Release Evan Gershkovich from his wrongful Putin prison sentence and send him home

 Wall Street Journal Marks 250 Days of Detention for journalist Evan Gershkovich ’14 By Tom Porter

“It’s time to bring Evan home,” wrote the Wall Street Journal's editor-in-chief, as Gershkovich spent his 250th day in Russian captivity earlier this month. Meanwhile, the reporter’s family says they’re “keeping a seat reserved for Evan” as the holidays approach. On December 20, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the US is looking for the “right way” to work with Moscow for the return of Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, reports The Wall Street Journal. “We are very actively working on it, and we will leave no stone unturned to see if we can’t find the right way to get them home…as soon as possible,” he said.

The editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal issues a personal appeal for the release of Evan Gershkovich as the jailed reporter spends his 250th day behind bars in Russia, facing unsubstantiated espionage charges.

“Monday, December. 4, will mark 250 days since our reporter, Evan Gershkovich, was arrested and wrongfully detained by Russian authorities while doing his job and falsely charged with espionage,” writes Emma Tucker in an open letter to WSJ readers.

“That is 250 days since President Vladimir Putin’s clampdown on independent media extended to the foreign press, much of which understandably left Russia in the wake of Evan’s detention,” she continues. Read more.

As part of the newspaper’s extensive focus today on Gershkovich’s plight, the Bowdoin College graduate’s family also published an open letter in the WSJ.

“Eight months ago, we couldn’t believe we would be spending the holidays without Evan,” writes the Gershkovich family. “Today, he remains imprisoned under a false charge of espionage, enduring 250 days of isolation from loved ones and the world. Countless milestones, including his 32nd birthday, weddings, holidays and other priceless moments, have passed with Evan confined in a small cell. Yet, his resilience and unwavering strength never cease to amaze us. Witnessing him hold his head high fills us with immense pride.”

Throughout the holiday season, they say they will keep a seat reserved for Evan at the table—"a symbolic reminder of his absence but also of the widespread support enveloping us from around the globe.”

Gershkovich’s friends have also been speaking out. “I feel like I’ve lived half a life since he was detained,” Polina Ivanova, a Russia correspondent for The Financial Times, told the WSJ. Gershkovich’s Bowdoin classmate Simon Brooks ’14 was also among those quoted by the newspaper. “Until he’s home, we’re never doing enough,” Brooks said.

To access the latest updates on Evan Gershkovich, and for more resources on how to get involved in the campaign to free him, visit wsj.com/Evan.

Track media coverage of Gershkovich since his arrest in March, 2023.

Predicting inescapable truth at the January 6th insurrection

Published March 30, 2021, by Tom Porter 

January 6, 2021- Trump White Supremacy insurrection and sedition

An echo Conversations on Democracy published in Bowdoin News, Brunswick ME: 

White Power and the Capitol Riots

As a scholar of the American white power movement, Kathleen Belew (Ph.D., Yale University '11), watched the dramatic events of January 6th, 2021, unfold on her television screen with a chilling sense of familiarity. 

Although unprecedented, this attack on the central seat of government reminded her of an ongoing trend in the movement.

“Manifestations of white power tend to come on the heels of a major war,” said Belew, in a lecture she gave to the Bowdoin community on March 24, 2021. 

Kathleen Belew, Ph.D. historian and author

Kathleen Belew is assistant professor of US history at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in the recent history of the US, examining the long aftermath of warfare and the place of violence in American life and culture. Her 2018 book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, finds that “the best predictor for surges in clan and vigilante violence in the US is not poverty, or populism, or immigration or civil rights gains: the best predictor is the aftermath of warfare.”

Belew’s talk and the ensuing discussion, moderated by Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Matthew Klingle, was part of a semester-long series organized in the wake of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol and efforts by former president Trump and his allies to overturn the election. "After the Insurrection: Conversations on Democracy" consists of virtual discussions with leading experts on subjects that relate to the current state of and future prospects for American democracy.

This connection between the aftermath of warfare and right-wing political violence at home is consistent across the broad sweep of American history, said Belew. Why does this happen? Is it due to the number of veterans returning home, brutalized by warfare and trained in violence? This is certainly a factor, said Belew, but there is more to the story.

“The inescapable truth,” she said, “is that all of us become more violent after warfare.” Sociologists, she added, have found this to be a phenomenon that goes across age and across gender and affects veterans and nonveterans alike. “We're currently living through the longest, most protracted aftermath we've ever seen,” argued Belew. “My undergraduates don't remember a time before the global ‘War on Terror’ and yet it is not even in what most people might list as the top five crises facing our country at any given moment.” Warfare and its consequences have simply become a normal part of American life for the current generation.






Different groups unite

Belew divided the people who forced their way into the Capitol on January 6 into three broad groups:

First, there were what she called the “garden variety President Trump faithful… the MAGA ‘stop the steal’ ralliers. A lot of those people,” she said, “were there simply to demonstrate their support for Donald Trump to exercise their right of assembly and free speech and to peaceably demonstrate.”

Second, there were the far-right conspiracy theorists who follow the “QAnon” movement. “These people have been recently radicalized,” said Belew, “most of them being only one or two years into radical activity. QAnon, as a whole, represents a somewhat new phenomenon, in many ways.”

The third strand of this crowd, she said, is one that poses a substantial threat to democratic institutions and to the nation as a whole, and that is the organized white power movement, which comprises several different groups. “We know that many of these groups preplanned their attack. We also know that they made a deliberate plan to work together. There was communication about setting aside group differences and banding together to deliberately attack the workings of democracy.”

Belew stressed that the behavior witnessed on January 6 is not new. “It’s part of a movement that’s been in our public life since the late 1970s. It's a movement that is well organized, includes people in every region of the country, and in all ways but race is quite diverse and opportunistic, willing to incorporate a broad array of people and beliefs, bringing them together through this shared sense of emergency.”

It’s also a movement that has already carried out mass casualty attacks, most notably the 1995 attack on a federal building in Oklahama City, that killed 168 people, including nineteen children. The attack was perpetrated by extremists Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, but Belew said it’s wrong to attribute the atrocity to a few “bad apples” or “lone wolves". Rather, the attack was the culmination of decades of organizing. “The movement that carried it out, the white power movement, brought together a bunch of different currents of activity. It united Klansmen, neo Nazis, radical tax resistors, and later on skinheads and parts of the militia movement.” Worryingly, said Belew, this kind of collaboration within the white power movement could also be seen on January 6.

Student veteran- Bowdoin College news

Published November 10, 2020 by Tom Porter- Bowdoin College News- Echo report:

From Sailor to Student: Navy Vet Enjoys New Chapter at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine
https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2020/11/from-sailor-to-student-navy-vet-enjoys-new-chapter-at-bowdoin.html

When Andrew Hall ’22 was the same age as most of his classmates, he was serving aboard the USS Makin Island, an amphibious assault ship deployed to the Persian Gulf in support of US military operations in the region. Among his jobs was firefighting.

“I was trained to deal with electrical and gas fires,” he recalled, and on occasion was required to put his training into action. (“We put all the fires out in under ten minutes.”) He also worked on the flight deck, directing aircraft and sometimes transporting them to their hangars. “I was a twenty-year old driving a tractor with an aircraft on the back that was worth, like, seventy-five million dollars!”

Hall enlisted in the ranks of the US Navy the summer he left high school, in his hometown of Bakersfield, California. By his own admission, he was not ready for higher education at eighteen. “I needed to find something to do other than college,” he said, and so he ended up spending three and a half years in the navy. Based mostly in San Diego, he said, he was deployed to the Far East and Hawa’ii, as well as the Middle East.

When he left the service at twenty-two, Hall felt ready for college, but he still didn’t know what he wanted to study. He enrolled in his local community college in Bakersfield, where the first course he took was a horticulture class. He ended up getting an associate’s degree and took further courses, including stints at Yale and Stanford. It was at Stanford, where he was taking a writing seminar specifically for veterans in the summer of 2018, that Hall learned about Bowdoin and decided to apply.

From Service to School-  Hall transferred to Bowdoin this semester as a junior with the help of Service to School (S2S), a nonprofit that helps military veterans get a college education through a program called VetLink. 

“Helping Andrew find a home at Bowdoin College is why S2S exists,” said chief operating officer Jim Selbe. “The admissions team at Bowdoin provided tremendous support to Service to School as we worked with Andrew to identify schools that were a great fit with a demonstrated commitment to supporting veterans," he added.

"Veteran voices have been a part of Bowdoin’s history, and it’s important to make sure they are part of the present and future, as well." Dean of Admissions Whitney Soule.

As well as promoting schools like Bowdoin to potential candidates, S2S also reaches out to those schools to highlight significant aspects of the applicant’s military career, such as deployments, awards, special skills, and other achievements.

Bowdoin’s Dean of Admissions Whitney Soule said: “In choosing a new class each year, we select students who demonstrate curiosity and motivation—students who are looking to use their Bowdoin education to leave the world better than they found it. Furthermore,” she continued, “veteran voices have been a part of Bowdoin’s history, and it’s important to make sure they are part of the present and future, as well. The perspective and experiences of our veteran students add an important dimension to conversations both in and out of the classroom, and we’re excited to welcome Andrew as our first matriculated veteran from the Service to School partnership.”

Former E-3/(Airman) Andrew Hall, meanwhile, is enjoying life on campus even though classes are remote at the moment, and he hopes his biology major will lead to a career in the pharmaceutical industry. He also wants to study abroad for a semester. 

“I really like the collaborative atmosphere of studying at Bowdoin,” said Hall. “At my previous college it seemed everyone was competing with each other to get a better grade, whereas at Bowdoin students work with each other.”

Donald Trump - geography confusion: stress symptom or ignorance?

Reported in Le Monde and Newsweek

Regardless of why Donald Trump made this geographical error (and let's not rule out the possibility that, for some reason, it could have even been intentional!).....the facts continue adding up to support what The Resistance has said. That is, since becoming president, Trump is incompetent to lead.

Madness of Donald Trump graphic published in Rolling Stone

Published in Newsweek: Trump confused the Baltics with the Balkans and accused confused leaders of starting the Yugoslav Wars by Tom Porter.

Donald Trump confused the Baltic states in Europe with the Balkans—and chastised leaders of the former for starting wars in the 1990s that lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia, French daily Le Monde reported.

Trump reportedly made the mistake in a White House meeting with Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania, Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia and Raimonds Vējonis of Latvia in April.

The leaders were reportedly confused by the president’s accusation, and it took them a minute to realize he had confused the Balkans and the Baltics.

The Baltic states lie in northern Europe, on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea.

Around 1,000 miles away sits the Balkan region in south-eastern Europe. It comprises states including Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.

Much of the region was incorporated into the state of Yugoslavia, which became a socialist state after German occupying forces were ousted following World War II.

In the 1990s, Yugoslavia disintegrated and the region was torn apart in a series of civil wars, culminating with the Kosovo war of 1998-1999.

Trump’s mistake is perhaps more surprising given that his wife, Melania, was born in Slovenia, a state that was part of Yugoslavia until 1991.


Trump, according to the Le Monde report, remained “apparently uneducated in the matter by his wife, Melania, originally from the former Yugoslavia”.

The report comes with new tensions emerging this weekend between Trump and the U.S.'s traditional European allies. Donald Trump was in Europe during the November 9th weekend for events marking the centenary of the end of the First World War.

On Friday, Trump attacked French President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, after the French leader said that Europe needed to take more responsibility for its own security.

The president faced widespread criticism Saturday for canceling a visit to Belleau, where 2,000 U.S. Marines were killed in combat in 1918, because it was raining.

In a speech in Paris on Sunday, Macron criticized nationalism—with self-declared nationalist Trump sitting only meters away.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” said Macron, at the Armistice Day commemoration under the Arc de Triomphe.

“By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others’, we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values.”

*This article was corrected on Sunday to state that Yugoslavia became a socialist state after World War II.

MaineWriter postscript: It's evident on a daily basis that the White House is dysfunctional and Donald Trump's behavior becomes more dangerously unpredictable by the hour. When will Republicans take control of him?