that would be unconstitutional. Another horrid example of Stupid Is As Stupid Does, or #SIASD!)

"Two things are infinite in the universe and human stupidity- and I'm not sure about the universe," Einstein.

But, going to extraordinary lengths to fight a pandemic isn’t. 

In 1796, Congress passed “An Act Relative to Quarantine,” authorizing the president “to direct the revenue-officers and the officers commanding forts ... to aid in the execution of quarantine and in the execution of the health laws of the states.”

The president was George Washington, a man with some passing knowledge of the Constitution.

But you don’t have to go back centuries to understand that federal action is neither illegal nor unconstitutional. Helping localities promote vaccination was part of the March COVID relief package, and such efforts have been underway since April.

Besides, what’s wrong with going door to door to inform people where, how and why they should get vaccinated?

People go door to door all the time. The Census Bureau does it (and that is in the Constitution). Political campaigns do it, as do churches, charities and activist groups. Supporting local efforts to promote vaccination is a perfectly reasonable response to an ongoing pandemic (with new strains popping up) that has cost America more than 600,000 lives and trillions of dollars.

You can just say, “Not interested.”

I’m not arguing for the feds to knock on doors to promote getting vaccinated — especially now that the right has primed people to be outraged by it. But the hysteria is embarrassing.

It’s also bewildering. When Former Guy (aka #tfg) Trump was president, Operation Warp Speed was an own-the-libs triumph. 

On Nov. 20, Laura Ingraham of Fox News said: “The stunning success of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed caught team apocalypse totally off guard. Don’t you love it?”

Now, Ingraham and many other right-wing media figures are engaged in fearmongering over the alleged dangers of a vaccine we wouldn’t have were it not for #tfg Trump.

At last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (C-PAC junk pack!) in Dallas, professional gadfly Alex Berenson said the Biden administration was “hoping they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated, and it isn’t happening” — and the crowd cheered. (OMG! Kill off their own kind?)

At a time when COVID-19 is spiking among the unvaccinated and 99.5 percent of COVID deaths are among this group, this is depraved. It’s certainly not pro-life.

But as bad as all this is, it would be a mistake to think this is purely a right-wing problem. When #tfg Trump was in office, anti-vax sentiment was high among Democrats, including then-Sen. Kamala Harris and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. 

Mr. Biden himself raised doubts about a Trump vaccine in a debate. Mr. Trump shot back: “You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?”

After President Biden won, vaccine paranoia became largely a right-wing phenomenon (which Mr. Trump, who is vaccinated, refuses to push back on). Of course, there’s plenty of other paranoia and hysteria on the left these days, including about the alleged resurgence of Jim Crow. But at least that paranoia isn’t getting people killed.

For the anti-vaccine right, it’s as if President Biden were the pilot of a plane and they would rather open the door and bail midflight if the alternative is being a “sucker” by landing safely.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.