This seems so much bigger than just museums. Once people stop trusting historians because the truth is politically inconvenient, it becomes easier to dismiss journalists, scientists, judges, and anyone else who documents reality. That’s how reality itself becomes negotiable.
Kelli, it is bigger than just museums. It is about bringing down the educated elite. The people who are Trump's followers don't trust historians anyway. My political book club is reading a book called" Die Globale Rechte:Geschichte, Erfolgsbedingungen, Auswirkungen" (The Global Right: History, Conditions for Success, and Impact) by Marcel Lewandowski, and in it he points out that attacking intellectuals has historically been coded language for attacking Jews, just as attacking Immigration is code for attacking non-whites. Hungary's attack on George Soros is a case in point. Here all the coded language turns into justification for actions that are both racist and anti elitist. It is frightening how much work goes into destroying truth and reality, and replacing them with lies and conspiracy theories. We need to all beware.
Agree! If not only for the truth that was written, then at least for the quality of writing and authorship of each book. Isabel Wilkerson is an extraordinarily detailed writer.
What is sad is that Isabel Wilkerson wrote about how the Germans studied the U.S. Jim Crow efforts to deny people of color (former slaves) their civil rights.
I'm currently reading Caste and just finished the chapter on the Nazi policy meeting held in 1934 that to design policy around controlling the Jews. The meeting seemed completely guided and amazed by an in depth study they had generated on how the "dominant caste" subjugated blacks in America, i.e. Jim Crow laws.
Riad, I have had the privilege of reading both books and found them excellent: thought-provoking, challenging, well-written, and painful to read at times. Those are definitely good reasons to read them!
Without doubt, Ruth. The truth hurts worse for Trumpers than for us, which is exactly, as you say, why those folks need to read her books. Our discomfort is born from reimagining what so many of our disenfranchised citizens had to go through; there (MAGA mentality folks) discomfort would come from fighting to deny what clearly was and is in front of their eyes. It must be terrible to know that, and embrace a lie, yet accept it at the same time, all for the glory of their white shade.
Spot on - while I disagree with the opening comment that a foreigner could never become French (etal) , the central message is spot on. The Maga Party (used to be the Republican Party) has brought Reagan's warning to its shameful current state of shame. Our founding documents are aspirational - this means we have not achieved those ideals. We must continue to actively pursue them, embrace them, preserve them. I fear the average citizen rightfully cares about rising prices but does not really understand or place high value on those founding words. That lukewarm response is a danger to our democratic existence. I often disagreed with Reagan but he knew how to lead, he knew how to inspire, and he knew how to use the bully pulpit.
Reagan was well read? Um, no he was not. Read Andy Borowitz's book "Profiles in Ignorance"; it is satirical (but not a satire) but also truthful and enlightening--more so than most things Reagan said.
Thanks for the link. I keep a file of notes on various topics of interest, and have added this to one of mine: Reagan'sspeech that day.. Here's the relevent text.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Wonder who wrote that for him? He had a nice voice for reading. Nancy was using an astrologer to help her make decisions for him at the end of his presidency when dementia was becoming apparent. This is a nice sentiment about immigrants, but Reagan was manipulated and groomed to set in motion policies that led to a society bookended by the homeless and the billionaires. The Republicans conveniently forgot that the job of government is to take care of all its people. And they continue to sow hatred.
Reagan was naive. He was the equivalent of the Marlboro Man. But, I'm afraid he was a dull tool for some behind-the-scenes manipulators. And there is/are quite a handful of them. Remember the 11 & 12% mortgage rates and plenty-more deviousness. It's grown from there. Yess, today we have Trump the punching bag, distracting you and I from what is going on underneath. I think the DNC is complicit.
Thank you for sharing that video. I had never seen or heard it before. Reagan seemed sincere, and he was not a particularly good actor. At least it took off the extremely sharp edge of my "upseted-ness" over the content of today's letter for a few minutes.
The truth is the truth, whether we like it or not.
Mary Ann, my hair is. on fire reading about that poor Indian student who tried and tried to bring home the gold and was slapped down by racists. Sickens me that innocent children are being used as pawns.
Some of the best students that I taught in my Art classes were Indian. They were encouraged by their families to pursue extracurricular activities and interests and they excelled at them. I attended an Indian dance performance given by one of my best students who excelled at seemingly everything she did....painting, writing, mathematics, languages, music and more. I think skewing the questions in that way should have been illegal.
I would pay money to see the pimple pop! While I think it is unfair to demean and belittle someone for their inherent stupidity, the rectal polyp needs a lesson in being human. The sniveling NAZI is a shame on all who love our country! Warts and all…our greatest skill was learning and it was a super power, great universities…and engineers…and writers…and truth-tellers.
Unfortunately, concurrent with Americans who have loved and lifted up education and learning, is a very dark streak. That dark streak consists of not only those who are ignorant but also those who love and cherish that ignorance and pronounce it to be better than "them thar elitist, educated folk who think they is better than us." That ignorance has been--and still is--endlessly exploited by businesses and politicians. (case in point: the discount Foghorn Leghorn, Senator Kennedy of Louisiana who has an excellent education including a stint at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, but in order to be acceptable to his constituents, affects a accent thicker than roux for gumbo.)
Although I will note that the bulk of the real work in this country is done by folks have a certificate, maybe two years ago a CC, and see these ‘elites’ dismissing their value and intellect…you must admit there is a very strong eugenics streak in higher education, even though intelligence is not really heritable.
And yes GW learned to mispronounce nuclear to get votes in Texas…I spent 30 years in higher education and found a few actually remarkable people…no more than working in construction. Actually the vetting process in building stuff was higher than in so called higher education…really!
Liverpool, they will blame Democrats for Reagan's pro-immigration speech; somehow Democrats got into the room where the speech was written and reworked it. Since Reagan had Alzheimer's by then, they will say he was just reading it. OR, they will say that "times have changed and we don't need immigrants anymore." Republicans have lost any semblance of decency they had in Reagan's time. It has joined as Trumplandia and its unamerican activities are creating an enemy within, a kind of treason against the American people and our Constitution.
i am an audio book person. I just borrowed Caste and among 3 libraries (2 people share their libraries with me) that I can borrow from The warmth of other suns is not available in audio or print. If anyone else can check their library and share it with me, I would appreciate it .
Nancy, it’s widely available in both formats. In fact I listened to Warmth from Audible. It’s also available on Libby, if your library uses that. Don’t give up. You’ll find it.
I must add one more comment. “It is painful to read this post and others like it that are so demeaning and hurtful to U.S. citizens, immigrants, guests, as well as our democracy and Constitutional laws.
I tried to read "Caste". There were so many inaccuracies that I had to stop reading (and I'm a progressive).
We should have a real debate about DEI ideology in this country, because it's not because neofascists have chosen it as their target that somehow, by definition, it was a good idea in the first place.
Good starting points are the books by Jon McWhorter and Susan Neiman.
“Are America’s School Books written according to the Ideology of the Epstein Class?”
Disclaimer: Rhetorical. No response required
Solution? Read Dr Seuss He was insidiously clever in his mockery. The rhymes used to keep you distracted while he taught young minds to think. “Sneetches” and “The Butter Battle Book”; similar to Rocky and Bullwinkle
Linda, I have been saying that the global cabal conservatives fear and preach about is among them. It is not a liberal thing, but conservative aimed at entrenching power for the purpose of profit and exploitation.
Rickey, my book club has just started reading "Die Globale Recht: Geschichte, Erfolgsbedingungen, Auswirkungen" (The Global Right:
History, Conditions for success, Impact) by Marcel Lewandowski. In it he is making a distinction between conservatives and far right. In "far right" he has 3 categories: far right populists, far right radicals, and far right extremists. If you find a translation I recommend it for really teasing out what people are and the antecedents to the thinking. It is interesting. We are liking this book that we just started.
Linda, the know nothing attitude. I have encountered this constantly since the advent of the internet which makes everyone an expert on history, medicine, science, etc. I am reading now Book and Dagger about the need to get an intelligence service (OSS) going during WWII. They hired lots of professors, librarians, archivists, etc.
That sounds a bit simplistic to me, when Israel itself now has a government that leans towards neofascism, and quite some Jews (although still a minority) inside the US support the neofascist GOP too.
As to intellectuals: the problem is much bigger than that. The problem is that, where a democracy vitally needs intellectuals, fascism knows that intellectuals can destroy a fascist regime. So the need to silence them is real.
It's also not something only neofascists care about. In 1976, Irving Kristol, founder of neoconservatism, wrote an op-ed in the WSJ entitled "The Stupid Party". In it (already in the first paragraphs), he argues that in a "healthy society", intellectuals HAVE to stay "at the margins", because as soon as they participate actively in public debates... conservatives cannot but lose elections. Conservatives need people to vote with their gut feeling, he writes.
And remember, Kristol is a Jew himself...
So it's imagining THAT somehow all intellectuals would be Jews, or that all Jews are pro-intellectuals, that ITSELF prolongs a stereotype that today, not many people share anymore in the first place...
It is bigger than just museums. It's an ethnic cleansing strategy. Now, I say Trump is doing this, but actually he is too stupid to actually think this philosophically. But others around him do, and he is base enough to feel the underlying emotions without the erudite philosophy.
This is how anthropologist James Greenberg explains the point.
"Romantic nationalism [which Trump is attempting to redefine] held that nations are defined not by a social contract but by blood, language, religion, custom, shared history, and collective memory. Culture was understood as the essence of a people, each possessing its own unique spirit that could not be reduced to universal principles. Belonging was less about citizenship than membership in an imagined historical community.
Nations are rarely as culturally homogeneous as their myths suggest. Most encompass multiple peoples, languages, religions, and historical memories. Yet nation-building often requires forgetting as much as remembering. States construct narratives of common origin and shared destiny, but these narratives often erase internal diversity, suppress inconvenient histories, and marginalize peoples who do not fit the national story.
As a political project, Romantic nationalism sought to define the boundaries of the state by aligning it with what it regarded as a single people united by common culture, history, language, and ancestry. By equating the nation with a people, it consolidated power in the hands of the dominant group and defined who belonged and who did not.
Romantic nationalism worked differently in Europe than in the United States. In Europe it often sought to unite culturally similar peoples divided among competing states. In the United States, the conditions were different. The continent held hundreds of Native nations, a large enslaved population, and a steady stream of immigrants from diverse traditions. Early loyalties ran to the states rather than the federal government. American nationalism had to invent a common identity rather than recover one. That identity coalesced around those who held power—predominantly white, European, Christian, and English-speaking. Native peoples and African Americans were left outside the imagined community.
Once a people imagines itself as the authentic nation, policies of assimilation, exclusion, removal, and, in extreme cases, ethnic cleansing become conceivable means of aligning the state with its imagined community."
ICE and rewriting history per the above exclusions ARE Trump's ethnic cleansing...to our nation's detriment.
Linda, that is why we who care about our nation and our history have to work harder to demonstrate to the American people just how much Trumplandia depends on lies, disinformation, gaslighting, and hate to get people who don't know any better to harm others they are being programmed to hate. I am hoping most people don't want to be haters, but we need to point out to them that this is exactly what Trumplandia wants them to become! That is not a Christian way of life, nor is it part of Islam, Judaism, or any other major religion I know of. OK, it is part of Trumplandia's modus operandi.
Ruth, I think Trump is doing a good job on his own of demonstrating to the people what it feels like to live under catastrophe and chaos, yet again, without even having a plague like covid.
In the book, "The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging" Noelle Cook concludes that to wrest these women and people from their conspiracy narrative world, they need to decide that on their own. Perhaps our role is to be there for those who leave the fold and try to rejoin the sane world. We need to be non-judgmental.
If you want to bring down the elite, have your book club read, "The Decline of the German Mandarins," by Fritz Ringer. It has the definitive story. Furthermore I am personally aware of two book clubs that never had another meeting after selecting this book.
Bob, thanks for the recommendation. I will add it to our list of books we will potentially read. Having divested from Amazon, I will have to find a different source for book review.
It is truly unbelievable to see and hear of these distorted attacks on our country and citizens.
You do have to wonder if they ever had a history class. Do they recognize how their fantasies and outlook parrots the history of Germany’s time with Hitler?
Linda, I was just thinking that this assault against this storied institution has stephen “goebbels” miller’s handiwork all over it. He must have really suffered trauma as a kid to be so hate-filled towards America and the truth that made us a great country the world admired and aspired to. No more.😢💔
It is authoritarianism 101 - discredit (or eliminate) the educated intellectuals who are capable of critiquing the destructive nonsense coming out of such a regime.
It's no accident that the first people they went after were comedians and historians. The first because of the obvious -- comedians prompt ridicule -- at THEM -- for their absurd attempts to rewrite natural and human history based solely on Donnie's vast array of wee widdle butthurts and psychiatric distempers. The latter because they narrate our real past, rather than the make-believe-Disneyland-Father-Knows-Best version acceptable to Donnie Doofus as he tries to turn America into a dystopic chapter from "1984."
I used to be a volunteer at both the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History (right next to American History) as well as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The former would get visited by groups of evangelical loonies who took exception to the very existence of the Museum's Hall of Human Origins, sometimes staging group public prayer sessions there (which nobody ever interfered with). Some of the left took exception to its bearing the name Koch Hall of Human Origins, since David Koch donated $10 million to help create it 20 years ago. (Any donor to the Smithsonian signs away all rights over content, however, and the Koch Brothers had no role in what the Museum chose to exhibit).
In 2019, the Smithsonian re-opened a re-imagined and rebuilt Dinosaur Hall -- Deep Time. Starting with the formation of the solar system, and tracing the 5 Great Extinctions to highlight trade-offs we are all making right now, during the Anthropocene, the exhibit is a celebration of Charles Darwin's fundamental contribution to science and includes his sentence displayed above the exhibits: "From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and ARE BEING, EVOLVED."
The other day, one of those Congressional pea-brains tried to snare the Director of American History, by waving a pink baseball cap with the words "Latina Power" on it at her, demanding to know what that meant (it's among the swag and stuff sold at the Museum's gift shop, run by private contractors). How this eminent American historian kept from bursting out laughing, I've no idea.
ICTT thank you so much for being one of the volunteers at the Smithsonian.. what an experience.
Haven’t been back to DC for a number of years. Going through the Holocaust Museum with a friend is one of the most overwhelming experiences in our lifetimes. We left there and didn’t speak for hours, just walked…
Most thinking people are simply stunned into silence by what they see. The lanyard holding my federal ID said it well -- I would sometimes show it to people at the end of my tours -- "Think About What You Saw Here" -- It was really the only thing we could ask of visitors.
I held up a tour bus in Israel while visiting that Holocaust Museum. I remember being so shook up I could not let go of (in my head) the exhibit of the room filled with a huge pile of children's shoes. I could not stop crying. The vision still haunts me.
I have tried three or four times to watch Schindler's List and I just can't. It still feels incomprehensible to me we can treat others this way.
May we all do our part together now to not ever allow this to happen ever again within our own nations boundaries … Too big to Rig - Vote and grab your friends with you…
My son and I toured the Holocaust museum in D.C. when he was twelve. It is emotionally overwhelming. The exhibit that really affected him was the display of yellow stars - a small quiet display. There was the star for someone who is one quarter Jewish. He would have had to wear such a star. It hit him so personally, as if it had his name on the label.
Took five of my grandchildren through this museum after my own experience years later. At that time they were various ages, the youngest twelve the oldest sixteen they only made it to the shoes, before they all were unable to control their sobs. The one who was sixteen had a friend at the time who denied that the Holocaust ever happened. Weeks later my sixteen year old grandson in a conversation mentioned he no longer was friends with this person any longer...Think that in our children's and grandchildren's and further generations curriculum in education that this experience, this museum should be a part that is taught -- a reminder to Never Forget - Never Again. Maybe more adults should experience it for themselves...
Like after leaving Dachau and not being able to speak of being there for 2 years. “Those who forget the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them.” Is it still at the exit, I wonder.
Rickey, I think Robert Reich accurately explains what the Kochs were up to ... and what all today's gazillionaires are up to. It's not noble, charitable or penitent.
Exactly. I thought Reich made an important distinction there. The giving may do real good, but it doesn’t erase how the wealth was accumulated or the policies that made that accumulation possible in the first place.
The Koch Bros. are hardly alone in that. This is a story that goes all the way back to Alfred Nobel and the invention of dynamite.
Having said that, I'd far rather have a world where penitent sinners try to atone for how they got their wealth than one dominated by cruel, screaming shit-monkeys like Pete Hegseth bouncing up and down on his Florsheims just to make himself look taller.
I felt privileged to be able to share my respect for history -- both human and natural -- with people who come from all over the world to connect with it.
As a supporter of the Smithsonian I receive their magazine. The latest issue (Summer 2026) is a superb and not-so-subtle push back against the lies the regime is peddling. As a celebration of the country's 250th anniversary it includes a variety of articles highlighting American accomplishments, including medical advancements such as the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, (the son of Jewish immigrants); an early intellectual advocate for women's equality, Margaret Fuller (who also wrote about injustices against Native Americans); the essential abolitionists, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass; and pioneering advocates for the preservation of both our history and our environment, looking at the work of Alan Lomax, who spent years recording the folk music of ordinary Americans of all types, and Aldo Leopold, who advocated for understanding the complex interdependence of ecosystems.
There is much more in the issue, and I would encourage the fine people here to support the Smithsonian by buying the issue.
Oh my! This should all be put together and posted somewhere some how. I love the Smithsonian the free museums and the castle. And it has its great isms but still free museums!
We need to support new media as they document the present for the historians of the future. An example of an indefatigable woman doing this important work is Olga Lautman. She is another daily MUST READ for her cataloging of the evolution of Trump's tyranny. While Heather chronicles specific issues in depth each day, Olga sources the full panoply of events every day related to the Trump regime's attacks on our democracy, by the dozens, grouped into categories and themes.
Olga is also an incredible resource for understanding the functioning of the new Axis of Evil: Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. There is no question that the Ukraine War and the Iran War are now entangled with joint arms development and intelligence sharing. That, coupled with Russian threats against NATO members, with multiple drone incursions into Romanian airspace and overflights of Poland and the Baltic nations, while the Trump regime is withdrawing support for NATO, points to the threat of a broadening of conflicts into a merged European/Middle Eastern theater.
The fundamental question is what role the US will play in a broader war and where its allegiance will lie given the chaotic, erratic, sycophantic, strategy-free Trump regime foreign and defense policies.
The upgrade box kept moving across the text of the link you provided, so that I couldn't read it. Too bad, because it looked important.
People wonder why so many voted for Trump. Maybe it is because they can't afford to pay for the news that hasn't been filtered through what the wealthy want them to know. I see Substack headed in the direction of so many first of all, requiring payment to allow comments, then putting up paywalls in the middle of their essays that contain information many must know if we're going to reverse the impending authoritarianism and growing inequality.
When the main source of news was in print, people could leave their copy of the newspaper at the local diner or McDonald's to share with others who couldn't afford it. The K-shaped economy is creating a K-shaped propaganda system that is dividing us by socioeconomic status.
Agree about Substack. This has become a moneymaker for many rather than a way to inform. The “dangling carrot” is frequently used to encourage paid subscriptions in order to get the information promised in the next part of an email. I only know of one person who does not use this strategy to increase subscribers. That is Heather Cox Richardson. Thank you, Professor Richardson.
I think that’s one of the reasons Heather has built such a loyal community. People never feel like they’re being pushed. They support her because they value her work.
I pay for Heather and feel I’m getting a bargain. I trust her reporting and can only afford one newspaper myself. I get the benefit of everything Heather reads.
Heather has said she does not need the support. She has enough. She asked us to support others. But I have been reluctant to quit supporting her because I feel she should be supported regardless. HCR has the luxury. As well I think she realizes that getting her POV out, teaching, is important and necessary.. to reach a very wide audience, as many as possible. She is on YouTube as well and spread herself liberally as she can... very unusual, valuable, a treasure and a gift. As well she probably is making quite a difference.. at least holding us together and hosting this community. (see my comment above).
Paying should be voluntary. I accept voluntary payments, but don't require that people pay to read or comment. I know what it feels like to be excluded from knowledge or from participating because I can't afford it. There are other subscriptions I wish I could pay for, but I'm at my budgetary limit.
Gloria, I feel the same way. All of my essays are free because I want the ideas and conversations to be accessible to everyone. The only thing behind a paywall is my Weekly Reflection, which is a more personal piece and simply my way of thanking the people who voluntarily support the work. I’d much rather have people reading, thinking, and participating than feel excluded because they can’t afford a subscription.
Marj, nobody is asking any content creators to work for free. Gloria and Barb are addressing issues created by Substack and other "independent" media platforms.
First, let me note that an overwhelming number of Substack content creators, including HCR, derive income from other sources. This is not their survival platform.
Second, Substack has morphed from a forum for writers and artists to a revenue generator for the owners as well as users who simply want to generate income. As a member, I am deluged with emails from Substack suggesting ways I can leverage their latest new features to boost audience and make money. HCR chooses not employ these tricks. As the Substack content creator with the largest number of subscribers, she can afford not to.
Substack is competing for a larger slice of the social media pie by exploiting their content creators rather than selling ads.
Gloria states that her subscription to Letters is a bargain – and it is. Other subscriptions are $80, $100 or more per year.
When I subscribed to the Washington Post (before Will Lewis), I had daily access to dozens – maybe hundreds – of excellent content creators for $100/year. At the time, that was a bargain.
I've counted: If I were to pay for subscriptions to all the Substack content creators I appreciate and follow, my annual expenditure on Substack alone would be several thousand dollars. I can't afford that, and I doubt many people could.
Yet, Substack's owners refuse to offer a "bundling discount" similar to what cable TV operators offer.
“Let your conscience be your guide,” Jiminy Cricket. lol. I don’t believe in exploiting writers’ hard work, and I pay for what I can afford. I know that is how my 18 paying subscribers feel. I resent stingy Substack writers who bait you as though you are a hungry animal in a cage by showing you a little of what you are missing. I am a very curious person, and it seems cruel.
So far I am not complaining about Substack. We sorely needed this. As a forum it's invaluable, gathering community. It's good to hear your complaint and worries some of which I share though I do not create my own content.
Not necessarily. There is, apparently, another level above Subscriber called “Founder”, which I could never afford. There are so many good choices in Substack, it’s difficult to choose. And there are lots of gimmicks like, here’s $25, give 5 of your friends and family a free month, which then acts as advertising to those 5 and may obligate those not familiar with how Substack works to stop their subscription at the end of the month. Substack is an important way to provide a living to many great news reporters who may have lost their jobs in main media or who are just beginning this new career, and it is important to pay people for their work, but yes, there are limits to what I can afford.
the existence and timing of a paywall is the decision of the writer of the particular substack, not of management of the platform. Some writers choose, or need, to monetize their production, others leave it to people to volunteer payment.
How much do you think it costs to monetize Substack's production? I pay a yearly subscription for Grammarly and a monthly fee for internet access. I offer my Substack for free, and some people are kind enough to pay me for my work. My Social Security check is about $1500 per month.
Some of the people charging are wealthy by the standards of the people they expect to pay for the information they provide.
I confess I resent having to pay for their content. How much is enough?
Very true. We're trading our money for the time someone else has spent researching an issue. There's little we couldn't do/learn on our own. We only need to vet our sources.
The source in print one heavily relied upon was always insufficient.
I have been worried about this problem. As a substack becomes more successful, gathering audience, it's tempting for it to start limiting what is available to the non-paying subscribers and non-subscribers. After all journalists, writers, artists, analysis/ opinion writers have to make a living. They take a bold step or have to leave the MSM for one reason or another ( corporate buyout.. like WAPO). They need support. It's risky and competition. Some people blossom via substack.
But those of us out here begin to see that while this is beneficial and necessary it's a bigger and bigger bill that keeps accruing-monthly or annually. Like a candy store almost.
Substack is also a business. It's a marketplace. People who cannot afford or are of limited funds and time, have to choose. A lot of info, as well, is filtered and culled from (supposedly) reliable sources that report the straight news. (Do you still need the legacy media like the NYT or WSJ etc?) So your news is *curated* this way for you- often with links, some of which is behind a paywall, some "gifted", some links just available (NPR, the Guardian?) (We subscribe to the NYT WAPO-still, donate to NPR/PBS.) This is an investment in being informed. Some I read on the substacks have found reason to quit "the legacy media"- whatever that means and depend solely on substack, youtube, etc. Are we better off? Are we more channeled than ever?
I think we see what role the US is playing in the broader war. It is now reclaiming all of its weapons because they are running out, so the world can no longer look to the US to supply it with weapons when the country cannot supply itself. Pete Hegseth is wasting a lot of military budget on his testosterone initiative which in addition to being dangerous is quite costly and once started will need to be maintained after the person is out of the service from what I understand.
Idiots are running our country and that will have consequences for the US foreign policy that are leading to permanent rifts. Europe meanwhile has to slog on its own, and is not just joining Trump in his forever war with Iran. Europe is firmly behind Ukraine as a group, although individual countries are less or more. The US is looking to get drones from Ukraine, which has a better manufacturing set up for the weapons it makes. Ukraine attacking an Iranian ship providing weapons for Russia is not a sign of a world war, because Iran cannot afford to pursue this according to Malcolm Nance, former US military intelligence in the region.
I think Trump and Hegseth are so out of it and so ill-informed that they didn't realize that Iran is that closely allied with Russia, and they actually don't understand that China is providing the pipeline for high-tech components, including US-manufactured ones, to keep the Iranian and Russian war efforts going. Trump was totally OK with sales of advanced Nvidia chips to China that could go into drones.
Everything is transactional and amoral with Trump; he sees everything in terms of profit. Weapons deals are agnostic as long as some crony makes money off of it. Giving MBS uranium enrichment capabilities is the latest example. Trump doesn't have a clue about how that is an incitement for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon. But his buds at Westinghouse will make a killing.
Yes. These people make a killing and then find themselves living in a country that is very undesirable and complain about individuals or groups of people being the problem, when it is they and their amoral, neoliberal economic policies that are the problem.
Neoliberal, Linda? The people who, as you say, make a “killing” by being cronies of Trump? I haven’t noticed them being any kind of liberal, neo- or otherwise.
I too was confused when I first heard the term neoliberalism. Then I learned it is a term like National Socialism; it does not mean what its components mean. It's not liberal at all. It's Milton Friedman's "free market" capitalism and trickle down economics.
RJM, I recommend the book, "Secret Doctrine: The History of Neoliberalism" by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson, because they do a better job of explaining neoliberalism than I could.
Hegseth is acting like a cartoon super hero -- except that there is nothing super or heroic about him. If he could inflate his chest so that it pops off his shirt buttons, he would!
I don't know about heralding. Malcolm points out that Iran threatening Ukraine is not really different from Russia threatening Ukraine because Iran isn't going to do anything different from what Russia has been doing every day. On the other hand, Iran cannot risk Ukraine going after their worldwide assets, which it can.
That being said, if we look at the countries backing Russia, or Ukraine, or Iran, or Israel, or Lebanon we have a lot of countries involved in weapons provision, intel provision and troop training, so by that standard we already have a war that many countries of the world have a stake in, and particularly the US attack on Iran. If that is the definition then we might see it as a world war. However, it is not the definition I am using. I am using ones where countries declare war and engage in fighting.
Would it be fair to say the axis of evil now appears to include the U.S.? Except we are the hanger-on. Odd to see these delusions of authoritarian grandeur in a country that, for all and despite all its faults, has been a beacon of light in so many ways for so many years for so many people.
I'm not discounting its faults. But it also has greatness. It's a walking, talking contradiction of hope and despair. We have a choice to make. It won't be easy.
Krikit, we HAD a degree of greatness and even nobility. Sadly, we long ago sold these for wealth and comfort. It takes a lot of time and effort to recover from bad habits.
TY Georgia, I subscribed to Olga ..Balance needed from the brainwashing propaganda panda box ‘in power’. VOTE 💙 let’s get these sickos aptly behind the bars needed.
Let us hope the US does not seek to have a substantive role in a broader war, in any war. Are we still operating on the myth that wars can achieve anything good? Even "defensive" wars, so-called, soon become muddied and muddled and cross a line to become wars of aggression. There has got to be a better way to resolve conflicts. We've become permanent hostages to the arms manufacturers and those they fund.
Donna, I'm having trouble putting my finger on any "defensive" wars the U.S. has been involved in. The Revolutionary War was somewhat defensive, insofar as British colonists were shot by British regulars, but the dispute was about taxes not territory. The War of 1812 was declared by the U.S. against Great Britain over U.S. port blockades. That's sort of defensive. The U.S. doesn't like anyone messing with our revenue streams. The U.S. got dragged into World War II as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but that was more retributive than defensive. Likewise, the U.S. launch of the Iraq war was retributive. Seems to me, all the other wars involving the U.S. have been either assisting allies in their wars or naked military meddling rather than defensive.
Dale we've gotten involved in the 'defensive' wars of others. As you said, wars that might conceivably be considered defensive were never that. But the rationale for the morality of "just wars," is largely tied to the idea of wars as defense against aggression. Personally I don't think modern war is ever moral. If war ever was.
Between Olga Lautman's Tyranny Tracker, Anne Applebaum's Kleptocracy Tracker, Ellie Leonard, Kait Justice, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Sarah Kendzior, Heather Cox Richardson and handful of other writers here on Substack, it's a full plate every day! But I try!
One understanding of reality in any case, Real circumstances don't seem to care what we think of them, are what they are and do what they do; and understanding is human. Yet don't we as humans prosper when our understandings most agree with what is? So it would seem.
Much of the thinking of the American Experiment hails from "The Enlightenment Era". Not that those thinkers had all the answers, but it was an age of serious questioning and noticeably better answers than "The Dark Ages".
Obviously, a word such as hypothesis scares Trump folks. They don’t understand the scientific methods and statements of confidence or uncertainty. They want simple black/white Truth as defined in Trump’s posts and Fox News. They can’t handle “gray” issues that force them to think.
The White House Domestic Policy Council's 162-page document, titled Saving America's Story, was released on July 4, 2026, following a review ordered by President Donald Trump.
The White House Domestic Policy Council 162-page documents targets The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Rumor has it that a "White Power" cell wanted LENI RIEFENSTAHL's children on the cover with a banner "Lineage of Drumph".
UPDATE: Per Artforum headline: "TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ISSUES DEMAND FOR POLITICIZED LAWN SIGNS AT SMITHSONIAN"
Apparently Leni Riefenstahl never had any children but Karoline Leavitt, Natalie Harp and Susie Wiles sure seem to have the same adoration, loyalty and captivation with Trump as she had with Hitler. Maybe not genetically related but ideologically and politically kinsfolk through their fascistic propaganda, media manipulations, obfuscations and empowerment of a fuhrer...
''Welcome to the MAGA Museum of Alternative History''
The Trump administration has apparently discovered the greatest threat to American civilization, and it is not corruption, climate collapse, or a president treating executive power like a Costco sample tray. No, the emergency is a museum label explaining that slavery was bad.
That is why the White House is now trying to rescue history from historians. Apparently, trained scholars have been recklessly using facts, context, and complete sentences, when everyone knows proper patriotism requires a blonde child, a flag pin, and a multiple-choice test with the immigrant contestant quietly removed.
The new MAGA theory of history is simple. America sprang fully formed from George Washington’s forehead, slavery was an unfortunate foreign import, and the Civil War was a spirited disagreement about regional manners. The 258,000 Americans who died defending slavery should apparently be filed under “unpleasant trivia.”
At congressional hearings, Republicans demanded to know whether museum director Anthea Hartig loved America. This is now the official loyalty test: You must declare unconditional love while elected officials interrupt you, misquote you, and ask why the Smithsonian lacks an exhibit honoring “50 million aborted babies.” Nothing says serious historical inquiry like Lauren Boebert turning a museum hearing into open-mic night at the Apocalypse Saloon.
The administration even wants warning signs outside Smithsonian museums explaining that the exhibits were created by people who do not want visitors to love their country. Presumably, the gift shop will soon sell red hats reading, “I Visited American History and All I Got Was Uncomfortable Context.”
The problem is not that museums hate America. The problem is that authoritarian politics hates memory. History contains receipts, witnesses, contradictions, and names. It reminds us that patriotism is not worship. It is the difficult work of telling the truth about a country precisely because you want it to become better.
MAGA does not want history. It wants a bedtime story, with white heroes, obedient exhibits, and no scary facts after dark.
It also wants a washing machine where it can launder its oen bloody past, while making certain everyone else's stained clothing gets displayed prominently in the village square.
MAGA is the American equivalent of every insane, right-wing blood-and-soil movement in Eastern Europe for the past 200 years. They all keep alive every memory of every evil they were subject to, but forget about every one they inflicted on others. Memory works well, but only when it's not sanitized to the point of absurdity.
When you read the statement by the Domestic Policy Council, it is so much of a full-blown _confession_ of what they want to do with the Smithsonian (and other museums) that it’s almost funny. Well, almost.
The Trump administration is in progress trying to make us an intolerant ignorant society that they can dominate. Not gonna happen. Why? Because they are not smarter than we are.
And, riding in to backstop the effort: AI, which creates support that is impossible to distinguish from truth for any claim of historical fact.
It makes complete sense that people who want to control the political and social narrative would want to discredit objective truth and replace it with whatever supports their desires.
It's past time to legislate watermark requirements for all AI-generated content., with huge fines and jail time for violations. Protecting the truth from dilution by AI it too important.
Connect the dots...museums, books,R&D, immigration (unless South African white), allies, universites/colleges, educators, civil rights, voting rights, dissent, all attacked, and attorneys general eliminated.... Pol Pot hated the educated and the intelligencia too.
Steve, that is why we have to form a powerful resistance movement, much of which is underground and those who participate need to be vetted, but inclusive. We should have been doing that with the whole issue of abortion, find ways to carry out abortions and offer quality care with no one but the patient and practitioners knowing it. The network needs to be everywhere, but invisible but able to be contacted and activated when necessary. We the People have enormous talent, creativity, and flexibility. We need to use those things for the American people and anyone living here.
You're right. It's so much bigger than a museum. But if there is a clearer example of what the project is for Project 2025 and this administration, I don't know what is. The label "fascist" has been bandied about pretty recklessly and naively lately, so I enter it here cautiously. However, central to establishing and sustaining a fascist authoritarian rule is hyper nationalism, and that's what this is clearly all about. You can't feel nationalist fever with a nuanced view of your nation's history. It's all or nothing. They don't want a historical museum, they want a cheerleading exhibit to foster nationalist zeal. Add efforts to associate Trump with what makes the nation great (again?), while sidelining the other branches of government, and you have fascism. Pure and simple.
If the link fails, look at BBC news online, 26 July 2026, 09.41 BST,
‘US walks out of Security Council meeting during France’s remarks.’
There is nothing accidental in the Administrations attempts to re-write history to suit its contemporary political agenda, as described today by Heather Cox Richardson.
And, pointing to Heather’s eleventh paragraph (“Part of that, the report says, should include…”), the action on behalf of the US Government in the US Security Council is indeed contemporary ‘America’s contribution to global freedom’…
We can agree: shame USA.
Thank you Kelli, and thank you Heather, for focussing our attention on this unforgivable Administration and its actions.
Diabolical effort to both discredit the Smithsonian and encourage physical violence against the institution and its staff. Stay strong Smithsonian, and maybe put up some signs of your own.
Personally, I can't think of a better incitement to visit the Smithsonian than a ridiculous sign at the entrance to any exhibit letting me know Steven Miller doesn't approve of what I'm about to see.
To say these people are stupid on steroids is to insult steroids, I guess. Everything they touch is turning to shit with each passing day, and they know it. We know it. Most everyone else does too. In the meantime, kudos to our wonderful Smithsonian staff and volunteers for showing the past in all its complexity and countervailing currents.
What a great clip; thanks, ICTT. Sorry to say, I didn't recognize who it was sitting with Obama at the movie theater. Can you - or someone - fill me in?
That would have been our departed, former permanently Merlot-drunk (and forever weepy) Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who, by current standards, seems like a knight in shining armor....at least he had a sense of humor.
That was fun! Anyone else notice in the bottom center of the very last frame that Maria Bartiromo was giving the side-eye and not applauding. What a joyless heifer.
See, too, Mojave, the larger context of what matters when almost nobody reads books.
For a larger look at this predicament, see “The End of Reading is Here,” now in the August Atlantic, a beautifully, aptly long, marvelously researched piece by Rose Horowitch.
Her piece covers how the U.S. online, video world's "explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information."
She reminds us how "reading books is a workout for the attention span." And she looks well at how "Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me [to Rose Horowitch] how this plays out. 'You name an enemy and you polarize the public,' he said. 'You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.'"
Can our schools, can some public officials, Mojave, stress return to whole books, with all the nuances, complications, and serendipities Heather cites in real history?
One bright spot I've seen lately is more people reading on the NYC subway -- on my last ride on the train at least 4 people sitting near me were engrossed in their books.
Did you notice, too, all the camera personnel, wardrobe, and cosmetic others also assembled around this tableau? Didn't some marketing firm put this together following months-long research into finding all four persons in the greater-NYC areas who still read books -- then getting them on the same subway car together?
It truly is a great article. I sent it to my grandson and highlighted the paragraph about the young woman remembering being read to every night by her father.
Yes Trump and the regime stoking the stochastic terror again, and again...
I stand with the Smithsonian, for the right to know and tell Our history, to learn, educate, work and progress to actually be on the 'right' side of history...
Nice Loren. On Friday, Susan Collins thought she was insulting Troy Jackson by calling him a 'Bernie Bro'. I'm going to order some Bernie Bro pins with Jackson's picture on it(?). I'm open to better ideas.
There is a group called Citizen Historians or Historian Citizens that has been working on this issue for sone time. They were going to protest at the mall and have done lots of work with photographing exhibits in danger of being removed. Dr Joanne Freeman did two lovely videos of her at the Philly President’s House . We all should be doing these things if we are able. The Chicago National Archives is being shut down and I need to go there very soon! There are many national archives sites and so many historical sites . Pullman Historical area is also important.
I won’t live to see it, but someday there will be interesting exhibits at the Smithsonian about this bizarre period in American history when the inmates attempted, and even briefly succeeded, taking over the asylum.
Excellent assessment, JohnC. I don't think "forgotten" is quite right. I think that they were manipulated to believe that the lies they were being fed were the truth and thereby losing the ability to think critically.
I see strains of that in some of the comments here.
From the official 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. "
Feeling is essential to human sentience; I think and feel, therefore I am.
It appears to me that wisdom is hard to define precisely, but I believe it has to do with some degree of integration of both accuracy and value. By value, I mean what matters most to our species, and even beyond, as, if we are honest. we benefit greatly by things and beings apart from ourselves. Evolution preserves competition, but also mutuality and compassion, which is somehow less talked about; and I would argue that human intelligence is not just the ability to notice and process, but what you notice and process, and why. That's one of the things that has troubled people, such as Stephen Hawking, about AI.
The scientific method, and the epistemology at it's root, is one of humanities most fruitful and powerful tools, and it can help us prioritize our values, but not, in the end, determine them. That emerges from our own experience of sentience and experiential resonance with other beings. We are all an "I" ("ego" in Latin) and we are also all We. "We" appears early in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as mutual sentiment, and outcomes that we are inclined to condemn as "evil" lack conscience and compassion.
I think, and feel, therefore I am; and my personal envelope of sentience is enriched and grows or or withers, or goes dangerously septic with our capacity to emotionally mature.
I expect it will rate up near or with the holocaust when it's done.
Not only that question every school child asks "what they heck were they thinking?"
But all the unnecessary deaths. COVID, Gaza, Iran, Africa (ending USAID), the US. It can all be traced back to MAGA. (Ukraine? Technically not MAGA as it was Obama's screwup but given the fact that it's still going on I could see it being in the same exhibit)
And we now have reached the point where Climate change is not only undeniable but unfixable. Between that and the gutting of American agriculture... the famines will start soon. The small farmers who understood to protect their land quality have lost their farms. The corporate farmers care more about next quarter than next year or next decade. We may be looking at the Dustbowl part 2.
And an economic system that makes the Great Depression look like a walk in the park.
American Exceptionalism? No, more like the fall of the American Empire.
Why is DEI considered to be bad? “DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is a set of rules and ideas that schools and workplaces use to treat all people fairly, welcome different backgrounds, and fix old problems that left some groups out.” It’s simple. MAGA doesn’t believe in fairness, being welcoming and dealing with America’s problems. That’s the problem.
Somehow, some people are so adamant to see to it that another person (mainly of a different colour) won’t get _anything_, that they are willing to give up everything themselves - as long as “that lazy n**** doesn’t get anything”. They prefer dying in poverty to cooperating and having a good life for both black and white.
Dutch-The dynamic you describe so well has brought us to this place in time. America has been divided since the beginning and we're still fighting a "Civil War". The question is what kind of nation do we want to be.
The ideals and principles laid out in our founding documents have inspired some people to fight for the kind of democracy where "we the people" reign while others see these ideals as a hindrance to the kind of capitalism that enriches a few at the expense of many.
Americans have been indoctrinated with a false narrative about race. It's a man made concept designed specifically for the purpose of keeping us divided. Unity and truth would thwart the ability of those who want to maintain and promote division.
For centuries too many Americans have been brainwashed. Our laws and systems have intentionally supported the idea that some people are better and more deserving than others. Most of America is still segregated. This includes our educational system, churches and communities.
DEI and woke have been villainized. The opposite is no diversity, no equity and continued exclusion. This is how our government is now operating despite any previous progress we may have made after centuries of denying and bestowing human rights on people based on skin color.
I used to think that education would lead us out of the morass of racism but now after this regime was put in place by a majority of white people I see clearly a reluctance to move on from white supremacy. Most of us just want to get back to "normal" when normal has been part of the problem.
"Most of us just want to get back to "normal" when normal has been part of the problem."
So. Much. This.
Race is but one factor in this, albeit the most visible one that has had the most impact on the most people. Gender is another, as are physical/mental/emotional disabilities.
I think you're right, Gina. As Heather often puts it: "The Confederacy is still very much alive." It seems that a large part of the population is inherently racist (by indoctrination/"upbringing"), but hides it in the times when it's not suitable. But as soon as a leader appears who says it's fully ok to be racist, they come crawling out from every nook and cranny...
That is exactly the dynamic, it's just that there are other colors and other ethnicities besides "Black" that are excluded (or recruited) as it suits the "white". Like "Jews will not replace us!" from Charlottesville.
I'll bet most Magats don't know what the letters even stand for. And, along the same lines with "woke" -- being aware of social injustice, having an inclusive world view - basically a secular version of the Golden Rule.
I was so disgusted when I read Dave Portnoys book where he constantly ranks on wokeness and DEI etc etc. he is a Boston guy so I was curious being from here but after reading the book I’m disgusted because so many people follow this guy and his idiotic thinking. It’s disappointing.
Lauriemcf, that's a safe bet. Because in fact, magats know nothing about what they rail against. Ask a magat to explain what socialism is. Or communism. Or fascism. Or any other "ism." They can't define the terms, much less, explain the differences.
It’s racism mostly. Racists are destroying our democracy. Racism is an insult to our humanity. And racists deny reality. They have a fantasy that only white humans are worthy and deserve human rights. And now, look at what the white racists have accomplished: MAGA is their accomplishment.
The primary point of that NYT report is that the Democrats have put themselves in that hopeless position. And given how long and effectively they've been doing it, it cannot be anything but deliberate.
Oh no. Nothing is deliberate. Just a combo of being dense, accepting what I call unquestioning white man’s liberalism. I am a liberal radical whatever. I’m also conservative on may issues. I hve had as many fights with my liberal side as I’ve had with conservatives. I don’t like partisan bullcrap.
I should think it would be easy to explain. And btw, before we invented this cutesy phrase, what did we verbalize? Anti discrimination. Laws against redlining. Laws protecting women in the workplace place. Laws protecting based on race, gender. So the cute little DEI comes around.
I foolishly applied to be a vendor at the democratic national convention in early 2024. I forgot one pivotal word in front of the call out. The web site said “Virtual Vendor.” Central committee was seeking virtual vendors but in reality, it was data collection so that those who applied would be donation demand requested to death. Act Blue is involved. Ok, I get it. We all must do our share to help democrats win. But did the Central Committee have to be so devious? I was suckered into it and now forevermore, I’m hounded in text for donations. I asked to be removed but it won’t ever happen. Now back to DEI.
So I filled out the app to be a vendor (like hell). The app asked me, 1. Are you a woman-owned business, 2. Are you minority-owned business, 3. Are you union-friendly, 4. Are you LBGT. By this time I was thinking to lie and say I was gay just to get in. Cheeses Christ what has the world come to. And the whole process was designed to just collect my data just so I could be donation demanded to death.
So we have sliced and diced all groups and put them out front for first choice. Why? Because white people all white people have somehow been tarnished with the privilege doctrine. If you are white you are privileged. Now I understand there is history to this inequality. But in my opinion, we are moving in the wrong direction. We keep slicing and dicing. I don’t give a fuck who or what you are. Everyone is treated equally in my workshop. You might be half bird and half man but you will be treated EQUALLY. I noted a few years ago that a Black woman acquaintance can get into a convention to show her services but I had to pay.
Is that right? Of course it’s not right. I regret it. I rage against it. Why. Because it discriminates. And another matter. This disparity in the marketplace has helped create a very ugly backlash. Can’t you see it? Are your blinders so tight around your eyes that you can’t see the resistance. Don’t you understand that Joe Biden’s once white working class support base ran off and into the arms of MAGA republicans? Do you get it? What I am asking for is a discrimination-free system in which we certainly give aid to those who need it I’m not that stupid or blind. But cut out this shit about DEI. I have been against DEI way before Donald Trump ever came around. I don’t give a fuck what he believes in. I have my own belief system. It’s not perfect by any means. But it works for me. That woman I mentioned who gets in free based on her race and gender happens to have a related business to my own, but much larger than mine is. But she gets in for free. No, I’m against all forms of discrimination and in a real way, DEI discriminates.
I know I have lost 99% of you but I don’t give a twick. This is my explanation and what and why I believe. Have a good day.
Bill, this post could be a poster child for white male privilege. I know that you hate being called "privileged", and you might want to read what you've written here with a critical eye. To one on the outside looking in, you protest that questions were asked of you were discriminatory (at least that is my read, YMMV); you communicate an assumption that you should be allowed in with no considerations at all.
We are on the same side, we just see and experience the world very, very differently.
Also I explicitly said that we lost the nation to very unfit leadership that successfully manipulated enough voters to vote for the Antichrist of the ages. That is a major point. And again, laws can always be strengthened to protect. But we don’t need to isolate large segments of the population as we did putting working class out to pasture. Some felt they had no where to turn so they revenge voted a monster into office. You don’t get it and frankly as I stated, I expected 99% here to not understand at all the complexity of successful governance in a democracy. You too may join the New Snazzy Nazi dance craze sweeping the country, lol. Or be sent to detainment camps as my story goes in my book, Donald’s Vanity Tantrums. You would enjoy the read.
And so you don’t understand what I’m saying and I don’t understand what you are saying. Sounds like a good play to watch at the theater.
“Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that there is a savior on the horizon. We are waiting for the Second Coming. We live in a society fixated on heroes who save the day. This childish mythology denies us our agency. The way to save the day is collective action. We the People are the Second Coming.”
If history is an accurate guide, Republicans can’t be trusted about anything. Remember “Swift Boating”? Accusations of Hillary sex trafficking in a pizza parlor basement? Obama birtherism? Hunter Biden’s laptop nothingburger and the “Biden crime family”? They follow the commander-in-chief of mendacity. They used AI fakes to smear Rep. Thomas Massie in his Kentucky primary. They tried to smear Darializa Avila Chevalier in a NYC Democratic Party primary for U.S. Representative with taken out of context social media posts and false statements from the Dominican Republic (her parent’s country of origin). They smeared Graham Platner with unverifiable accusations from Lyndsey Fifield, an ultra right wing (Heritage Foundation) political activist. They tried to accuse James Talarico of being LGBTQ but he turned it back on them. They tried to smear Senator Ruben Gallego (AZ) over an accusation of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct by Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.). But the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint because no evidence was found to verify the complaint. The latest Republican propaganda falsehoods claim Democrats are communists. They apparently don’t even know what the definition of communism is. It’s where the government owns all the businesses. In that vein note that Trump has started buying U.S. government stakes in private businesses. Who is the communist? Etc., Etc.. This is the MO of Republicans. Attack opponents with misrepresented ad hominem attacks to character assassinate and demonize them so you don’t have to discuss the real issues.
(B) U.S. Representative Jim Hines, 4th District of Connecticut, Ranking member of House Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee and a member of the “Gang of 8” (a term used for the eight key leaders in the U.S. Congress who are briefed by the executive branch on highly classified intelligence matters and covert operations), was interviewed by the Bulwark about Trump’s 7/16/26 speech and the prospects for a free and fair November 2026 election and what can be done (19 min.).
(C) For those interested in the Maine U.S. Senate race, this is Troy Jackson’s record that he is running on:
(a) Universal School Meals: Sponsored cornerstone legislation in 2021 establishing Maine as one of the first states in the country to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students;
(b) Prescription Drug Reform: Sponsored and helped pass a comprehensive 2019 reform package to regulate drug prices, increase price transparency, and allow the wholesale importation of medicine.
(c) Child Care Wage Stipends: Introduced legislation in 2023 to expand the state’s Child Care Affordability Program and secure monthly wage stipends for child care workers.
(d) Criminal Justice & Domestic Violence: Championed a 2018 bill (LD 449) mandating an automatic life sentence for domestic abuse resulting in murder and establishing special sentencing weights.
(e) Healthcare & Insurance: Supported and co-sponsored major health legislation, including laws to codify Affordable Care Act (ACA) protections and prohibit certain medical facility fees. And several other legislations.
He says if elected he will push for key pieces of legislation and policy initiatives he supports which include:
Healthcare: Championing legislation to implement a Medicare-for-all healthcare system and laws to combat high pharmaceutical costs.
Labor & Wages: Pushing for federal legislation that protects union workers, strengthens collective bargaining rights, and supports working families.
Technology: Proposing safeguards to limit job displacement from artificial intelligence, mandate ethical AI use in government, and enforce environmental standards for AI data centers.
Childcare: Advocating for federal investments to provide free or highly subsidized childcare for working families.
Corporate Accountability: Backing legislation to heavily regulate private equity buyouts of hospitals and nursing homes.
And several other Legislations. What’s not to like?
(D) “The Overton window is the range of ideas, policies, and public beliefs that a society finds acceptable at any given time. Named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, the model explains that politicians usually only support ideas inside this window to avoid looking too extreme or losing public support. The window can move up or down the political spectrum over time as social values change. Activists, media groups, and politicians often push extreme ideas on purpose. Even if the extreme idea is rejected, it can drag the rest of the conversation with it, making a previously radical middle-ground idea look reasonable by comparison.“ In her politics chats Heather and others like Robert Reich have pointed out that far right extremism in this country has dragged the Overton window to the right so far that what was once middle of the road moderation is now viewed as left wing. Heather showed this by reading parts of the 1956 Republican National Platform of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower which contained positions which many current Democratic Party candidates are running on but the current Republicans denounce as left wing extremism.
(E) TRUMP CONTINUES TO ATTEMPT TO RIGG THE 2026 ELECTIONS
Marc Elias, American voting rights attorney and podcaster (DemocracyDocket), discusses the latest maneuver by Trump to alter voting in elections. In March 2026 Trump issued Executive Order 14399 “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in U.S. Elections”. It: (1) directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of U.S. citizens whom they believe are eligible to vote; (2) Directs the U.S. Postal Service to only send out election ballots to people on the lists compiled by DHS and SSA. Asks States to send in their voter lists 60 days prior to the election or they will be sued by DOJ; (3) Directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute election officials who send ballots to people whom the Trump Administration has determined according to their culled lists are ineligible to vote. (What could possibly go wrong?) Noncompliant States are subject to the loss of Federal Funding.
Lawsuits were filed in the Massachusetts 1st Circuit by State Attorney Generals and the Judge ruled to deny and block the implementation of the Executive Order. Trump has recently appealed the ruling to the SCOTUS which is currently out of session and on summer vacation. Another lawsuit was filed concurrently in the DC Court by Marc Elias and other parties who have now filed amicus briefs with the case before the SCOTUS.
Marc Elias calls this a full assault by Trump on U.S. elections and democracy.
Wake up, people; the fix is in -- and, yes, we are contending with unprecedented Evil. (Have been ever since 4 July 1776; greatest scam in human history.)
Your journal records how much of our democratic crisis comes down to a sustained assault on reality itself. Once a political movement decides that truth is optional --that evidence, expertise, and documented history are inconveniences rather than obligations -- every institution built to preserve our shared reality becomes a target: historians, journalists, scientists, educators, and even museums whose only mission is to tell the human story as honestly as possible.
The pattern is familiar across human history: when groups abandon reality, they abandon the feedback loops that keep societies functional. You cannot solve problems you refuse to see. You cannot steward a nation you insist on mythologizing. And you cannot sustain a democracy when large factions treat truth as a negotiable commodity.
This is why your work that you are sharing on Substack and other media and the work of every serious chronicler of human history matters so profoundly. Establishing reality is not an academic exercise; it is the foundation of national capacity. It is how free people coordinate, how institutions learn, and how future generations inherit something better than chaos.
We are living through a period when the most basic civic responsibility is simply to insist that facts remain facts. That is the quiet, essential work of stewardship. And it is the work that will determine whether the next generation inherits a functioning republic or a cautionary tale.
Thank you for your personal dedication to recording the truth.
Sadly, I think those promoting the “alternate facts” view of history, actually believe their own lies. Remember, most of them were raised in very white, comfortable, protected environments where they were led to believe everyone lived that way. Poor little rich kids; they cling to their own distorted world view. But my sorrow at their unfortunate lack of perspective doesn’t prevent me from fighting every day for TRUTH and justice.
I wonder how much of the sense of a perfect past is being held in ones' mother's arms? Or maybe even the encompassing warmth of the womb prior to birth. What nation in the world is "perfect"? Not this one according to Republicans. Trump is always citing some kind of "emergency" and Republicans constantly fume about all they say is "wrong".
Was there ever a perfect time? Nope. Even in fiction, as well as on record, there were the fearsome "Four Horsemen" and more. We might find some historical lives that seemed to go exceedingly well, given the circumstances: yet just what, overall, were those circumstances, and their pros and cons? Some eras seem more attractive than others and we might learn from that some ways to optimize our own possible future, but to actually GO there? What might you be giving up? Take an inventory.
The present moment? The world is replete with beauty, opportunity, and terrors, and if you are unacquainted with the latter. no doubt you know someone who, is or was. or likely inevitably will. Life is hard enough at baseline without the ego games that make it harder, when not abjectly tragic. Once again, perhaps our world can be a rose garden, despite the presence of thorns, and also once again, we might learn something, provided we are willing to consider what is wise to seek, what is wise to avoid, and what is wise to greet with gratitude.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten... History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." - George Orwell
Hitler, a frustrated former painter, despised modernism, abstraction, and avant-garde movements, viewing them as elite, Jewish, or communist plots that threatened German society. Between 1937 and 1939, a special Reich commission stripped German museums of more than 16,000 to 21,000 works of art. Masterpieces of Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Dadaism were stripped from gallery walls. The regime organized the infamous 1937 “Degenerate Art” Exhibition 1937 in Munich. They deliberately hung these purged museum pieces haphazardly alongside derogatory slogans to mock and radicalize public opinion against modern culture. Leftover purged art was either sold internationally to raise foreign currency for Nazi remilitarization or burned in a massive courtyard bonfire at the Berlin fire department.
Hitler utilized Germany’s prominent military museums to reshape public memory of World War I, reinforcing his false Dolchstoßlegende (the "stab-in-the-back" myth) that Germany only lost the war due to internal domestic betrayal. The Zeughaus (the prestigious military history museum in Berlin) was completely re-engineered under a 1940 directive issued by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel on Hitler's orders. Army units occupying foreign territories (like France and Belgium) were ordered to survey local museums, dismantle historic war memorials, and seize captured German weapons that were on display as Allied trophies. These items were forcibly shipped back to the Berlin Zeughaus to sanitize historical memory and create an exhibit portraying German military infallibility.
Hitler's ultimate ambition for rewriting museum history was the creation of the Führermuseum. This was a massive, hyper-ambitious cultural complex planned for his hometown of Linz, Austria.
To stock this dream museum, Hitler ordered the systematic, continent-wide looting of European artwork and cultural treasures. Specialized task forces stripped pieces from occupied national museums and systematically plundered private collections belonging to Jewish families.
In 2026 a sign at all the Smithsonian’s should say, "A lying Felon demanded this Warning: the exhibits in this museum . . ."
And the (literal) Mother-rapers have even stolen the acronym of my blog, OAN -- Outside Agitator's Notebook -- thereby killing it forever (because Blogger doesn't allow name changes), destroying even the tiny bit of my work that survived their 1 September 1983 arson). Morrigan curse them every one.
Those of us born after WWII now see how Hitler did it. Lies by people who once knew better are replacing the truth to support a madman for fear of being punished or in hopes of getting some of his loot.
The Milgram experiments showed that the underlying truth of the WWII immoral behavior is OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. The MAGA crowd has been taught since childhood to conform to prevailing norms (in their little world) and to do what they’re told. Witness January 6. They will continue to follow the dictates of Project 2025 as they’re told by Dear Leader.
surely it's a universal and permanent truth that gold is beautiful, so covering everything in gold must show a devotion to beauty. Truth is optional ...
The degree of detail that MAGA supporters use to attack our institutions, intelligence is utterly breathtaking. No stone left unturned and altered to support a false narrative. Like an army invading.
Reality will win in the end--it always does. But one thing we can all do to accelerate the collapse of Trump's fantasy empire of lies is to relentlessly call out the lies, to "call bullshit" at every turn, as Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West wrote in their book of the same name.
Dr. Richardson's courage and unwavering dedication to facts and reality are a shining light and an example for all of us who love democracy, freedom, equality and truth.
I beg to differ. These people are proof that reality does not necessarily win in the end. The Post-WWII American policy is why these people somehow believe that America is exceptional and has never done anything wrong.
The idea that AMERICA brought down slavery is just about the dumbest thing I've ever read. If we had lost the Revolution and stayed part of England then we would have been without slaves long before 1865. England was literally turning our slaves into free men in 1770's. This is part of why we went to war to begin with. They had already realized that slavery was an abomination. It was the American Oligarchs of the southern colonies who disagreed. Thousands of slaves escaped to work with the British and were given passage to go to England as free people.
The whitewashed history books we were all taught with are a direct result of the American government's plan to promote patriotism and exceptionalism after the end of WWII... not truth.
So I believe there are more than just a few MAGA who actually believe this crap. There are many well meaning people on the left that also believe this crap because that's what we were taught in school. But it's still not true.
Talk to historians. Read some books and websites. Read about Ona Judge. And you realize that it was all BS. But your average high school graduate working 40 a week, partying on Friday night, Going to the beach on the weekends with their kids has literally never been taught anything but the whitewashed American exceptionalism story.
BLB-Well said. If only the truth could prevail. The evidence is well documented and available. Efforts to deny, distort and ignore the truth have prevailed. The 2024 election shows us whose winning.
This seems so much bigger than just museums. Once people stop trusting historians because the truth is politically inconvenient, it becomes easier to dismiss journalists, scientists, judges, and anyone else who documents reality. That’s how reality itself becomes negotiable.
Kelli, it is bigger than just museums. It is about bringing down the educated elite. The people who are Trump's followers don't trust historians anyway. My political book club is reading a book called" Die Globale Rechte:Geschichte, Erfolgsbedingungen, Auswirkungen" (The Global Right: History, Conditions for Success, and Impact) by Marcel Lewandowski, and in it he points out that attacking intellectuals has historically been coded language for attacking Jews, just as attacking Immigration is code for attacking non-whites. Hungary's attack on George Soros is a case in point. Here all the coded language turns into justification for actions that are both racist and anti elitist. It is frightening how much work goes into destroying truth and reality, and replacing them with lies and conspiracy theories. We need to all beware.
Recommend the book, "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson, Author of "Warmth of Other Suns".
Great recomendation! Both "Caste" and "The Warmth of Other Suns" are books that should be read by all Americans.
Agree! If not only for the truth that was written, then at least for the quality of writing and authorship of each book. Isabel Wilkerson is an extraordinarily detailed writer.
What is sad is that Isabel Wilkerson wrote about how the Germans studied the U.S. Jim Crow efforts to deny people of color (former slaves) their civil rights.
John,
I'm currently reading Caste and just finished the chapter on the Nazi policy meeting held in 1934 that to design policy around controlling the Jews. The meeting seemed completely guided and amazed by an in depth study they had generated on how the "dominant caste" subjugated blacks in America, i.e. Jim Crow laws.
Agree. It was painful to read.
Riad, I have had the privilege of reading both books and found them excellent: thought-provoking, challenging, well-written, and painful to read at times. Those are definitely good reasons to read them!
Without doubt, Ruth. The truth hurts worse for Trumpers than for us, which is exactly, as you say, why those folks need to read her books. Our discomfort is born from reimagining what so many of our disenfranchised citizens had to go through; there (MAGA mentality folks) discomfort would come from fighting to deny what clearly was and is in front of their eyes. It must be terrible to know that, and embrace a lie, yet accept it at the same time, all for the glory of their white shade.
Love both those books!
And let's put up a display of Ronald Reagan giving this last speech ("a love letter") lionizing our country's immigration history.
Whatever will the Heritage Society say about that! Stephen Miller's head will explode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R8QxCD6ir8
I was never a Regan fan, but this was a speach for all to see & hear. It discribes clearly what we've lost under this Presidency.
Spot on - while I disagree with the opening comment that a foreigner could never become French (etal) , the central message is spot on. The Maga Party (used to be the Republican Party) has brought Reagan's warning to its shameful current state of shame. Our founding documents are aspirational - this means we have not achieved those ideals. We must continue to actively pursue them, embrace them, preserve them. I fear the average citizen rightfully cares about rising prices but does not really understand or place high value on those founding words. That lukewarm response is a danger to our democratic existence. I often disagreed with Reagan but he knew how to lead, he knew how to inspire, and he knew how to use the bully pulpit.
Who wrote it? I know he was well read so maybe he did?
Reagan was well read? Um, no he was not. Read Andy Borowitz's book "Profiles in Ignorance"; it is satirical (but not a satire) but also truthful and enlightening--more so than most things Reagan said.
Reagan had skillful staff and speechwriters
speechwriter
Thanks for the link. I keep a file of notes on various topics of interest, and have added this to one of mine: Reagan'sspeech that day.. Here's the relevent text.
“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Could someone please make signs with this text and Reagan's photo to put up in front of the White House every day? We need a news story about it...
Wonder who wrote that for him? He had a nice voice for reading. Nancy was using an astrologer to help her make decisions for him at the end of his presidency when dementia was becoming apparent. This is a nice sentiment about immigrants, but Reagan was manipulated and groomed to set in motion policies that led to a society bookended by the homeless and the billionaires. The Republicans conveniently forgot that the job of government is to take care of all its people. And they continue to sow hatred.
Given what's happening right now, that doesn't sound to me lke the worst way for the US to run its foreign policy.
Reagan was naive. He was the equivalent of the Marlboro Man. But, I'm afraid he was a dull tool for some behind-the-scenes manipulators. And there is/are quite a handful of them. Remember the 11 & 12% mortgage rates and plenty-more deviousness. It's grown from there. Yess, today we have Trump the punching bag, distracting you and I from what is going on underneath. I think the DNC is complicit.
Thank you for sharing that video. I had never seen or heard it before. Reagan seemed sincere, and he was not a particularly good actor. At least it took off the extremely sharp edge of my "upseted-ness" over the content of today's letter for a few minutes.
The truth is the truth, whether we like it or not.
Mary Ann, my hair is. on fire reading about that poor Indian student who tried and tried to bring home the gold and was slapped down by racists. Sickens me that innocent children are being used as pawns.
Some of the best students that I taught in my Art classes were Indian. They were encouraged by their families to pursue extracurricular activities and interests and they excelled at them. I attended an Indian dance performance given by one of my best students who excelled at seemingly everything she did....painting, writing, mathematics, languages, music and more. I think skewing the questions in that way should have been illegal.
Your hair burns, my tummy pukes. Lots of strange sickness going around. I really, really want to feel healthy. And I know you do too.
In the Age of Trump, the truth is often in hiding.
I like it! Great point!
Oh, don't I just wish! (That Miller's head would explode upon watching Ronnie Raygun giving his last speech praising immigration)
I would pay money to see the pimple pop! While I think it is unfair to demean and belittle someone for their inherent stupidity, the rectal polyp needs a lesson in being human. The sniveling NAZI is a shame on all who love our country! Warts and all…our greatest skill was learning and it was a super power, great universities…and engineers…and writers…and truth-tellers.
Unfortunately, concurrent with Americans who have loved and lifted up education and learning, is a very dark streak. That dark streak consists of not only those who are ignorant but also those who love and cherish that ignorance and pronounce it to be better than "them thar elitist, educated folk who think they is better than us." That ignorance has been--and still is--endlessly exploited by businesses and politicians. (case in point: the discount Foghorn Leghorn, Senator Kennedy of Louisiana who has an excellent education including a stint at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, but in order to be acceptable to his constituents, affects a accent thicker than roux for gumbo.)
Although I will note that the bulk of the real work in this country is done by folks have a certificate, maybe two years ago a CC, and see these ‘elites’ dismissing their value and intellect…you must admit there is a very strong eugenics streak in higher education, even though intelligence is not really heritable.
And yes GW learned to mispronounce nuclear to get votes in Texas…I spent 30 years in higher education and found a few actually remarkable people…no more than working in construction. Actually the vetting process in building stuff was higher than in so called higher education…really!
Shared
Thank you for the link.
Liverpool, they will blame Democrats for Reagan's pro-immigration speech; somehow Democrats got into the room where the speech was written and reworked it. Since Reagan had Alzheimer's by then, they will say he was just reading it. OR, they will say that "times have changed and we don't need immigrants anymore." Republicans have lost any semblance of decency they had in Reagan's time. It has joined as Trumplandia and its unamerican activities are creating an enemy within, a kind of treason against the American people and our Constitution.
Warmth of the Other Suns was an amazing and educational book. I highly recommend and agree with KMD that it should be read by all Americans.
I have Caste on my "to read" pile. I'll have to move it up a bit!
Walker's comparative analysis of other culture's "caste" hierarchies is powerful & revealing particularly the "untouchables" of India.
Good name for a book club: "The Untouchables".
Put it on the top. It's that important and powerful.
reading it now. Also, The Sum of Us - Heather McGee
√
What’s worse - an immigrant winning, or allowing that poor girl and her family to know that our country actively undermined her?!
The movie Origin is based on caste book. Beautifully presented.
i am an audio book person. I just borrowed Caste and among 3 libraries (2 people share their libraries with me) that I can borrow from The warmth of other suns is not available in audio or print. If anyone else can check their library and share it with me, I would appreciate it .
Nancy, it’s widely available in both formats. In fact I listened to Warmth from Audible. It’s also available on Libby, if your library uses that. Don’t give up. You’ll find it.
And I’m listening to Caste and about 7 hours in. It’s a hard listen
I don’t have audible. I do use Libby and it’s not in The 3 libraries I have access to
I must add one more comment. “It is painful to read this post and others like it that are so demeaning and hurtful to U.S. citizens, immigrants, guests, as well as our democracy and Constitutional laws.
I tried to read "Caste". There were so many inaccuracies that I had to stop reading (and I'm a progressive).
We should have a real debate about DEI ideology in this country, because it's not because neofascists have chosen it as their target that somehow, by definition, it was a good idea in the first place.
Good starting points are the books by Jon McWhorter and Susan Neiman.
What, in your frame of reference would constitute a "real debate about DEI ideology"? I am genuinely curious.
A frame of reference that drops the very idea of "frame of reference" and goes for objectively proven truths instead :-).
Like women not being permitted to get a credit card in their own name until the early 70’s?
I've read CASTE, twice. Once on my own and again with my book club. It is a heartbreaking, powerful book. I recommend it too.
Also Jason Stanley's Erasing History
Thank-you for posting this. I loved "Caste"! I wish every American would read it. I still think about it a lot.
Both great!
Thanks so much Bryan for these 2 recommendations!
Remaking the country's image to reflect Trump. And everyone knows what he is.
That is Harvey, except for the 30+% that think he is the second coming and /or a reptilian shape shifter that came on earth to save them.
Linda, nicely put.
Trump is just the stand in. Stephen Miller has been taken over by evil.
Years ago I recommended to the author of “Democracy in Chains,”
Professor and historian at Duke (tobacco) University that the university should rescind Miller’s degree. Sigh.
“Are America’s School Books written according to the Ideology of the Epstein Class?”
Disclaimer: Rhetorical. No response required
Solution? Read Dr Seuss He was insidiously clever in his mockery. The rhymes used to keep you distracted while he taught young minds to think. “Sneetches” and “The Butter Battle Book”; similar to Rocky and Bullwinkle
Thank you both ,Linda and Kelli..and Heather🫶…will in the end most not believe a thing a Republican says…finally?
Be sure to write …Donald accomplished this…but not single handedly..pride went long before that fall
I sentiment also
Linda, I have been saying that the global cabal conservatives fear and preach about is among them. It is not a liberal thing, but conservative aimed at entrenching power for the purpose of profit and exploitation.
Rickey, my book club has just started reading "Die Globale Recht: Geschichte, Erfolgsbedingungen, Auswirkungen" (The Global Right:
History, Conditions for success, Impact) by Marcel Lewandowski. In it he is making a distinction between conservatives and far right. In "far right" he has 3 categories: far right populists, far right radicals, and far right extremists. If you find a translation I recommend it for really teasing out what people are and the antecedents to the thinking. It is interesting. We are liking this book that we just started.
We are aware and frightened. We know how bad this is.
Linda, the know nothing attitude. I have encountered this constantly since the advent of the internet which makes everyone an expert on history, medicine, science, etc. I am reading now Book and Dagger about the need to get an intelligence service (OSS) going during WWII. They hired lots of professors, librarians, archivists, etc.
Michele, the book sounds interesting. I am interested in intelligence services. Who is the author.
Elyse Graham. I am finding it very interesting.
That sounds a bit simplistic to me, when Israel itself now has a government that leans towards neofascism, and quite some Jews (although still a minority) inside the US support the neofascist GOP too.
As to intellectuals: the problem is much bigger than that. The problem is that, where a democracy vitally needs intellectuals, fascism knows that intellectuals can destroy a fascist regime. So the need to silence them is real.
It's also not something only neofascists care about. In 1976, Irving Kristol, founder of neoconservatism, wrote an op-ed in the WSJ entitled "The Stupid Party". In it (already in the first paragraphs), he argues that in a "healthy society", intellectuals HAVE to stay "at the margins", because as soon as they participate actively in public debates... conservatives cannot but lose elections. Conservatives need people to vote with their gut feeling, he writes.
And remember, Kristol is a Jew himself...
So it's imagining THAT somehow all intellectuals would be Jews, or that all Jews are pro-intellectuals, that ITSELF prolongs a stereotype that today, not many people share anymore in the first place...
It is bigger than just museums. It's an ethnic cleansing strategy. Now, I say Trump is doing this, but actually he is too stupid to actually think this philosophically. But others around him do, and he is base enough to feel the underlying emotions without the erudite philosophy.
This is how anthropologist James Greenberg explains the point.
"Romantic nationalism [which Trump is attempting to redefine] held that nations are defined not by a social contract but by blood, language, religion, custom, shared history, and collective memory. Culture was understood as the essence of a people, each possessing its own unique spirit that could not be reduced to universal principles. Belonging was less about citizenship than membership in an imagined historical community.
Nations are rarely as culturally homogeneous as their myths suggest. Most encompass multiple peoples, languages, religions, and historical memories. Yet nation-building often requires forgetting as much as remembering. States construct narratives of common origin and shared destiny, but these narratives often erase internal diversity, suppress inconvenient histories, and marginalize peoples who do not fit the national story.
As a political project, Romantic nationalism sought to define the boundaries of the state by aligning it with what it regarded as a single people united by common culture, history, language, and ancestry. By equating the nation with a people, it consolidated power in the hands of the dominant group and defined who belonged and who did not.
Romantic nationalism worked differently in Europe than in the United States. In Europe it often sought to unite culturally similar peoples divided among competing states. In the United States, the conditions were different. The continent held hundreds of Native nations, a large enslaved population, and a steady stream of immigrants from diverse traditions. Early loyalties ran to the states rather than the federal government. American nationalism had to invent a common identity rather than recover one. That identity coalesced around those who held power—predominantly white, European, Christian, and English-speaking. Native peoples and African Americans were left outside the imagined community.
Once a people imagines itself as the authentic nation, policies of assimilation, exclusion, removal, and, in extreme cases, ethnic cleansing become conceivable means of aligning the state with its imagined community."
ICE and rewriting history per the above exclusions ARE Trump's ethnic cleansing...to our nation's detriment.
Linda, that is why we who care about our nation and our history have to work harder to demonstrate to the American people just how much Trumplandia depends on lies, disinformation, gaslighting, and hate to get people who don't know any better to harm others they are being programmed to hate. I am hoping most people don't want to be haters, but we need to point out to them that this is exactly what Trumplandia wants them to become! That is not a Christian way of life, nor is it part of Islam, Judaism, or any other major religion I know of. OK, it is part of Trumplandia's modus operandi.
Ruth, I think Trump is doing a good job on his own of demonstrating to the people what it feels like to live under catastrophe and chaos, yet again, without even having a plague like covid.
In the book, "The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging" Noelle Cook concludes that to wrest these women and people from their conspiracy narrative world, they need to decide that on their own. Perhaps our role is to be there for those who leave the fold and try to rejoin the sane world. We need to be non-judgmental.
If you want to bring down the elite, have your book club read, "The Decline of the German Mandarins," by Fritz Ringer. It has the definitive story. Furthermore I am personally aware of two book clubs that never had another meeting after selecting this book.
(Read the reviews on AMAZON to get a taste.)
Bob, thanks for the recommendation. I will add it to our list of books we will potentially read. Having divested from Amazon, I will have to find a different source for book review.
It is truly unbelievable to see and hear of these distorted attacks on our country and citizens.
You do have to wonder if they ever had a history class. Do they recognize how their fantasies and outlook parrots the history of Germany’s time with Hitler?
Linda, I was just thinking that this assault against this storied institution has stephen “goebbels” miller’s handiwork all over it. He must have really suffered trauma as a kid to be so hate-filled towards America and the truth that made us a great country the world admired and aspired to. No more.😢💔
It is authoritarianism 101 - discredit (or eliminate) the educated intellectuals who are capable of critiquing the destructive nonsense coming out of such a regime.
It's no accident that the first people they went after were comedians and historians. The first because of the obvious -- comedians prompt ridicule -- at THEM -- for their absurd attempts to rewrite natural and human history based solely on Donnie's vast array of wee widdle butthurts and psychiatric distempers. The latter because they narrate our real past, rather than the make-believe-Disneyland-Father-Knows-Best version acceptable to Donnie Doofus as he tries to turn America into a dystopic chapter from "1984."
I used to be a volunteer at both the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History (right next to American History) as well as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The former would get visited by groups of evangelical loonies who took exception to the very existence of the Museum's Hall of Human Origins, sometimes staging group public prayer sessions there (which nobody ever interfered with). Some of the left took exception to its bearing the name Koch Hall of Human Origins, since David Koch donated $10 million to help create it 20 years ago. (Any donor to the Smithsonian signs away all rights over content, however, and the Koch Brothers had no role in what the Museum chose to exhibit).
In 2019, the Smithsonian re-opened a re-imagined and rebuilt Dinosaur Hall -- Deep Time. Starting with the formation of the solar system, and tracing the 5 Great Extinctions to highlight trade-offs we are all making right now, during the Anthropocene, the exhibit is a celebration of Charles Darwin's fundamental contribution to science and includes his sentence displayed above the exhibits: "From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and ARE BEING, EVOLVED."
The other day, one of those Congressional pea-brains tried to snare the Director of American History, by waving a pink baseball cap with the words "Latina Power" on it at her, demanding to know what that meant (it's among the swag and stuff sold at the Museum's gift shop, run by private contractors). How this eminent American historian kept from bursting out laughing, I've no idea.
ICTT thank you so much for being one of the volunteers at the Smithsonian.. what an experience.
Haven’t been back to DC for a number of years. Going through the Holocaust Museum with a friend is one of the most overwhelming experiences in our lifetimes. We left there and didn’t speak for hours, just walked…
Most thinking people are simply stunned into silence by what they see. The lanyard holding my federal ID said it well -- I would sometimes show it to people at the end of my tours -- "Think About What You Saw Here" -- It was really the only thing we could ask of visitors.
I would be surprised if any MAGAt ever visited that section…
Will anyone be surprised if the Trump administration tries to close the Holocaust Museum for "indefinite" repairs?
Has there ever been a time since the 1600's that the America's were so adverse to the truth and education?
It did?! I didn’t know that. I was there with my daughter last week—she’d never been.
Maybe the parallels between the Trump admin and the Nazis were too obvious for the white supremecists.
MAGA would be more likely to use the Holocaust Memorial Museum to boost support for Netanyahu since evangelicals want to bring about Armageddon.
I held up a tour bus in Israel while visiting that Holocaust Museum. I remember being so shook up I could not let go of (in my head) the exhibit of the room filled with a huge pile of children's shoes. I could not stop crying. The vision still haunts me.
I have tried three or four times to watch Schindler's List and I just can't. It still feels incomprehensible to me we can treat others this way.
Marj years later it still remains..
May we all do our part together now to not ever allow this to happen ever again within our own nations boundaries … Too big to Rig - Vote and grab your friends with you…
My son and I toured the Holocaust museum in D.C. when he was twelve. It is emotionally overwhelming. The exhibit that really affected him was the display of yellow stars - a small quiet display. There was the star for someone who is one quarter Jewish. He would have had to wear such a star. It hit him so personally, as if it had his name on the label.
Took five of my grandchildren through this museum after my own experience years later. At that time they were various ages, the youngest twelve the oldest sixteen they only made it to the shoes, before they all were unable to control their sobs. The one who was sixteen had a friend at the time who denied that the Holocaust ever happened. Weeks later my sixteen year old grandson in a conversation mentioned he no longer was friends with this person any longer...Think that in our children's and grandchildren's and further generations curriculum in education that this experience, this museum should be a part that is taught -- a reminder to Never Forget - Never Again. Maybe more adults should experience it for themselves...
Marj, I did not cry, but I felt the same way while visiting Auschwitz...what got me was the piles of hair.
Like after leaving Dachau and not being able to speak of being there for 2 years. “Those who forget the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them.” Is it still at the exit, I wonder.
I so enjoy your witty commentaries ICTT.
The kochs donation are the example of what I call penitence - paying for their sins.
Rickey, I think Robert Reich accurately explains what the Kochs were up to ... and what all today's gazillionaires are up to. It's not noble, charitable or penitent.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-coming-gusher-of-charitable-giving
Exactly. I thought Reich made an important distinction there. The giving may do real good, but it doesn’t erase how the wealth was accumulated or the policies that made that accumulation possible in the first place.
The Koch Bros. are hardly alone in that. This is a story that goes all the way back to Alfred Nobel and the invention of dynamite.
Having said that, I'd far rather have a world where penitent sinners try to atone for how they got their wealth than one dominated by cruel, screaming shit-monkeys like Pete Hegseth bouncing up and down on his Florsheims just to make himself look taller.
Tax write-off.
What a wonderful way to have spent your time!
I felt privileged to be able to share my respect for history -- both human and natural -- with people who come from all over the world to connect with it.
As a supporter of the Smithsonian I receive their magazine. The latest issue (Summer 2026) is a superb and not-so-subtle push back against the lies the regime is peddling. As a celebration of the country's 250th anniversary it includes a variety of articles highlighting American accomplishments, including medical advancements such as the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk, (the son of Jewish immigrants); an early intellectual advocate for women's equality, Margaret Fuller (who also wrote about injustices against Native Americans); the essential abolitionists, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass; and pioneering advocates for the preservation of both our history and our environment, looking at the work of Alan Lomax, who spent years recording the folk music of ordinary Americans of all types, and Aldo Leopold, who advocated for understanding the complex interdependence of ecosystems.
There is much more in the issue, and I would encourage the fine people here to support the Smithsonian by buying the issue.
Oh my! This should all be put together and posted somewhere some how. I love the Smithsonian the free museums and the castle. And it has its great isms but still free museums!
We need to support new media as they document the present for the historians of the future. An example of an indefatigable woman doing this important work is Olga Lautman. She is another daily MUST READ for her cataloging of the evolution of Trump's tyranny. While Heather chronicles specific issues in depth each day, Olga sources the full panoply of events every day related to the Trump regime's attacks on our democracy, by the dozens, grouped into categories and themes.
https://trumptyrannytracker.substack.com/p/trump-tyranny-tracker-day-551-553
Olga is also an incredible resource for understanding the functioning of the new Axis of Evil: Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. There is no question that the Ukraine War and the Iran War are now entangled with joint arms development and intelligence sharing. That, coupled with Russian threats against NATO members, with multiple drone incursions into Romanian airspace and overflights of Poland and the Baltic nations, while the Trump regime is withdrawing support for NATO, points to the threat of a broadening of conflicts into a merged European/Middle Eastern theater.
The fundamental question is what role the US will play in a broader war and where its allegiance will lie given the chaotic, erratic, sycophantic, strategy-free Trump regime foreign and defense policies.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/208747413
The upgrade box kept moving across the text of the link you provided, so that I couldn't read it. Too bad, because it looked important.
People wonder why so many voted for Trump. Maybe it is because they can't afford to pay for the news that hasn't been filtered through what the wealthy want them to know. I see Substack headed in the direction of so many first of all, requiring payment to allow comments, then putting up paywalls in the middle of their essays that contain information many must know if we're going to reverse the impending authoritarianism and growing inequality.
When the main source of news was in print, people could leave their copy of the newspaper at the local diner or McDonald's to share with others who couldn't afford it. The K-shaped economy is creating a K-shaped propaganda system that is dividing us by socioeconomic status.
I hate to see Substack going in this direction.
Agree about Substack. This has become a moneymaker for many rather than a way to inform. The “dangling carrot” is frequently used to encourage paid subscriptions in order to get the information promised in the next part of an email. I only know of one person who does not use this strategy to increase subscribers. That is Heather Cox Richardson. Thank you, Professor Richardson.
I think that’s one of the reasons Heather has built such a loyal community. People never feel like they’re being pushed. They support her because they value her work.
I pay for Heather and feel I’m getting a bargain. I trust her reporting and can only afford one newspaper myself. I get the benefit of everything Heather reads.
Heather has said she does not need the support. She has enough. She asked us to support others. But I have been reluctant to quit supporting her because I feel she should be supported regardless. HCR has the luxury. As well I think she realizes that getting her POV out, teaching, is important and necessary.. to reach a very wide audience, as many as possible. She is on YouTube as well and spread herself liberally as she can... very unusual, valuable, a treasure and a gift. As well she probably is making quite a difference.. at least holding us together and hosting this community. (see my comment above).
People can't afford to work for free Barb! Would you ask a house cleaner or salon employee to work for free?
Paying should be voluntary. I accept voluntary payments, but don't require that people pay to read or comment. I know what it feels like to be excluded from knowledge or from participating because I can't afford it. There are other subscriptions I wish I could pay for, but I'm at my budgetary limit.
Gloria, I feel the same way. All of my essays are free because I want the ideas and conversations to be accessible to everyone. The only thing behind a paywall is my Weekly Reflection, which is a more personal piece and simply my way of thanking the people who voluntarily support the work. I’d much rather have people reading, thinking, and participating than feel excluded because they can’t afford a subscription.
Marj, nobody is asking any content creators to work for free. Gloria and Barb are addressing issues created by Substack and other "independent" media platforms.
First, let me note that an overwhelming number of Substack content creators, including HCR, derive income from other sources. This is not their survival platform.
Second, Substack has morphed from a forum for writers and artists to a revenue generator for the owners as well as users who simply want to generate income. As a member, I am deluged with emails from Substack suggesting ways I can leverage their latest new features to boost audience and make money. HCR chooses not employ these tricks. As the Substack content creator with the largest number of subscribers, she can afford not to.
Substack is competing for a larger slice of the social media pie by exploiting their content creators rather than selling ads.
Gloria states that her subscription to Letters is a bargain – and it is. Other subscriptions are $80, $100 or more per year.
When I subscribed to the Washington Post (before Will Lewis), I had daily access to dozens – maybe hundreds – of excellent content creators for $100/year. At the time, that was a bargain.
I've counted: If I were to pay for subscriptions to all the Substack content creators I appreciate and follow, my annual expenditure on Substack alone would be several thousand dollars. I can't afford that, and I doubt many people could.
Yet, Substack's owners refuse to offer a "bundling discount" similar to what cable TV operators offer.
“Let your conscience be your guide,” Jiminy Cricket. lol. I don’t believe in exploiting writers’ hard work, and I pay for what I can afford. I know that is how my 18 paying subscribers feel. I resent stingy Substack writers who bait you as though you are a hungry animal in a cage by showing you a little of what you are missing. I am a very curious person, and it seems cruel.
So far I am not complaining about Substack. We sorely needed this. As a forum it's invaluable, gathering community. It's good to hear your complaint and worries some of which I share though I do not create my own content.
Barb, from Greenville SC?
Try hitting subscribe and then choosing the free option. I don’t pay for either subscription—Narrativ has a lot that is not behind a paywall.
I thought that when your option is “upgrade” that you are already a free subscriber.
Not necessarily. There is, apparently, another level above Subscriber called “Founder”, which I could never afford. There are so many good choices in Substack, it’s difficult to choose. And there are lots of gimmicks like, here’s $25, give 5 of your friends and family a free month, which then acts as advertising to those 5 and may obligate those not familiar with how Substack works to stop their subscription at the end of the month. Substack is an important way to provide a living to many great news reporters who may have lost their jobs in main media or who are just beginning this new career, and it is important to pay people for their work, but yes, there are limits to what I can afford.
Some of these things are easy to subscribe to, and almost impossible to unsubscribe.
the existence and timing of a paywall is the decision of the writer of the particular substack, not of management of the platform. Some writers choose, or need, to monetize their production, others leave it to people to volunteer payment.
How much do you think it costs to monetize Substack's production? I pay a yearly subscription for Grammarly and a monthly fee for internet access. I offer my Substack for free, and some people are kind enough to pay me for my work. My Social Security check is about $1500 per month.
Some of the people charging are wealthy by the standards of the people they expect to pay for the information they provide.
I confess I resent having to pay for their content. How much is enough?
The truth is if you have the time you can dig up your own info on anything. We are paying for a service others use their time to aggregate.
There are paywalls that prevent even scientists from accessing information that would be useful. We commodify everything now.
Very true. We're trading our money for the time someone else has spent researching an issue. There's little we couldn't do/learn on our own. We only need to vet our sources.
Exactly John.
You are not alone Gloria 🤬
The source in print one heavily relied upon was always insufficient.
I have been worried about this problem. As a substack becomes more successful, gathering audience, it's tempting for it to start limiting what is available to the non-paying subscribers and non-subscribers. After all journalists, writers, artists, analysis/ opinion writers have to make a living. They take a bold step or have to leave the MSM for one reason or another ( corporate buyout.. like WAPO). They need support. It's risky and competition. Some people blossom via substack.
But those of us out here begin to see that while this is beneficial and necessary it's a bigger and bigger bill that keeps accruing-monthly or annually. Like a candy store almost.
Substack is also a business. It's a marketplace. People who cannot afford or are of limited funds and time, have to choose. A lot of info, as well, is filtered and culled from (supposedly) reliable sources that report the straight news. (Do you still need the legacy media like the NYT or WSJ etc?) So your news is *curated* this way for you- often with links, some of which is behind a paywall, some "gifted", some links just available (NPR, the Guardian?) (We subscribe to the NYT WAPO-still, donate to NPR/PBS.) This is an investment in being informed. Some I read on the substacks have found reason to quit "the legacy media"- whatever that means and depend solely on substack, youtube, etc. Are we better off? Are we more channeled than ever?
I think we see what role the US is playing in the broader war. It is now reclaiming all of its weapons because they are running out, so the world can no longer look to the US to supply it with weapons when the country cannot supply itself. Pete Hegseth is wasting a lot of military budget on his testosterone initiative which in addition to being dangerous is quite costly and once started will need to be maintained after the person is out of the service from what I understand.
https://theintercept.com/2026/07/24/hegseth-testosterone-hormone-therapy-veterans-affairs/
Idiots are running our country and that will have consequences for the US foreign policy that are leading to permanent rifts. Europe meanwhile has to slog on its own, and is not just joining Trump in his forever war with Iran. Europe is firmly behind Ukraine as a group, although individual countries are less or more. The US is looking to get drones from Ukraine, which has a better manufacturing set up for the weapons it makes. Ukraine attacking an Iranian ship providing weapons for Russia is not a sign of a world war, because Iran cannot afford to pursue this according to Malcolm Nance, former US military intelligence in the region.
I think Trump and Hegseth are so out of it and so ill-informed that they didn't realize that Iran is that closely allied with Russia, and they actually don't understand that China is providing the pipeline for high-tech components, including US-manufactured ones, to keep the Iranian and Russian war efforts going. Trump was totally OK with sales of advanced Nvidia chips to China that could go into drones.
Everything is transactional and amoral with Trump; he sees everything in terms of profit. Weapons deals are agnostic as long as some crony makes money off of it. Giving MBS uranium enrichment capabilities is the latest example. Trump doesn't have a clue about how that is an incitement for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon. But his buds at Westinghouse will make a killing.
Yes. These people make a killing and then find themselves living in a country that is very undesirable and complain about individuals or groups of people being the problem, when it is they and their amoral, neoliberal economic policies that are the problem.
Neoliberal, Linda? The people who, as you say, make a “killing” by being cronies of Trump? I haven’t noticed them being any kind of liberal, neo- or otherwise.
Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism - Wikipedia
Neoliberalism is what the US has been pushing for since the Reagan administration.
I too was confused when I first heard the term neoliberalism. Then I learned it is a term like National Socialism; it does not mean what its components mean. It's not liberal at all. It's Milton Friedman's "free market" capitalism and trickle down economics.
RJM, I recommend the book, "Secret Doctrine: The History of Neoliberalism" by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson, because they do a better job of explaining neoliberalism than I could.
Hegseth is acting like a cartoon super hero -- except that there is nothing super or heroic about him. If he could inflate his chest so that it pops off his shirt buttons, he would!
I think too the US underestimated Iranians- thinking they are rubes living in tents in the dessert. They sure played 'dear leader'.
Welcome to the world of AMORAL.
"Look what I can do!" say Trump and Hegseth.
Kathleen, I'm guessing you had this in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TA2t6HRn2I
Ha! It wasn't, but thanks for the laugh. I was remembering the toddlers around me tumbling and rolling without navigation abilities.
Indeed not a "sign of," though indisputably a [potential] step toward...
Correct. Or "heralding".
I don't know about heralding. Malcolm points out that Iran threatening Ukraine is not really different from Russia threatening Ukraine because Iran isn't going to do anything different from what Russia has been doing every day. On the other hand, Iran cannot risk Ukraine going after their worldwide assets, which it can.
That being said, if we look at the countries backing Russia, or Ukraine, or Iran, or Israel, or Lebanon we have a lot of countries involved in weapons provision, intel provision and troop training, so by that standard we already have a war that many countries of the world have a stake in, and particularly the US attack on Iran. If that is the definition then we might see it as a world war. However, it is not the definition I am using. I am using ones where countries declare war and engage in fighting.
Would it be fair to say the axis of evil now appears to include the U.S.? Except we are the hanger-on. Odd to see these delusions of authoritarian grandeur in a country that, for all and despite all its faults, has been a beacon of light in so many ways for so many years for so many people.
I'm not discounting its faults. But it also has greatness. It's a walking, talking contradiction of hope and despair. We have a choice to make. It won't be easy.
Krikit, we HAD a degree of greatness and even nobility. Sadly, we long ago sold these for wealth and comfort. It takes a lot of time and effort to recover from bad habits.
TY Georgia, I subscribed to Olga ..Balance needed from the brainwashing propaganda panda box ‘in power’. VOTE 💙 let’s get these sickos aptly behind the bars needed.
Let us hope the US does not seek to have a substantive role in a broader war, in any war. Are we still operating on the myth that wars can achieve anything good? Even "defensive" wars, so-called, soon become muddied and muddled and cross a line to become wars of aggression. There has got to be a better way to resolve conflicts. We've become permanent hostages to the arms manufacturers and those they fund.
Donna, I'm having trouble putting my finger on any "defensive" wars the U.S. has been involved in. The Revolutionary War was somewhat defensive, insofar as British colonists were shot by British regulars, but the dispute was about taxes not territory. The War of 1812 was declared by the U.S. against Great Britain over U.S. port blockades. That's sort of defensive. The U.S. doesn't like anyone messing with our revenue streams. The U.S. got dragged into World War II as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but that was more retributive than defensive. Likewise, the U.S. launch of the Iraq war was retributive. Seems to me, all the other wars involving the U.S. have been either assisting allies in their wars or naked military meddling rather than defensive.
Dale we've gotten involved in the 'defensive' wars of others. As you said, wars that might conceivably be considered defensive were never that. But the rationale for the morality of "just wars," is largely tied to the idea of wars as defense against aggression. Personally I don't think modern war is ever moral. If war ever was.
Between Olga Lautman's Tyranny Tracker, Anne Applebaum's Kleptocracy Tracker, Ellie Leonard, Kait Justice, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Sarah Kendzior, Heather Cox Richardson and handful of other writers here on Substack, it's a full plate every day! But I try!
One understanding of reality in any case, Real circumstances don't seem to care what we think of them, are what they are and do what they do; and understanding is human. Yet don't we as humans prosper when our understandings most agree with what is? So it would seem.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias", - Stephen Colbert quote from the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Much of the thinking of the American Experiment hails from "The Enlightenment Era". Not that those thinkers had all the answers, but it was an age of serious questioning and noticeably better answers than "The Dark Ages".
Yes. It comes down to -- What is reality?
What is real, what is true, what is good. The immemorial questions of philosophers.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K Dick
Good one. It doesn't quite settle the question, but I think it points the way,
Never heard that, but it’s perfect and comprehensible to all! Thank you.
Yup, that's a big one. Some takes on that appear to be more fruitful from an outcomes perspective than others.
Obviously, a word such as hypothesis scares Trump folks. They don’t understand the scientific methods and statements of confidence or uncertainty. They want simple black/white Truth as defined in Trump’s posts and Fox News. They can’t handle “gray” issues that force them to think.
Hypothesis is one of the deadlier side effects of vaccinations.
The White House Domestic Policy Council's 162-page document, titled Saving America's Story, was released on July 4, 2026, following a review ordered by President Donald Trump.
The White House Domestic Policy Council 162-page documents targets The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Rumor has it that a "White Power" cell wanted LENI RIEFENSTAHL's children on the cover with a banner "Lineage of Drumph".
UPDATE: Per Artforum headline: "TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ISSUES DEMAND FOR POLITICIZED LAWN SIGNS AT SMITHSONIAN"
July 27, 2026 3:42 pm
Apparently Leni Riefenstahl never had any children but Karoline Leavitt, Natalie Harp and Susie Wiles sure seem to have the same adoration, loyalty and captivation with Trump as she had with Hitler. Maybe not genetically related but ideologically and politically kinsfolk through their fascistic propaganda, media manipulations, obfuscations and empowerment of a fuhrer...
''Welcome to the MAGA Museum of Alternative History''
The Trump administration has apparently discovered the greatest threat to American civilization, and it is not corruption, climate collapse, or a president treating executive power like a Costco sample tray. No, the emergency is a museum label explaining that slavery was bad.
That is why the White House is now trying to rescue history from historians. Apparently, trained scholars have been recklessly using facts, context, and complete sentences, when everyone knows proper patriotism requires a blonde child, a flag pin, and a multiple-choice test with the immigrant contestant quietly removed.
The new MAGA theory of history is simple. America sprang fully formed from George Washington’s forehead, slavery was an unfortunate foreign import, and the Civil War was a spirited disagreement about regional manners. The 258,000 Americans who died defending slavery should apparently be filed under “unpleasant trivia.”
At congressional hearings, Republicans demanded to know whether museum director Anthea Hartig loved America. This is now the official loyalty test: You must declare unconditional love while elected officials interrupt you, misquote you, and ask why the Smithsonian lacks an exhibit honoring “50 million aborted babies.” Nothing says serious historical inquiry like Lauren Boebert turning a museum hearing into open-mic night at the Apocalypse Saloon.
The administration even wants warning signs outside Smithsonian museums explaining that the exhibits were created by people who do not want visitors to love their country. Presumably, the gift shop will soon sell red hats reading, “I Visited American History and All I Got Was Uncomfortable Context.”
The problem is not that museums hate America. The problem is that authoritarian politics hates memory. History contains receipts, witnesses, contradictions, and names. It reminds us that patriotism is not worship. It is the difficult work of telling the truth about a country precisely because you want it to become better.
MAGA does not want history. It wants a bedtime story, with white heroes, obedient exhibits, and no scary facts after dark.
It also wants a washing machine where it can launder its oen bloody past, while making certain everyone else's stained clothing gets displayed prominently in the village square.
MAGA is the American equivalent of every insane, right-wing blood-and-soil movement in Eastern Europe for the past 200 years. They all keep alive every memory of every evil they were subject to, but forget about every one they inflicted on others. Memory works well, but only when it's not sanitized to the point of absurdity.
When you read the statement by the Domestic Policy Council, it is so much of a full-blown _confession_ of what they want to do with the Smithsonian (and other museums) that it’s almost funny. Well, almost.
WE ARE NOT INTIMIDATED!!
WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER!!
WE WILL NEVER STOP FIGHTING BACK for AMERICA and DEMOCRACY!!
VOTE 'EM ALL OUT...
AND THEN...
LOCK 'EM ALL UP!!
I think George Orwell was a Time Traveller
Dave, brilliant!
The Trump administration is in progress trying to make us an intolerant ignorant society that they can dominate. Not gonna happen. Why? Because they are not smarter than we are.
And, riding in to backstop the effort: AI, which creates support that is impossible to distinguish from truth for any claim of historical fact.
It makes complete sense that people who want to control the political and social narrative would want to discredit objective truth and replace it with whatever supports their desires.
It's past time to legislate watermark requirements for all AI-generated content., with huge fines and jail time for violations. Protecting the truth from dilution by AI it too important.
Mobiguy, I do like your ideas here and wish we had a way to enforce them! It would save a lot of trouble in the future!
Connect the dots...museums, books,R&D, immigration (unless South African white), allies, universites/colleges, educators, civil rights, voting rights, dissent, all attacked, and attorneys general eliminated.... Pol Pot hated the educated and the intelligencia too.
Steve, that is why we have to form a powerful resistance movement, much of which is underground and those who participate need to be vetted, but inclusive. We should have been doing that with the whole issue of abortion, find ways to carry out abortions and offer quality care with no one but the patient and practitioners knowing it. The network needs to be everywhere, but invisible but able to be contacted and activated when necessary. We the People have enormous talent, creativity, and flexibility. We need to use those things for the American people and anyone living here.
You're right. It's so much bigger than a museum. But if there is a clearer example of what the project is for Project 2025 and this administration, I don't know what is. The label "fascist" has been bandied about pretty recklessly and naively lately, so I enter it here cautiously. However, central to establishing and sustaining a fascist authoritarian rule is hyper nationalism, and that's what this is clearly all about. You can't feel nationalist fever with a nuanced view of your nation's history. It's all or nothing. They don't want a historical museum, they want a cheerleading exhibit to foster nationalist zeal. Add efforts to associate Trump with what makes the nation great (again?), while sidelining the other branches of government, and you have fascism. Pure and simple.
Thank you Kelli for this comment.
And thank you Heather Cox Richardson for this post.
Now read this BBC report:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c87nj3w9gxio
If the link fails, look at BBC news online, 26 July 2026, 09.41 BST,
‘US walks out of Security Council meeting during France’s remarks.’
There is nothing accidental in the Administrations attempts to re-write history to suit its contemporary political agenda, as described today by Heather Cox Richardson.
And, pointing to Heather’s eleventh paragraph (“Part of that, the report says, should include…”), the action on behalf of the US Government in the US Security Council is indeed contemporary ‘America’s contribution to global freedom’…
We can agree: shame USA.
Thank you Kelli, and thank you Heather, for focussing our attention on this unforgivable Administration and its actions.
Anthony
It seems they started with science and journalists (back in 2016) and have now expanded to history.
Diabolical effort to both discredit the Smithsonian and encourage physical violence against the institution and its staff. Stay strong Smithsonian, and maybe put up some signs of your own.
Personally, I can't think of a better incitement to visit the Smithsonian than a ridiculous sign at the entrance to any exhibit letting me know Steven Miller doesn't approve of what I'm about to see.
To say these people are stupid on steroids is to insult steroids, I guess. Everything they touch is turning to shit with each passing day, and they know it. We know it. Most everyone else does too. In the meantime, kudos to our wonderful Smithsonian staff and volunteers for showing the past in all its complexity and countervailing currents.
Once upon a time, Presidents actually had a sense of humor......
https://substack.com/home/post/p-208610175?autoPlay=true
I’ve seen this multiple times and think it’s hilarious. Can one even imagine Trump poking fun at himself? (And with so many possible topics …)
What good medicine--thank you! And ironically, the clip appeared to have been shown at a White House Correspondents' Dinner.
What a great clip; thanks, ICTT. Sorry to say, I didn't recognize who it was sitting with Obama at the movie theater. Can you - or someone - fill me in?
That would have been our departed, former permanently Merlot-drunk (and forever weepy) Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who, by current standards, seems like a knight in shining armor....at least he had a sense of humor.
Plus, he supported legalizing pot. Just too far ahead of the curve to be a true Republican.
Morning, Lynell! I had no idea who "the other guy" was in that video.
Thanks. I enjoyed that.
That was fun! Anyone else notice in the bottom center of the very last frame that Maria Bartiromo was giving the side-eye and not applauding. What a joyless heifer.
I noticed the exact same thing!
Thank you. Thank you for this link. Great . Not just a sense of humor but also human
What a hoot 🤣
See the pages of our complicated history that Donald Trump doesn't want you to see!
The sign the Smith really needs at the entrance is "Fuck DonOLD Trump (and Stephen Miller)
Good idea Montana . Slap that on both their backs before the guilty sentencing.
Actually...manipulation isn't stupid at all.
See, too, Mojave, the larger context of what matters when almost nobody reads books.
For a larger look at this predicament, see “The End of Reading is Here,” now in the August Atlantic, a beautifully, aptly long, marvelously researched piece by Rose Horowitch.
Her piece covers how the U.S. online, video world's "explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information."
She reminds us how "reading books is a workout for the attention span." And she looks well at how "Politicians on the right and the left have figured out how to exploit these new platforms. Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, described to me [to Rose Horowitch] how this plays out. 'You name an enemy and you polarize the public,' he said. 'You don’t allow for nuance, because nuance is just a confusion when you’re in a struggle for power.'"
Can our schools, can some public officials, Mojave, stress return to whole books, with all the nuances, complications, and serendipities Heather cites in real history?
One bright spot I've seen lately is more people reading on the NYC subway -- on my last ride on the train at least 4 people sitting near me were engrossed in their books.
Charming, laurie.
Did you notice, too, all the camera personnel, wardrobe, and cosmetic others also assembled around this tableau? Didn't some marketing firm put this together following months-long research into finding all four persons in the greater-NYC areas who still read books -- then getting them on the same subway car together?
Nope! It was the real thing! 😊
I’ve done nothing but read this summer. The tv has been turned off for two months. I’m a lot happier for it.
I noted in February at airports that I was the only one reading a book.
It truly is a great article. I sent it to my grandson and highlighted the paragraph about the young woman remembering being read to every night by her father.
I think that this is a very important article that I have already gifted to many people.
Yes Trump and the regime stoking the stochastic terror again, and again...
I stand with the Smithsonian, for the right to know and tell Our history, to learn, educate, work and progress to actually be on the 'right' side of history...
James Smithson the illegitimate heir to a vast British fortune created the idea and funding.
"... put up some signs of your own." Absolutely! Go on offense.
I was thinking the same. I might be in Washington in September so I shall make up little signs with double-sided adhesive.
Suggestions: https://pdflink.to/33b83ce7/
Nice Loren. On Friday, Susan Collins thought she was insulting Troy Jackson by calling him a 'Bernie Bro'. I'm going to order some Bernie Bro pins with Jackson's picture on it(?). I'm open to better ideas.
Good idea.
Thank you.
Someday, won’t the study of this particular time in history make an “interesting” exhibit?!
There is a group called Citizen Historians or Historian Citizens that has been working on this issue for sone time. They were going to protest at the mall and have done lots of work with photographing exhibits in danger of being removed. Dr Joanne Freeman did two lovely videos of her at the Philly President’s House . We all should be doing these things if we are able. The Chicago National Archives is being shut down and I need to go there very soon! There are many national archives sites and so many historical sites . Pullman Historical area is also important.
I won’t live to see it, but someday there will be interesting exhibits at the Smithsonian about this bizarre period in American history when the inmates attempted, and even briefly succeeded, taking over the asylum.
I sure hope so. It will be one of the most cautionary of historical exhibits. "What were they thinking" people will ask?
And the answer is, of course, they weren’t. They were “feeling.” They had forgotten how to think.
Excellent assessment, JohnC. I don't think "forgotten" is quite right. I think that they were manipulated to believe that the lies they were being fed were the truth and thereby losing the ability to think critically.
I see strains of that in some of the comments here.
From the official 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. "
Thank you Ally, I agree. I couldn’t quite find the right way to express it……
Feeling is essential to human sentience; I think and feel, therefore I am.
It appears to me that wisdom is hard to define precisely, but I believe it has to do with some degree of integration of both accuracy and value. By value, I mean what matters most to our species, and even beyond, as, if we are honest. we benefit greatly by things and beings apart from ourselves. Evolution preserves competition, but also mutuality and compassion, which is somehow less talked about; and I would argue that human intelligence is not just the ability to notice and process, but what you notice and process, and why. That's one of the things that has troubled people, such as Stephen Hawking, about AI.
The scientific method, and the epistemology at it's root, is one of humanities most fruitful and powerful tools, and it can help us prioritize our values, but not, in the end, determine them. That emerges from our own experience of sentience and experiential resonance with other beings. We are all an "I" ("ego" in Latin) and we are also all We. "We" appears early in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as mutual sentiment, and outcomes that we are inclined to condemn as "evil" lack conscience and compassion.
I think, and feel, therefore I am; and my personal envelope of sentience is enriched and grows or or withers, or goes dangerously septic with our capacity to emotionally mature.
I expect it will rate up near or with the holocaust when it's done.
Not only that question every school child asks "what they heck were they thinking?"
But all the unnecessary deaths. COVID, Gaza, Iran, Africa (ending USAID), the US. It can all be traced back to MAGA. (Ukraine? Technically not MAGA as it was Obama's screwup but given the fact that it's still going on I could see it being in the same exhibit)
And we now have reached the point where Climate change is not only undeniable but unfixable. Between that and the gutting of American agriculture... the famines will start soon. The small farmers who understood to protect their land quality have lost their farms. The corporate farmers care more about next quarter than next year or next decade. We may be looking at the Dustbowl part 2.
And an economic system that makes the Great Depression look like a walk in the park.
American Exceptionalism? No, more like the fall of the American Empire.
And, David, it will be reported on factually as American history.
A most important perspective, David!
Amen!
Why is DEI considered to be bad? “DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is a set of rules and ideas that schools and workplaces use to treat all people fairly, welcome different backgrounds, and fix old problems that left some groups out.” It’s simple. MAGA doesn’t believe in fairness, being welcoming and dealing with America’s problems. That’s the problem.
It's a threat because it takes away traditional advantages conferred upon the non-diverse by the non-diverse.
..like the proverbial “ they protesteth too much”?
"Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion"
Way too political. It's sounds like the Declaration of Independence or something.
"Liberty and Justice for all". Now that's pretty radical.
Somehow, some people are so adamant to see to it that another person (mainly of a different colour) won’t get _anything_, that they are willing to give up everything themselves - as long as “that lazy n**** doesn’t get anything”. They prefer dying in poverty to cooperating and having a good life for both black and white.
Dutch-The dynamic you describe so well has brought us to this place in time. America has been divided since the beginning and we're still fighting a "Civil War". The question is what kind of nation do we want to be.
The ideals and principles laid out in our founding documents have inspired some people to fight for the kind of democracy where "we the people" reign while others see these ideals as a hindrance to the kind of capitalism that enriches a few at the expense of many.
Americans have been indoctrinated with a false narrative about race. It's a man made concept designed specifically for the purpose of keeping us divided. Unity and truth would thwart the ability of those who want to maintain and promote division.
For centuries too many Americans have been brainwashed. Our laws and systems have intentionally supported the idea that some people are better and more deserving than others. Most of America is still segregated. This includes our educational system, churches and communities.
DEI and woke have been villainized. The opposite is no diversity, no equity and continued exclusion. This is how our government is now operating despite any previous progress we may have made after centuries of denying and bestowing human rights on people based on skin color.
I used to think that education would lead us out of the morass of racism but now after this regime was put in place by a majority of white people I see clearly a reluctance to move on from white supremacy. Most of us just want to get back to "normal" when normal has been part of the problem.
"Most of us just want to get back to "normal" when normal has been part of the problem."
So. Much. This.
Race is but one factor in this, albeit the most visible one that has had the most impact on the most people. Gender is another, as are physical/mental/emotional disabilities.
I think you're right, Gina. As Heather often puts it: "The Confederacy is still very much alive." It seems that a large part of the population is inherently racist (by indoctrination/"upbringing"), but hides it in the times when it's not suitable. But as soon as a leader appears who says it's fully ok to be racist, they come crawling out from every nook and cranny...
That is exactly the dynamic, it's just that there are other colors and other ethnicities besides "Black" that are excluded (or recruited) as it suits the "white". Like "Jews will not replace us!" from Charlottesville.
Oh yes. That is the dynamic of the "in crowd". It can change at a whim.
I'll bet most Magats don't know what the letters even stand for. And, along the same lines with "woke" -- being aware of social injustice, having an inclusive world view - basically a secular version of the Golden Rule.
I was so disgusted when I read Dave Portnoys book where he constantly ranks on wokeness and DEI etc etc. he is a Boston guy so I was curious being from here but after reading the book I’m disgusted because so many people follow this guy and his idiotic thinking. It’s disappointing.
Lauriemcf, that's a safe bet. Because in fact, magats know nothing about what they rail against. Ask a magat to explain what socialism is. Or communism. Or fascism. Or any other "ism." They can't define the terms, much less, explain the differences.
Exactly!
It’s racism mostly. Racists are destroying our democracy. Racism is an insult to our humanity. And racists deny reality. They have a fantasy that only white humans are worthy and deserve human rights. And now, look at what the white racists have accomplished: MAGA is their accomplishment.
Meanwhile -- cunningly protected by self-manufactured plausible deniability -- the [utterly treacherous/hopelessly compromised] post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party does its accursed best to ensure the ChristoNazi victory is forever: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/politics/ken-martin-dnc-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.kZnu.3n1BGK9a6Ylg&smid=url-share
I agree with you, Loren but perhaps a few different reasons I’m not sure. Yes I read that nyt article my god.
The primary point of that NYT report is that the Democrats have put themselves in that hopeless position. And given how long and effectively they've been doing it, it cannot be anything but deliberate.
Oh no. Nothing is deliberate. Just a combo of being dense, accepting what I call unquestioning white man’s liberalism. I am a liberal radical whatever. I’m also conservative on may issues. I hve had as many fights with my liberal side as I’ve had with conservatives. I don’t like partisan bullcrap.
I should think it would be easy to explain. And btw, before we invented this cutesy phrase, what did we verbalize? Anti discrimination. Laws against redlining. Laws protecting women in the workplace place. Laws protecting based on race, gender. So the cute little DEI comes around.
I foolishly applied to be a vendor at the democratic national convention in early 2024. I forgot one pivotal word in front of the call out. The web site said “Virtual Vendor.” Central committee was seeking virtual vendors but in reality, it was data collection so that those who applied would be donation demand requested to death. Act Blue is involved. Ok, I get it. We all must do our share to help democrats win. But did the Central Committee have to be so devious? I was suckered into it and now forevermore, I’m hounded in text for donations. I asked to be removed but it won’t ever happen. Now back to DEI.
So I filled out the app to be a vendor (like hell). The app asked me, 1. Are you a woman-owned business, 2. Are you minority-owned business, 3. Are you union-friendly, 4. Are you LBGT. By this time I was thinking to lie and say I was gay just to get in. Cheeses Christ what has the world come to. And the whole process was designed to just collect my data just so I could be donation demanded to death.
So we have sliced and diced all groups and put them out front for first choice. Why? Because white people all white people have somehow been tarnished with the privilege doctrine. If you are white you are privileged. Now I understand there is history to this inequality. But in my opinion, we are moving in the wrong direction. We keep slicing and dicing. I don’t give a fuck who or what you are. Everyone is treated equally in my workshop. You might be half bird and half man but you will be treated EQUALLY. I noted a few years ago that a Black woman acquaintance can get into a convention to show her services but I had to pay.
Is that right? Of course it’s not right. I regret it. I rage against it. Why. Because it discriminates. And another matter. This disparity in the marketplace has helped create a very ugly backlash. Can’t you see it? Are your blinders so tight around your eyes that you can’t see the resistance. Don’t you understand that Joe Biden’s once white working class support base ran off and into the arms of MAGA republicans? Do you get it? What I am asking for is a discrimination-free system in which we certainly give aid to those who need it I’m not that stupid or blind. But cut out this shit about DEI. I have been against DEI way before Donald Trump ever came around. I don’t give a fuck what he believes in. I have my own belief system. It’s not perfect by any means. But it works for me. That woman I mentioned who gets in free based on her race and gender happens to have a related business to my own, but much larger than mine is. But she gets in for free. No, I’m against all forms of discrimination and in a real way, DEI discriminates.
I know I have lost 99% of you but I don’t give a twick. This is my explanation and what and why I believe. Have a good day.
Bill, this post could be a poster child for white male privilege. I know that you hate being called "privileged", and you might want to read what you've written here with a critical eye. To one on the outside looking in, you protest that questions were asked of you were discriminatory (at least that is my read, YMMV); you communicate an assumption that you should be allowed in with no considerations at all.
We are on the same side, we just see and experience the world very, very differently.
Also I explicitly said that we lost the nation to very unfit leadership that successfully manipulated enough voters to vote for the Antichrist of the ages. That is a major point. And again, laws can always be strengthened to protect. But we don’t need to isolate large segments of the population as we did putting working class out to pasture. Some felt they had no where to turn so they revenge voted a monster into office. You don’t get it and frankly as I stated, I expected 99% here to not understand at all the complexity of successful governance in a democracy. You too may join the New Snazzy Nazi dance craze sweeping the country, lol. Or be sent to detainment camps as my story goes in my book, Donald’s Vanity Tantrums. You would enjoy the read.
And so you don’t understand what I’m saying and I don’t understand what you are saying. Sounds like a good play to watch at the theater.
“Facts are stubborn things” John Adams
I hope John was right. Otherwise, these might be 'alternate facts' once again?
“Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that there is a savior on the horizon. We are waiting for the Second Coming. We live in a society fixated on heroes who save the day. This childish mythology denies us our agency. The way to save the day is collective action. We the People are the Second Coming.”
What do you expect from people stupid enough to believe in fantasies about how the saviors are invisible and live in the sky?
So wait, Greg...what am I supposed to do with the Bat-signal on my roof?
And here I thought that our ultimate deciders were supposed to be us!
(A) Will the 2026 elections be free and fair?
If history is an accurate guide, Republicans can’t be trusted about anything. Remember “Swift Boating”? Accusations of Hillary sex trafficking in a pizza parlor basement? Obama birtherism? Hunter Biden’s laptop nothingburger and the “Biden crime family”? They follow the commander-in-chief of mendacity. They used AI fakes to smear Rep. Thomas Massie in his Kentucky primary. They tried to smear Darializa Avila Chevalier in a NYC Democratic Party primary for U.S. Representative with taken out of context social media posts and false statements from the Dominican Republic (her parent’s country of origin). They smeared Graham Platner with unverifiable accusations from Lyndsey Fifield, an ultra right wing (Heritage Foundation) political activist. They tried to accuse James Talarico of being LGBTQ but he turned it back on them. They tried to smear Senator Ruben Gallego (AZ) over an accusation of campaign finance violations and sexual misconduct by Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.). But the bipartisan Senate Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint because no evidence was found to verify the complaint. The latest Republican propaganda falsehoods claim Democrats are communists. They apparently don’t even know what the definition of communism is. It’s where the government owns all the businesses. In that vein note that Trump has started buying U.S. government stakes in private businesses. Who is the communist? Etc., Etc.. This is the MO of Republicans. Attack opponents with misrepresented ad hominem attacks to character assassinate and demonize them so you don’t have to discuss the real issues.
(B) U.S. Representative Jim Hines, 4th District of Connecticut, Ranking member of House Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee and a member of the “Gang of 8” (a term used for the eight key leaders in the U.S. Congress who are briefed by the executive branch on highly classified intelligence matters and covert operations), was interviewed by the Bulwark about Trump’s 7/16/26 speech and the prospects for a free and fair November 2026 election and what can be done (19 min.).
“Rep. Jim Himes: Tuberville is “participating in a coup d’etat” - YouTube”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL1IupBDS-s
(C) For those interested in the Maine U.S. Senate race, this is Troy Jackson’s record that he is running on:
(a) Universal School Meals: Sponsored cornerstone legislation in 2021 establishing Maine as one of the first states in the country to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students;
(b) Prescription Drug Reform: Sponsored and helped pass a comprehensive 2019 reform package to regulate drug prices, increase price transparency, and allow the wholesale importation of medicine.
(c) Child Care Wage Stipends: Introduced legislation in 2023 to expand the state’s Child Care Affordability Program and secure monthly wage stipends for child care workers.
(d) Criminal Justice & Domestic Violence: Championed a 2018 bill (LD 449) mandating an automatic life sentence for domestic abuse resulting in murder and establishing special sentencing weights.
(e) Healthcare & Insurance: Supported and co-sponsored major health legislation, including laws to codify Affordable Care Act (ACA) protections and prohibit certain medical facility fees. And several other legislations.
He says if elected he will push for key pieces of legislation and policy initiatives he supports which include:
Healthcare: Championing legislation to implement a Medicare-for-all healthcare system and laws to combat high pharmaceutical costs.
Labor & Wages: Pushing for federal legislation that protects union workers, strengthens collective bargaining rights, and supports working families.
Technology: Proposing safeguards to limit job displacement from artificial intelligence, mandate ethical AI use in government, and enforce environmental standards for AI data centers.
Childcare: Advocating for federal investments to provide free or highly subsidized childcare for working families.
Corporate Accountability: Backing legislation to heavily regulate private equity buyouts of hospitals and nursing homes.
And several other Legislations. What’s not to like?
(D) “The Overton window is the range of ideas, policies, and public beliefs that a society finds acceptable at any given time. Named after American policy analyst Joseph Overton, the model explains that politicians usually only support ideas inside this window to avoid looking too extreme or losing public support. The window can move up or down the political spectrum over time as social values change. Activists, media groups, and politicians often push extreme ideas on purpose. Even if the extreme idea is rejected, it can drag the rest of the conversation with it, making a previously radical middle-ground idea look reasonable by comparison.“ In her politics chats Heather and others like Robert Reich have pointed out that far right extremism in this country has dragged the Overton window to the right so far that what was once middle of the road moderation is now viewed as left wing. Heather showed this by reading parts of the 1956 Republican National Platform of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower which contained positions which many current Democratic Party candidates are running on but the current Republicans denounce as left wing extremism.
(E) TRUMP CONTINUES TO ATTEMPT TO RIGG THE 2026 ELECTIONS
Marc Elias, American voting rights attorney and podcaster (DemocracyDocket), discusses the latest maneuver by Trump to alter voting in elections. In March 2026 Trump issued Executive Order 14399 “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in U.S. Elections”. It: (1) directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of U.S. citizens whom they believe are eligible to vote; (2) Directs the U.S. Postal Service to only send out election ballots to people on the lists compiled by DHS and SSA. Asks States to send in their voter lists 60 days prior to the election or they will be sued by DOJ; (3) Directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute election officials who send ballots to people whom the Trump Administration has determined according to their culled lists are ineligible to vote. (What could possibly go wrong?) Noncompliant States are subject to the loss of Federal Funding.
Lawsuits were filed in the Massachusetts 1st Circuit by State Attorney Generals and the Judge ruled to deny and block the implementation of the Executive Order. Trump has recently appealed the ruling to the SCOTUS which is currently out of session and on summer vacation. Another lawsuit was filed concurrently in the DC Court by Marc Elias and other parties who have now filed amicus briefs with the case before the SCOTUS.
Marc Elias calls this a full assault by Trump on U.S. elections and democracy.
“BREAKING: Trump's DOJ asks Supreme Court to Let Him Block Your Mail Ballot - YouTube”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBI7Lr0Dk3w
(F) For those interested in the Michigan Democratic Party Primary for U.S, Senate:
“Voters want change’: Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed on tight primary race - YouTube”. (Meet the Press Interview 13 min.). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1QOT55IkcM
And
“Democrats running for U.S. Senate debate” (53 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE5V0RjWLAI
Why the Democrats have already lost the midterms -- the party's deliberate, anti-socialist, capitalism-forever collaboration with the ChristoNazis to throw the election covered by the same plausible deniability that covered the Biden/Harris scheme: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/26/us/politics/ken-martin-dnc-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.kZnu.3n1BGK9a6Ylg&smid=url-share
Wake up, people; the fix is in -- and, yes, we are contending with unprecedented Evil. (Have been ever since 4 July 1776; greatest scam in human history.)
Dr. Richardson,
Your journal records how much of our democratic crisis comes down to a sustained assault on reality itself. Once a political movement decides that truth is optional --that evidence, expertise, and documented history are inconveniences rather than obligations -- every institution built to preserve our shared reality becomes a target: historians, journalists, scientists, educators, and even museums whose only mission is to tell the human story as honestly as possible.
The pattern is familiar across human history: when groups abandon reality, they abandon the feedback loops that keep societies functional. You cannot solve problems you refuse to see. You cannot steward a nation you insist on mythologizing. And you cannot sustain a democracy when large factions treat truth as a negotiable commodity.
This is why your work that you are sharing on Substack and other media and the work of every serious chronicler of human history matters so profoundly. Establishing reality is not an academic exercise; it is the foundation of national capacity. It is how free people coordinate, how institutions learn, and how future generations inherit something better than chaos.
We are living through a period when the most basic civic responsibility is simply to insist that facts remain facts. That is the quiet, essential work of stewardship. And it is the work that will determine whether the next generation inherits a functioning republic or a cautionary tale.
Thank you for your personal dedication to recording the truth.
"Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers—"
Yup. And endure the consequences.
History is complicated.
Loving America does not mean whitewashing our history.
My fellow commenters on this site love America enough to express concern about its current direction under this administration.
Ms Hartig is an excellent director and those who denigrate her work need to look in the mirror. It is they who are politicizing history.
Sadly, I think those promoting the “alternate facts” view of history, actually believe their own lies. Remember, most of them were raised in very white, comfortable, protected environments where they were led to believe everyone lived that way. Poor little rich kids; they cling to their own distorted world view. But my sorrow at their unfortunate lack of perspective doesn’t prevent me from fighting every day for TRUTH and justice.
and they have Fox running in the background, if not foreground, all day long, feeding them lies and hate.
Or NewsMax, or OAN… same crap, different channel.
Don't forget Praeger U for those more erudite MAGAts.
And they sup at that trough of garbage and beg for more.
Oh, they believe with all their stony hearts.
I wonder how much of the sense of a perfect past is being held in ones' mother's arms? Or maybe even the encompassing warmth of the womb prior to birth. What nation in the world is "perfect"? Not this one according to Republicans. Trump is always citing some kind of "emergency" and Republicans constantly fume about all they say is "wrong".
Was there ever a perfect time? Nope. Even in fiction, as well as on record, there were the fearsome "Four Horsemen" and more. We might find some historical lives that seemed to go exceedingly well, given the circumstances: yet just what, overall, were those circumstances, and their pros and cons? Some eras seem more attractive than others and we might learn from that some ways to optimize our own possible future, but to actually GO there? What might you be giving up? Take an inventory.
The present moment? The world is replete with beauty, opportunity, and terrors, and if you are unacquainted with the latter. no doubt you know someone who, is or was. or likely inevitably will. Life is hard enough at baseline without the ego games that make it harder, when not abjectly tragic. Once again, perhaps our world can be a rose garden, despite the presence of thorns, and also once again, we might learn something, provided we are willing to consider what is wise to seek, what is wise to avoid, and what is wise to greet with gratitude.
A Thousand small cuts...
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten... History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right." - George Orwell
Hitler, a frustrated former painter, despised modernism, abstraction, and avant-garde movements, viewing them as elite, Jewish, or communist plots that threatened German society. Between 1937 and 1939, a special Reich commission stripped German museums of more than 16,000 to 21,000 works of art. Masterpieces of Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Dadaism were stripped from gallery walls. The regime organized the infamous 1937 “Degenerate Art” Exhibition 1937 in Munich. They deliberately hung these purged museum pieces haphazardly alongside derogatory slogans to mock and radicalize public opinion against modern culture. Leftover purged art was either sold internationally to raise foreign currency for Nazi remilitarization or burned in a massive courtyard bonfire at the Berlin fire department.
Hitler utilized Germany’s prominent military museums to reshape public memory of World War I, reinforcing his false Dolchstoßlegende (the "stab-in-the-back" myth) that Germany only lost the war due to internal domestic betrayal. The Zeughaus (the prestigious military history museum in Berlin) was completely re-engineered under a 1940 directive issued by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel on Hitler's orders. Army units occupying foreign territories (like France and Belgium) were ordered to survey local museums, dismantle historic war memorials, and seize captured German weapons that were on display as Allied trophies. These items were forcibly shipped back to the Berlin Zeughaus to sanitize historical memory and create an exhibit portraying German military infallibility.
Hitler's ultimate ambition for rewriting museum history was the creation of the Führermuseum. This was a massive, hyper-ambitious cultural complex planned for his hometown of Linz, Austria.
To stock this dream museum, Hitler ordered the systematic, continent-wide looting of European artwork and cultural treasures. Specialized task forces stripped pieces from occupied national museums and systematically plundered private collections belonging to Jewish families.
In 2026 a sign at all the Smithsonian’s should say, "A lying Felon demanded this Warning: the exhibits in this museum . . ."
And the (literal) Mother-rapers have even stolen the acronym of my blog, OAN -- Outside Agitator's Notebook -- thereby killing it forever (because Blogger doesn't allow name changes), destroying even the tiny bit of my work that survived their 1 September 1983 arson). Morrigan curse them every one.
Those of us born after WWII now see how Hitler did it. Lies by people who once knew better are replacing the truth to support a madman for fear of being punished or in hopes of getting some of his loot.
The Milgram experiments showed that the underlying truth of the WWII immoral behavior is OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY. The MAGA crowd has been taught since childhood to conform to prevailing norms (in their little world) and to do what they’re told. Witness January 6. They will continue to follow the dictates of Project 2025 as they’re told by Dear Leader.
Makes sense, so little or no hope for wake up calls to work/sink in through the slush…how sad.
With the apocalyptic robot -- literally a mechanical zombie -- as their ultimate model of weaponized moral imbecility.
Only one conclusion is possible. Drump and his maga-maniacs hate the truth.
And beauty.
Apparently. Glaringly in fact
surely it's a universal and permanent truth that gold is beautiful, so covering everything in gold must show a devotion to beauty. Truth is optional ...
Well, he manages to make gold look cheap - he has no sense of beauty.
The degree of detail that MAGA supporters use to attack our institutions, intelligence is utterly breathtaking. No stone left unturned and altered to support a false narrative. Like an army invading.
They should focus on bringing peace to the Mideast, and rebuilding what they have destroyed . So easy to destroy than build.
Reality will win in the end--it always does. But one thing we can all do to accelerate the collapse of Trump's fantasy empire of lies is to relentlessly call out the lies, to "call bullshit" at every turn, as Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West wrote in their book of the same name.
Dr. Richardson's courage and unwavering dedication to facts and reality are a shining light and an example for all of us who love democracy, freedom, equality and truth.
I beg to differ. These people are proof that reality does not necessarily win in the end. The Post-WWII American policy is why these people somehow believe that America is exceptional and has never done anything wrong.
The idea that AMERICA brought down slavery is just about the dumbest thing I've ever read. If we had lost the Revolution and stayed part of England then we would have been without slaves long before 1865. England was literally turning our slaves into free men in 1770's. This is part of why we went to war to begin with. They had already realized that slavery was an abomination. It was the American Oligarchs of the southern colonies who disagreed. Thousands of slaves escaped to work with the British and were given passage to go to England as free people.
The whitewashed history books we were all taught with are a direct result of the American government's plan to promote patriotism and exceptionalism after the end of WWII... not truth.
So I believe there are more than just a few MAGA who actually believe this crap. There are many well meaning people on the left that also believe this crap because that's what we were taught in school. But it's still not true.
Talk to historians. Read some books and websites. Read about Ona Judge. And you realize that it was all BS. But your average high school graduate working 40 a week, partying on Friday night, Going to the beach on the weekends with their kids has literally never been taught anything but the whitewashed American exceptionalism story.
So who's winning?
BLB-Well said. If only the truth could prevail. The evidence is well documented and available. Efforts to deny, distort and ignore the truth have prevailed. The 2024 election shows us whose winning.