Donald Trump and maga Republicans must support equal justice under the law for legal an innocent immigrants

Boston Globe Editorial Board echo:

Massachusetts can’t stop (evil❗) ICE. But it can help its vulnerable immigrant population. The horror of Minneapolis can happen here.

Some 1.2 million immigrants call Massachusetts their home. They are, as Governor Maura Healey put it, “workers, parents, caregivers, business owners, and essential contributors to the Commonwealth’s economy and civic life.” And, sadly, they are, at this moment, extremely vulnerable.

The nation has watched day after day the countless affronts to human dignity in Minneapolis as a Trump administration-ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement “surge” separates families and devastates a community. And, yes, it can happen here.

The unfortunate reality is that immigration enforcement is the federal government’s prerogative. There’s not much that the state can do about it if the federal government seeks to deport Massachusetts residents who are in the country illegally or revoke the legal status of those who are here legally.

But, given the terrible impact such indiscriminate actions would have on Massachusetts communities and on the economy, Healey and lawmakers are right to look for ways to at least reduce the harm (evil❗) ICE could do in the Commonwealth.

ICE is Ku Klux Klan with different color face masks.

And, so Healey issued a raft of measures last week, including new proposed legislation designed to codify immigrant protections. 

Some Democrats wish she’d gone further. But she is attempting to walk a fine line, protecting immigrants without overstepping the state’s authority and without taking actions that could boomerang on state residents.

Take the controversial agreements that some public agencies strike with ICE called 287(g) agreements. Some immigration advocates want to ban them altogether.

Healey doesn’t go quite that far — but for good reasons. Under her executive order, no executive branch office or agency may enter into a new 287(g) agreement to partner with ICE unless approved in writing by the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, which must certify it is based on “a specific, articulable public safety risk or need.”

Currently, only the state Department of Correction has such an agreement. But that agreement serves a legitimate public safety purpose, allowing the state to turn over convicted criminals to ICE for deportation.

The Plymouth County House of Correction, which does house criminally charged detainees, currently operates under a separate, narrower agreement that would not be impacted by Healey’s order. The latter agreement is actually supported by many members of the immigrant community as a way to keep detained family members nearby.

Healey’s proposals would also bolster the protections for immigrants at state courthouses and in certain other spaces.

Under the so-called Lunn decision, handed down by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2017, Massachusetts court officers have no power to hold a prisoner on a civil immigration detainer — unless a warrant has been issued for their arrest.

But, ICE agents often hang around at courthouses — which impedes the justice system by scaring away immigrants who are witnesses or participants in cases.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said in a statement that he has had “productive conversations” with caucus members, adding, “At the same time, we understand the deep nuance on this issue and the limitations of what the Commonwealth can do on immigration policy.”

The Legislature’s goal should be to lay out a clear policy that would withstand judicial scrutiny. The state may not be able to stop ICE, but it can guide state actors and state facilities in order to protect those who are indeed a critical part of our community.

In doing so the state would be standing up for Massachusetts values and the protections long offered by our own constitution, which guarantees “equality under the law” to all regardless of national origin. There is nothing ambiguous about that.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.

“Access to justice cannot coexist with a threat of civil arrest looming over those who enter a courthouse to assert their right to defend themselves or to fulfill their civic obligations,” Essex County District Attorney Paul Tucker said, appearing with Healey last week.

Tucker said recent ICE activity has deterred people from vulnerable populations from appearing as witnesses or as victims of crimes in the state’s courts. Healey’s bill, he said, “will help to relieve that fear and enhance public safety.”

The bill would also add the nonpublic areas of schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and child-care programs to the list of protected spaces that ICE is prohibited from accessing without a warrant.

And the bill would allow parents to prearrange guardianship in the event of detention or deportation.

“I’m really sorry to even have to utter those words,” Healey said, “but at the end of the day, we’ve seen here in Massachusetts and around this country, little kids taken away from their parents, left alone or in the care of maybe a neighbor, maybe the state. It’s wrong.”

The protections offered in Healey’s bill are attached to a supplementary budget, which provides both a certain urgency to its passage and requires — because it is a money bill — that it is first passed by the House, which is scheduled to caucus twice this week to consider Healey’s version and a bill, the PROTECT Act, offered by the Legislature’s Black and Latino caucus.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must put an end to hate speech. Tragically Donald Trump has normalized the ugliness of "hate"!

Echo opinion by Armstrong Williams, published in The Baltimore Sun with a follow up reader's letter*

Hate is ugly- full stop❗❗

Like sex, hate sells. Possibly even more so. 

Unfortunately, the modern economy of outrage rewards those who can turn resentment into revenue. To denounce another as the worst possible type of person is to buy a ticket to fame. It pays dividends, gets clicks, builds audiences and keeps people listening. In the digital marketplace of ideas, indignation is the only currency that never devalues.

Truth, however, is bankrupt. We have grown so addicted to emotional certainty that facts are now treated as inconveniences. Few care to examine whether their assumptions are wrong, or whether the person they loathe is not, in fact, a monster. The only “facts” that matter are the ones that affirm what we already believe. Those who control the levers of information — media outlets, social media platforms, activists and politicians — understand this perfectly. They’ve learned that rage keeps people watching, sharing and donating.

It’s a strange moment in our culture. Good news no longer travels. Even when there is progress — record charitable giving, declining global poverty, medical breakthroughs — few seem to care. Hope is quiet; hysteria is loud. What sells isn’t the story of a community rebuilding, but the image of that community burning. We are not drawn to calm, but to chaos. We crave villains because they give shape to our anxieties. We want to see the boogeyman.

But here’s the truth: There are very few boogeymen left. At least not the kind that once haunted America. Rarely do we see organized, racially motivated killings in the United States today, though there has been a distressing rise in antisemitic attacks since the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel. 

But the days of the Ku Klux Klan marching in the open or white supremacist cells bombing federal buildings have long passed. What remains are small, miserable, irrelevant groups — pale imitations of what once terrified the public. Yet they dominate our airwaves.

Why❓ Because fear is profitable. Networks, influencers and political campaigns have discovered that outrage converts into engagement, and engagement converts into money. The algorithm rewards anger, not reason. The more you hate, the more you scroll. The more you share, the more they earn. The villains we see on our screens are not reflections of reality, but of the market.

Meanwhile, the countless good people who make this country function go unnoticed. The teacher who stays late to help a struggling student, the firefighter who risks his life in a burning home, the small business owner who employs people in his community — these are the quiet heroes. But they don’t trend. They don’t drive ratings. And so, we barely see them.

We’ve inverted our moral priorities. The destructive are celebrated; the constructive are ignored. Outrage has become a form of entertainment, and the producers of hate are its most successful showrunners. This is not to deny that real hatred still exists — it does — but to point out that much of what we now consume as “hate” is curated theater, engineered to sustain attention.

The result is a nation that increasingly mistakes anger for virtue. We’ve come to believe that the louder we condemn, the more righteous we are. But moral noise is not moral clarity. It’s a performance. And as long as we reward it, the performance will continue.

If we truly wish to weaken hate, we must stop buying tickets to its show. Stop amplifying 📣 those who profit from division. 

Stop feeding the algorithm of outrage. Start sharing what is good, noble and constructive about this country — because there is much of it left.

The real rebellion in an age of hate is not to hate back. It is to refuse to be manipulated. The media cannot manufacture outrage without our participation. The demagogue cannot rise without our applause. And the hate-peddler cannot sell without our attention.

America’s greatest strength has always been its capacity for renewal — for rediscovering its decency after moments of darkness. Perhaps it’s time to rediscover that again. Not by pretending evil doesn’t exist, but by refusing to make it our entertainment.

Until we do, hate will remain one of the most profitable products in America — and we’ll keep paying for it with our peace of mind.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

*The recent column by Armstrong Williams, “Armstrong Williams: Why has hate become so profitable?” (Oct. 11), was a beautifully written and thoughtful commentary on the profitability of hate. 

His opinion is a welcome acknowledgement and description of a serious issue in today’s civil discourse.

Williams outlined a simple correct strategy for disarming the trend — “not to hate back.”

Perhaps someone should impart it to the person who said “I hate my opponent and don’t want the best for them.” That would be President Donald Trump.

From — Nick James, in Baltimore

Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans continue their cruelty campaign against innocent immigrants: Senator Alex Padilla STRONG!

Senator Alex Padilla endured dehumanizing treatment opinion letter to the Santa Cruz Sentinel in California: 

Dear Senator Alex Padilla,

I would like to extend my gratitude for your speaking up against ICE (Immigration and Customs) deportations at the Department of Homeland Security meeting last month with Kristi Noem. I was utterly appalled by the sight of a U.S. senator being roughed up and handcuffed just because you asked a question.

As a fellow person of color, you must realize the ugly truth of racism that underlies this outrageous action: racism against brown people (the darker the worse generally) within a structure of white supremacist imperialism that plagues our lives.

Brown people from Baja to Gaza are victims of colonialism. Hardworking brown folks, undocumented Latino immigrants who represent the undersalaried essential workers of our food and health systems, must juggle imprisonment in their homes with the need to work (for living expenses) with its attendant risk of being swept up by ICE agents (masked like the evil hooded Ku Klux Klan) to horrible detention centers. They are living in uncertain precarity under conditions of occupation.

Another brown people, oppressed by Israel, which the U.S. seems to consider as a 51st state, are the Palestinians, who have been living under conditions of occupation, dispossession, five wars since 1967, this current one aiming to annihilate or expel them, God knows where.

With the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear sites extending the war into the broader Middle East region, the Palestinians, in their 100-year struggle for freedom and rights to their indigenous land against Israeli occupation, seem to be forgotten. Senator Padilla, with your recent experience of being stripped of human dignity, you might feel a sense of the complete loss of dignity, the invisibility, and powerlessness that Palestinians have endured for a century. 

Obviously America has yet to recover from the Civil War- One historian explains why

 A lot of learning in this history education essay, about Manisha Sisha's research, reports how the failure of the post Civil War Reconstruction is impacting America today:

Book review by Adam Horchshild

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic Reconstruction 1860-1920

This essay is a book review, authored by Adam Hochschild, published in The New York Review of Books. 

A Maine Writer spoiler: I would not want Mr. Hochschild to be my history teacher. He gives a lukewarm review to Ms. Sisha's research, but I learned a lot by reading his review. 

My take away question raised by Mr. Hochschild's essay is this, "Would Donald Trump have found a right wing proxy Ku Klux Klan MAGA cult if America had succeeded to achieve the intended goals of the post Civil War Reconstruction❓

Thank you Manisha Sisha for writing about the Reconstruction era in American history. Her research may not be expressed the way Mr. Hochild would have written about the subject, but he does justice to describing Ms. Sisha's insightful perspective about how America has not recovered from the Civil War. (My humble opinion).

This short overview was published in an on-line book site: "We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed--and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality."

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).

One Brief Shining Moment essay by Adam Hochschild: Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a (sadly) different America.

In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a few of whom had to be taken away in horse-drawn ambulances when felled by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked, frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago.

A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part (or said they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten…. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic.

Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her provocative The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, but it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the rights of Black Americans. In President Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.”

Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies.

Reconstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white men,” he wrote, “and…as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”), who was in office after President Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining historical moment” that held open a door to a different America. Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but Congress usually overrode him.

The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans” that did everything from helping them settle on public land to protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the newly freed in their homes.

All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a number of what today we call HBCUs—historically Black colleges and universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first commissioner.

Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in 1866 warned “lovers of…constitutional liberty” of the dangers of a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was “by coercion” robbed of land.

Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans: protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and more.

The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war (almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama established an agricultural college and property rights for married women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could collect pay from their former owners for the period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation—surely America’s first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not say if anyone was actually able to collect.

Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first time in the South, with South Carolina…and Texas making attendance mandatory…. They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the crops they produced.

Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state legislatures.

All these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in 1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White of Louisiana, was chief justice of the Supreme Court. The early moment of promise had existed only while the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder, mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and highly segregated for nearly a century to come.

It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. 

Again, Sinha’s wide perspective covers more than race:

Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common grazing lands…. They also rescinded lien laws that protected sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia…even authorized whipping for petty theft.

Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes,




helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements.

The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again, declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the British were so successful in their colonial wars.

Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and Indian must jointly occupy the country.”
William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home.

The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns. One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We got the Yankees on the run!”

On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now “being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and working hours but demanded that government soldiers suppress unions. And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain will never be known.

It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained away…there are many more ifs.

Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the West after the war…was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun, telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the Dominican Republic.

If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income, wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government as well.

I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the “contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South, while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded “uniform national system of primary and secondary education.” Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley.

Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never gives us full, flesh-and-blood portraits of any of the major figures, especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America that might have been.

Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes. The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913, fell short of the one that at least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very satisfied.

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. (May 2025)

Another horrific example about how damaging Donald Trump is to our national heritage! He is desecrating the Iwo Jima Memorial!

Donald rump will silence opposition to his crusade against diversity. It's sickening and outrageous❗ Echo opinion published in NewJersey.com by
Rob Miraldi

The evil Donald Trump administration supported by Republican cult removed Ira Hayes' Native American heritage from the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo website.

The Department of Defense cited "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs" as eroding camaraderie and threatening mission execution.

Books on sensitive topics like the Holocaust and racism were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library.

Vice President J.D. Vance is tasked with removing exhibits from the Smithsonian that promote ideologies inconsistent with federal policy.
The author argues these actions are a violation of the First Amendment and exemplify authoritarianism.

Ira Hamilton Hayes, born in 1923, was a Pima Indian, raised on the Gala Reservation in Arizona. The 15,000 Pima who lived there were known to be peaceful and educated when many of the Native Americans out West were not. But the Pima were treated poorly, their land relentlessly used up by the settlers. Hayes was quiet — very quiet — but also very intense. His nickname was “Chief Falling Cloud,” his favorite game was solitaire and he was an avid reader. If he was a loner, it should not be surprising. Pimas were not allowed to vote or be citizens.

Hayes lived in a one-room adobe hut with his parents and five siblings. His mother, Nancy, was a devout Presbyterian; the Bible and the American flag prominent in their home. While attending the Phoenix Indian School, each day would begin with news about World War II. The students would then rise and sing the Marine, Navy and Army anthems.

Hamilton Hayes (born January 12, 1923 – died January 24, 1955) was an Akimel O'odham American and a United States Marine during World War II.

Nine days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hayes enlisted in the Marines. As a corporal in a parachute battalion, he fought with 60,000 marines in the great battle at Iwo Jima in the Pacific.

On Feb. 23, 1945, when the Americans took the island, Hayes was one of the six Marines who helped raise the American flag over Mount Suribachi as photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the image that has become one of the most iconic World War II photos.

After the war, Hayes suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He died in 1955, aged 32, of alcoholism and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. If Hayes, a hero, had any peace in the afterlife, it was disrupted last month.

On March 17, unceremoniously — as if Ira Hayes had not sacrificed for his country, fought for the freedom to believe what he wanted and be, proudly, who he was — the Trump administration ordered that any reference to his Native American heritage be stripped from the famous federal Iwo Jima photo website.

Declared the Department of Defense, “Efforts to put one group ahead of another through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.”

Ira Hayes is not alone in the era of Trumpism

Thus, the government reasoned, a “digital content refresh” demanded officials take “all practicable steps” to remove “improper ideology.”

Presumably the same henious ideology that led the Defense Department to take down baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military record. Of course, on second thought the DOD said that was a mistake, not because of a change of heart but because the ensuing outrage forced its hand.

Meanwhile, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, a presidential directive ordered the removal from its library of 391 “improper” books — on the Holocaust, civil rights and racism, the Ku Klux Klan, feminism and a wide array on gender. Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” was purged. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” remains on the shelf.

Not clear is where the volumes were taken, but thus far we have no signs of a book burning. They may just be waiting because Vice President JD Vance has been put in charge of cleaning up the venerable Smithsonian Institution. Its 157 million items at 21 museums and 21 libraries will offer him lots of possibilities.

Will Lincoln’s top hat and Harriet Tubman’s shawl go? Will he take a wrecking ball to the Museum of African Art, the National American Indian Museum, the African American History Center and the American Women's History Museum?

Vance will have a ball at those since his mission is to slash funding for exhibits that promote “ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy,” including those that recognize trans people, “degrade shared American values,” or “divide Americans based on race.”

A consistent, stark disregard for the First Amendment

I wish I could assure you that purging of websites are isolated incidents, but we are only four months into this administration. And we are seeing a consistent and stark violation of both the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

I thought Orwell’s “1984” was fiction. Then I read the list of words that are no longer allowed to be used on federal websites. It could be comical, if not so ominous — typical of authoritarians who try to control everyone’s thoughts.

Banned words and phrases include “biased,” “Black,” “climate crisis,” “equal opportunity,” “female,” “Gulf of Mexico,” “immigrants,” “inequality,” “LGBTQ,” “marginalized,” “Native American,” “pollution,” “abortion,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “social justice,” “transgender,” “traumatic,” “unconscious bias” and “women,” among hundreds of others.

The mushrooming fear is not that the party in power today will wreck the education department or bulldoze its way to deporting immigrants or covet Greenland. We can like or dislike those policies.

The fear is the route to getting their way — silencing anyone who opposes. They will purge ideas they dislike and so chill the speech of opponents that hope for reasonable dialogue in the public space will disappear. That is what authoritarians do.

Using public relations tools to win a debate is one thing. Being better at making your arguments is the way the game has always been played. The battle for public opinion is a nasty and cunning battle built into democratic life that takes place in the open.

But, censoring the views of those you disagree with, that is exactly what the First Amendment was meant to prevent, from both sides of the aisle. It is when those who have power to silence, muffle or intimidate opponents that we cross over into fascism.

And it is arguably unconstitutional❗ The Supreme Court ruled numerous times that government is supposed to be “content neutral” when it comes to speech. In another words, it can disagree with someone’s speech but not silence them because it doesn’t like the content.

What if the speaker is the government itself

What if the speaker is the government itself❓ Can it purge ideologies and ideas it does not like? Only if the ban furthers an important or substantial government interest. Claiming to seek to silence “ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy” is just bogus.

The Constitution guarantees equality. All I see in the government purge is racism, homophobia and intolerance, hardly bona fide government goals.

As for Ira Hayes, should a government website celebrate a man who left the seclusion of a reservation to risk his life and fight a war against the fascists? Does lauding his courage really threaten “mission execution”? Not if the mission is to enhance the equality the Constitution guarantees or to celebrate the freedom to embrace whatever ideology a citizen wants. Or to actually embrace America’s diversity.

The Constitution guarantees equality. All I see in the government purge is racism, homophobia and intolerance, hardly bona fide government goals.

As for Ira Hayes, should a government website celebrate a man who left the seclusion of a reservation to risk his life and fight a war against the fascists? Does lauding his courage really threaten “mission execution”? Not if the mission is to enhance the equality the Constitution guarantees or to celebrate the freedom to embrace whatever ideology a citizen wants. Or to actually embrace America’s diversity.

Oops, sorry Donald Trump, I am not supposed to use the word  “diversity.” I won’t say it, I will just applaud it. 

And thank Ira Hayes, Jackie Robinson and Maya Angelou. And remind them: This president does not speak for America.

Rob Miraldi’s First Amendment writing has won numerous awards. He taught journalism at the State University of New York for many years. Email: rob.miraldi@gmail.com  

Recognized how Arlington National Veterans Cemetery became hallowed ground: Donald Trump History lesson 101

Opinion | Trump’s Arlington stunt was even more offensive than we first thought published in MSNBC and Yahoo.com by 
James Downie

I visited Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 23, 2022, for the interment of my grandfather. Eighty years earlier, he’d gotten his first taste of combat as a line officer at the Battle of Midway. 

We were there to bury him in Section 31, alongside my grandmother. The sun was shining, and a bagpiper played “Going Home.” There were no thumbs up from anyone.

When I read the accounts of Donald Trump’s outrageous photo-op at Arlington, and his campaign staff’s altercation with a cemetery employee, I thought of my grandparents and the anger they’d have for a political candidate trampling on their graves for a campaign ad. I also thought of the cemetery employee, who according to The New York Times declined to press charges out of fear of “retaliation from Trump supporters.” (Politico likewise reported that the decision was “due to concern over retaliation.”) That employee’s fear is even more chilling if you consider Arlington’s history.

What would become a national shrine to our country’s military heroes began as the estate of George Washington Parkes Custi, the adopted son of the nation’s first president. 

When he died in 1857, the property passed to his daughter Mary, whose husband was a U.S. Army officer named Robert E. Lee. Four years later, in the early weeks of the Civil War, the Union Army seized the Arlington estate for use as an artillery outpost. By then, Lee was already a Confederate general, stationed well south of Washington, and his wife ordered the people enslaved on the property to pack up the family’s silver and papers before she abandoned the property ahead of Union troops.

By 1864, according to Smithsonian magazine’s Robert M. Poole, Washington’s cemeteries were running out of room for the war dead. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs — who had served under Lee before the war but now believed he should be “executed if caught” — suggested Arlington. He oversaw the burial of thousands of soldiers at the estate and continued doing so after the guns fell silent. He did so not just to ease the burden on other cemeteries, but also to make Arlington uninhabitable for the rebels’ most prominent general at war’s end.

Yet, even as Meigs did his part to make sure the Confederacy never rose again, the freedoms and rights Arlington’s dead had fought for were being undermined. 

Key to this effort was the use of intimidation. Within a year of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, a group of Tennesseeans founded the Ku Klux Klan. They and other armed whites embarked on a reign of terror throughout the South against Black people and their white allies. “We are intimidated by the whites,” Black residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi, told the state’s governor in 1875, “We will not vote at all, unless there are troops to protect us.”

The troops did not come. After the disputed 1876, presidential election and the subsequent Compromise of 1877, federal troops withdrew from the South entirely. Reconstruction was over, replaced by Jim Crow segregation. Intimidation and retaliation were this toxic stew’s most important ingredients.

Which brings me back to Trump’s visit to Arlington and the subsequent fallout. The Army told NBC News on Thursday that a Trump aide “abruptly pushed aside” a cemetery employee who was trying to enforce the cemetery’s restrictions on photos and videos. But the employee refused to press charges. 

Military officials told The New York Times, “she feared Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation.” If this isn’t intimidation, what is?

The employee wasn’t acting arbitrarily: As the cemetery noted in a statement, “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending.” And Trump’s campaign dispelled any doubts about the purpose of the visit when its TikTok account used footage from Arlington in a post.

The woman’s fear is entirely reasonable, and not just because an aide to a former president felt emboldened to push her in the first place. Even without her identity being public, Trump campaign's press secretary Steven Cheung accused her of “suffering from a mental health episode.” Trump senior adviser (evil 👿😡) Chris LaCivita, best known for leading the smear of 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry’s military service, called her a “despicable individual.” 

And at a subsequent rally, Trump irreverently linked the cemetery staff ❗with the prosecutors of the multiple indictments against him — that is, he linked her to people he says have it out for him.

More broadly, intimidation has been an essential feature of Trump’s campaigns. In his first run, he excused and even applauded when his supporters roughed up protesters. His second run culminated in his incitement of the January 6 insurrection. 

And in his third run, with staffers like LaCivita and Cheung in key positions, he has done nothing but double down. Now he and his (cult 💢) campaign are bullying a woman who merely followed the law protecting the country’s war dead from being exploited as campaign props. It’s a campaign of thugs, led by a thug.

The events at Arlington and the way Trump maligned the character of the woman doing her job epitomize one of the key stakes of this election: whether a man who embraces intimidation over law returns to power. Recent decades have seen America tilt away from the idea that “might makes right.” But that principle reigned during much of our country’s history, and defeating Trump is a way to help keep this dangerous ⚠️idea from roaring back❗

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

Calling on American youth to improve our national human condition

Keep marching, children- So, here it is, in 2023, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, Texas, walked out of schools protesting gun violence, and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little- and outright refuse- to stop it.

In the Virginia State Capitol Building, a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture of Barbara Johns. In 1951, she and other students led a strike to protest the conditions at their racially segregated school.

Echo history opinion by Cary Clack published in the San Antonio Express-News:  

But let's begin in 1951:  

It’s 1951 and R.R. Moton High School is a dump.

Pre-Brown v. Board of Education, the Black high school in Farmville, Virginia., is evidence that separate isn’t equal. 

All while the white high school across town, Farmville High, has all the resources needed for the education and comfort of its students, but on rainy days at Moton, students used umbrellas to keep dry in classrooms because of the porous roofs.

On April 23, 1951, the principal of Moton High receives a phone call that two of his students are going to be arrested at the bus station, so he leaves to go help them.

It’s a trick, and in his absence a note written in his name is sent to each of the classrooms calling for everyone to gather for a general assembly. Not knowing their reason for gathering, the 450 students and 25 teachers wait for their principal to explain.

But when the curtain opens, standing on stage isn’t the principal but Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, who had manipulated the principal’s absence so she could call on the student body to protest the second-class conditions of their school. 

Barbara Johns (1935-1991)

She asks, then demands, the teachers to leave the auditorium. Those who don’t are politely escorted out by students.

Moton High lacks, among other things, a cafeteria, lockers, a science lab, a gym, and an infirmary. Johns tells her fellow students that since their parents and other Black adults haven’t been listened to by the white establishment, it’s time for the Black students to act.

She called for a strike and leads all the students on a march out of school to the county courthouse and into the offices of the school superintendent. All day, the students demanded better schools.

When their demands are rebuffed, Johns reaches out to NAACP lawyers. In a mass rally, the lawyers warn Farmville’s Black community of the dangers involved with filing a lawsuit, but the students respond that there aren’t enough jails to hold them.

Over the next few months, Johns is harassed. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in her family’s front yard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Johns’ parents send her to Montgomery, Alabama., to live with her uncle, Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Now it’s 1963, and the man who succeeded Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., is leading a civil rights campaign in Birmingham to desegregate public facilities. King spends Easter weekend in jail. After his release, protests continue but the campaign isn’t capturing the nation’s attention.

That changed on May 2, when Black youth, more than 1,000 and some as young as 6, poured out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing freedom songs. Police used paddy wagons, squad cars and buses to ferry the children to jail. The next day, when another thousand-plus students rolled out of church and down the street, Bull Connor ordered high pressure water hoses, dogs and batons be turned on them.

Birmingham now has the attention of the world.

It’s 2023, and last Wednesday, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, walked out of school protesting gun violence and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little to stop it.

One of the Uvalde students was Jazmin Cazares, a senior at Uvalde High School. Her 9-year-old sister, Jacklyn, was one of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary. 

Jazmin was part of what she described on Twitter as a 77-minute sit-in, explaining, “That’s how long it took for police to enter rooms 111 and 112 at Robb Elementary.”

Students have been marching with urgency since the 2018, school shooting in Parkland, Florida., stole 17 lives. The name of the student-led movement arising from that massacre, “March for Our Lives” is an indictment of a nation whose leaders leave children with no option but to march for their lives.

Their marching and activism make many uncomfortable because marching and activism always makes people uncomfortable. Nonviolent protest is supposed to make people uncomfortable.

While imprisoned in Birmingham, Easter weekend, 60 years ago, Dr. King began composing his classic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to clergy critical of him and the protests.

“You may well ask,” King wrote, “‘Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And it worked.

Because of Barbara Johns and her schoolmates, their lawsuit was one of the five cases of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate wasn’t equal. 

A statue of Barbara Johns will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

Because of children marching in Birmingham, city leaders and business owners desegregated public facilities.

There is a direct line between Barbara Johns’ generation and Jazmin Cazares’ generation.

So, walk together children. Don’t you get weary.

Maine Writer calls on American youth to rally our recalcitrant policy leaders and champion a movement to improve our national human condition. 

Donald Trump is irresponsible in his Waco display as the Hitler reenactor

Trump is stoking the fires of Waco (Editorial)

Echo opinion published in the Houston (Texas!) Chronicle:

(Just my opinion but the word "waco" and the name of the place in Texas, seems to be synonymous.)

Branch Dividian cult flag in Waco Texas

On a sultry Sunday afternoon in August, 1980, the Republican nominee for president of the United States chose the Neshoba County Fair outside the little town of Philadelphia, Miss., for his first major campaign speech. 

Ronald Reagan — “appearing in an open-necked shirt and red clay-stained shoes,” a local reporter noted — assured a mostly white crowd that day that he was a firm believer in “states’ rights,” an oft-used code in the South in those days for racial segregation and discrimination.

Reagan happened not to mention that seven miles from where he was speaking, three young civil rights workers had been kidnapped and murdered 16 years earlier by a Ku Klux Klan gang that included the county sheriff. Debated to this day is the question of whether the candidate’s paean to states’ rights, combined with his failure to mention the martyred trio, represents an early example of what has come to be called dog-whistle politics — in other words, conveying a subtle message for those with ears to hear, while maintaining plausible deniability.

Waco version of the Ku Klux Klan- terrorist white men without the hoods.

Some historians suggest that a campaign scheduler made a mistake by sending the candidate to Philadelphia, and Reagan was reluctant to disappoint his Mississippi audience by backing out. 

Others maintain that the former two-term governor of California, a first-time presidential nominee but an experienced politician, was pursuing his own “southern strategy” by showing up in a place associated with all-out resistance to civil rights.

When Donald Trump went into Waco (Texas) on Saturday (March 25) evening for the first major campaign event of his 2024, reelection quest, dog ears were not the only ones twitching. Trump doesn’t do subtle; dog-whistle messages are not his style. The more apt metaphor is the blaring air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down Interstate I-10.

The former guy once upon a time president arrived in Waco during the 30th anniversary of the disastrous cult Branch Davidian debacle, a two-month-long siege by the ATF, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies culminating in a fire storm that killed 74 people, including 21 children. What happened at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco on April 19, 1993, was the deadliest day in FBI history. (Additionally, four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians lost their lives on the first day of the 51-day siege.)

The GOP-friendly city of Waco — Trump won McLennan County by more than 20 percentage points in 2020 – has every right, of course, to host a former president, the leading contender for the 2024, Republican presidential nomination, but “Waco,” the symbol, like “Philadelphia, Miss.,” the symbol, means something else entirely. “Waco” has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists.

What happened near Waco helped spawn what Fort Worth writer Jeff Guinn calls a “legacy of rage” in his new book about the Branch Davidian siege. The Northeast Texas Regional Militia of Texarkana erected a granite headstone at the site that reads as follows: "On February 28, 1993, a church and its members known as Branch Davidians came under attack by A.T.F. and F.B.I. agents. For 51 days the Davidians and their leader, David Koresh, stood as a cult, proudly." As Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh put it, “Waco started this war.”

The former guy Trump led a song of sedition in Waco Texas on March 27, 2023. A despicable display to instigate anti-democracy.

Trump is an Adolf Hitler reenactor.

Thirty years later, the anti-government paramilitary groups feeding off lies about the “deep state” and a stolen election periodically visit the modest, little chapel on the site of the sprawling, ramshackle building that burned to the ground. Although the Branch Davidians had nothing to do with anti-government conspiracists, chapel construction was funded by loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

Militia members and conspiracists know exactly what Trump’s Waco visit symbolizes. They have heard him castigate the FBI and the “deep state,” particularly after agents searched for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. How they’ll respond to his remarks, particularly if he shows up as the first former president in American history to face criminal charges, has law enforcement in Waco and beyond taking every precaution. What he says will likely set the tone for the presidential campaign to come. Every American should be concerned.

The Trump campaign insists that the candidate’s visit during the Branch Davidian anniversary is purely coincidental. A spokesman said the campaign was looking for a site away from the big cities but close enough to Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Houston and San Antonio to draw a crowd. The Waco Regional Airport and an expected crowd of 10,000 or so fit the bill. Of course, Temple or Belton or Killeen (home to Fort Hood) would have fit the bill, as well — without the weight of symbolism.

Trump alerted his followers that the feds were coming to get him with an all-caps alert last Saturday morning on Truth Social, his social-media site: “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

His call to arms echoed his “Be there, will be wild,” exhortation a few weeks before January 6, as well as his “fight like hell” screed on the Ellipse, shortly before several thousand insurrectionists took him at his word, marched up Pennsylvania Ave. and sacked the Capitol.

The Proud Boys and other anti-government extremists with a propensity for violence took him seriously on that ignominious day. They might do the same in Waco.

Although Trump's predicted arrest did not take place, he appears to be close to facing criminal charges in Manhattan, where District Attorney Alvin Bragg may bring charges involving an allegation that the former president attempted to hide a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter. The $130,000 payment would be in violation of federal election laws. Trump denies the encounter.

Whatever Bragg decides about bringing charges will be controversial. Legal experts and political observers with no ties or allegiance to Trump have questioned whether the Daniels imbroglio, one of multiple investigations involving the former president, is worthy of indictment.

“The problems are manifold,” Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post wrote in a recent column. “New York state law makes it a crime to falsify business records — for example, listing hush-money payments as a retainer — but that is only a misdemeanor. It could rise to the level of a felony charge if prosecutors could show that Trump ordered falsification of records to conceal another crime. But would ‘another crime’ need to be a federal offense, or would a state offense be sufficient?”

While the merits of the Daniels case are debatable, there should be no controversy about castigating an American presidential candidate encouraging extremists among us. In a deeply divided nation, a nation under stress, incitement should be cause for exile from public life.

Go to Waco, we suggest. Go to Waco to take in Baylor football and basketball, and the Armstrong-Browning Library on the Baylor campus. Marvel at a fossil herd of Ice Age mammoths and enjoy a forested municipal park along the banks of the Brazos and Bosque rivers, sample Chip and Joanna Gaines’s ever-expanding Fixer Upper empire. Don’t bother with a bombastic, bullying candidate inclined to incitement and bent on “retribution.” His appearance is ample reason to stay home.