Lately, the scope of the cruelty and misinformation often becomes overwhelming--I'm a physician so yesterday's CDC claw backs hit me hard. Thank you for this call to courage and resistance. We need leaders and you provide that.
It's a blitzkrieg. Meant to come at you so fast and furious you can't even breathe. That 'lightning war' term got coined by the SS and the German Army for a reason: it perfectly encapsulated the brutality of their assault against Poland, which managed to survive only for about 2 weeks. Psychological warfare at its cruelest, with confusion, chaos and a sense of loss as a result that disarms your enemies faster than physical conflict.
Somehow we must not just summon collective anger, but channel it into the most effective opposition we can think of. Sometimes that will be through mass demonstrations, sometimes winning by-elections, by our donations, often by shaming these miserable Republican collaborators to their faces. We will need to stay unified, undistracted and unwavering. They are counting on us to fail at these tasks. Somehow, we must disappoint them.
If it really is all about money, can we not stop the flow of our personal money? Can we not forsake gratification of discretionary spending for the short term? If we collectively STOP spending except for bare necessities, would it have any effect?
I never heard about the effect of the call to not spend money last year on so-called biggest shopping day, the Friday after Thanksgiving. Did I miss that? One day is not enough of a boycott to be effective, but did it even register?
Oppression leads to revolution only when hope is added. In fact, I believe a central element of the MAGA/Project 2025 strategy is aimed squarely at hope for that reason. So, I am surprised that Democrats and ‘Never Trump’ Republicans aren’t reanimating and updating Obama’s theme for his very successful 2008 Campaign. It seems to me, “Trump is hopeless” will ring true to the vast majority of Americans.
The large and powerful associations and, it grieves me to say, the large and powerful unions have not led the way toward resistance. The AMA did nothing to oppose the overthrow of Roe v Wade. The ABA did not take action to disbar such players as Judge Cannon and AG Barr, one for utter incompetence and the other for corruption. Had they done so, fewer lawyers would have been so eager to line up to kiss drumpf's rear. University ADMINISTRATORS bow to power because their own roles in educational institutions consist of standing in the way, instead of promoting, education, for the bloated salaries that upper administrators are making at the expense of hiring faculty and paying the nearly slave-labor adjunct faculty living wages. The unions, which should require that their members learn labor history, are also run by top leaders who make stupendous salaries and benefits, so their interests ally with the rich, not any party of and for the people. We need to resist drumpf, vote to change the majorities in Congress, impeach and convict him, and then have a national reckoning about the leaders to whom we have ceded so much power.
Anca, yes. yes. yes. We know that the commercial media all capitulated to the Felon's bullying. We are now seeing some of t he most powerful institutions in the country fail to support and protect their own populations. given that my career has been spent in higher education, I am especially disgusted and horrified by all the university administrators who see their own bonuses (and yes: they get bonuses at the top echelons) as more important than their students, their faculty, and their facilities. It is time to dump all of them. But most especially the yutzes in Washington who enabled all of this to proceed without comment.
The removal of the Inspectors General has put a significant dent in the system of checks and balances, as has the weaponization of the the Justice Department, the blind following of Congress, and the state of the warped Supreme Court.
Please, I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for decades that until doctors take to the streets and demand healthcare for all as a right of birth, we will never have it. They will bitch and moan about how bad the insurance companies are, but won’t do anything to change the system. I get it, it’s their livelihood, but they helped make the beds we all have to lie in lest people think otherwise.
They fiercely opposed Clinton's National Health plan because they didn't want to be managed by the government. Too late they find out that they're being managed by corporations, insurance companies, and big pharma.
This is a bit different from the other comments, but hopefully related. During COVID, I remember wondering why the AMA and the unions representing healthcare personnel, didn't sue Trump for his disinformation, and lack of funding.
"In the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died from COVID. Many of the deaths were avoidable; COVID mortality in the U.S. was 40% higher than the average of the other wealthy nations in the Group of Seven (G7).
On October 25, 2020, National Nurses United condemned statements by Trump and Meadows to dismiss Covid deaths, and downplay the toll of the pandemic. Their president said: “For more than eight months, registered nurses and other healthcare workers have been putting their lives, their coworkers, and their own families in jeopardy by caring for grievously ill patients, often gasping for breath, and dying from Covid."
“Some 2,000 front-line health care workers, including at least 230 nurses, have died too, often working with little or no optimal personal protective equipment and proper hospital safety protocols."
“All of those casualties have come while they have endured virtually no support from the federal government and a president who consistently dismisses the severity of this deadly pandemic and encourages his supporters to ignore and flout common-sense safety measures that are putting more people at risk, more people in the hospitals, and resulting in more people dying.”
There are organizations closer to the grassroots that have pushed for things like single-payer healthcare. A good example is Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org or it might be .com). In the labor context, some unions are timid and top-down but again there are organizations like Labor Notes that have been "putting the movement in the labor movement" for decades. Finding and supporting such organizations is particularly important right now. They don't get the press coverage they deserve.
I've been involved with that org and they go well beyond what I believe their mission should be, so it gets watered down. They don't understand meeting people where they are, so the result is they are tuned out by a lot of people that would otherwise be in sync.
If unions understood that supporting single payer takes a huge thing off of the bargaining table and then the only thing left is pay. It's boggling to me, having lived in Europe, that we think it's ok not to have healthcare as a right of birth in this country. And the Dems have been just as much of a stop gap in getting it. Citizens United means it will never happen.
Anca Vlasopolos, AMEN to every example you offered. The AMA, ABA, University Administrations, are accountable as a huge part of the COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM…can we call them forward in public forums for Q&A’s?…these are the people we count on to be educated and representative of the best of human evolution…yea, right?!?!
Less than 50% of physicians are a member of the AMA, it's because they're a lobbying group and would never support single payer. And the ABA is about to be taken over by MAGAs, just like every other major org.
Everybody reading this who is not aware of who Bandy Lee is and her professional career, please research her work. BANDY LEE laid it all out for us and the powers that be squelched it. And here we are.
It has occurred to me that we should be asking, What is the truth in “the administrative state” and “the deep state?” It hits home with people. Why? Just because they’ve bought into conspiracy theories hook, line and sinker? Is there something else? It seems to me this discussion is surfacing some of those truths.
I can describe some truths from my professional experience in K-12 education policy & data—for example, lots of highly skilled people getting good salaries to work in an accountability industry that doesn’t have knowledge of education. Meanwhile the schools that need the most assistance are neglected (giving money isn’t enough—also need to be guided by knowledge) and far too little useful knowledge is generated on how to support and lead these schools. So maybe accountability” belongs in the "administrative state" category. Interesting that “accountability” is near and dear to Republicans. It’s one of those words we could do without because when it reveals where real problems are, they get ignored/overlooked.
Why don’t we know more about neglected schools? Because they are often in the poorest communities and it is all but taboo in education to talk about poverty as an experience that schools can/should respond to in their mission to educate students. No excuses!!
My deepest hope is that the trauma we are going through now will shake things up in a way that changes the conversation about the public’s responsibilities to education. While we defend the U.S. Dept of Education, we should also acknowledge it hasn’t been doing enough under the mission of advancing equal opportunity through education. We have been stuck for more than several years between the failures of policy based on accountability and the understanding that schools need to better respond to students and families whose lives have been shaped my poverty. I would like to see us get unstuck and finally advance the conversation around better responses to families in need so we can improve educational outcomes. I'm talking about seizing the moment.
Expanding with an example. I worked as a researcher for a state-of-the-art university-based leadership prep program in Chicago. It trains principals and vice principals for the city’s schools using a residency model like in medical school. It does great work. But poverty was (is?) mostly not in the curriculum—it gets added at the fringes when there’s a sympathetic and knowledgeable faculty member. Some of these leaders find themselves leading an entire school system (they get hired outside Chicago as well as inside CPS), not a rare occurrence since they are the best and brightest. When this happens, they can be at a loss for how to lead when the union representing frontline workers pushes the system to be more responsive to students and families who live in poverty. Our best trained, most well meaning educational leaders can be far too clueless about the populations of people the systems they lead serve. They fall back on accountability-speak, no excuses, yes-there’s-poverty-but-no-need-to-talk-about-it, etc. (locally, reflecting The Chicago Tribune, which is a conservative voice). And they can get mopped up by the union in a city like Chicago where residents want our public systems to do better for neglected Black communities. The unions need system leaders to work with them on sound policies and programs that will last, that everyone is invested it. Otherwise the union can win big in on its demands when there should be more back-and-forth on goals and how best to achieve them.
Let's all adopt the slogan 'Courage is Contagious '.
Replace his 'divide & conquer' with 'Unite & Win'
We have done it before and we can do it again...too many people have suffered & died to give us the freedoms and benefits of democracy to let a belligerent bully take it all away !
They say strength comes in numbers...I say strength comes from the heart. we are stronger than we know.
Apply pressure to Congressional Republicans. The past few days the main issue has been national security. 22 senate Republicans and dozens of Republican House members voted to support Ukraine, only to find we have joined the axis of evil. Thank Sen Roger Wicker R. MS. for speaking truth yesterday.
I keep being reminded of a story I read some years ago--perhaps I've mentioned it before, I'm quite old and quite ill and tend to repeat myself, as all us old ladies come to do.
It's a sort of passing moment of light in a time otherwise quite grim: it illustrates the possibility of resistance and public courage in a land further down the road to authoritarianism than we are at this moment (mind you, we're on that road, and too far along it for comfort, but we still have a ways to go).
It took place in Berlin in 1943. The war was raging, the genocide was raging. The Nazis had been in power for a decade.
A group of Jewish men had been rounded up and were being held in what was termed a "collection center" (the sort of place Stephen and Katie Miller dream of, one supposes).
These men, as it happens, although Jews themselves, had married non-Jewish women, and those women, finding courage from God only knows what source, refused to accept the right of the state to seize and imprison and abuse their menfolk. They staged what would become known as the Rosenstrasse Protest.
These gaunt German women knew the brutal power of the state and the soulless brutality of official reprisals against those who challenged the state. They nonetheless marched by the hundreds on the building where their husbands were held, demanding their release.
Though warned off and threatened by armed SS guards, the women persisted, coming back day after day, from February 27 until March 6, when the authorities caved and ordered the release of the men.
Why did an all-powerful state yield to a group of unarmed women--ordinary women who had thrown their thin coats over their aprons and marched in the icy Berlin late winter, chanting, "Give us our husbands back!" ?
Perhaps it was because the women made them afraid--afraid of the implications for a civilian population that they controlled mostly through fear and propaganda.
At the end of the day, even an all-powerful state cannot keep every single citizen under armed guard around the clock--you cannot tyrannize without the consent of the tyrannized, any more than you can govern without the consent of the governed.
These women had revoked their consent. The state understood the implications. If passersby saw the courage of these women, their fearlessness, their willingness to risk their lives to oppose the state, they might realize that they themselves had a similar power. There might be a contagion of courage; an epidemic of honor.
It was the Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels, who concluded that releasing the men was in the best interests of the state: in short, the Minister of Propaganda recognized that he'd come up against the limits of his own ugly, sordid little craft.
Maybe one day Lachlan Murdoch or Elon Musk will come up against a similar blinding shock of recognition. That day can't come soon enough.
As an old lady myself, thank you for this story. Whether or not it is a repeat, it never hurts to have a reminder of what can be done and in fact should be done by all of us to the extent of our abilities.
Jen, I cancelled my longtime subscription to the Washington Post knowing that I would miss your writing. It was a joy when you began The Contrarian. I subscribe because of the premise of today’s written article. I believe that The Contrarian and similar voices have inherited the essence and energy of the Muckrakers of the earlier Gilded Age so well described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.” Thank you!
The hardest part is breaking through the noise. For example, with the media reporting those executive orders as facts instead of memos with little standing in the law for what he's trying to do. They have to do better, just like we have to be better and explaining the consequences of what they are doing, which is destroying the entire fabric of government. I really wonder how we're going to be able to figure out what the weather will be like two years from now, as we've gutted NOAA.
Hard to do flight planning without weather forecast through your route plan. Best to have live updates of changes along the route. NOAA publishes this to all aviation receivers.
Glad to see that. We really need NOAA, et al. I now live in a hurricane susceptible area. And I'd like to have advanced notice of the weather, temps, etc. every day.
Whilst not so visible as US based street protests those taking place around the World can inform and encourage US citizens to do the same. In July 2018, 250.000 people marched through the streets of London in protest at Trump’s first State visit. 1.8million UK residents signed a petition against it. If his second State Visit does actually take place the protests will be much larger. The complete trashing of 80 years of US soft power in Europe by Trump, Vance and Hesketh has resulted in the latest Ipsos poll (March 4) showing almost three-quarters of the British public (73%) say they do not trust President Trump very much, or at all, to help deliver peace in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
The UK Foreign Office is now advising citizens to be very careful when travelling to the US on visas. At an individual level foreign travellers can, and no doubt will, vote with their feet and choose to travel elsewhere. I first visited the US in 1966 and have been back many times since. Llke millions of other Brits we have friends and relatives in the US. My family will not be back so long as the thugs are in charge. We watch in astonishment and despair with fear and loathing of Trump. How sad.
The horrifying debacle that the British student experienced--being shackled and detained for 19 days on false claims that her visa was incorrect because they found anti-Felon comments in her phone--should give anyone thinking about travel to the USA pause. And I say don't come here. The people who voted for the Felon and his evil enablers and handlers need to be taught a lesson: "owning the libs" is not a thing. Your lives, your financial wellbeing, your jobs, your children are now all at risk because of your moronic, racist, sexist decision to vote for a convicted felon instead of for a competent, experienced, SANE leader who happens to be a woman of color. I also think that US citizens returning from travel abroad might become targets once the supply of foreign nationals dries up. After all: all the Felon wants is photo ops. Richard, if you still know of suppliers for the Baby Trump in Diaper giant balloon that was featured in the London protests back in 2018, could you send some our way???
Can we not give up spending our money for the short term on ALL NON-ESSENTIALS? How much money do WE control?…unfortunately, probably not near enough.
But, between now and the 2026 elections, we could find out. The short term pain and loss of profit to many of us dependent on consumer spending may be less painful than the loss of our freedom to utter tyranny over our future. Maybe if we collectively support only the writers and commentators that we trust, and join forces with them, we can use the absence of money in our favor. Those writers and commentators could be our leaders and heroes for the history we are living through. I just looked up Fifth Estate…I’m old but still trying to keep learning….
Street protests in the U.S. are visible in the U.K., Europe, and around the world? That's very encouraging; usually it's the other way around, for those here who look beyond what's going on only at home.
Then again, it's sobering when people in the U.K. and elsewhere know more about our own protests than we do. Thanks for the perspective across the "pond".
There actually have been (with more coming) here in the U.S. The problem is in the reporting. Main Stream Media (MSM) has pretty much been cowed by Trump as its ownership (often of the billionaire class) don't want to stand and deliver for the people as they should. Play nice, stay under the radar, and get along seems to be their goal.
Thanks. I compare reading articles in the NY Times, Washington Post to The Contrarian and The Guardian and PBS and the BBC. These days, one has to "shop" many sources to get what approaches the whole picture.
We're going to have to keep each other informed, since the mainstream media won't do it. Some of us will do what you do and compare sources. Others will gather from other sources; myself, I'm applying my own continuing and revived studies of dissident movements, social justice crusades, world history, etc., to the present time. And no small amount of my faith, without which - not my faith alone, but an example being Abraham Lincoln's, or Harriet Tubman's, or Dr. King's faith and prayers - nothing will be accomplished.
That said, keep up the good work and your own research and queries, and keep the rest of us informed. I'll do the same.
I am personally surrounded by those who have beliefs divergent to mine. To coexist I chose to affirm what I can. Because so many are uninformed does not mean they are less than. It is a challenge and not joy filled. Platforms such as this one assure me that light and honor still exist. I am grateful. And, FEARLESS.
In Timothy Snyder's book "On Tyranny", his first point in how to resist is "Do Not Obey In Advance". Thank you for pointing out that we need to call for collective action with this in mind.
Jen, this is one of the reasons I always looked forward to reading your pieces when you were with the WaPo. Your writing style is a joy for the reader. Now, with TC, I get a healthy dose of Jen daily. Unlike some who have joined the Substack family from TV, I have observed that the questions you ask in your interviews are focused and more importantly, you give the interviewee a chance to speak without interrupting them. WaPo's loss is TC's gain. On les aura!!
Every local demonstration is a ripple that each of us here can create…
I’d rather be afoot soldier spreading truth in my community than have my grandsons be a foot soldier spreading terror in a war zone to come if we don’t stand up.
What Jen calls for here is mostly to get activists to bully the bullied institutions to get them to stand up to the Trump bullying. Wouldn’t it be better to stand in solidarity with the bullied party? Why didn’t every major law firm defend Paul Weiss (instead of trying to steal their clients)? Why didn’t every other Ivy League school support Columbia, and stand together to sue the Trump administration? Granted, Paul Weiss and Columbia showed themselves to be cowards. But wasn’t that partly because their fellow legal firms and universities were standing by idly, or attempting to take advantage of their weakened position? Where are their allies?
Working in a law firm environment and hearing nothing about it makes me suspect there is politics and maneuvering going on behind close doors. I don't know for sure, since I'm not privy to it, and not an attorney myself. Much less is there even a single thread of detail, but I suspect it.
Thank you for giving some hope and outlining how we can do it. Could Germany have taken a different path if citizens stood up to Hitler. I don’t know the answer but I hope it is what will have here.
I went to a state university that’s accredited and they have had many graduates to attend medical school, law school and many other professional programs so who needs Ivy League? The prestige of many of these institutions have become tarnished. If they want to capitulate to Authoritarian rule then that’s their choice but it’s going to come at a cost. We might find that our good old state universities are now becoming the flagship institutions of our time. This may even leave some employers thinking twice about who they hire when these institutions make bone headed decisions that might unfairly reflect on their graduates. Being in academia myself I have seen the good and bad of what happens to faculty, staff and students when such decisions are made albeit over something that is lesser in nature than what is being presented in the here and now. Rachel Cohen laid it out very clearly as to how this kind of thing affects the legal profession.
Your "good old state institutions" are also capitulating, Michelle. I have been in higher education for 40 years as professional and the levels to which state university presidents and chancellors will stoop is astonishing. In Missouri, the system president ditched DEI in JULY--talk about pre-capitulation! And still the UM system lost hundreds of millions of dollars in grant and grant-adjacent funding. So no: there is nowhere to go.
Yes, the problem is everywhere but not to the extent that Columbia has to bow to. Students save a lot on tuition by not going to these schools. DEI has been abolished at the schools but not totally. Some are flying under the radar.
Lately, the scope of the cruelty and misinformation often becomes overwhelming--I'm a physician so yesterday's CDC claw backs hit me hard. Thank you for this call to courage and resistance. We need leaders and you provide that.
It's a blitzkrieg. Meant to come at you so fast and furious you can't even breathe. That 'lightning war' term got coined by the SS and the German Army for a reason: it perfectly encapsulated the brutality of their assault against Poland, which managed to survive only for about 2 weeks. Psychological warfare at its cruelest, with confusion, chaos and a sense of loss as a result that disarms your enemies faster than physical conflict.
Somehow we must not just summon collective anger, but channel it into the most effective opposition we can think of. Sometimes that will be through mass demonstrations, sometimes winning by-elections, by our donations, often by shaming these miserable Republican collaborators to their faces. We will need to stay unified, undistracted and unwavering. They are counting on us to fail at these tasks. Somehow, we must disappoint them.
Continue to support the Article III branch to hold trump and his crew legally accountable.
If it really is all about money, can we not stop the flow of our personal money? Can we not forsake gratification of discretionary spending for the short term? If we collectively STOP spending except for bare necessities, would it have any effect?
I never heard about the effect of the call to not spend money last year on so-called biggest shopping day, the Friday after Thanksgiving. Did I miss that? One day is not enough of a boycott to be effective, but did it even register?
And we will disappoint them!
Feathers of Hope is contagious -- spread it. https://jerryweiss.substack.com/
The entire medical profession is adversely affected.Surely Congressional Republicans need physicians.
Oppression leads to revolution only when hope is added. In fact, I believe a central element of the MAGA/Project 2025 strategy is aimed squarely at hope for that reason. So, I am surprised that Democrats and ‘Never Trump’ Republicans aren’t reanimating and updating Obama’s theme for his very successful 2008 Campaign. It seems to me, “Trump is hopeless” will ring true to the vast majority of Americans.
A very wise comment. Will get poster board tomorrow fir TeslaTakedown on Saturday
Short, to the point, and accurate. Well said.
The large and powerful associations and, it grieves me to say, the large and powerful unions have not led the way toward resistance. The AMA did nothing to oppose the overthrow of Roe v Wade. The ABA did not take action to disbar such players as Judge Cannon and AG Barr, one for utter incompetence and the other for corruption. Had they done so, fewer lawyers would have been so eager to line up to kiss drumpf's rear. University ADMINISTRATORS bow to power because their own roles in educational institutions consist of standing in the way, instead of promoting, education, for the bloated salaries that upper administrators are making at the expense of hiring faculty and paying the nearly slave-labor adjunct faculty living wages. The unions, which should require that their members learn labor history, are also run by top leaders who make stupendous salaries and benefits, so their interests ally with the rich, not any party of and for the people. We need to resist drumpf, vote to change the majorities in Congress, impeach and convict him, and then have a national reckoning about the leaders to whom we have ceded so much power.
Anca, yes. yes. yes. We know that the commercial media all capitulated to the Felon's bullying. We are now seeing some of t he most powerful institutions in the country fail to support and protect their own populations. given that my career has been spent in higher education, I am especially disgusted and horrified by all the university administrators who see their own bonuses (and yes: they get bonuses at the top echelons) as more important than their students, their faculty, and their facilities. It is time to dump all of them. But most especially the yutzes in Washington who enabled all of this to proceed without comment.
every aspect of"America" has just become all about the money
Exactly! Greed is a disease and is highly addictive. That's why so many checks and balances have needed to be created to quelch it when possible.
The removal of the Inspectors General has put a significant dent in the system of checks and balances, as has the weaponization of the the Justice Department, the blind following of Congress, and the state of the warped Supreme Court.
Please, I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for decades that until doctors take to the streets and demand healthcare for all as a right of birth, we will never have it. They will bitch and moan about how bad the insurance companies are, but won’t do anything to change the system. I get it, it’s their livelihood, but they helped make the beds we all have to lie in lest people think otherwise.
They fiercely opposed Clinton's National Health plan because they didn't want to be managed by the government. Too late they find out that they're being managed by corporations, insurance companies, and big pharma.
This is a bit different from the other comments, but hopefully related. During COVID, I remember wondering why the AMA and the unions representing healthcare personnel, didn't sue Trump for his disinformation, and lack of funding.
"In the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, more than 450,000 Americans died from COVID. Many of the deaths were avoidable; COVID mortality in the U.S. was 40% higher than the average of the other wealthy nations in the Group of Seven (G7).
On October 25, 2020, National Nurses United condemned statements by Trump and Meadows to dismiss Covid deaths, and downplay the toll of the pandemic. Their president said: “For more than eight months, registered nurses and other healthcare workers have been putting their lives, their coworkers, and their own families in jeopardy by caring for grievously ill patients, often gasping for breath, and dying from Covid."
“Some 2,000 front-line health care workers, including at least 230 nurses, have died too, often working with little or no optimal personal protective equipment and proper hospital safety protocols."
“All of those casualties have come while they have endured virtually no support from the federal government and a president who consistently dismisses the severity of this deadly pandemic and encourages his supporters to ignore and flout common-sense safety measures that are putting more people at risk, more people in the hospitals, and resulting in more people dying.”
There are organizations closer to the grassroots that have pushed for things like single-payer healthcare. A good example is Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org or it might be .com). In the labor context, some unions are timid and top-down but again there are organizations like Labor Notes that have been "putting the movement in the labor movement" for decades. Finding and supporting such organizations is particularly important right now. They don't get the press coverage they deserve.
I've been involved with that org and they go well beyond what I believe their mission should be, so it gets watered down. They don't understand meeting people where they are, so the result is they are tuned out by a lot of people that would otherwise be in sync.
If unions understood that supporting single payer takes a huge thing off of the bargaining table and then the only thing left is pay. It's boggling to me, having lived in Europe, that we think it's ok not to have healthcare as a right of birth in this country. And the Dems have been just as much of a stop gap in getting it. Citizens United means it will never happen.
I pledge allegiance to the bottom line of the corporate states of America
and to the republic, which they own,
one nation, under management
with liberty and justice for those who can afford it.
Touche'
Anca Vlasopolos, AMEN to every example you offered. The AMA, ABA, University Administrations, are accountable as a huge part of the COLLECTIVE ACTION PROBLEM…can we call them forward in public forums for Q&A’s?…these are the people we count on to be educated and representative of the best of human evolution…yea, right?!?!
Less than 50% of physicians are a member of the AMA, it's because they're a lobbying group and would never support single payer. And the ABA is about to be taken over by MAGAs, just like every other major org.
The APA also did nothing to support the writers of The DAngerous Case of Donald Trump. Harvard disciplined Bandy Lee.
Everybody reading this who is not aware of who Bandy Lee is and her professional career, please research her work. BANDY LEE laid it all out for us and the powers that be squelched it. And here we are.
It has occurred to me that we should be asking, What is the truth in “the administrative state” and “the deep state?” It hits home with people. Why? Just because they’ve bought into conspiracy theories hook, line and sinker? Is there something else? It seems to me this discussion is surfacing some of those truths.
I can describe some truths from my professional experience in K-12 education policy & data—for example, lots of highly skilled people getting good salaries to work in an accountability industry that doesn’t have knowledge of education. Meanwhile the schools that need the most assistance are neglected (giving money isn’t enough—also need to be guided by knowledge) and far too little useful knowledge is generated on how to support and lead these schools. So maybe accountability” belongs in the "administrative state" category. Interesting that “accountability” is near and dear to Republicans. It’s one of those words we could do without because when it reveals where real problems are, they get ignored/overlooked.
Why don’t we know more about neglected schools? Because they are often in the poorest communities and it is all but taboo in education to talk about poverty as an experience that schools can/should respond to in their mission to educate students. No excuses!!
My deepest hope is that the trauma we are going through now will shake things up in a way that changes the conversation about the public’s responsibilities to education. While we defend the U.S. Dept of Education, we should also acknowledge it hasn’t been doing enough under the mission of advancing equal opportunity through education. We have been stuck for more than several years between the failures of policy based on accountability and the understanding that schools need to better respond to students and families whose lives have been shaped my poverty. I would like to see us get unstuck and finally advance the conversation around better responses to families in need so we can improve educational outcomes. I'm talking about seizing the moment.
Expanding with an example. I worked as a researcher for a state-of-the-art university-based leadership prep program in Chicago. It trains principals and vice principals for the city’s schools using a residency model like in medical school. It does great work. But poverty was (is?) mostly not in the curriculum—it gets added at the fringes when there’s a sympathetic and knowledgeable faculty member. Some of these leaders find themselves leading an entire school system (they get hired outside Chicago as well as inside CPS), not a rare occurrence since they are the best and brightest. When this happens, they can be at a loss for how to lead when the union representing frontline workers pushes the system to be more responsive to students and families who live in poverty. Our best trained, most well meaning educational leaders can be far too clueless about the populations of people the systems they lead serve. They fall back on accountability-speak, no excuses, yes-there’s-poverty-but-no-need-to-talk-about-it, etc. (locally, reflecting The Chicago Tribune, which is a conservative voice). And they can get mopped up by the union in a city like Chicago where residents want our public systems to do better for neglected Black communities. The unions need system leaders to work with them on sound policies and programs that will last, that everyone is invested it. Otherwise the union can win big in on its demands when there should be more back-and-forth on goals and how best to achieve them.
Let's all adopt the slogan 'Courage is Contagious '.
Replace his 'divide & conquer' with 'Unite & Win'
We have done it before and we can do it again...too many people have suffered & died to give us the freedoms and benefits of democracy to let a belligerent bully take it all away !
They say strength comes in numbers...I say strength comes from the heart. we are stronger than we know.
SPEAK UP & SPEAK OUT
Apply pressure to Congressional Republicans. The past few days the main issue has been national security. 22 senate Republicans and dozens of Republican House members voted to support Ukraine, only to find we have joined the axis of evil. Thank Sen Roger Wicker R. MS. for speaking truth yesterday.
I keep being reminded of a story I read some years ago--perhaps I've mentioned it before, I'm quite old and quite ill and tend to repeat myself, as all us old ladies come to do.
It's a sort of passing moment of light in a time otherwise quite grim: it illustrates the possibility of resistance and public courage in a land further down the road to authoritarianism than we are at this moment (mind you, we're on that road, and too far along it for comfort, but we still have a ways to go).
It took place in Berlin in 1943. The war was raging, the genocide was raging. The Nazis had been in power for a decade.
A group of Jewish men had been rounded up and were being held in what was termed a "collection center" (the sort of place Stephen and Katie Miller dream of, one supposes).
These men, as it happens, although Jews themselves, had married non-Jewish women, and those women, finding courage from God only knows what source, refused to accept the right of the state to seize and imprison and abuse their menfolk. They staged what would become known as the Rosenstrasse Protest.
These gaunt German women knew the brutal power of the state and the soulless brutality of official reprisals against those who challenged the state. They nonetheless marched by the hundreds on the building where their husbands were held, demanding their release.
Though warned off and threatened by armed SS guards, the women persisted, coming back day after day, from February 27 until March 6, when the authorities caved and ordered the release of the men.
Why did an all-powerful state yield to a group of unarmed women--ordinary women who had thrown their thin coats over their aprons and marched in the icy Berlin late winter, chanting, "Give us our husbands back!" ?
Perhaps it was because the women made them afraid--afraid of the implications for a civilian population that they controlled mostly through fear and propaganda.
At the end of the day, even an all-powerful state cannot keep every single citizen under armed guard around the clock--you cannot tyrannize without the consent of the tyrannized, any more than you can govern without the consent of the governed.
These women had revoked their consent. The state understood the implications. If passersby saw the courage of these women, their fearlessness, their willingness to risk their lives to oppose the state, they might realize that they themselves had a similar power. There might be a contagion of courage; an epidemic of honor.
It was the Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels, who concluded that releasing the men was in the best interests of the state: in short, the Minister of Propaganda recognized that he'd come up against the limits of his own ugly, sordid little craft.
Maybe one day Lachlan Murdoch or Elon Musk will come up against a similar blinding shock of recognition. That day can't come soon enough.
As an old lady myself, thank you for this story. Whether or not it is a repeat, it never hurts to have a reminder of what can be done and in fact should be done by all of us to the extent of our abilities.
I think my sign on April 5 will read: "no tyranny without the consent of the tyrannized. Fight back." Thank you.
This is well written....you still got it !
Jen, I cancelled my longtime subscription to the Washington Post knowing that I would miss your writing. It was a joy when you began The Contrarian. I subscribe because of the premise of today’s written article. I believe that The Contrarian and similar voices have inherited the essence and energy of the Muckrakers of the earlier Gilded Age so well described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.” Thank you!
The hardest part is breaking through the noise. For example, with the media reporting those executive orders as facts instead of memos with little standing in the law for what he's trying to do. They have to do better, just like we have to be better and explaining the consequences of what they are doing, which is destroying the entire fabric of government. I really wonder how we're going to be able to figure out what the weather will be like two years from now, as we've gutted NOAA.
There does seem to be less video coverage of these executive orders. I think the video media got bored.
Not we - they've gutted noaa
look out the window
Hard to do flight planning without weather forecast through your route plan. Best to have live updates of changes along the route. NOAA publishes this to all aviation receivers.
Marine craft as well.
I know that Bill, just a joke...a small one
Glad to see that. We really need NOAA, et al. I now live in a hurricane susceptible area. And I'd like to have advanced notice of the weather, temps, etc. every day.
Whilst not so visible as US based street protests those taking place around the World can inform and encourage US citizens to do the same. In July 2018, 250.000 people marched through the streets of London in protest at Trump’s first State visit. 1.8million UK residents signed a petition against it. If his second State Visit does actually take place the protests will be much larger. The complete trashing of 80 years of US soft power in Europe by Trump, Vance and Hesketh has resulted in the latest Ipsos poll (March 4) showing almost three-quarters of the British public (73%) say they do not trust President Trump very much, or at all, to help deliver peace in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
The UK Foreign Office is now advising citizens to be very careful when travelling to the US on visas. At an individual level foreign travellers can, and no doubt will, vote with their feet and choose to travel elsewhere. I first visited the US in 1966 and have been back many times since. Llke millions of other Brits we have friends and relatives in the US. My family will not be back so long as the thugs are in charge. We watch in astonishment and despair with fear and loathing of Trump. How sad.
The horrifying debacle that the British student experienced--being shackled and detained for 19 days on false claims that her visa was incorrect because they found anti-Felon comments in her phone--should give anyone thinking about travel to the USA pause. And I say don't come here. The people who voted for the Felon and his evil enablers and handlers need to be taught a lesson: "owning the libs" is not a thing. Your lives, your financial wellbeing, your jobs, your children are now all at risk because of your moronic, racist, sexist decision to vote for a convicted felon instead of for a competent, experienced, SANE leader who happens to be a woman of color. I also think that US citizens returning from travel abroad might become targets once the supply of foreign nationals dries up. After all: all the Felon wants is photo ops. Richard, if you still know of suppliers for the Baby Trump in Diaper giant balloon that was featured in the London protests back in 2018, could you send some our way???
The Guardian recommends a 'do not travel to the U.S.' position.
Can we not give up spending our money for the short term on ALL NON-ESSENTIALS? How much money do WE control?…unfortunately, probably not near enough.
But, between now and the 2026 elections, we could find out. The short term pain and loss of profit to many of us dependent on consumer spending may be less painful than the loss of our freedom to utter tyranny over our future. Maybe if we collectively support only the writers and commentators that we trust, and join forces with them, we can use the absence of money in our favor. Those writers and commentators could be our leaders and heroes for the history we are living through. I just looked up Fifth Estate…I’m old but still trying to keep learning….
Street protests in the U.S. are visible in the U.K., Europe, and around the world? That's very encouraging; usually it's the other way around, for those here who look beyond what's going on only at home.
Then again, it's sobering when people in the U.K. and elsewhere know more about our own protests than we do. Thanks for the perspective across the "pond".
There actually have been (with more coming) here in the U.S. The problem is in the reporting. Main Stream Media (MSM) has pretty much been cowed by Trump as its ownership (often of the billionaire class) don't want to stand and deliver for the people as they should. Play nice, stay under the radar, and get along seems to be their goal.
I say that's an accurate assessment.
Thanks. I compare reading articles in the NY Times, Washington Post to The Contrarian and The Guardian and PBS and the BBC. These days, one has to "shop" many sources to get what approaches the whole picture.
Good work.
We're going to have to keep each other informed, since the mainstream media won't do it. Some of us will do what you do and compare sources. Others will gather from other sources; myself, I'm applying my own continuing and revived studies of dissident movements, social justice crusades, world history, etc., to the present time. And no small amount of my faith, without which - not my faith alone, but an example being Abraham Lincoln's, or Harriet Tubman's, or Dr. King's faith and prayers - nothing will be accomplished.
That said, keep up the good work and your own research and queries, and keep the rest of us informed. I'll do the same.
I left out Dan Rather's Steady site on Substack. The man has been around, seen history, and is still reporting.
We "ordinary" Americans, mostly Democrats, never trusted Trump years back and are shocked that our Congress is allowing his crap.
Call their bluffs! Stand up to unconstitutional “Executive Spasms”. Courage IS contagious — get some!
I am personally surrounded by those who have beliefs divergent to mine. To coexist I chose to affirm what I can. Because so many are uninformed does not mean they are less than. It is a challenge and not joy filled. Platforms such as this one assure me that light and honor still exist. I am grateful. And, FEARLESS.
In Timothy Snyder's book "On Tyranny", his first point in how to resist is "Do Not Obey In Advance". Thank you for pointing out that we need to call for collective action with this in mind.
Jen, this is one of the reasons I always looked forward to reading your pieces when you were with the WaPo. Your writing style is a joy for the reader. Now, with TC, I get a healthy dose of Jen daily. Unlike some who have joined the Substack family from TV, I have observed that the questions you ask in your interviews are focused and more importantly, you give the interviewee a chance to speak without interrupting them. WaPo's loss is TC's gain. On les aura!!
Anti-Trump/Musk demonstration should be held at local offices of Republicans.
Every local demonstration is a ripple that each of us here can create…
I’d rather be afoot soldier spreading truth in my community than have my grandsons be a foot soldier spreading terror in a war zone to come if we don’t stand up.
This is how we do it. Solidarity.
What Jen calls for here is mostly to get activists to bully the bullied institutions to get them to stand up to the Trump bullying. Wouldn’t it be better to stand in solidarity with the bullied party? Why didn’t every major law firm defend Paul Weiss (instead of trying to steal their clients)? Why didn’t every other Ivy League school support Columbia, and stand together to sue the Trump administration? Granted, Paul Weiss and Columbia showed themselves to be cowards. But wasn’t that partly because their fellow legal firms and universities were standing by idly, or attempting to take advantage of their weakened position? Where are their allies?
It's not clear that Paul,Weiss asked for support. Columbia certainly didn't.
They shouldn’t have to ask for support.
Working in a law firm environment and hearing nothing about it makes me suspect there is politics and maneuvering going on behind close doors. I don't know for sure, since I'm not privy to it, and not an attorney myself. Much less is there even a single thread of detail, but I suspect it.
*closed* doors - spell check, I swear!
Thank you for giving some hope and outlining how we can do it. Could Germany have taken a different path if citizens stood up to Hitler. I don’t know the answer but I hope it is what will have here.
I went to a state university that’s accredited and they have had many graduates to attend medical school, law school and many other professional programs so who needs Ivy League? The prestige of many of these institutions have become tarnished. If they want to capitulate to Authoritarian rule then that’s their choice but it’s going to come at a cost. We might find that our good old state universities are now becoming the flagship institutions of our time. This may even leave some employers thinking twice about who they hire when these institutions make bone headed decisions that might unfairly reflect on their graduates. Being in academia myself I have seen the good and bad of what happens to faculty, staff and students when such decisions are made albeit over something that is lesser in nature than what is being presented in the here and now. Rachel Cohen laid it out very clearly as to how this kind of thing affects the legal profession.
Your "good old state institutions" are also capitulating, Michelle. I have been in higher education for 40 years as professional and the levels to which state university presidents and chancellors will stoop is astonishing. In Missouri, the system president ditched DEI in JULY--talk about pre-capitulation! And still the UM system lost hundreds of millions of dollars in grant and grant-adjacent funding. So no: there is nowhere to go.
Yes, the problem is everywhere but not to the extent that Columbia has to bow to. Students save a lot on tuition by not going to these schools. DEI has been abolished at the schools but not totally. Some are flying under the radar.
it's all about the $$$