Mark Ruffalo, 2010 (www.promiflash.de, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In my blog of August 31, “WHAT IS (AND ISN’T) ANTISEMITISM? MARK RUFFALO AND THE PARAMOUNT/WB MERGER,” I stated that a “low turnout” from the Hollywood community came to Ruffalo’s defense over his alleged antisemitic comments in an Instagram post about the merger.

My statement was true—at the time. But the very next day, Variety reported:

“More than 170 Jewish figures from the entertainment industry and beyond have signed a letter in support of Mark Ruffalo over what it asserts is a ‘smear campaign’ against the actor . . . who has been the subject of ‘spurious charges of antisemitism.’”

I love the word “spurious.” And Hooray for Hollywood (except for the PEPs).[1]

For the full letter and a list of signatories, see Alex Ritman, September 1, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/film/global/mark-ruffalo-open-letter-antisemitism-claims-paramount-1236848093.

That’s it for now.

[1] PEP stands for Progressive Except for Palestine. See my August 31 blog for a full description and its relation to the Ruffalo/Paramount snafu.

The cover of an 1893 edition of the openly antisemitic French newspaper and illustrated weekly “La Libre Parole” (The Free Word), featuring a caricature titled “Leur Patrie” (Their Homeland) (Public Domain)^[1]

They didn’t even have to identify him. Because the beastly figure with humungous hook nose and clawlike hands (and feet!) was instantly recognizable—with glee by antisemites and disgust by others—as the most nefarious of all creatures, the JEW.

He’d been wickedly caricatured in this manner since mediaeval times.^[2] The modern twist was his making the whole world his own. This had been added to the witches brew of Christ-killing myths and blood libels with the rise of the Rothschild banking empire in the early 1800s, which led to fear among antisemites of a Jewish conspiracy for global domination. And lo and behold, the dread was seemingly affirmed in 1903 by the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

A fabrication of the Russian secret police and thoroughly debunked as a hoax at the time and since, the vicious lie was given new life in antisemite auto magnate Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent newsletter in the 1920s. And as Hollywood was emerging around the same time, the Jewish global dominion myth lent support to the corollary fable of Jewish control of the film industry.

The caption at the bottom of this May 22, 1920, article reads: “The article that signaled the start of Henry Ford’s seven-year hate campaign against the Jews (COLLECTION OF THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM, GREENFIELD VILLAGE)” (Public Domain)

But then the kicker, underscoring antisemitism’s inherent irrationality: the belief that the shape-shifting Jews, along with their evil capitalist cabal, were simultaneously also the leaders of the godless communist conspiracy to rule the world!

No contradiction for Hitler, of course, who was more than happy to incorporate both calumnies into his own actual plans for global domination—which you’d think would’ve spelled the end of it.

But affirming the old saw that Jew-hatred is indefatigable and never dies, Arab countries began disseminating the Protocols during the Arab-Israeli conflict and into the 2000s, even teaching it in public schools, though more recently also beginning to challenge its falsehoods.^[3] The upshot, either way, was to throw Israel into the antisemitic mix and to create three new mutations of the seemingly incurable disease:

1) The Jew-haters now also included Arabs and Persians, ethnoreligious groups that in centuries past had been far more tolerant of Jews than European Christians had been.^[4]

2) The neo-antisemites were more narrowly focused on Israel than on the Jewish people writ large.

3) And most unusually, criticism of Israeli policy and support for the Palestinian cause, by itself, was now adeemed antisemitic. And this “false” or “weaponized” antisemitism, imposed on those who took a politically motivated stance against the Israeli regime, is where Mark Ruffalo and the Paramount/WB merger enter the fray.

THE DEAL

In August 2025, David Ellison, producer and founder/CEO of Skydance Media, purchased Paramount Global to form Paramount Skydance, a huge conglomerate that besides Paramount Pictures and CBS, owns several major non-broadcast networks and Miramax.

The takeover wasn’t exactly greeted with hosannas by liberal-leaning Hollywood. Ellison’s Trump-friendly conservatism was well known and instantly put on display in the hiring of “center-right, anti-woke” Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News.^[5]

Then in September, David Ellison with the backing of his father, Larry Ellison, major Trump insider and co-founder/CEO of technology giant Oracle Corp., put in a bid for another entertainment/media behemoth, Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of Warner Bros. studios, HBO, CNN, et al. And this time, when the WBD board approved the offer in February 2026, Hollywood didn’t take the mega-merger lying down.

They sat up and wrote an open letter in April 2026 signed by more than 5,000 film and TV professionals including big-name producers, directors, writers, and actors, Mark Ruffalo among them. The letter warned that the Paramount/WB deal:

1) would “further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it.”

2) would mean “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world.”

3) and “would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four”—the other three being Universal, Sony (which owns Columbia), and Disney (which owns Twentieth Century Fox).”^[6]

Despite mounting industry opposition, however, the merger was tentatively approved by Trump’s puppet Department of Justice on June 12, 2026. But hurdles remained, and in the interim, California Attorney General Ron Bonta, joined by 11 other state attorneys general, filed a suit against the merger on July 13, 2026.^[7] And it’s been a rocky ride since.

At one point, David Ellison threatened to move the studio from California, which Bonta called “blackmail.” More recently, Bonta backed out of negotiations because of alleged Paramount-perpetrated leaks about the negotiations. As of this writing, if no agreement between the two sides is reached, “a jury trial is preliminarily slated for early March.”^[8]

ENTER MARK RUFFALO

On August 21, 2026, Variety’s headline howled: “Mark Ruffalo Goes Scorched-Earth on Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger, Calling Out the Ellison Family’s Complicity in Palestinian ‘Genocide.’”^[9]

Palestine and Israel had never been part of the merger discussion until Ruffalo, one of Hollywood’s premier actor-activists, brought up the connection in his Instagram post. Ruffalo focused on Larry Ellison and his involvement with Israel via Oracle, which he claimed “Ellison is using to fund his son David’s Warner Bros. acquisition”—essentially correct, since the proposed $40 billion equity financing is based largely on his Oracle stock holdings.^[10]

Ruffalo began the post with a video of Oracle’s executive vice chair, Safra Catz, boasting about the company’s efforts to help Israel in the Gaza War: “There’s a few things that we did that I really can’t talk about. . . . But we have some really profoundly scary technology at Oracle and we wanted to make sure that it was available for the [Israeli] effort.”^[11]

Ruffalo then used this scary admission as a springboard for a dire warning against the “illegal” merger and its “catastrophic” consequences as delineated in the open letter: greater concentration of power, massive job losses in the industry, higher costs and reduced choices for consumers. But the emphasis of the tirade was on Oracle’s complicity in “what we now have come to see as a genocide [in Gaza], which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”^[12]

Pretty strong language, to be sure. But rather than discuss “scary” Oracle, the controversial merger, or the hot potato of military support for Israel by Big Business and, preeminently, the US government, all the chattering classes wanted to chatter about was—ANTISEMITISM.

Admittedly, Ruffalo, who is not Jewish, had thrown a soft ball to the Ellisons, who are Jewish (as is Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav), no coincidence in an industry long dominated—to be distinguished from controlled—by Jews. And sure enough, Paramount pounced on it.

“Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong,” a Paramount spokesperson responded, “they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.”^[13]

But this was just a trickle. A cascade of antisemitic charges against Ruffalo soon followed, by four major Jewish advocacy groups: the Anti-Defamation League, Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Creative Community for Peace, and L.A. Jewish Federation. The thrust of their complaints, as with Paramount’s, were the antisemitic “tropes,” made so by their association with Israel.^[14]

But let’s step back a moment. Accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide is admittedly asking for trouble, but Ruffalo was in fairly august company in doing so. Numerous reputable institutions and individuals, Jewish and non-Jewish, including former president Jimmy Carter and prominent Israeli military figures, have called Israel’s treatment of the West Bank Palestinians a form of apartheid. A similar chorus has used the term genocide in regard to the Gaza War, with support from the United Nations. Its Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory already in 2024 determined that “certain Israeli military actions in Gaza are genocidal under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”^[15]

As for calling Larry Ellison “a classic Oligarch,” which some accusers implied was another Jewish slur, coming from leftist Ruffalo this clearly has to be taken as a socialist rather than antisemitic critique of the Trumpite billionaire.^[16]

Yet despite the weaponized antisemitic overkill, only a few Hollywood figures, such as Jane Fonda, John Cusack, Tatum O’Neil, and the Jewish Ellen Einbender, have come to Ruffalo’s defense. The low turnout of celebrity supporters, given much of Hollywood’s opposition to the merger, can partly be explained by possible support for Israel, or also, as Ruffalo had suggested a few months prior in a New York Times op-ed, they might’ve feared blacklisting by studio executives.^[17]

[SEE MY SEPTEMBER 1 BLOG ON A SUBSEQUENT OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT FOR RUFFALO FROM THE HOLLYWOOD COMMUNITY.]

No such qualms, however, held back what I call the PEP Boys (and Girls) of a Hollywood group called the Brigade. Numbering about 1,000 entertainment biggies including Lawrence Bender, Ram Bergman, Anthony Bregman, Micah Green, Teddy Schwarzman, and Haim Saban, the Brigade piled on the Jew-hating charges against Ruffalo.^[18]

It’s important to note that most of the Brigade’s members are Jewish and liberal Democrats—but also staunch supporters of Israel.^[19] Which is where the acronym PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) fits them to a tee, since as otherwise anti-MAGA humanitarians, when it comes to Israel, different standards apply.

It’s also crucial to emphasize, because it always gets lost in the shuffle, that not all Jews, and especially American Jews, are PEPs—indeed, only a small portion are. According to March 2026 polls by 2 Jewish organizations (one nonpartisan, the other liberal): between 55% and 60% of all US Jewish voters opposed the war, with opposition among Jewish Democrats jumping to between 74% and 83%—and you can count me among them!^[19]

Which is why I bristle at the ignorance of those who recklessly brand as antisemitic anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who deigns to criticize Israel, which includes many Israeli Jews, by the way, and is a basic right in any democracy.^[20]

Indeed, it’s the PEPs, I believe, who’ve abandoned Jewish ethical principles by making an exception for Israel, right or wrong. And why, though I feel that Mark Ruffalo’s bringing up Israel in connection to the Paramount/WB merger was misguided and counterproductive, I thoroughly condemn the antisemitic charges against him and passionately stand by his response—which is as follows:

“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest. Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”^[21]

Amen.

Figure saying “Amen” in the Luzzatto Machzor, a 700-year-old illuminated Jewish prayer book for the High Holidays, created in southern Germany in the late 13th or early 14th century (Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks again to my friend Rabbi Chava Bahle for her invaluable assistance.

^[1] https://portal.ehri-project.eu/units/us.

^[2] Sara Litpton, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2016/06/06/the-first-anti-jewish-caricature.

^[3] Nina Shea and Jeanne Hoffman, February 1, 20026, https://www.hudson.org/human-rights/teach-your-children-well-classic-anti-semitic-literature-in-arab-schools; https://www.ajc.org/news/arabic-video-on-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-challenges-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories.

^[4] Tyler the Skeptic, May 12, 2024, https://medium.com/wake-write-win/brief-history-of-arabs-and-jews.

^[5] J. Oliver Conroy, October 6, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/oct/06/bari-weisss-cbs-news-analysis.

^[6] Dominick Mastrangelo, April 13, 2026, https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5828779-entertainment-pros-oppose-paramount-warner-merger; https://blockthemerger.com/openletter.

^[7] Jody Godoy and Dawn Chmielewski, July 13, 2026, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/us-business/article-us-states-california-sue-to-block-paramounts-acquisition-of-warner. The other states are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington.

^[8] July 13, 2026, https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-files-lawsuit-block-110-billion-warner-brosparamount; Todd Spangler, August 11, https://variety.com/2026/film/news/david-ellison-move-paramount-out-of-california-states-antitrust-lawsuit; Brett Stover, August 11, 2026, https://fox40.com/news/paramount-lawsuit-ellison-bonta-antitrust; Dominick Mastrangelo, August 25, 2026, https://thehill.com/media/6050281-paramount-warner-bros-merger-antitrust-lawsuit-rob-bonta.

^[9] Marlow Stern, October 21, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/film/news/mark-ruffalo-paramount-warner-bros-merger-david-ellison-1236840301.

^[10] Ibid.; Micah Zimmerman, https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/07/25/larry-ellison-personally-guaranteed-404-billion-of.

^[11] Stern.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Jessica Steinberg, August 26, 2026, https://www.timesofisrael.com/powerful-hollywood-execs-accuse-mark-ruffalo-of-antisemitism-in-paramount-attack.

^[14] Benjamin Lindsay and Kim Murphy, August 23, 2026, https://www.thewrap.com/media-platforms/politics/mark-ruffalo-boycott-antisemitic-ellison-remarks.

^[15] https://togetheragainstapartheid.org/whos-calling-it-apartheid; Chris McGreal, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/30/jimmy-carter-israel-apartheid-palestinians; https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds.

^[16] Stern.

^[17] Aastha Dass, August 25, 2026, https://www.aol.com/articles/list-celebrities-supporting-mark-ruffalo-083212000.html; Zack Sharf, May 7, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/film/news/mark-ruffalo-paramount-warner-bros-blacklist-merger-1236740819.

^[18] Abid Rahman, August 25, 2026, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/haim-saban-lawrence-bender-teddy-schwarzman-slam-mark-ruffalo-123668168.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Theodor Sasson, March 31, 2026, https://www.inss.org.il/social_media/new-surveys-of-american-jewish-opinion-show-disapproval-of-war-erosion-of-support. The two polling groups were the Mellman group on behalf of the non-partisan Jewish Electorate Institute and the GBAO group on behalf of the liberal advocacy organization J Street.

^[21] August 25, 2025, https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel-at-war/artc-poll-62-of-israelis-say-there-are-no-innocent-people-in-gaza.

^[22] Talia M., August 22, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/mark-ruffalo-rejects-antisemitism-accusations-211419425.html.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC) speaking at a rally for Bernie Sanders at Council Bluffs, Iowa, in November 2019 (photo by Matt Johnson, CC BY 2.0)

A 30-year-old democratic socialist congresswoman of Puerto Rican descent rallying for a 78-year-old Jewish socialist senator leading up to the 2020 Democratic presidential caucuses. Who could ask for anything more? No racism, no sexism, no ageism, no antisemitism, no anti-socialism, and no generation gap—in deep-red Iowa, no less!

And if we flashforward to February 2020, it gets even better, as the septuagenarian socialist Jew would win the caucuses, barely edging out Pete Buttigieg (pronounced boo-tuh-jej), the 39-year-old gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, no less.

But let’s stick with the generational aspect for a moment.

THE GENERATION GAP

The term is of comparatively recent vintage, originating in the turbulent 1960s and memorialized in Berkeley FSM leader Jack Weinberg’s quip, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”^[1] While ageist by today’s standards, the stigma wasn’t really meant in chronological terms.

The gap was really about differences in cultural and political attitude and outlook, as in hip (with it, liberal) versus square (out of it, conservative). It derived from the 1950s black hipsters and their Beat admirers, as chronicled in Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”^[2] And it doesn’t take a hipster, black or white, to see that a Generation Gap of renewed virulence has emerged in the woke/anti-woke wars of the 2010s and 2020s.

Lead Belly (aka Huddie Ledbetter), 1946 (photo by William P. Gottlieb, Public Domain)

WOKE

Famed folk and blues singer Lead Belly had used “stay woke,” a common southern black vernacular, as early as 1938, in a recording about the Scottsboro Boys.^[3] The Scottsboro Boys were 9 African American youths, ages 13 to 19, falsely accused of raping a young white woman and a white teenager on an Alabama train in 1931. The case sparked outrage worldwide over its blatant racism and led to landmark Supreme Court decisions on jury selection and the right to counsel.^[4]

After wallowing in an Alabama prison for 7 years, barely surviving lynch mobs while the case dragged through the courts, 4 of the 9 defendants were freed but the other 5—despite no evidence of rape and a recantation by one of the alleged victims—were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Over time, 4 of the 5 were paroled or pardoned. One, Haywood Patterson, escaped in 1948, was convicted of manslaughter in another incident in 1950, co-wrote a book, Scottsboro Boy, and died in prison of cancer in 1952.^[5]

But “take the rag away from your face,” to quote the bard, “now ain’t the time for your tears.” ^[6] Because it took 61 years after Patterson’s death and 24 years after all the Scottsboro Boys had passed (the last, Clarence Norris, died in 1989), for Alabama Governor Robert Bentley to posthumously pardon and exonerate all 9 men on April 19, 2013. ^[7]

The Scottsboro Boys, 1931, left to right: Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Ozie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems, Roy Wright, and Haywood Patterson (Public Domain)

And guess what?

In July 2013, just 3 months after Bentley’s belated action, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi founded #BlackLivesMatter, “in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.” And in 2014, BLM revived the slogan “stay woke” at a protest over police officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.^[8]

From there it’s been a rollercoaster ride for the controversial phrase, which initially, among black southerners, meant to “stay alert to the deceptions of people . . . as a basic survival tactic.” After Ferguson, it “suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets,” referring specifically to police brutality mainly directed, as it tended to be, at African Americans.^[9]

After whittling the warning down to the single word “woke,” the movement broadened its focus, to systemic racism in US society as a whole, and soon expanded further, along the lines of Stuart Hall’s two-stage process of identity politics as experienced by the liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s:

• Stage 1: developing a unified sense of identity within a particular marginalized group.

• Stage 2: acknowledging internal differences and forming bonds with other marginalized groups to more broadly and productively effect social change.^[10]

For “woke” this meant evolving into a catchall for social justice writ large, embracing issues related not solely to race and ethnicity but also to gender and sexuality. And for a time, considerable success was achieved, in encouraging corporate, educational, and cultural institutions to put woke’s progressive principles into practice.

But this success, in some ways too rapid for its own good, also ignited a massive anti-woke backlash that contributed substantially to the rise and sustainability of Trump and MAGA. And this new Generation Gap, which re-normalized racism, sexism, and homophobia and led to backtracking among the same institutions that had just adopted the woke-based measures, also led to rumblings among the left, about woke’s perceived excesses and political pitfalls.

WOKE 1/1.0

On Sunday August 9, 2026, in an ABC “This Week” interview, AOC, former woke poster child and now, according to Axios reporter Mike Zapler, “the country’s most prominent democratic socialist,” dropped a bombshell. “Woke 1 is crazy,” she said with a laugh, quoting a tweet a few months before from a fellow democratic socialist, New York City Council Member Chi Ossé.

She then added more seriously, with an inference that it was time to rein in woke: “I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.” As for her previous support for woke measures such as defunding the police, she explained, “During this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window [referring to the range of ideas and policies broadly palatable to the public at a given time].” And this made it possible “to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.” But the “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”^[11]

The “Tax the Rich” print from AOC’s 2021 Met Gala dress (image by Robbgodshaw, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fortunately, AOC still supports more equitable wealth distribution, but questions remain about what’s in store for woke.^[12] Because we certainly don’t want to throw out the baby—woke’s worthwhile agenda—with the bathwater of its occasional overreach. To do so would mean capitulating to the anti-woke forces that have already turned back much of the progressive tide and show no signs of letting up.

As for the policies worth standing behind at all costs, I agree with The Guardian’s Nesrine Malik:

• the policing of minority communities

• the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated

• awareness of the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both

• reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems

• asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources

• recognizing the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions—from the media to the academy—in order to enfranchise change

And with one addition—the right of LGBTQ+ persons to be treated with equality, dignity, and respect—I’m sure Malik would still conclude, “None of this is ‘crazy,’”^[13]

So, what about Woke 1’s policies and practices that progressives (like me) believe were crazy and are best discarded or revised in the movement’s best interests. Some examples:

• “Defund the police”: a worthwhile slogan if it means redirecting police resources to non-violent public services but a disastrous choice of words that implies abolishing the police altogether.

• Abolish the police, and prisons, altogether, as BLM and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have proposed: more than crazy, this is cloud-cuckoo-land and politically suicidal.

• Language policing: while “politically correct” neologisms such as “Latinx” for “Latino,” “unhoused” for “homeless,” and “cis-gender” for birth gender-identification are well-meaning and individually only minor irritants, taken together they become oppressive and conjure the “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984.

• Cultural appropriation: something to be sensitive about, to be sure, but not to the extent of dissing “outsiders” for cultural borrowing made from a non-exploitative position of respect. Such an overreaction is both overly proprietary and disregards the fact that culture thrives through mixing and matching.

• “Cancel Thanksgiving”: Francesca Hong’s notion that contributed to her primary loss in Wisconsin had been a crazy part of woke ideology for some time. A more workable solution is to have discussions about the very real problems with Thanksgiving and to do what several states and cities, including Madison, Wisconsin, have done: replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day.^[14]

• Self-righteousness: a sense, among the ultra-woke, that woke practices are sacrosanct and for anyone, even woke-sympathizers, to defy or even question them makes one suspect at best, at worst in need of shaming and re-education. Most importantly, this attitude ends up alienating those who are on your side and whom the movement desperately needs if it’s to accomplish any of the highly worthy items on its agenda.

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE PRIZE

We must never lose sight of the fact that however “crazy” some of its practices may have been, the TRUE INSANITY and by far the most destructive words and deeds have emanated not from Woke 1/1.0 but from Trump 2.0 and his anti-woke cohort. And to “stay woke” is as applicable as ever!

That said, BLM, the DSA, and woke as a whole must also acknowledge and correct some of its missteps if progressives are going to have any chance of narrowing the new Generation Gap and saving a society and a planet teetering on the abyss.

Sculpture of Atlas by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, 2005, located at the Praza do Toural, Santiago de Compostela (CC BY-SA 3.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

^[1] https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2000-04-06/article/759?headline=Don-t-trust-anyone-over-30-unless-it-s-Jack-Weinberg--Daily-Planet-Staff.

^[2] Dissent Magazine, 1957.

^[3] https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/proginfo/2023/08/woke-the-journey-of-a-word.

^[4] Douglass O. Linder, https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/SB_acct.html

^[5] Ibid.; Douglass O. Linder, https://famous-trials.com/scottsboroboys/1601-chronology; Patterson’s cowriters on Scottsboro Boy were Earle Conrad and Joseph Hirsch. It was published by Doubleday.

^[6] Bob Dylan, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” 1964.

^[7] Linder, https://famous-trials.com/scottsboroboys/1601-chronology; Albin Krebs, https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/26/obituaries/clarence-norris-the-last-survivor-of-scottsboro-boys-dies-at-76.html/

^[8] https://blacklivesmatter.com/our-history; Aja Romano, October 19, 2020, https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy.

^[9] Romano.

^[10] Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” 1991, https://www.scribd.com/document/352003623/Hall-Old-and-New-Identities-Ethnicities-Stuart-Hall-pdf.

^[11] Mike Lapler, https://www.axios.com/2026/08/12/aoc-democratic-socialists-2028; Robin Abcarian, “Was ‘Woke 1’ really that crazy?” Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2026, A17.

^[12] Ananya Gairola, May 12, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/aoc-slams-billionaire-wealth-subsidized-094602546.html.

^[13] Nesrine Malick, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/18/woke-progressives-rightwing-backlash-equality.

^[14] Jennifer Calfas, December 12, 2023, https://time.com/4968067/indigenous-peoples-day-columbus-day-cities.

“Gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, left, with Senator George McGovern, June 1972 (Photo by Annie Leibovtiz, Public Domain)

BILL MAHER

“Gonzo-ish” he might be, but I’m not a fan of the late-night talk-show host, mainly because of his wacky politics, which I’d already excoriated from a feminist perspective in an August 2023 blog, “Bill Versus ‘Barbie.’” And his recent Trump-like rant against democratic socialism absolutely cannot go answered.

“Donald Trump,” Maher chided in his July 29^th routine, “has told one trillion lies, but when he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually communists, that’s not one of them.” “Even five years ago,” he added, “it shunned communists.” But now, hold your breath, “They’re not trying to hide it.”^[1]

And it gets worse.

“Not a week goes by where I don’t read about some newly chosen exciting new face in the Democratic Party. And then when that face opens its mouth the Communist Manifesto or some other crazy shit comes out.”^[2]

And worse.

“Not to leave any doubt, New York Mayor Mamdani once tweeted Karl Marx’s words exactly.” And what was this horrid quote from the Devil himself? “Each according to their ability, each according to their needs.”^[3]

Well, it’s actually “From each” and “to each.” But more importantly, the same idea, as much of socialism’s and communism’s tenets, come straight from the Gospels. This includes both the communal lifestyle of Jesus and his disciples and his statements about the meek inheriting the earth and the impossible odds of the rich making it to Heaven.

And Maher’s punchline? “Yes, my vote is in play. I’m not voting for anyone who thinks the wrong side won the Cold War or cheers for the Intifada like it’s the World Cup.”^[4]

Only thing missing from the tirade was Trump’s McCarthyist insult about “godless Commies,” probably because Mamdani is a practicing Muslim and Maher is an atheist.

Herblock’s March 29, 1950, “Washington Post” cartoon that coined the term McCarthyism (Fair Use)

Now I’ve already thoroughly dismantled the socialism-equals-communism smear in my June 9, 2026, blog subtitled “Faux Commies vs. Neo-Fascists,” so I’ll let that ignorant buffoonery slide.

I will grant that the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform is pretty extreme. Its mission statement is unimpeachable: “to create a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.”^[5] But as a democratic socialist who (like Bernie Sanders) is not a DSA member, I don’t subscribe to many of the group’s policy proposals. Nor do several Democratic politicians who do belong to the organization, such as Mamdani and Los Angeles City Councilmember / mayoral candidate Nithyia Raman.^[6]

Because while some proposals accord with boilerplate progressivism, such as universal healthcare, rent control, and more equitable wealth distribution, others are naively utopian or totally unreasonable and, in any event, politically suicidal, such as abolishing the police, prisons, the Pentagon, border control, and the US Senate.^[7]

As for public ownership of large corporations—which, hypocritically, the Trump administration itself has embarked upon—conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg debunked this pipe dream in his LA Times op-ed titled “Socialism doesn’t pose a threat to free markets”: “Even if you think such proposals make sense on the merits—I don’t!—politically, this stuff is nuttier than a pool party at Mr. Peanut’s pad.”^[8]

Heading into the Midterms, however, Democratic pols and pundits find it harder to joke about the DSA and the sudden surge in democratic socialist candidates. And this is where their and Maher’s dissing of the trend goes beyond the party’s usual ideological tug-of-war and conjures an iconic intra-party squabble a half-century ago.

THE MCGOVERN SYNDROME

The 1972 presidential campaign, at the height of the social liberation movements and civil unrest over the Vietnam War, offered voters a stark choice: between incumbent Republican President Richard Nixon and Democratic challenger Senator George McGovern.

McGovern had briefly run for president in 1968 as a stand-in for the assassinated RFK. And after Ted Kennedy, the initial favored candidate in 1972, fell victim to Chappaquiddick, the left-leaning McGovern eventually won the nomination over fierce centrist opposition.

And while the party had to fall in line, the AFL-CIO, the largest labor organization in the country and a reliable Democratic supporter, more than threatened—a la Bill Maher—to withdraw its endorsement. The union federation’s executive council decided, for the first time, to remain neutral in the presidential election.^[9]

AFL-CIO president Geoerge Meany said the decision was based on “the ‘new politics’ that had taken over the Democratic party and ‘arrogantly excluded’ members of the old Democratic coalition, particularly organized labor.” Many among the rank and file, however, begged to differ with the council’s decision, and about half of the AFL-CIO’s 13.6 million members ended up joining a committee in support of McGovern.^[10]

Thus it appeared that the junior senator from South Dakota still had a chance.

His call for the immediate withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam, though still controversial, energized the base. And the youth vote, expanded by the 26^th Amendment’s lowering of the qualifying age from 21 to 18, seemed primed to favor him. As for his major policy positions, while radical by centrist standards, they closely resembled FDR’s proposed “second bill of rights” of 1944.

FDR’s 2^nd Bill of Rights.^[11]

• Employment (right to work)

• The right to an adequate income for food, shelter, and recreation

• Farmers’ rights to a fair income

• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies

• Decent housing

• Adequate medical care

• Social security

• Education

McGovern’s Platform^[12]

• Comprehensive national health insurance

• A guaranteed minimum income ensuring coverage of people’s basic needs for food, shelter, and healthcare

• A progressive tax system to promote economic equity

• Worker’s rights for a decent wage and working conditions

• Women’s rights including reproductive rights and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)

• Civil rights including increased measures to combat discrimination and systemic racism

• Environmental protection

• Increased funding for public education, including college

• Campaign finance reform to get the money out politics

• Protection and expansion of Social Security

It didn’t call for abolishing the police, the Pentagon, or private property, and though it’s as progressive as anything being proposed today, one would think it might’ve brought a few independents aboard.

Think again!

Fueled partly by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s premature claim of a peace deal with North Vietnam on the 11th hour before the election, it turned into one of the biggest landslides in US history, matching FDR’s trouncing of Alf Landon in 1944 and LBJ’s of Barry Goldwater in 1964.^[13]

• Nixon won the popular vote 60.7% to 37.5%

• He took the electoral vote 520 to 17, with even McGovern’s home state ditching him and only Massachusetts and DC bucking the tsunami

• As for the expanded youth vote, ’twas not to be

In short, it was a calamity that proved traumatic for the Democratic Party.

It didn’t spell utter doom. Future candidates moderated their positions, and other vicissitudes came into play. Watergate and the Oil Shock cleared the way for Carter; a mild recession ushered in Clinton; the subprime loan debacle gave us Obama; and COVID begat Biden. But now, with the rise of the democratic socialists at a time when turning back the Trumpian tide is crucial for the survival of democracy, what I call the “McGovern syndrome” has returned from the repressed as a more pointedly ideological subset of the catchall buzzword “electability.”

JAMES CARVILLE

A noted Bill Clinton strategist and media pundit, Carville has been the attack dog, minus Maher’s McCarthyist malarky, on the electoral threat posed by the democratic socialists. In June, Carville went so far as to urge that those who identified as such should form their own movement rather than be absorbed into the Democratic party ^[14]

He singled out the democratic socialist views of Darializa Avila Chevalier, Democratic primary winner in New York City’s 13^th Congressional District, as “a bridge too far.” And by August, echoing the AFL-CIO and mimicking Maher, he even threatened to leave the Democratic party if democratic socialist-aligned influencer Hasan Piker became a force in the party.^[15]

As for Abdul El Sayd, surprise Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan, though a non-DSA member, he was too “way left” for Carville, while other centrists pulled out the stops, calling him a “radical freak.”^[16]

And it’s become more than a war of words.

Third Way, a leading centrist think tank formed in 2005 whose name recalls Bill Clinton’s policy for bridging center-left and center-right, “has already raised millions to discredit democratic socialists by investing in social media and mobilizing activists against candidates like El-Sayed.”^[17]

Carville has certainly done his part, capped by his contention that the democratic socialists aren’t popular. “People don’t like them. . . . And you might end up losing a race which you should’ve never lost in the first place.”^[18] And so far, opinion polls appear to bear him out—with the electorate as a whole.

Among Democrats, Gallop polls have shown socialism to be highly popular, with favorability scores rising from 57% in 2018 to 66% in 2025, and in a recent Washingtom Post poll, 3 of 4 Democrats said they’d “be open to a democratic socialist for president.” With all Americans, however, it’s a different story, with only 15%, in the Post poll, viewing democratic socialism favorably, 36% unfavorably, and the rest having no opinion.^[19]

Then again, “only” 55% of all voters in the same poll said they would NOT vote for a democratic socialist president, which seems to indicate that for many Americans, dislike for the Trump/MAGA alternative outweighs their dislike for democratic socialists.^[20] And if so, this would add fodder to the “energize the base” argument, in the Midterms and the presidential election, that new and dynamic leaders rather than the “same old, same older,” added to growing anti-Trumpism, might prove decisive.

And therein lies the dilemma for Democrat-leaning voters, one that needs to be hotly debated based not solely on ideological grounds or the McGovern syndrome but on the most practical course to take for victory at the polls—in November and beyond.

“Debating Society,” 1795 etching by Isaac Cruikshank (Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

^[1] Teresa Monroe-Hamilton, August 1, 2026, https://rairfoundation.com/bill-maher-goes-anti-communist-rant-warns-democratic; Mira Bhakta, August 1, 2026; https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6003816-maher-knocks-democratic-socialists-as-communists-theyre-not-trying-to-hide-it.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Bhakta.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism.

^[6] https://www.amny.com/news/mamdani-draws-line-with-dsa-on-police-prisons; Maxwell Adler, July 29, 2026, https://www.vanityfair.com/story/nithya-raman-los-angeles-mayoral-race?

^[7] https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism; https://program.dsausa.org.

^[8] Michael Hiltzik, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-08-11/the-trump-administrations-investments-in-corporate-stocks-raise-fears-of-crony-capitalism; https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2026-07-28/democratic-socialists-free-markets.

^[9] https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/20/archives/aflcio-chiefs-vote-neutral-stand-on-election-aflcio-unit-neutral-on.html.

^[10] Ibid.; https://time.com/archive/6840158/labor-sitting-out-1972.

^[11] Joseph Chuman, July 1,2020, https://ethical.nyc/a-second-bill-of-rights.

^[12] https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1972.

^[13] Robert Kaiser, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1983/10/02/double-dealing-when-peace-was-at-hand.

^[14] Julia Bonavita, June 27, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/media/james-carville-says-socialist-dem-shouldnt-democratic-party-calls-views-bridge-far.

^[15] Jahaura Michelle, August 4, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/james-carville-threatens-leave-democratic-120540630.html.

^[16] Ryan Mancini, August 3, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6005137-carville-criticizes-democratic-progressives; Nesrine Mallick, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/10/centrist-democrats-abdul-el-sayed-michigan-2028-zohran-mamdani.

^[17] Mallick.

^[18] Mancini.

^[19] Daniel Allott, https://ca.news.yahoo.com/democrats-keep-nominating-candidates-most-083123087.html; Teo Armus and Scott Clement, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/30/most-americans-would-not-support-democratic-socialist-president-poll-finds.

^[20] Armus and Clement.

Universal Pictures’ theatrical poster (Fair Use)

SPOILER ALERT

And it’s actually two mounts.

Photo by kallerna, 2025 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Mt. Olympus: whence the Greek Gods interfaced with humans and the world below, making mischief, dispensing wisdom, and acting as coaches, puppet masters, and procreators.

Photo by Downtowngal (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mt. Lee: upon which rests the Hollywood sign, whose name has become synonymous with both the American film industry writ large and a formulaic, spectacle-driven, crowd-pleasing cinematic style.^[1]

MT. OLYMPUS

Olympian Gods, both major—Zeus, Hermes, Athena, Poseidon—and minor—Calypso, Circe—drive the plot and action of Homer’s Odyssey and, if less visibly, Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation (henceforth HO and NO). In HO, Zeus speaks directly to an assembly of the Gods at the outset and later individually to Hermes, Hermes helps Odysseus in his encounters with Calypso and Circe, and Athena guides Odysseus through much of his journey. In NO, only Zendaya’s Athena appears physically, while Poseidon and Zeus make their presence felt indirectly: Poseidon through the fickle winds and angry seas that Matt Damon’s Odysseus must navigate; and Zeus through occasional thunderbolts and, most significantly, through his “law of hospitality” (xenia in Greek) the mortals frequently invoke.

And “frequently” is an understatement.

Zeus’s admonition, to treat strangers and beggars kindly, and one’s neighbor as one wishes to be treated, is uttered in NO from start to finish, from characters high and low, serving as one of the film’s major motifs and as a key feature of its sermon on the mount.

“The Sermon on the Mount,” 1877 painting by Carl Bloch (Public Domain)

And the allusion is meant literally here, given xenia’s affinity with Chrisitan moral precepts, as several reviewers have noted.^[2] What’s been missing from the Christian-based commentary, however, is Zeus’s law’s deeper connection, chronologically and philosophically, to the Torah.

Centuries before Jesus’s sermon as recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, the Torah’s admonition to treat strangers with kindness and to love and protect the outsider is mentioned 36 times (and some say 46 times)!^[3] Even Zeus’s impetus for acting with empathy “because the stranger might be a God” is echoed obliquely in Leviticus 19:34: “You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

But the scriptural source of the commonsense notion of treating outsiders with compassion is secondary here. Of greater significance is the allegorical resonance of Zeus’s law, for an audience in the Trump era, to the least compassionate, most inhospitable US president in the nation’s history, most shamefully in his actions against immigrants (especially those of color). And which his henchman, Vice President Vance, has deigned to justify—on religious grounds!

In a television interview in early 2025, Vance flaunted his recent Catholic conversion by contending that the Chrisitan tenet of ordo amoris (the order of love) deemed that “Christian love should be ranked—prioritizing family and citizens above others.”^[4] This fallacy was quickly corrected by Pope Francis: “The true ordo amoris,” he scolded, “is that which we discover . . . by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”^[5]

While in a letter honoring America’s 250^th anniversary, newly elected Pope Leo XIV aimed his reproach squarely at Trump’s immigration policies: “To receive (immigrants) with compassion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.”^[6]

ICE and Border Patrol agents aiming “less-lethals” at protestors in Minneapolis, January 2026 (Photo by Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0)

And humanitarianism isn’t NO’s only moral. It vies for prominence with pacifism, or at least strong anti-war sentiment, which reviewer Josh Rothenberg actually sees as a corollary to xenia. Quite unlike in HO, where Odysseus remains a staunch and proud warrior to the end, in NO he’s conscience-stricken by the destruction and horrific slaughter of the Trojan War.

“The Trojan Horse casts a long shadow,” Rothenberg observes. “It haunts Matt Damon’s guilt-ridden Odysseus. He comes to see the Trojan Horse itself, his great act of cunning, as a violation of Zeus’s sacred law of hospitality. One of his defining triumphs becomes, in Nolan’s telling, something closer to original sin.”^[7]

And at the end of his journey, Odysseus appears to be on the verge of atonement, when in a major change from HO, he chooses self-exile with his wife, Penelope (Anne Hatahway), rather than reclaiming the Ithacan throne. His motives are noble: to honor his crew who were denied a proper burial, and to allow a younger generation, through his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), the new Ithacan king, to build a society more in keeping with Zeus’s law.

Well and good for Ithaca, and for NO’s allegorical hope for a post-Trump US.

Except that just prior to sailing off with Penelope, Odysseus had made a mockery of his pacifist conversion and nascent atonement. Rather than using his legendary cunning to placate Penelope’s suitors and avert a violent clash, he reverts to his warrior-king persona. He bends and strings the mighty bow as only he is capable of doing and commences, Trojan War-style, with Telemachus and the household servants’ help, to horrifically slaughter the suitors.

How then to reconcile this glaring moral breach with NO’s sermon on the mount?

MOUNT LEE

The Hollywood sign hovered over NO’s $250 million IMAX presentation from the start. The film’s epic scope, action-packed production, and a classic Hero’s Journey directed by the popular, Oscar-winning Nolan with a star-studded cast, seemed to check all the blockbuster boxes.

These included the need to milk the battle scenes for all they’re worth and to end with a flourish. Even in an anti-war film, as NO purports to be, the Hollywood motto “to get it both ways”—to satisfy both the moralists and the violent-action addicts—tends to hold sway. This paradox was brought home to me most forcefully when some US soldiers in the Iraq War of the 2000s were said to be “getting off” on Francis Coppola’s ultra-anti-Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.^[8]

But this “excuse” for the moral breach only takes us so far. Because there’s another Hollywoodish ingredient curiously missing from NO, as was emphatically not the case in HO and has befuddled reviewers—SEX. It’s implied, but not shown, in Odysseus’s multi-year sojourn with Charlize Theron’s Calypso, whose carnal attraction to our hero, if less reciprocated by him, is palpable. But that’s about it.

In Odysseus’s encounter with Samantha Morton’s Circe, he and the man-hating sorceress go at it verbally but refrain from getting it on physically, as they do in HO. As for the Sirens, their seductive call is literally muted by lowering the soundtrack’s volume to emulate the effect of Odysseus and his men putting wax in their ears.

Now we’re talking the post-Production Code era here, where sex and violence go hand in gland, and NO’s R-rating is designed to protect the young. So what the fuck!

A two-fold explanation for the G-rated omissions are ready at hand: that both Odysseus’s love for Penelope and his guilt-ridden soul would’ve been irrevocably tarnished by the graphic depiction of his HO-style adulterous banging. And if you’ll indulge me, I propose that Odysseus’s sexual repression throughout the film also served subliminally as impetus for the morally antithetical battle scene at the end—through a return of the repressed in his “climactic” slaughter of the suitors.

Whether you buy the Freudian analysis or not, NO shows how HO’s violent, supernatural, and sexy Greek myth turns out, in this instance, to be more Hollywood than Hollywood, and that Nolan’s sermon on the mount might be saying more than he might’ve imagined.

Thomas Degeorge’s 1812 painting of Odysseus, Telemachus, and others slaughtering Penelope’s suitors (photo by VladoubidoOo, CC BY-SA 3.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to Lauren Parks, Ryan Stack, and Rabbi Chava Bahle for their assistance.

^[1] Mount Lee was unnamed when the Hollywoodland (later Hollywood) sign was erected in 1923. It wasn’t officially named until 1938, four years after his death, for Los Angeles car dealer and radio station owner Don Lee (Hadley Meares, January 17, 2014, https://www.pbssocal.org/history-society/behind-the-sign-the-lost-meanings-of-the-original-hollywood-sign).

^[2] Dr. Jeremy Berg, https://kingdomharbor.com/2026/07/23/the-odyssey-christian-morality-and-the-law-of-zeus.

^[3] Rabbi Reuven Firestone, https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/torah-commentary/commandment-love-and-help-stranger.

^[4] Malcolm Ferguson, February 11, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/post/191401/pope-trump-mass-deportations-jd-vance-fake-christianity.

^[5] Ibid, emphasis mine.

^[6] Ariana Baio, July 30, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/pope-leo-takes-shot-trump-142717970.html. Emphasis mine.

^[7] Josh Rothenberg, “8 Ways That ‘Odyssey’ Changes Homer’s Epic,” Los Angeles Times, July 26, 2026, E5.

^[8] January 3, 2005, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6780587.

Nasal Index from Paul Topinard’s “Éléments d’anthropologie Générale” of 1885 (Public Domain)

Getting a bit personal on this one, but not to worry. It’s G-rated.

My wife, Karen, and I have lived in the same house on Robinson Street in Silver Lake since 1980. Like my father, I’m an outgoing sort and have gotten to know most everybody on my block over the years.

And I’ve gone the extra mile.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for a local paper about the exceptional racial and ethnic diversity on our street. To research the piece, I knocked on every door and collected a sample that bore out my thesis and then some.^[1] I also take regular walks around the neighborhood, engaging with neighbors along the way. And most recently, after Rafael Vela, a longtime neighbor, was abducted by ICE, I co-organized a vigil for him and his family, attended by a cross-section of the community.^[2]

All this is to say that few people were better informed about the neighbors on our block than I was.

Then Gina Fiore Levin passed away, at 83.

The Robinson Street frontage of Gina’s home

Gina had lived right across the street from me since she and her husband, Art, moved in about 40 years ago. It’s a hilly area and their house lay secluded behind large trees and other vegetation at the bottom of the downslope. I’d gotten to know Art, who died in 2021, but only barely from brief conversations when he ventured up to Robinson Street to put out the trash. Their cars were parked in the garage below, along Sayre Lane, a private alleyway

But I’d never seen Gina at all.

I didn’t even know her name until two years ago, when she called out of the blue about some loud music nearby she hoped I could do something about, which I did, and we never spoke again. All I knew about her was that she’d suffered a stroke several years before Art died, that since Art’s death she lived alone in the hidden house, and that she was cared for by a close friend, Sarah Scott, a horse and dog trainer who provided some added protection via her two (trained to be) fearsome Rottweilers.

Gina’s house tucked away somewhere below

Then the other day a neighbor called and said that, after hearing strange sounds coming from Gina’s house, she’d gone over and learned from Gina’s sister and nephew that Gina had died a few weeks before. This was news to me, and believing that most others on the block still didn’t know, I sent a group email identifying Gina in the sketchy manner I just described and mentioning that she’d recently passed away.

Then all heaven broke loose.

Eddie Hibbs, who lived next-door to Gina, immediately sent an email to the group. He thanked me and then blew my mind:

“Gina passed June 3, 2026. I knew her for 30+ years. She was a firecracker. She was an incredible artist and sculptor. She loved horse and motorcycle riding. She had a wicked sense of humor, greatly appreciating the absurd, satirical, and surreal style of Monty Python. Gina is survived by 2 pets: a cat named Kip and a snake, now named Coil; both of which I adopted. And she is survived by her younger sister Nina and nephew Anthony, both of whom are here from Michigan. Funeral services for Gina are being held this Thursday, July 16 at 11:00 AM at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. After that, there is a group reservation at 12:45 at The Smoke House Restaurant in Burbank where we can eat lunch while sharing memories and stories of our friendships with her. Feel free to join us for both.”

Another longtime neighbor, Monique Herrera, responded to Eddie’s email by recalling how she’d met Gina as a student in a figure sculpting class she supervised, and how avid and talented Gina was.

As for the funeral, Eddie, Sarah, and Stan Keyes, another neighbor who knew Gina well, related how Gina’s ashes were buried along with her wedding ring (Art’s ashes had been taken by his family) and the ashes of her favorite dog, Django, a sweet Black and Tan Coonhound who’d died in 2022. Many of us who didn’t know Gina had known and grown to love Django, who’d come running up to be petted at the fence along Robinson Street.

Sarah had added another personal touch to the interment ceremony by having Kraken, one of her Rottweilers, pull a cart carrying Gina’s and Django’s ashes to the burial site, accompanied by a recording of one of Gina and Sarah’s favorite Mony Python sketches, “Bring Out Your Dead.”^[3]

And more revelatory details were yet to come, about Gina as a person and why she’d remained a blank to so many on the block for so long.

From Sarah, Eddie, and Stan, the latter two having helped Gina with maintenance work and other chores after Art died, I learned that it wasn’t the stroke that kept Gina from showing her face on Robinson Street. Pre-stroke she regularly drove off from Sayre Lane in one of her and Art’s three vintage cars, for art classes, riding her horse, Kei-bo, and much else. She loved motorcycling and archery for leisure, and it wasn’t all fun and games. She also volunteered with the art program at the local Braille Institute.

Afterwards, with her right leg, arm, and hand partially paralyzed (and she was right-handed), she continued driving to the art classes (now in an automatic transmission Toyota), started strength training, and with Sarah’s help, even managed to ride Kei-bo until he was retired (he died in 2021) and another horse one last time. Gina was tough, “even a bit ornery,” Eddie recalls, or as Stan summed up, “She just wouldn’t give up.”

I also learned that Art was no slouch. A veteran of World War II, he was a zookeeper at the LA Zoo for 40 years and also played the tuba in a band that held free concerts in city parks along with other gigs. Sharing some of Gina’s sense of humor, his license plate on the vintage Porsche read “FIRST TUBA,” a band or orchestral position that doesn’t exist. A veritable fountain of youth, he lived to a remarkably spry 96.

Gina had actually been briefly married once before (“a mistake,” she called it), after moving to LA from DC in her younger years. She also then changed her first name to Gina from her given names, Janet Annteresse.

Now comes the topper.

In LA, as Gina Fiore, she began performing as a Go-Go dancer at a club on Melrose near Vermont. Having changed hands several times and once owned by Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, the club was named the Faultline in 1996 after the ’94 quake. The place closed in 2021, but before that, guess what? Eddie himself had performed there for over 15 years!

Gina also worked as a bikini-clad “grid girl,” who waves the start and finish flags at motorcycle and car races, but whose main purpose is to promote the sponsors—though for Gina, no doubt, the primary aim, as with the Go-Go gig, was promoting herself to Hollywood agents and casting directors.

“She was a knockout!” Eddie exclaimed, from photos he’d seen. “Like a Bridget Bardot pin-up girl!”

More Gina Lollobrigida, I’d say, given her dark Italian looks. But in any case—Va-Va-Voom!

Okay, so many of us on Robinson Street missed out bigtime on getting to know a fascinating-sounding (and stunning-looking) woman. And surely other amazing stories have yet to be revealed about other Robinson Street neighbors. But besides teaching us something important about knowing thy neighbor as well as loving them no matter what, indulge me about another effect the Gina experience has had on me:

That our neighborhood Mystery Woman also conjures the Boo Radley character in To Kill a Mockingbird.

We’re not talking direct resemblances, of course, either in Gina and Boo as people or in the neighbors’ responses to them. But some things do strike a chord: 1) that Gina, as far as most of us knew, was a recluse living in a dark, somewhat foreboding house; 2) that she sculpted figures much as Boo carved figurines for the kids; and 3) that just as Scout only sees Boo and the world from his perspective at the very end, it took until Gina’s end for most of us to finally “see” her and get a glimpse of her world.

I also wonder what children on the block might’ve made of the “loner” in the hidden (haunted?) house. Indeed, the whole adventure has turned the child in me into a quasi-Scout, wishing that I’d gotten to know Gina better and perhaps even become her friend, like some of my neighbors did.

In lieu of that, I’ll just imagine Gina “Boo” Fiore Levin riding Kei-bo or a motorcycle off into the sunset, with tuba-playing Art and tail-wagging Django there to greet her.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Special thanks to Sarah Scott, Stan Keyes, Monique Herrera, Halley Albert, Patty Malkin, Nina Lucia, and especially Eddie Hibbs for their invaluable contributions.

^[1] Insert from Vincent Brook, “Top It If You Can! Multicultural Microcosm on a Silver Lake Street,” Los Feliz Ledger, August 2013, page 23.

^[2] For more on Rafael, see https://babblingbrook.substack.com/p/ice-is-beneath-contempt. Unfortunately, as of this writing, Rafael is still in confinement.

^[3] For a video of Gina’s funeral, go to @acheronfarms on Instagram.

IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS:

• The two photos of Gina’s home are by me.

• Gina’s sculpture photo is by Stan Keyes.

• Bikini-clad Gina is courtesy of Sarah Scott (photographer unknown).

• The final image of Gina is courtesy of Elizabeth Hackman (photographer unknown).

Left Hook Versus Right Cross

There’d been hints that one of Trump’s strategies for the Midterms was going to be painting the Democrats with a Commie brush. A relic of the “red scare” of the 1940s and 50s, the liberal-communism conflation had been packed in mothballs by the end of the Cold War. But with little to brag about and much to answer for—the inflation, the economy in general, the botched Iran War, the padding of his pocketbook while the commoners suffered—Trump dusted off the canard and trotted it out in full regalia after the Mamdani-inspired democratic socialist sweep in the New York City primaries of June 23.

As if reading from a Joe McCarthy script the next day at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual “Road to Majority” conference, Trump warned that the Democrats were “godless communists,” who posed an existential threat to the nation. They’re “not social Democrats. They are core communists.”[1]

As for the horrors that lay in store: “They want to resume the transgender mutilation of children, they want to restart the war on Christians and churches, and as you saw with the communists elected in New York recently . . . they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. . . . [They] hate our country and our people.”[2]

And as if this wasn’t alarmist enough for his rightwing Christian audience, he laid it on thick: “These ruthless communists attack all religions, but in particular Christianity. They always do. They’re after Christianity more than any other religion.” And in an obvious allusion to the Charlie Kirk killing: “I’m sorry to say but the assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassinations are a big deal for them. They are animals!”[3]

Then came an ideology lesson from Professor Trump:

“Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy.” So easy, he added with self-parody, “I think I’d be the greatest communist in history. I’d give free rent, free houses, free food, everything is free. Unfortunately, after two or three years, the Country where this is taking place would fail. It always does, and then you’ll start living in squalor. Everyone will suffer or die. That’s what happens.”[4]

Pretty pukey stuff, but you’d better reach for the Zofran. Because Trump’s 250th anniversary eve speech at Mt. Rushmore piled on the slop: “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”[5]

The only thing missing (besides the Cold War) was for all god-fearing Americans to load up their assault rifles!

United Artists poster for the 1966 film (Fair Use)

So, to quote Vladimir Lenin, “What is to be done?”[6]

There’s no hope of educating MAGA loyalists or Christian nationalists about this unadulterated crap, or getting through to Republicans who know better, yet swallow the blather nonetheless. It’s really only the centrist, election-swinging independents who offer the slightest chance of coming to see the fraudulence of Trump’s reckless fearmongering.

And to this end, what follows are some talking points for enlightening those less or ill-informed about how ludicrous, disingenuous, and dangerous Trump’s anti-Commie crusade clearly is.

SOCIALISM VS. COMMUNISM

Both ideologies indeed emerged in the 1800s in tandem and in opposition to unbridled capitalism, whose development, along with unprecedented technological progress and economic growth, produced horrendous working conditions, extreme wealth disparity, and boom-and-bust financial instability. And both socialism and communism indeed championed the working class and proposed public control of private property and industry for purposes of creating a more just and equitable society.

But by the 1900s, socialist and communist movements began to diverge. Socialist parties shifted toward a more moderate position that embraced democracy and allowed for a mixed capitalist/socialist economy. Communists stuck to their guns and converted Czarist Russia, through violent revolution, into the first avowed communist country.

The USSR, however, as we know—while initially boosting women’s rights and through its proxy in the US fighting for civil rights—quickly devolved into state-sponsored despotism under Stalin, as would later communist systems in China under Mao and North Korea under the Kim family.

Democratic socialist-oriented countries in Europe, however, after a wobbly start and greatly aided in the post-World War II era by America’s Marshall Plan, have thrived economically and socially. Most boast large corporations, have more fully democratic systems of government than our electoral college / gerrymandered disaster, and provide universal, publicly funded healthcare and other social services that put the US to shame.

I myself experienced the socioeconomic success of these countries during extended stays in Europe over the years. And if you think my leftist view might be biased, I’ll never forget a talk I had with a rightwing Chrisitan American who’d been working for a US company in Denmark.

Clearly capitalism was in safe hands, and he’d witnessed no limits on free speech or religious expression. This surprised him a little, but what stunned him most was that despite the Danes’ extremely high taxes by American standards—most people had nice houses and cars and seemed content, and there was hardly any visible poverty.

Which is no surprise, given that according to a 2026 survey, “average poverty in the US has increased almost continuously since 1990. In contrast, it has declined over time in most other high-income countries,” with average US poverty now about twice that of the UK, France, and Germany (and surely also of the Scandinavian countries).[7]

Skid Row, Los Angeles, 2018 (photo by Russ Allison Loar, CC BY-SA 4.0)

And poverty is only one of several categories in which the US record is an embarrassment compared to that of democratic socialist and many other countries, as anchor Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) famously reminded us on Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series The Newsroom (2012-14).

In education, McAvoy informed a group of American college students at a panel discussion, the US stood 7th in literacy, 22nd in science, and 27th in math. In life expectancy we stood at an abysmal 49th and in infant mortality an obscene 178th. America led the world “in only 3 categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spent more than the next 26 countries combined.”[8]

So it seems that rather than bashing the democratic socialists, Trump could give his cratering opinion polls a bump by adopting measures that raise Americans’ overall living standards and level of contentment, rather than upping the ante on policies and rhetoric that widen the wealth gap and fuel resentment.

But since acting rationally and empathetically is beyond our supreme leader’s capacity, better to keep the ball rolling for the Midterms by following my friend Rabbi Chava Bahle’s modest proposal—send “47” a Red Card.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] David Smith, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/26/trump-democrats-communists-midterms.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.; Brendan Raacius, June 26, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/animals-trump-decries-godless-communists-190639270.html.

[5] Steven Sloan, Steve Peoples, and Michael L. Price, July 4, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-trump-hails-u-s-exceptionalism-warns-of-communist-threat-in-speech-at-mount-rushmore.

[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd.

[7] Servet Yanatma, May 15, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/articles/way-measure-poverty-shows-us-055219877.html.

[8] The Newsroom, Episode 1, “We Just Decided To,” June 24, 2012, on HB0, now widely available on YouTube.

IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS (for those not listed above):

Boxers drawing: From Edmund Price’s The Science of Self Defense: A Treatise on Sparring and Wrestling, 1867 (Public Domain).

Red Card: Photo by Vincent Brook (Public Domain).

Don’t’ get me wrong. I’m still rooting for the US in the World Cup. I’ve always taken pride and joy in our natural wonders and as a child even wanted ours to be more grandiose than any other country’s!

On a more serious note, I’ll be eternally grateful to America for having offered a safe haven from the Nazis to my German Jewish refugee parents. I also revel in the artistic, literary, musical, and theatrical culture that Americans (native-born and immigrant) have gifted to the world. And as a child of the 60s, I get teary-eyed with joy when I see how racially, ethnically, and orientationally diverse my hometown of Los Angeles and especially my adopted neighborhood of Silver Lake have become.

And indeed, impressive progress has been made across the country on the multicultural front thanks to the grassroots movements, court decisions, and congressional acts of the counterculture era and belated breakthroughs for LGBTQs in the 2000s, when, as Gary Fields so nicely puts it: “the country seemed to mature into the nation of its creed.”[1]

But then the ghost of the Confederacy reared its head and found a flag-bearer par excellence in our twice-elected, once-insurrectionist, always repugnant president. And since then, except for a revived resistance movement, much of the US, from the top down, has regressed with a vengeance into the creed-defying nation it’s been for the bulk of its quarter-millennium.

And it sickens me. And why I can’t bear to participate in any event that ignores, much less glorifies, the Trump era’s individual, institutional, constitutional, and environmental catastrophes capped by the normalizing of a culture of dishonesty, indecency, bigotry, and lawlessness on the presidential level that’s unprecedented in American history.[2]

Pres. Trump displaying his January 20, 2025, executive order granting pardons and commutations to over 1,500 individuals who attacked the Capitol building on January 6, 2020, in a violent attempt to overthrow the newly elected government of Joe Biden (the Trump White House, Public Domain)

So I’m afraid, like many African and Native Americans, who’ve long kept at arm’s length from celebrating July 4^th, I also will turn my back on the whoop-tee-doo this year and those that follow—until this pox upon the republic has been roundly repudiated.

Not to rain on everyone’s parade, and to show that I’m not a total Scrooge, I fully embrace the various activities being mounted this Independence Day as alternatives to pro-Trump events. And to these acts of defiance, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s “250 to 250” video series and other progressive projects, I say—Right On![3]

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Notes

[1] Gary Fields, Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2026, A5.

[2] For my earlier anti-Trump blogs, go to https://www.babblingbrook.substack.com/archive.

[3] Heather Cox Richardson’s “250-250” video series is explained on her “Letters from an American” website and episodes are posted on YouTube.

The attribution for the “No Kings” logo is https://www.nokings.com (Fair Use).

Movie Poster (Universal Pictures, Fair Use)

SPOILER ALERT

* * * * * * * * * *

HE’S BACK

• After two critically well-received but commercially disappointing efforts, 2021’s West Side Story and 2022’s The Fabelmans, and a hiatus during which Spielberg wrote a story on which David Koepp’s screenplay was based, the result has been another blockbuster for the most successful box-office director of all time.[1]

• The filmmaking technique also lives up to the gold standard one associates with the master, with the help of his right-hand cinematographer since 1993’s Schindler’s List, Janusz Kamiński, frequent editor Sarah Broshar, perennial music scorer John Williams, and an excellent cast topped by Emily Blunt.

• And while it may be crammed with several other allusions to his past work (I’ll leave that to the Spielberg freaks), the film struck me as essentially a more topically relevant Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) meets Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It unmistakably combines basic narrative, genre, and stylistic elements from these Spielberg classics of yore, plus a little E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982) sprinkled in for good measure. As for the Close Encounters connection, screenwriter Koepp has called Disclosure Day a “bookend” to the earlier film.[2]

Re: Close Encounters

Mirroring Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild and Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner—the two white Americans in Disclosure Day who crash the TV newscast and orchestrate the eponymous announcement—Close Encounters’ Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfus) and Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) are the only unofficial guests at the alien mothership’s climactic landing at Devils Tower. Roy’s “chosen-ness” is further signaled in his being the only earthling welcomed aboard for the aliens’ return flight. Also, per Margaret and Daniel, whose attempt to accomplish their mission is blocked at every turn by the black ops, Roy and Jillian must elude the US Army’s attempt to keep the general public and the media at bay. Finally, the intentions of the aliens in both films (and ET) are benign and they look enough alike to be blood relatives.

Re: Raiders of the Lost Ark

The action-adventure thrills in the first Indiana Jones film and the high-stakes rivalry over a hidden object of geopolitical significance (the Nazis’ coveted Ark of the Covenant) are echoed in Disclosure Day’s chase-scene set pieces and the over-the-top battle with the black ops over the top-secret alien files.

Re: ET: The echoes here are fewer and more peripheral given Disclosure Day’s darker tone, but the flashback sequence of the alienized animals entering Margaret’s childhood bedroom and guiding her (and young Daniel) to the forest and into a Hansel and Gretel-like cottage clearly evokes ET’s sense of fairytale wonder.

SORTA

• Compared to his best films—for me, alphabetically: A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Bridge of Spies, Catch Me If You Can, Close Encounters, The Color Purple, Duel, ET, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Lincoln, The Post, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saving Private Ryan, and Schindler’s List—some of the creativity, magic, and occasional profundity have been sacrificed in Disclosure Day for action-packed thrills, no matter how masterfully realized, that pay off at the box office but somewhat compromise the film’s ostensibly loftier notions and timely premise: That the government has been hiding, since Roswell in 1947 and ongoing, evidence of alien visitation—and it’s high time that the truth be told!

By no means intended as red meat for the conspiracy crowd, this is a premise Spielberg takes quite seriously. Never having experienced an alien encounter himself and initially a skeptic, he now states, “Based on the circumstantial evidence of everything that I’ve gathered throughout my whole life, everybody I’ve listened to and every documentary I’ve ever watched and all the testimonies in Congress that I’ve heard, I absolutely think that they have been here, and they are here.”[3]

And while taking a mainstream commercial approach on a serious issue might be seen as a cop-out, it’s a choice filmmakers often confront when dealing with an important message. In the classical studio era, the choice was simple, as famously quipped by producer Samuel Goldwyn, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”[4] In the post-classical period of greater director freedom, especially for those with a solid track record, the choice instead comes down to: pulling out all the stops in hopes of reaching as broad an audience as possible versus staying true to the material but likely limiting the eyeballs to critics and a handful of highbrows—and, if you’re lucky, the Motion Picture Academy.

• Spielberg’s believing-the-believers conversion may be recent, but he’s long been an outspoken progressive, and he thankfully inserts a couple of digs at Trump in the film. I only wish he’d included a tad more given the threat to democracy and humanitarian values we currently face in this country (and the world), a threat that’s of more immediate concern than whether we’ve not been alone, but what difference has it made?

The first of the anti-Trump barbs occurs right off the bat, in the uncannily timely WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) opening. The bullying, boastful, brutally violent antics of the chest-beating wrestlers, Brian Cage and Lance Archer (credited as Lance Hoyt), can’t help but conjure caveman Trump and his UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) extravaganza on the White House South Lawn—held on June 14, the Sunday after Disclosure Day’s June 12 release!

Adding to the anti-Trump effect, the wrestling scene also begs to be taken as a jab at his fanatical MAGA supporters, given how the staged bout’s super-fans, like Trumpites at one of his rallies, jump up and cheer wildly at every slam-down, with one exception—Daniel, who, like a man from another planet, remains seated with a blank stare of incomprehension at the boorish spectacle.

The second dig is kinder and gentler, but no less aimed at our supreme leader. This comes midway through when black-ops defector Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) relays to his archrival, black-ops chief Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the aliens’ overarching message: What the world needs now is Empathy—just the thing, “coincidentally,” that Trump has too little of! (My paraphrase.)

That Hugo speaks for the filmmaker is underscored in Spielberg’s actual musical allusion: “At the core of Disclosure Day is the question: Where has all our empathy gone?”[5]

Well and good, but for me this core ends up playing second fiddle to the film’s pyrotechnics.

• Then there’s the “refrigerator talk.” Coined by playwright and screenwriter Samuel A. Taylor and popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, this refers to when a moviegoer—having gone home after a film and perhaps to the refrigerator—says, “Now wait a minute, that plot point doesn’t make sense.” And especially with thrillers, Taylor and Hitchcock admit, the viewer’s point might be well taken, and this could spell a problem if the questions arise while watching the film. But if the person enjoyed the film and the druthers occur sometime later, the film is on safe ground—as Disclosure Day is for me, “refrigerator talk” notwithstanding.

  1. How could the aliens ensure, even if the 10-year-olds had been given special powers: (a) that Daniel would not only grow up become a math and computer whiz but would end up with the black ops and thus be able to steal the alien files; (b) that Margaret would become a weathercaster with access to a TV station; and (c) that especially Daniel would be able to miraculously escape the black ops’ clutches time and again?

  2. Implausible enough, but even if one grants that the aliens and their magic wands possessed the stupendous ability to manipulate people, places, things, and time, why did they have to resort to such a convoluted, highly precarious means of achieving their epoch-making ends—unless they were actually aspiring alien screenwriters itching for an Oscar and 15 minutes of fame?

A friend argued that this questioning actually points to the film’s ambiguity rather than illogic, and is what makes it more intriguing rather than befuddling. I agreed to a point but felt he was giving the film and the aliens a bit too much credit.

Various sources supplied by AI, however, taken in toto, dispel both our arguments. These commentators, not speculatively but with utmost assurance, proclaim that everything leading up to Margaret’s epochal announcement was indeed planned by the aliens decades in advance. She and David were bio-engineered, in a spaceship disguised as a fairytale cottage, to fulfill their critical function. The belated contributions of Hugo and Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), were also factored in, and the aliens were just waiting for the right moment to set the final stage of the Disclosure Day project in motion.[6]

Well, perhaps. Except that to my recollection and that of several other friends, none of this “unambiguous” clarification is provided in the film. Which, anecdotally at least, confirms the validity of our refrigerator talk and the ambiguity theory, with the bottom line that we all enjoyed the film and our listening to one another only enhanced our appreciation.

As for it bringing us any closer to believing the believers . . . ?

The Green Bank Telescope in the Allegheny Mountains, circa 2001, one of the radio telescopes used by the Breakthrough Listen project to search for alien communications (photo by NRAO/AUI, CC BY 3.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to my friends Ali Bhutto, Steve Mamber, Lauren Parks, Ryan Stack, and Ken Windrum for their assistance.

[1] June 7, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/video/extended-interview-steven-spielberg; October 15, 2025, https://www.directv.com/insider/top-grossing-directors. And this position holds after the latest Avatar film by Spielberg’s closest competitor, James Cameron.

[2] https://www.youtube/watch?v=MjW_cfPYn_s.

[3 June 7, 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/disclosure-day-director-steven-spielberg-141827336.

[4] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki. There are several slightly different versions of this classic quote.

[5] Wesley Stenzel, June 9, 2026, https://ew.com/disclosure-day-steven-spielberg-emily-blunt-josh-oconnor-cover-story-11992832. For younger readers, the musical allusions of my and Spielberg’s empathy-related statements are, respectively: for mine, to Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s 1965 hit “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” made popular by Jackie DeShannon; and for Spielberg, to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” written and originally performed in 1955 by Pete Seeger.

[6] https://www.youtube/watch?v=MjW_cfPYn_s; Cortex Videos: Disclosure Day Explained (Full Movie Breakdown); Dani Di Placido, June 15, 2026; https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2026/06/15/the-mysterious-ending-of-disclosure-day-explained; Jason Hellerman, June 14, 2026, https://nofilmschool.com/disclosure-day-ending-explained; Hannah Long, June 20, 2026, https://thedispatch.com/article/steven-spielbergs-disclosure-day-wonder.

Torture by poisoned water, 1676 drawing by Erich Palmquist

Okay, so except for people caught up in the ICE raids, life under the Trump repugnancy hasn’t been quite as bad as toxic water torture. For comparatively privileged progressives, however, it has been crazy-making, and from anecdotal evidence and my own experience, several methods have been used to cope with the insanity. These methods are interrelated, have differing half-lives, and vary in intensity and efficacy depending on the level of repugnance. And with no pretense to scientific legitimacy, they boil down to the following.

RAGE

I don’t know if it was the first time Trump pushed my rage button, but what sticks most in my mind was his mimicking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski at a November 2015 campaign rally—an incident I keep repeating because it should live in infamy.[1] A close second was when, upon announcing his 1^st presidential bid in June 2016, he claimed with no evidence that hordes of Mexican rapists and other criminals were invading the US, and “some, I assume, are good people.”[2]

This was still early in the game, of course, and rage was more successful as a coping mechanism because Trump hadn’t yet been elected and it seemed impossible that he would or ever could be. Two surreal elections and nonstop revulsion since, rage has naturally become a less effective palliative—but heaven help us if his cruelty and depravity ever fail to elicit it!

LAUGHTER

Laughter as a reaction to Trump’s most abhorrent acts and utterances would be abhorrent in its own right. But several of his torrent of lies and self-aggrandizing boasts can’t help but leave one rolling in the aisles.

Given the 10s of 1000s of falsehoods documented over the past decade and counting, I’ll just point out a few of the more recent doozies.[3] High on the Richter scale was Trump’s touting his consistently acing the “intelligence” tests administered during his medical exams, as if this was a remarkable achievement. Problem is, the purpose of these 4^th-grade level tests was to measure dementia, not IQ, causing one to seriously question the veracity of his having aced the tests in the first place.

Then there’s the Truth Social platform, which by itself is worthy of an SNL sketch. The name alone is hilarious self-parody, given how Trump’s whole political career has been based on duplicity, among the most glaring examples of which is projecting his own pathological lying onto the alleged “fake news” of the legacy media.

But for me the Nobel Prize-winning knee-slapper, so far, has been his reaction to the recently announced spike in inflation to 4.2%. This was the highest rate since 2023 under Biden and well above the Federal Reserve’s 2.0 benchmark. Biden’s 4.2, however, was a triumph compared to the 9.1 he’d faced due to COVID-caused stagflation, and by the time he left office he’d further reduced the rate to 3.0.[4]

Trump had campaigned on Biden’s alleged inability to rein in inflation and boasted he’d bring it down in no time. But when his reckless tariffs did the opposite, leading to an “affordability” crisis, he typically claimed the crisis was a hoax.[5] And when the Iran War he’d started with Israel jacked up fuel prices and undeniably led to the 4.2% spike, you’d think he might be a tad rueful, considering the immense suffering the war had caused, here and abroad. But incredibly, the goofball was almost gleeful.

“No, I love it,” he beamed to reporters about the 4.2%. “The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation.”[6]

That at least one reporter didn’t crack up at Trump’s sudden inflation infatuation is equally incredible. Though any cackling, in this instance, would have to be of the Schadenfreude (joy at another’s expense) variety. For though one hopes that Trump’s risible remarks will further damage his already cratering opinion polls, the war’s toll in death, destruction, and economic hardship—though not close to that of the Vietnam or Iraq wars, as Trump also imbecilically proclaimed—is nothing to laugh at. [7]

RETREAT

Rage and laughter can help to a point, but given Trump’s maniacal actions and their often-disastrous repercussions, fulltime exposure can be debilitating and taking an occasional break is understandable, if not advisable. Some I know go whole hog in this direction, steering clear of almost all the dufus-related news.

My wife adopts this method, but only off and on, when she feels she’s “had it,” and I’ve adopted a variation. While I still regularly follow the news, I access it largely via the print media and instantly switch off the TV or radio whenever Trump appears on screen or starts to spout off.

HEADSCRATCHING

Once I’ve finished one round of Trump-incited rage, laughter, and retreat, and before embarking on another, I find myself scratching my head about an aspect of the Trump phenomenon that’s even more frustrating and infuriating than the man himself: his supporters. I leave out the hard-core MAGA fanatics and radical Chrisitan nationalists, not because they’re less dangerous—quite the opposite—but because they’re beyond reclamation. While those “independents” who vote their pocketbooks (as if that’s the only measure of being better or worse off than before), I’ll leave it to Trump’s economy to swing them around.

It’s the more thoughtful souls—some of whom I know and who despite claiming to despise Trump, continue to vote for him—who are the most befuddling to me. And yet for fear of either ruining our already fragile relationship or deepening my depression about the state of humanity, I haven’t been able to bring myself to ask these people how they manage to reconcile their vote with their dislike, and most of all, their principles. But I’ve at least found a way of dealing with the paradox.

After considering but rejecting a progressive friend’s explanation—“They’re STU-pid!”—I’ve relied on two educated guesses based on cognitive dissonance: the psychological unease when confronted with contradictions to one’s beliefs, which then compels one to rationalize the legitimacy of those beliefs.

One example of cognitive dissonance I see applying to some of the paradoxical Trump supporters is that they’re dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, born and bred in a GOP household, who can’t bear to betray the faith of their fathers and forefathers. The other, likely in tandem with the first, is that as bad as Trump might be, the Democrats—whom they associate with socialism, which they lazily conflate with communism, encouraged by Trump and Fox News—are the greater of two evils.[8]

With the first example, faith is a tough nut to crack. With the second, I let off some steam by imagining my telling the paradoxicals, first, that leftist Democrats, like my socialist-leaning self, though we might appreciate Marxism as a socio-economic theory, detest communism, having learned our lesson from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong Un.

Second, we realize that as Americans we live, for better and worse, under a capitalist system that ain’t goin’ away anytime soon and in a quasi-democracy that only allows for piecemeal reform, not wholesale overhaul.

Third, that most of the humanitarian reforms, such as worker rights, civil rights, Social Security, and Medicare, have been achieved under the socialist motto of “the greatest good for the greatest number” and against the fierce opposition of Republicans who can’t stop trying, and often succeeding, to whittle them away.

Fourth, that the real threat to the republic hasn’t come from Democrats but from Republicans, who’ve obscenely widened the gap between rich and poor, and from Trump, enabled by a conservative Supreme Court, who’s been radically rewriting the rules and demonstrably turning our quasi-democracy into a quasi-fascist state.

And finally, policy matters aside, I’d ask the paradoxicals how they can abide a hateful, bullying self-idolater as the country’s supreme leader, who hasn’t the least concern for common decency or the welfare of the common person, and who’s set the worst possible example for how to treat one’s fellow human beings.

SERENITY

I realize, of course, that given cognitive dissonance and its extreme expression, the boomerang effect, in which the greater the threat to one’s beliefs the more stubbornly one clings to them, my words would’ve met with deaf ears and the only benefit would’ve come from getting a load off my chest.

At which point it’s time to draw a few deep breaths and take some comfort from the serenity prayer’s advice about accepting the things one cannot change. Which I’ve done, and it’s worked for a brief while. But it’s the second suggestion, about gaining the courage to change the things one can—in this case doing something concrete about the threat Trump poses to the state of the nation and the world—that’s the most effective and rewarding of the coping mechanisms.

RESISTANCE

This is what the No Kings Day protests, community and judicial-based efforts to counter Trump’s racist crusades, and get-out-the-vote campaigns to tilt Congress in a more humane and constitutionally respectful direction have been doing—and like capitalism, this leftist movement ain’t goin’ away anytime soon.

Because beyond the morale boost of proactive striving for a more perfect world is the sense of solidarity that accompanies it. And out of this sense, indeed crucial grounding for it, is a coping mechanism that rounds out the regimen I’ve laid out here.

HOPE

Progressive movements have always drawn much of their fighting spirit from utopianism. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech built on the notion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”[9] While Barack Obama contributed an important addendum, “That the arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it does not bend on its own,” emphasizing how grassroots struggle is required to make the dream a reality.[10]

And undergirding this struggle is the indefagitable optimism that keeps the hope alive and generates the strength to stay the course. Strength to halt the ultra-reactionary trend of the Trump repugnancy, to repair the massive damage it’s done materially and spiritually, and to steer the arc of the moral universe back towards a more just society and a more sustainable planet for ourselves and all living things.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] Irin Carmon, August 10, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-s-worst-offense-mocking-disabled-reporter-poll-finds-n627736.

[2] Morgan Winsor, August 31, 2016, https://abcnews.com/Politics/donald-trump-mexico-vice-versa/story?id=41767704.

[3] Updated June 20, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database; Louis Jacobson, June 5, 2026, https://www.kcra.com/article/cognitive-test-trump-screens-signs-dementia-intelligence/71506967.

[4] Steve Kopack and Allie Canal, June 10, 2028, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/may-inflation-report-gas-prices-iran-rcna349059.

[5] Joe Hernandez, December 11, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/12/11/nx-s1-5639957/trump-affordability-hoax-economy-midterms.

[6] Raquel Coronell Uribe, June 10, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/president-says-i-love-the-inflation-annual-rate-hits-3-year-high-rcna349509.

[7] Mitchell Zimmermann, May 5, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-compares-iran-war-to-vietnam-iraq.

[8] Nnamdi Egwuonwu and Raquel Coronell Uribe, October 15, 2024; https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-democrats-enemies-within-rcna175628; Asra Q, Nomani, June 14, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/party-poopers-fight-card-jane-fonda-kings-communists-roll-rival-spectacle-trumps-250th.amp.

[9] Debra Ellis, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/10/21/arc-moral-universe-long-it-bends-toward-justice.

[10] Brent Lang, August 28, 2013, https://www.thewrap.com/obama-martin-luther-king-speech-113886.

IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS:

RAGE: “The Scream,” 1895 lithograph by Edvard Munch

LAUGHTER: Victorian-era depictions of laughter on advertising cards (creator unknown, printed by Young’s, the Hatter)

RETREAT: “Vier Weise Affen” (Four Wise Monkeys) by Bildforyou7, 2012 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

HEAD-SCRATCHING: Drawing of a man scratching his head from Philadelphia’s May 4, 1916, Evening Ledger (http://openclipart.org/detail/168137/head-scratcher-by-johnny_automatic)

SERENITY: photo by Jerry “Woody” (original source unknown, CC BY-SA 2.0)

RESISTANCE: No Kings Day protest in Dallas, Texas, 4/14/25 (photo by Brendenmroger, CC BY-SA 4.0)

HOPE: Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech (Associated Press photographer)

UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) bout (photo by Lee Brownlow, CC BY 2.0)

Just as I was about to post my blog about the UFC Freedom 250 extravaganza at the White House set for Sunday, June 14th—breaking news! A federal suit to stop the event was filed against the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior. The plaintiffs, Paul Romano and Susan Douglas of the Public Integrity Project, allege that park service rules were violated—specifically, that any special event (in this case, a mixed martial arts match) and the erection of any structures on the South Lawn (in this case, a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton fighting ring dubbed “The Claw”) require the prior consent of Congress and an environmental review.[1]

More controversially, the suit charges Trump and his rightwing allies, Paramount-Skydance CEO David Ellison and UFC CEO Dana White, with conflict of interest. The fight is “a private, for-profit sporting event,” the suit avers, for the financial benefit of “the UFC, its broadcast partners, and its advertisers.” As for Trump, just this year he invested “up to $50,000 in TKO, UFC’s owner.”[2]

Sounds like Romano and Douglas have something there. But whether their charges are valid, whether the last-minute filing can even be addressed in time to make a difference, or whether the Supreme Court in an emergency ruling might give the event one of its absurd go-aheads “for now,” makes no difference for the purposes of my blog.

For me, the very idea of staging in a monstrous “arena” at the White House an event featuring kickboxing and wrestling to ring in the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is utterly repugnant. But it’s no surprise. The more repugnant the better has been Trump’s motto ever since he mocked reporter Serge Kovaleki by mimicking his disability at a campaign rally in 2015—an act that alone should have disqualified him from public office, much less president of the United States.

An ultimate fighting contest is also perfectly in tune with Trump’s second-term mania for belligerence of every kind: ICE raids, media attacks, vindictive suits, and reckless militarism under the banner of a newly christened War Department. But while it was surely the furthest thing from Trump’s muddled mind, turning the White House into the Roman Coliseum for gladiatorial combat on this hallowed occasion also serves as an uncannily apt metaphor for the legal and lethal battles the US has fought since its inception: over how to turn the nation’s lofty ideals into practice.

Libraries are filled with tomes on this monumental and seemingly intractable struggle, and I’ve offered a few meager blogs to summarize it. Here, I’ve taken my cue from the Declaration of Independence and turned to some of America’s most cherished proclamations to capsulize the conflict, starting with the granddaddy of them all:

“all men are created equal”—emblazoned in the Thomas Jefferson-penned preamble to the Declaration of Independence as one of the embryonic nation’s “self-evident truths.”

Leaving aside the wording’s then-customary gender bias, this was indeed an inspiring pronouncement. But no matter how Trump and today’s anti-woke textbooks might spin it, the glorious phrase was shamefully at odds with life in the United States-to-be, thanks to slave-owners like Jefferson himself, several other Founding Fathers, and 10 of the first 12 US presidents.[3]

Adding insult to injury, the Constitution defined enslaved black people, who couldn’t vote, as 3/5 of a person for establishing congressional districts. Indigenous peoples were pummeled by the seizure of their lands and treatment as enemy aliens whose resilient survivors wouldn’t be granted citizenship rights until 1924, but which still didn’t solve the problem (see Killers of the Flower Moon).[4]

Even poor white folk got sucker-punched when many states restricted suffrage to “propertied” white males (though the property part was soon dropped because not enough men owned any). And some states went so far as to flout the First Amendment by allowing only Chrisitan men to vote (with Maryland maintaining the religious restriction until 1824).[5] Oh, and known homosexuals weren’t even allowed into the ring, as same-sex practice was not only taboo but illegal and had been since colonial times, starting with Massachusetts’ anti-sodomy law of 1641.[6]

Jumping forward four score and seven years, declaration-wise:

“that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”—the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address of 1863.

Given that Jefferson’s proposition had been a dead letter for close to a century and literally lay buried on the battlefield before him, Lincoln’s clarion call for a rekindling of the nation’s founding principles was long overdue, as was acknowledgement of how far the country still stood from its promise of liberty and justice for all.

Abe would’ve been thrilled to see hopeful gains in this direction via the 13^th–15^th amendments of the late 1860s/early 70s: outlawing slavery, ensuring “equal protection” under the law for all people, and granting voting rights to African American men. But much of this progress was soon dashed through Jim Crow laws in the South (until 1965), draconian immigration laws (until 1965), and the lack of women’s suffrage (until 1920). Nor, despite endless wrangling in Congress and the courts, can the US to this day be considered a true democracy—nor will it ever be so long as the electoral college, gerrymandering, and unlimited campaign financing remain on the books.

Jumping forward another century, declaration wise:

“We Shall Overcome”—the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Though now associated primarily with that movement, this iconic protest song has a long and collective history. Influences stretch to European songs of the 1700s, enslaved black people’s spirituals, and gospel songs of the early 1900s, all congealing in the 1945 arrangement of black composers Atron Twigg and Kenneth Morris. The song first hit the streets, however, in a 1945–1946 labor strike against American Tobacco in Charleston, South Carolina, and only spread to the fledgling Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, where it became, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and his “I Have a Dream” speech, one of the movement’s most celebrated symbols.[7]

Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech (Associated Press photographer, Public Domain)

The song’s fusion of the labor and civil rights movements affirmed a major shift between the two groups after a long history of white union hostility to black inclusion from the late 1800s into the 1940s. This blister burst politically in 1941 when a threat by Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters head A. Philip Randolph to mount a black worker protest march on Washington led FDR to ban discrimination in the defense factories.[8]

A. Philip Randolph, 1942 (photo by Gordon Parks)

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (photo Roland Scherman, Public Domain)

With “We Shall Overcome,” however, the UFC fight metaphor for the nation’s struggle to fully realize its democratic ideals requires some nuancing. For from Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus in 1955, to the fight for school desegregation, equal public accommodations, and voting rights into the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement’s battle was fought with different rules. Much violence ensued, of course, but it issued only from forces opposing, with all the weapons at their disposal, the movement’s righteous demands. The movement, to the contrary, harking to Thoreau’s civil disobedience and Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, saw taking the moral high ground through freedom marches, protest songs, and turning the other cheek as a more effective modus operandi—as it proved to be—for reaching the Promised Land.

Equally important in relation to Jefferson’s ode to equality and Lincoln’s to a rebirth of freedom, the impetus for the Civil Rights Movement sprang from the grassroots, not from a Virginia plantation or the Oval Office (though it still required the halls of Congress and the president’s pen to turn its ultimatums, at long last, into the law of the land). And given its methods and its manifesto—of the people, for the people, by the people—the astonishing success of the Civil Rights Movement, if still fragile and under attack (a member of Musk’s DOGE team called for repealing the Civil Rights Act), can rightfully be deemed a second American Revolution.[9]

All the more so when one takes into account the other liberation movements the Civil Rights Movement spawned—for women, for other peoples of color, and most remarkably, for gays and lesbians. It took this group another few decades—with the AIDS epidemic and Republican government obstinacy a roadblock along the way—to make real headway. But at longer last, the Supreme Court finally saw fit to decriminalize gay sexual conduct (by a 6-3 count) in 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas decision and to legalize gay marriage (by 5-4) in 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Though here, too, polls in 2026 have shown support for LGBTQ+ issues dwindling for the first time in 20 years.[10]

Thus, as enormous as the progressive strides made in the 1960s, 1970s and 2000s have been, they remain, per the county’s one step forward / one step back pattern, well short of complete fulfilment due to persistent backlash and, for the last decade, a counterrevolution whose reactionary aims are embedded in another declaration:

“Make America Great Again”

And, surprise, Donald Trump wasn’t the first to utter it. President Reagan employed the phrase in his first campaign, as did President Clinton in his.[11] For Reagan, it was directed primarily at the double-digit inflation triggered by the Oil Shock of 1973 and rumblings of “malaise” in the American populace.[12] For Clinton, it was part of his Third Way strategy of threading a needle between Left and Right.

For Trump, however, the model for the slogan—despite his kneejerk denials but supported by his ghastly behavior—is clearly Adolph Hitler, with some Mussolini added to the witches brew. Comparisons to the Führer began as early as 2016, when it was pointed out that beyond Trump’s Nazi-mirroring ultra-nationalism, anti-immigrant fanaticism, and disdain for objective truth, Adolph had made Make Deutschland Great Again pronouncements already before he rose to power and reiterated them more stridently afterward.[13]

Likewise, during Trump’s second term, boosted by the Supreme Court’s executive immunity ruling, the Hitler-like comparisons have grown exponentially—not only in his hateful, duplicitous rhetoric but in xenophobic policies, media manipulation, cultural appropriation, military adventurism, expansionist designs, and brazen self-idolatry straight from the fascist playbook.

Under MAGA, the attempt to live up to the ideals of Jefferson, Lincoln, and MLK has been replaced by a world view that flatly contradicts them. That harks back to the early years of the republic when white, propertied, preferably Chrisitan males ruled the roost. Or even farther back, to the Roman Empire when bread and circuses served to keep the masses in line. Like the UFC Freedom 250 spectacle at the White House—minus the bread.

“Two Gladiators Fighting in Front of an Arch,” after Giulio Romano, 1560 (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund 1953, CCO)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] Raquel Coronell Uribe and Gary Grumbacj, June 7, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/federal-lawsuit-aims-stop-ufc-event-white-house-south-lawn-rcna348910.

[2] Jack Dunn, June 7, 2026, https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/lawsuit-donald-trump-ufc-white-house-freedom-250-1236768945.

[3] Lara Ewen, “Tarnished legacies: Presidential libraries grapple with the histories of their subjects,” American Libraries, January–February 2021.

[4] On voting rights: Walter Friedman, “Fourteenth Amendment,” Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (January 1, 2006); on Killers of the Flower Moon: https://www.babblingbrook.substack.com/post/p-141085328.

[5] On voting rights: https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/voting-rights-timeline; on religious restrictions: https://theamericanleader.org/timeline-era/expanding-white-mens-right-to-vote-1787-1856.

[6] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/biases-and-vulnerabilities/lgbtq-people/criminalization-of-homosexuality-in-american-history.

[7] https://www.kennedy-center.org/education/resources-for-educators/classroom-resources/media-and-interactives/media/music/story-behind-the-song/the-story-behind-the-song/we-shall-overcome.

[8] https://racial-justice.aflcio.org/blog/est-aliquid-se-ipsum-flagitiosum-etiamsi-nulla. This progressive action was overshadowed, of course, by FDR’s internment order for Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in 1942.

[9] Bobby Allen and Shannon Bond, https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5289337/elon-musk-doge-treasury. An earlier Civil Rights Act was passed in 1875, but it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1883.

[10] June 3, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/710810/support-lgbtq-issues-remains-down-peak.aspx.

[11] Emma Margolin, September 9, 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/make-america-great-again-who-said-it-first-n645716.

[12] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energy-and-national-goals-the-malaise-speech.

[13] Ben Wolfort, 2016, https://medium.com/latterly/what-i-learned-about-trump-from-reading-hitler; Stephen Rosenfeld, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and.

Novel published by William Morrow/HarperCollins/US and Sceptre/Hachette/UK

My blog heading sounds pretty highfalutin, don’t it? But don’t let the Apple TV series’ clunky title or glossy advertisement fool ya. This adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s widely praised 2024 novel by gold-standard showrunner David E. Kelley (L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Ali McBeal, Big Little Lies, et al.) has much on its mind. And if you dig a little deeper, even the title offers rewards.

But beware—spoilers galore.

Margo Millet (Elle Fanning), our eponymous protagonist, is a talented writer and college dropout who’s short on money and turns to exposing herself for money on the cock-teasing OnlyFans subscription website. She takes this intrepid step solely, at least initially, to earn enough money to support herself and her infant son, Bodhi, who was sired by her married-with-children college professor, Mark (Michael Angarano), who when she chose not to have an abortion, turned his back on her and the child.

As if this weren’t enough, Margo runs up against money in the person of Mark’s moneybags mother from hell (Marcia Gay Harden) and their six-figure family lawyer (Geoff Pierson), who coerce her into signing an NDA in exchange for a trust fund that will grow to $300,000 by the time Bodhi comes of age. And since neither Margo nor her divorced parents, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Jinx (Nick Offerman), can match their opponents’ financial firepower, you don’t have to be a Marxist to realize that Margo’s “money troubles” are driven by class conflict (and by association, as will be elaborated on below, Bertolt Brecht).

But that’s only the third of it.

Once knowledge of Margo’s “uncouth” profession goes viral, and Mark and Mom swoop in to snatch Bodhi because, as a “sex worker,” Margo is deemed unfit to raise him, class status comes into play—and thus the second of my heading’s trinity, Baker—Sean Baker, that is.

Five of Baker’s eight feature films so far, and the last five in row—Starlet (2012), Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), Red Rocket (2021), and Anora (2024)—sensitively explore the world of sex workers or porn stars, male, female, and transgender. The characters and their milieux are neither sensationalized (except for Anora) nor demonized but presented in a realistic manner that seeks to remove the stigma of ill repute that stubbornly, and hypocritically, clings to prostitution and pornography in polite society.

In Kelley’s film, it’s not only Mark and Mom who stigmatize Margo, if for purely exploitative purposes. Margo’s mom and dad also go berserk over her déclassé behavior, for both culturally imposed and personal reasons. Their kneejerk negativity is compounded by the guilt they feel because of their own “tarnished” backgrounds—as a former Hooters waitress and a retired entertainment wrestler (from drug addiction due to the pain from injuries suffered in the ring).

But Margo holds her own, and Kelley also renders Shyanne’s and Jinx’s stereotypically crude and unsophisticated characters as multidimensional and even erudite. Most importantly, they come to support Margo unequivocally in her custody battle for Bodhi—as do Jinx’s stereotype-defying wrestling partner turned successful lawyer, Linda (Nicole Kidman); Margo’s cosplaying roommate and rabid Jinx fan, Susie (Thaddea Graham); and most surprisingly, Shyanne’s new husband, Kenny (Greg Kinnear), the goody two-shoes president of an Episcopalian church congregation.

And Kenny, by ushering in religion, adds the Bible to Baker and Brecht, all of which come together in the series’ climactic custody battle scene.

The cards appear stacked against poor Margo, given that Jinx (while living in Margo’s apartment with Bodhi) had relapsed and overdosed shortly before the hearing. Nor does it help when Margo had lunged for Mark’s throat during a pre-hearing mediation session, thereby mirroring the anger management issues Jinx and Shyanne had earlier displayed (Jinx breaking Mark’s hand and Shyanne his mother’s jaw). And then there’s the notoriously tough-nosed Judge Andrew Spence (Paul McCrane).

What Margo has going for her are: “The Judgment of Solomon” from 1 Kings 3:16-28 in the Hebrew bible, Li Qianfu’s 13^th-century Chinese play The Chalk Circle, and Bertolt Brecht’s 1948 play The Caucasian Chalk Circle based on Li’s work.

A brief refresher on these classic texts sets the stage.

Starting with the biblical king renowned for his wisdom, this was most famously displayed in a custody battle between two women who lived in the same house and gave birth to a child within days of each other. When one of the infants died, the mother secretly swapped her dead child with the other woman’s living child and claimed it as her own. To determine the true mother, Solomon “called for the sword” and ordered the child to be cut in two, with each woman getting an equal share. The false mother agreed, saying that neither of them would then have the baby, while the true mother begged that the other woman be given the child lest harm come to it. Solomon recognized that such compassion for the child showed that she was the true mother and awarded her the child.

“The Judgment of Solomon,” 1860 woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld

The Chinese play reiterates the biblical moral but adds a class element. Here the true mother is a woman who was sold into prostitution by her impoverished parents, then taken by a wealthy but childless tax collector as his second wife. When she bears him a child, the first wife poisons the husband, blames the murder on the true mother, and claims that she herself is the mother so she can inherit the husband’s fortune. In this case, a judge has the infant placed inside a chalk circle and orders each woman to pull the child toward her. The true mother, as in the biblical version, cannot bear to harm her child by engaging in a tussle, is thereby also held to be the true mother and is awarded the child.

Illustration of a scene from “The Chalk Circle,” 1832 (Public Domain)

Brecht adopted the chalk-circle method, and as a good Marxist, the class element as well. But he inverted the proprietary aspect. In his version—replete with his trademark estrangement effects to emphasize ideas over emotional involvement—a poor servant girl raises a child abandoned by its wealthy mother, who now wants the child back, again mainly for pecuniary reasons. As in the biblical and Chinese versions, the woman who wants to go ahead with the chalk circle tussle forfeits the child to the woman who fears for its safety. But crucially, unlike the other versions, Brecht’s result disclaims ownership, biological or otherwise, and rewards compassion in and of itself.

Bertolt Brecht, 1954, photo by Kolbe, Jörg (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Granted, in Margo’s Got Money Troubles the custody battle doesn’t come down to two women vying for the same child—unless you count Mark’s mother, who in nastiness and greed bears striking resemblance to the two dastardly Chalk Circle women. But Margo is comparatively poor and, as in the Chinese version, is all but accused of being a prostitute—or “sex worker,” as Margo proudly calls herself. And finally, as in all three classic versions, a judge puts the two sides to a test.

And there’s the twist. For Judge Spence chooses to settle the custody dispute neither by sword nor tug-of-war. He lets the child decide!

After bounding into court and circling round the bench, Judge Spence steals the show. He lives up to his pugnacious reputation but in a populist manner. Dispensing with legal niceties, he confronts both parties nose to nose on their level, not letting either side off the hook. Then, after hearing them all out, including Jinx and Shyanne, as the final determination—no violence. He asks each of them simply to hold the child.

And what’s the verdict? There’s a twist there as well, and another involving Shyanne’s husband, Kenny, both of which serve to set up the second season.

But I think we’ve had enough spoilers for one blog.

Coat of arms of the Finnish Municipality of Kauhajoki (User: Tomia, design by Ahti Hammar, Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to my friend Dr. Rabbi Chava Bahle for her expertise.

Image by Denis Fadeev (CC BY-SA 3.0)

My apologies to non-Californians and Republicans for directing this message primarily (in more ways than one) at my state’s Democratic voters. And for those who already agree with the message or come to see its validity, please pass it on.

Because the logic is indisputable. If you’re a Democrat and a believer in democracy and don’t want two Republicans to gain the top two spots in the June primary, the only sensible thing is to cast personal preference aside and choose the clear-cut Democratic leader in the opinion polls—or at least one of the two if it’s too close to call. You might even wait longer than usual if you’re voting by mail, as I plan to do, to get the latest polling results.

Polls can gyrate, of course, and vary greatly among pollsters. But looking at the aggregate scores as of May 12, and with mail-in voting already underway, rather than letting your conscience be your guide, the only strategic choice comes down to Becerra or Steyer, with Becerra in the lead but with one new caveat. For while these two have been battling it out and statistically far ahead of the rest of the Democratic pack for some time, we’ll have to see how much the breaking news of criminal charges against Becerra’s “trusted adviser” Sean McCluskie will affect his rating.[1]

The scariest new wrinkle, however, is that Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, a far right-winger, has been creeping into contention on the Republican side, making the opinion-poll strategy of even greater consequence.

So how did California get into this mess?

Although our state wasn’t the first to adopt an open primary system, the process began here in 1996 with passage of Proposition 198, the Open Blanket Primary Election initiative. This stipulated that all candidates from all parties would appear on everyone’s primary election ballot, rather than only candidates from the party in which the voter was registered. The big difference from what we face today is that in the Prop 198 system the top two vote-getters in the primary election from each party appeared on the final election ballot.[2]

The Top-Two Open Primary Election Act (Proposition 14) of 2011 went the whole nine yards and got us to where we are now. After Prop 14’s passage, all candidates still appeared on everyone’s primary ballots, but only the top two vote-getters overall, from whichever party, moved on to the final election.

Utter chaos, however, did not ensue. Because of the general balance between a small number of major Republican and Democratic contenders, a Republican and a Democrat most often ended up vying in the final election. The 2016 senatorial election was a historic exception (doubly historic in having a face-off between a black woman and a Latina), with Kamala Harris winning over fellow Democrat Loretta Sanchez after they came in one-two in the primary. And a similar prospect has emerged this time on the Republican side, because of an exceptionally large number of high-profile Democratic candidates (eight, initially, now down to six) compared to only two Republicans, thus splitting the Democratic vote.

The key difference from the Harris-Sanchez election, however, is that while that race was criticized for being “uninspiring” because of the lack of a Republican foil, it was uncontroversial politically (racial and gender advances notwithstanding) because California had by then become a deep blue state, with independents also swinging leftward.[3] This time around, to have two Republicans contending for a major governmental position would leave the majority of the state’s voters out in the cold—a result much like that accomplished, more deviously, through gerrymandering.

A flagrantly undemocratic process that has long plagued US governance, gerrymandering involves redrawing districts on a partisan basis, even if this results in minority-party rule. And leave it to the conservative Supreme Court to all but endorse the practice in a 2019 decision that denied challenges to partisan redistricting in federal court. This ruling unsurprisingly led to a ramping up of gerrymandering nationwide, with Republicans indulging in it twice as much as Democrats.[4] It also cleared the way for the Trump-induced gerrymandering on steroids, aimed at stacking the deck against Democrats in Texas and other red states as part of the president’s plan to rig the Midterms.

Trump’s ploy prompted Governor Newsom to propose, and California voters to pass, a gerrymandering initiative as a countermeasure in 2025. Prior to that, California had been one of only seven states that had formed independent redistricting commissions.[5] And a move to reform the demonstrably flawed open primary system is already underway—hopefully to be achieved in time for the Democrat-controlled legislature to pass it, and Governor Newsom to sign it.[6]

But even if that effort prevails, it will be unable to alter the undemocratic outcome of the June primary, should two Republicans become the top two vote-getters. Only we can prevent this travesty from occurring—by basing our choice of Pol on the Polls!

Photo by Tom Arthur (CC BY-SA 2.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to Hans Johnson and Joe Levine for their assistance.

[1] Dakota Smith, “Becerra takes heat over crimes of aide,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2026, A1-7.

[2] May 12, 2026, https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_198,_Open_Blanket_Primary_Election_Initiative_(March_1996).

[3] Will Kane, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/2016-california-senate-harris-sanchez-jungle-open-primary-reform-214429.

[4] Michael Li, August 9, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/gerrymandering-explained.

[5] April 29, 2025, https://www.amacad.org/news/state-legislative-update-independent-citizen-redistricting-commissions. The other six states with independent redistricting commissions are blue Colorado and Washington, red Idaho and Montana, and swing states Arizona and Michigan.

[6] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-05-10/push-to-change-california-open-primary.

(Photo by Klaus with K, CC BY-SA 3.0)

On April 7, 2026, into the 6^th week of the Iran War that started on February 28, President Trump announced that the US would suspend bombing for two weeks to allow for negotiations, because:

The US had “already met and exceeded all military objectives. . . . Total and complete victory. 100%. No question about it.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed the hyperbole:

“Operation Epic Fury was a historic . . . capital-V military victory.” The operation “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.”[1]

Par for the course for Trump, especially, since nothing could be further from the truth—or more ironic. The triumphant boast belied Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone barrage that struck Israel, US aircraft, and lit up American bases and energy facilities throughout the Persian Gulf. And as if he’d plagiarized the script, the patent falsehood couldn’t help but conjure President George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech in 2003 at the start of the Iraq War. Besides their ludicrousness and prevarication, however, the similarities between the two utterances are quite uncanny.

Both Trump’s and Bush’s claims were made almost the exact same number of days after their video game-sounding Epic Fury and Shock & Awe operations were launched—39 days for Trump, 42 for Dubya. Just as incredibly, the battleship that displayed Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner was the very same ship that US planes took off from to bomb the daylights out of Iran: the USS Abraham Lincoln!

Bush’s banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003 (U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Juan E. Diaz, Public Domain)

US aircraft preparing for take-off from the USS Abraham Lincoln on February 27, 2026 (Public Domain)

One can only hope that Trump’s War won’t take the same 8 ½ more years to end, as Bush’s did after declaring it a done deal.[2]

Then again, the Iran War already has been going on far longer than the couple of months the historical amnesiacs would have us believe. It’s been brewing and/or blowing up animals, vegetables, and minerals for more than two decades.

The main cause of the conflict—besides Iran’s supporting proxy radical-Islamic groups in Gaza (Hamas) and Lebanon (Hezbollah) and terrorizing its own people—has been its uranium enrichment program, presumed for building nuclear weapons. Not without justification, one might add, given that archenemy Israel had come up with its first big bomb as early as 1966 and been stockpiling since, moving Iran to follow suit, much as Pakistan did with India.[3] No simple matter, then, and worthy of a brief backstory.

PHASE 1: UN INTERVENTION

2002: Iran’s secret enrichment of uranium in defiance of UN mandates is disclosed.

2006: The UN issues 2 resolutions requiring Iran to cease their enrichment program or face sanctions. Iran rejects the proposals and continues its enrichment program, which it claims, as it still does, is for peaceful uses.

2006 to 2015: UN sanctions go into effect.

2016: Iran agrees to UN inspections of its nuclear program.

2021 and 2023: The monitoring agreement is renewed.

PHASE 2: THE TWELVE-DAY WAR

May 22, 2025: Iran withdraws from the monitoring agreement.

June 13, 2025: The Twelve-Day War begins with a surprise Israeli attack, during which, altogether:

• Israel bombs Iranian nuclear and military facilities, assassinates military leaders, nuclear scientists, and politicians, with the infrastructure, environment, and civilian lives as the usual collateral damage.

• Iran retaliates by striking Israeli military, energy, and government sites, a population center, and a hospital.

• On June 21, the US enters the war, bombing additional Iranian nuclear sites, all of which Trump already then calls a “spectacular success,” adding that “Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities were completely and totally obliterated.”[4]

• On June 24, the Pentagon’s own investigation shows Trump’s claims to be false, which later reports confirm—as does the alleged need in 2026 to finish the job![5]

PHASE 3: THE IRAN WAR

On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel once again moved aggressively to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and military capability, this time with regime change added to the agenda. Yet despite all the bombing and bombast, the upshot has been a downward spiral from day one.

• Regime change not only wasn’t achieved with the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, but by killing the father of his replacement, Mojtaba Khamenei, the bloodied but unbowed regime’s desire for revenge has grown exponentially.

• Iran’s robust retaliation has expanded the war to the entire Persian Gulf region, disrupting an area that “holds roughly 2/3 of the world’s proven oil reserves and over 1/3 of its natural gas reserves.”[6]

• Hezbollah’s joining the fight on behalf of Iran triggered yet another Israeli campaign to root out Hezbollah but which—as in previous efforts and its scorched-earth crusade against Hamas in Gaza—has created a humanitarian and environmental crisis in Southern Lebanon.[7]

• Iran greatly exacerbated the energy crisis by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through and, together with the hostilities, “sent global fuel prices soaring.”[8]

• Trump’s call for our NATO partners to join the war was roundly rejected and, together with his customary bullying and badmouthing, created a rift in US-European relations it will likely require a new administration to heal.

• As for the Iranian people, including anti-government protesters, 1000s of whom were massacred by the regime in 2025 and 2026, Trump had threatened “strong” military action should the government crackdown persist.[9] Yet rather than liberating the people through a civilian uprising, as Trump assured Operation Epic Fury would precipitate, just the opposite has occurred. Besides the bombing’s structural damage and displacement, according to the US-based rights group HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency): from the beginning of the war through April 7, 3,636 Iranians had been killed, 1,701 of them civilians, including at least 254 children, 110 of whom, according to Amnesty International, perished in the girls’ elementary school bombing.

• Additionally, 1.900 Lebanese, 23-43 Israelis, and 13 US military personnel have lost their lives in the war. [10]

• Most of all, from a strategic perspective, the war’s main objective, at long last to destroy Iran’s nuclear program or force it to discontinue, hasn’t been achieved!

All that had been achieved when Trump and Hegseth declared a historic victory at the start of the ceasefire on April 7, during which Iran briefly opened the Strait of Hormuz, was the only “victory” Trump ever achieves—putting out the fire he himself has started!

Satellite image of the Strait of Hormuz (MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Public Domain)

Then came what I call the “straitjacket talk”—statements by Trump that indicated to anyone of rational mind that the malevolent narcissist who can never admit defeat had really flipped his lid.

Prior to the ceasefire, with the Strait of Hormuz still closed and the US and world economy reeling, Trump issued a threat that will live in infamy as the most deranged ever uttered by an American president.

If an agreement with Iran wasn’t reached, he thundered, “A whole civilization ​will die tonight.”[11]

Genocidal annihilation was postponed, for a while at least, when peace talks began in Pakistan with Vice President Vance as chief US negotiator. And while the talks were underway, which Trump must have sensed were going south, he took off his Darth Vader outfit and returned to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

To emphasize the depth of derangement of this second quote, let’s stack up the glorious accomplishments of the Iran War to this point: billions of dollars in military spending, a sizeable death toll, humanitarian and environmental crises, a crumbling US and world economy, a shattered NATO alliance, Iran still in the throes of an oppressive theocracy with a military capable of doing significant damage, and above all, with a nuclear program perhaps stalled but still intact!

So what does Bozo blurt in the face of this unmitigated disaster?

“It doesn’t matter. Regardless of what happens . . . from the standpoint of America, we win.”[12]

And the next day, after Vance came back with his tail between his legs, Trump sent a warship to blockade the Strait of Hormuz—and Iran retaliated by reclosing it.

Then there’s the Jesus picture . . . but that’s already been run into the ground. So how about this collector’s item to lift our spirits a notch.

Deacon Trump in 2020 (photo courtesy of the White House, Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman, https://www.politifact.com/article/2026/apr/08/Iran-Trump-ceasefire-strait-hormuz-win-lebanon.

[2] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-15/united-states-declares-end-to-iraq-war.

[3] Ari Shavit, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Random House: 2013), 188; https://web.archive.org/web/20150429192508/http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html.

[4] Ann Fugay, June 21, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39z01m93r4o.

[5] Nadine Yousif, June 24, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckglxwp5x03o.

[6] https://www.strausscenter.org/strait-of-hormuz-about-the-persian-arabian-gulf.

[7] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/7/how-israels-invasion-of-southern-lebanon-created-a-humanitarian-crisis.

[8 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78n6p09pzno.

[9] Ruth Sherlock, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/12/g-s1-105652/trump-military-action-iran-protests-deaths.

[10] On Iranian deaths, Nayera Abdallah and Menna Alaaeldin, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-people-have-been-killed-us-israel-war-iran-2026-04-07; on the school bombing, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable; on Lebanese deaths, Heather Miller, April 11, 2026, https://www.livenowfox.com/news/iran-war-latest-ceasefire-talks-strait-hormuz; on the deaths of Israelis and US troops, Patricia Kime, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/04/08/pentagon-data-13-us-troops-killed-346-wounded-in-operation-epic-fury.

[11] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-a-whole-civilization-will-die-tonight-if-iran-does-not-make-deal-2026-04-07.

[12] April 12, 2026, https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/iran-trump-peace-talks-video-b2956017.html.

A 1996-born robot named Kismet, who can recognize and simulate emotions, posing for a photo by Rama in 2019 (CC BY-SA 3.0 fr)

I’m 80 years old and childless, so the end-of-the-world scenario posed by AI, as a friend in the same boat is wont to say, “takes the sting out of death.” For those somewhat younger and/or with children and possibly also grandchildren, AI’s nightmarish prospects aren’t so easily whisked away.

Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell, co-directors of the 2026 feature The AI Doc: How I Became an Apocaloptimist, were both expecting their first children when they launched their investigation of AI, and, no surprise, the progeny factor plays a key role in the film.[1] Their kids even ended up being born one week apart, during the film’s production, and Roher and his filmmaker wife Caroline Lindy’s baby boy, Giddy, even got a cameo.[2]

The bundles of joy this brought to the directors and their spouses also proved to be their documentary’s saving grace. Because prior to Giddy’s birth, Roher, who stars as the on-screen interviewer, felt far from giddy, given the dystopian AI bent of most of his expert interviewees. A few even admitted they weren’t planning to have children because of AI’s bleak trajectory, which reminded me of a friend’s two twentysomething sons, one of whom, immediately after getting married, had a vasectomy, and the other planned to follow suit!

But wife Lindy, via the film’s often offbeat animation, wasn’t about to let the documentary end on a note of abject despair. So it was back for another round of interviews, this time titling to the more upbeat experts among the 30-odd total—a decidedly DEI-heavy bunch overall, on the researcher and CEO side of the ledger. And for those more positively inclined, upbeat is an understatement: We’re on the cusp of the greatest evolutionary leap in human history, they effused, the cosmos is at our fingertips, and the most exciting time to be born, if not today, is tomorrow!

But when Roher takes this euphoric news and runs with it, referee Lindy again blows the whistle, charging that this “kumbaya” approach undermines the doc’s credibility. So he spins the wheel once more and, lo and behold, comes up with an interviewee whose description of his own attitude toward AI both placates Lindy and inspires the doc’s brilliant subtitle: “Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”

I don’t remember the name of this interviewee from a single viewing of the film, and Google Gemini wasn’t any help. In fact, they falsely insisted that Roher coined the term. But they did at least agree, via AZ Family’s Hunter Norris, that the subtitle “is an obvious, intentional reference (homage) to Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” They also correctly added, again via Norris, that the Dr. Strangelove allusion is reinforced by another “interviewee in the documentary, Aza Raskin, [who] even explicitly compares the danger of AI to global nuclear war, strengthening the link to Kubrick’s Cold War satire.”[3]

Gemini might also have cited The AI Doc’s short clip of Dr. Strangelove’s Major “King Kong” (Slim Pickens) waving his cowboy hat and whooping it up as he rides the doomsday bomb like a rodeo bronc on its way to triggering “mutually assured destruction.”[4]

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee277/jefferyhodges/Slim-pickens_riding-the-bomb_enh-lo.jpg (Fair Use)

And perhaps most cleverly, there’s the punning of “Doc” in the film’s main title, which can double as an abbreviation for both documentary and doctor. All that’s missing is a Vera Lynn-like love song over closing images of planet Earth turned evil AI empire.

What all these Dr. Strangelove analogies accomplish, of course, is to add a satirical edge to the Apocaloptimistic notion, which still leans more to the promising than perilous potential of AI—a peril that lies not so much in the technology itself as in who will ultimately control its mind-boggling and morally challenging applications.

And it’s on this Big Question that The AI Doc concludes, satire aside, with a plea for viewers to call on their government representatives to push for safety regulations on AI’s development—something the leading AI company heads in the film admit they’re wary of doing unless their competitors do the same.

Drumming up grassroots support for federal regulation is a start, and the film doesn’t leave it at that. Because it follows from US companies’ wariness to engage in safety controls, that such a competitive strategy will also apply to other AI-developing countries. And thus what’s most needed, as the doc acknowledges with interviewee support, is international regulation.

Yes, but.

The threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War led, with UN assistance, to various mitigating treaties, which along with the deterrence effect have succeeded, so far, in keeping Armageddon at bay. Given the profound uncertainty about AI’s ultimate effects, however, and especially the proliferation of rogue states and ultra-nationalist leaders increasingly dismissive of international law, the chances of a similarly sane approach to AI succeeding at this eleventh hour seem razor thin.

Just look at how little progress has been made over the past few decades in dealing with climate change, even as its cataclysmic effects have become ever more apparent and efforts to combat them ever more urgent.

Yet no need to give up the ghost. Somewhere between apocaloptimism and taking the sting out of death, there’s another grassroots solution without which the one promoted in the film will be ineffectual:

THROW THE BUMS OUT!

A robot umpire (just kidding!), though an Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) has been introduced this season for use in ballplayer challenges (photo by Rdikeman, Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to Larry Eikleberry for his gallows humor.

[1] Roher and Tyrell are both Canadian. Roher won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for 2022’s Navalny, and Tyrell won the Best Short Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards for 2018’s My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes. The film’s producers, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known as the Daniels, wrote and directed 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay.

[2] Macy Meyer, March 27, 2026, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/the-ai-doc-film-review-and-interview. Lindy’s fictional films include the feature Your Monster (2024), the award-winning short Aspirational Slut (2022), and the short With You (2016), co-directed by Greta Titelman.

[3] Hunter V. Norris, https://www.azfamily.com/2026/03/24/ai-doc-review-documentary-that-gets-lost-within-its-mountain-information-self-serving-filmmaking. Raskin is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and of the Earth Species Project.

[4] Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD, formulated during the early Cold War period, referred to the self-destructive nature of nuclear warfare given that a nuclear attack against another country with nuclear counterstrike capability would assure the annihilation of both countries. Dr. Strangelove takes this notion to its apocalyptic endpoint because of the Soviets’ secret doomsday system, which if triggered by an enemy nuclear attack on the USSR will assure the destruction of the whole world.

Painting of Mission San Gabriel Arcángel by Ferdinand Deppe (1832) with a Tongva thatched hut called a kizh (pronounced “keech”) to the far right (Public Domain)

(Disclaimer: I’m not of Native American descent. But I’ve interviewed many indigenous people from the Los Angeles area, have attended some of their events, and have written about these experiences in my 2013 nonfiction book “Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles” and my October 28, 2023, blog “Tongva vs. Kizh: The Battle for the Name of L.A.’s Indigenous People.” Also, for convenience, I generally refer to the predominant indigenous tribe in the Los Angeles basin historically and presently as the Tongva people, rather than by their oft-used and legitimate variations such as Kizh, Gabrieleño, or Gabrielino.)

As someone who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and watched my family’s vintage Spanish-style house with a chicken farm and an apricot orchard razed in the 1960s to make way for a Starbucks, I can well relate to Emmett Rensin’s love-hate take on the Valley in his “Where I’m From” article about growing up in the 1990s/2000s in the mega-suburb of now close to 2 million people.[1]

The article begins beautifully, with a poetic description of the Valley’s geological formation: “Like a cupped hand plunged beneath the water, coming up: a ring of hills and mountains and a bowl between them, quivering with sediment, seawater, and muck. The fingers rise and the palm sinks. Are still sinking, still rising . . . .”

And the bulk of what follows, about Rensin’s Valley Boyhood, is a breezy read.

Unfortunately, and right off the bat, a few erroneous assertions or oversimplifications pop up about the first indigenous people to settle in the Valley—one of which is quite unsettling and behooves me to set the record straight.

Let’s start with the lesser blunders, which occur in the middle of the third paragraph:

• “In what is now Nevada a band of Uto-Aztecans break off from their friends and travel west, settling along the tributaries and springs inside the [Valley] basin. They called themselves the Tongva, or the Achooykomenga, which doubles as the name of their new home, the ones who face the sun.”

Though estimates vary, the Chumash people clearly had entered the Valley from the west well before the Tongva, and the Tataviam had arrived from the north either earlier or concurrent to the Tongva.[2] And while the Tongva were also known as the Achooykomenga, this was only a local appellation associated with a settlement at the later founded Mission San Fernando Rey de España. In general, the Tongva were known less by their pan-tribal name than by that of their particular village, which numbered close to 100 and lay mainly south and east of the Valley, extending to the Pacific Coast and the Southern Channel Islands, to Downtown and West LA, and to the San Gabriel Valley.[3]

This vast expanse is illustrated in the sacred sites that have been reconsecrated in recent years: in Downtown LA, Long Beach, Playa Vista, West LA, Seal Beach, and Newport Beach, as well as one in the Valley commemorating “a cultural crossroads” of the Fernandeño-Tataviam and Fernandeño-Tongva (the Spanish name given to both upon their joint consignment to Mission San Fernando) and the Barbareño- and Ventureño-Chumash (hyphenated due to their connections to Mission Santa Barbara and Mission Basilica Buenaventura.)[4]

“Southern CA Native American Tribal Territories,” 2022 (courtesy Native Land [.CA] 501c3)

Okay, so Rensin was playing it a bit fast and loose with the Tongva band’s proprietary claims to the Valley. But then, at the bottom of paragraph 3, he went whole hog in the opposite direction.

• “Smallpox, flu, and baptism by water, iron, fire: by 1826, no Tongva left . . .” (Emphasis mine)

Rensin is too intelligent to have meant that all the Tongva literally vanished from the face of the earth. For while Spanish-bred disease, harsh mission conditions, and even harsher post-mission treatment in the Mexican and early American periods devasted the indigenous populations—estimates range from a 30 to 50% reduction of the California native population by the American period and up to 80% thereafter—this still left more than a few living and breathing Tongva out of the estimated 5-10,000 people who’d inhabited the region prior to the European invasion.[5]

But if even if Rensin “only” implied that the ordeals of their mission enslavement and renaming totally deracinated the Tongva people—try telling their 1000s of living descendants today (close to 4,000 registered members as of 2013), still struggling for respect and recognition, that their ability to claim Tongva ancestry was expunged for all time two centuries ago![6]

Two Tongva women at Mission San Fernando, 1890 (author unknown, Public Domain)

First off, many Tongva had resisted deracination already during the mission period and continued to do so afterward, retaining traditional practices and returning to their villages.[7]

A more shameful corollary to Rensin’s claim, however, is its reviving the “no more left” calumny the Tongva had been subjected to since the early 1900s and modern-day Tongva thought had finally been laid to rest.

In reaction to the “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” strategy of the American-era boarding schools where native children were punished for claiming to be “Indian,” the Tongva resorted to publicly identifying as Mexican, learning Spanish, and adopting Catholicism while keeping their indigenous identity a secret.[8]

And so began the extinction myths.

In 1921, the Los Angeles Times headlined the death of José de los Santos Juncos, the purported last member of the area’s Gabrieleño Indians (from their affiliation with Mission San Gabriel Arcángel), lamenting that “with him died the last vestige of personal remembrance of the golden age of the California Missions and the passing of a vanished race.”[9]

In 1925, noted cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber added scholarly patina, unequivocally declaring that the Gabrieleños were extinct, having “melted away so completely that we know no more of the finer facts of the culture of ruder tribes.”[10]

Ouch!

And the insults continued. A modern-day Gabrieleño, Bea Alva, recalled that the leader of a Labor Day parade in the 1950s had echoed the “vanished race” claim, and another tribal member, Denise Martinez, remembered being scolded by her 4^th-grade teacher in the 1980s when Denise said she was Native American: “You live in a house, you wear clothes, so you can’t be an Indian!”[11]

And now in 2026, albeit with no malice aforethought, Emmett Rensin has once again lowered the boom.

Curious, actually, given his impressive and sympathetic credentials, which according to his Wikipedia entry include: American essayist and political commentator who writes from a leftist perspective, founding member of the award-winning Chicago First Floor Theater, and current contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. Perhaps his now living in Queens, according to the dispatch.com website for which he wrote his Valley article, explains Rensin’s seeming unawareness of—

THE TONGVA REVIVAL

Several Tongva organizations have emerged since the 1980s, referring to themselves as either Gabrieleño Tongva or Gabrieleño Kizh—kizh being what many of the Spanish had called the Tongva, based on the name for their thatched huts, as seen in the painting at the top.

While few records of the Tongva language and culture have been preserved, Loyola Marymount University has mounted an extensive collection of archival materials related to Tongva history, language revitalization classes have been developed, and Tongva is now spoken at public discussions and ceremonies, such as those mentioned above and others below.[12]

A summit in the Verduga Mountains in Glendale was named Tongva Peak in 2002. Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley contributed their groundbreaking history O My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area in 2009 (Gabrielino being an early Americanization of Gabrieleño). I did my bit with Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles in 2013, the same year that Tongva Park in Santa Monica was dedicated. And a one-acre site in Altadena was set aside as a Tongva homeland in 2022.

State recognition of both the Gabrieleño and Fernandeño Tongva tribes has also been achieved, but the grand prize of federal recognition remains elusive, largely due to dissention in the ranks between the Tongva- and Kizh-named groups and on whether or not, once federal recognition is secured, to build a casino.[13]

What the Tongva, Kizh, Gabrieleño or any combination thereof don’t need is somebody claiming once again that they don’t even exist!

A Gabrieleño Mission Indian woman filling a granary with acorns, c. 1898 (photo by Cacaiste, California Historical Society Collection at the University of Southern California Libraries, Public Domain)

* * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to my good friends Tom Pfister and Chava Bahle: to Tom for making me aware of the Emmett Rensin article and to Chava for her usual wise counsel.

[1] Emmit Rensin, “The Valley! The Valley! The San Fernando Valley!” https://thedispatch.com/article/san-fernando-valley-smoke-rain-driving.

[2] On the Chumash: https://greatwallinstitute.sparcinla.org/virtual-tour/indigenous-california; on the Tongva: https://ericbrightwell.com/2022/10/23/no-enclave-tongva-los-angeles; on the Tataviam: https://www.tataviam-nsn.us/heritage/history.

[3] John Dietler, Heather Gibson, and Benjamin Vargas, “‘A Mourning Dirge Was Sung’: Community and Remembrance at Mission San Gabriel,” Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California (University of Arizona Press, 2018)

[4] https://www.gabrieleno-nsn.us/post/sacred-sites-of-the-gabrieleno-tongva.

[5] On the state population stats: Brian T. McCormack, “Conjugal Violence, Sex, Sin, and Murder in the Mission Communities of Alta California,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 3 (December 4, 2007): 391–415; on mission mistreatment, Gregory Orfalea, August 31, 2015, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/hungry-souls; on the Tongva population: https://www.indigenousmexico.org/articles/the-native-roots-of-southern-californian.

[6] Lauren Gold, “Mission Impossible: Native San Gabriel Valley Indians seek U.S. recognition,” San Gabriel Valley Tribune, August 8, 2020.

[7] Dietler, et al., A Mourning Dirge.

[8] Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Residential Schools (City Light Books: 2004); on secret assimilation: A People's Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press: 2012), 71; on Tongva student treatment: Gloria Arellanes, The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement (University of California Press, 2015), 116–117,

[9] Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2009), 5.

[10] Heather Valdez Singleton, “Surviving Urbanization: The Gabrieleño,” Wíčazo Ša Review. 19 (2), 2004: 49–59.

[11] Jurmain and McCawley, O My Ancestor, 38, 181-182.

[12] Jana Fortier (December 2008). “Native American Consultation and Enthusiastic Study, Venture County, California,” La Jolla, California: California Department of Transportation: 13–14.

[13] On the state recognition: Oropeza. “SB 1134 Senate Bill - Introduced, www.leginfo.ca.gov, www.leginfo.ca.gov, March 4, 2016; on the modern-day intra-tribal conflict: Vincent Brook, Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2013) and Vincent Brook, Tongva vs. Kizh: The Battle to Name L.A.’s Indigenous People, October 28, 2023, https://www.babblingbrook.substack.com/p/tongva-vs-kizh.

G. W. Pabst during the filming of 1931’s “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Three Penny Opera”)(Public Domain)

(Spoilers, yes, but also some items not mentioned in “The Director” that might enhance your appreciation of the book.)

The image above wasn’t intended as a plug for Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, nor was German film director G. W. (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst related to the brewer’s co-founder, Frederick Pabst. It does, however, show the director in one of his last joyous moments.

As Daniel Kehlmann explores and fancifies in his intriguing and eccentrically written historical novel The Director, Pabst (hereafter GW), one of the greatest filmmakers of the Weimar era (1920-1933), was a unique casualty of the Third Reich.

Neither gay nor Jewish but an anti-Nazi leftist nicknamed “Red Pabst,” the 48-year-old director emigrated to France and then the US once Hitler came to power. After floundering in Hollywood, he returned to France and then planned to give Tinseltown another try by landing his prize “discoveries,” Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, for a surefire hit.[1]

Instead, he returned to post-Anschluss, prewar Austria (renamed Ostmark by the Nazis), but only to care for his ailing mother and still expecting, after placing her in a sanitarium, to return to the US with his wife, Trude, and fictionalized son, Jakob.[2]

No such luck.

War broke out soon after their arrival in Ostmark and the Pabsts found themselves caught in the Nazi web, where they’d remain throughout the war (and beyond), dealing with a moral dilemma that’s The Director’s raison d’être.

A forlorn-looking Joseph Goebbels in 1933, as if on some level regretting the crimes he’d commit and the horrors he’d help perpetrate (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1968-101-20A / Heinrich Hoffmann / CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

GW was of course extremely reluctant to do anything to aid the Nazi cause. But for Propaganda Minister Goebbels and the Nazis, he was a prize catch, and they weren’t about to let him off the hook. So began the Faustian bargain.

If GW refused to do the Nazis’ bidding, a concentration camp likely lay in store. Or possibly, as befell actor-author Helmuth Kionka (not mentioned in the book)—an anti-Nazi activist in exile who allowed himself to be lured back to Germany with a phony offer of theater work—he might be summarily executed.[3] Either way, GW felt compelled, for his own and his family’s safety, to make films under Goebbels’ watchful eye.

The three films he ended up directing weren’t overtly pro-Nazi, but no German film made during this ghastly period can be considered untarnished, especially ones with Pabst’s prestigious imprimatur attached. And while he was given creative freedom—far more, ironically, than he’d been given in Hollywood!—two of the three films, The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943), were wholly in tune with Nazi ideology in exalting Germany’s past glory, as attested by his Best Director award for The Comedians at the Hitler/Mussolini-sponsored Venice Film Festival and acclaim in the Nazi press for Paracelsus.

“THOSE WHO MAKE FILMS ARE ALWAYS IN A BIND”

This oft-quoted line in The Director superficially refers to filmmaking’s Murphy’s Law curse. Yet as uttered by Trude with stinging irony during the making of GW’s third Nazi-era film, 1945’s Der Fall Molander (The Molander Case), the words underscore the book’s overarching concern with GW’s (and others’) ethical compromise. (279)

But that’s only half the story, as the moral morass of the Nazi era has come to eerily parallel the ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist challenges we face today, and which Kehlmann’s bestseller (published in German in 2023 and in English in 2025) was primed to address. How he’s structurally chosen to tackle this existential conundrum, as I see it, is with three main motifs:

1) Incomprehensibility/Absurdity/Confusion

2) Art versus Principle (Kunst über Alles)

3) Playing the Game

INCOMPREHENSIBILITY/ABSURDITY/CONFUSION

An introductory and closing chapter frame the novel, both narrated in the first person, during the postwar period, by a peripheral and fictionalized character, Franz Wilzek. Franz pops up elsewhere as well, as assistant director on Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Tiefland (Lowland), left unfinished at war’s end and released in 1954, and as AD on Der Fall Molander, lost at war’s end.

GW never got over the loss of the film, according to The Director, because he considered it his greatest, but also likely because the story about a concert violinist caught in a bind, who commits fraud but is exonerated, served as a hopeful metaphor for GW’s own moral muddle.

Franz, in the concluding chapter, adds a twist to the Molander saga (which I’ll leave unspoiled). And having a fictional character offer insight into the material isn’t an unusual or unjustified tactic in a historical novel. Franz, however, in the framing chapters, suffers from dementia, thereby rendering the world around him incomprehensible to him and his narration unreliable for us.

Even the precise timeframe of Franz’s narration is murky, because no dates are given in the entire book. One has to piece together the chronology from names of historical figures or events, notable films, or off-hand comments strewn throughout the text. And if you lack sufficient specialized knowledge, you’ll have to google your way through—something an Internet Age author can now take for granted.

One important name is also elided: of the famous British writer/POW who narrates the entire Chapter 17. AI informed me that he was based on P. G. Wodehouse, though per AI, Wodehouse did not, contrary to his stand-in, write a glowing review of Paracelsus, under duress, for an English broadcast.

These informational gaps are no mere pretention, however, as they turn the book itself into a puzzle that resonates with the overall sense of uncertainty enveloping GW, his family, and others, and the crazy predicament they find themselves in. The jumbled literary form, including its jumping around in time, also mimics the elliptical, jump-cutting style of the French New Wave (some of whose innovations GW had experimented with). This meta relation to cinema also comports with GW’s compulsive dreaming about filmmaking in his waking state and seeing reality on the whole in cinematic terms.

Specific examples of incomprehensibility are legion, but to list a few: GW’s poor English contributes to his discombobulated stint in Hollywood. Nor did he later understand, as a consultant on Tiefland, where Riefenstahl got all the extras—which a quick google search would’ve told him were Romani, taken from a concentration camp, mistreated on the set by Riefenstahl (as is hinted), then returned to the camp and later transferred to Auschwitz.

At the grand premiere of Paracelsus, Pabst’s language problem in Hollywood is reversed, when the British writer, in conversation with GW, had “no clear idea of what Pabst was trying to say.” (225) While the film confused the British writer so much that he wondered with some scenes whether he’d actually seen them or only dreamt them: “What the devil was that?” he blurted about the “Dance of Death” scene between the eponymous 16th-century physician and the grim reaper. (235).

And the confusion expands exponentially in the postwar period, as we see with Franz, and in another fictional character’s response to whether GW was really a Nazi: “What do I know? People were many things before the war, and then they were something completely different. I’m telling you, it’s all jumbled and mixed up” (300-301).

ART VERSUS PRINCIPLE (KUNST ÜBER ALLES)

GW, in Kehlmann’s telling, is a master rationalizer in this regard. In response to Trude’s concerns about the lack of free speech even in social settings, he consoles: “All this will pass. But art remains.” And when she counters, “But doesn’t it remain bloody and soiled?”—he rebuts, “Art is always made under compromised conditions. It’s important to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in. Paracelsus will be seen 50 years from now, when this nightmare is long forgotten.” (215-216)

To Franz, in his AD phase, GW explains: “Art is always out of place. It’s always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that mattered.” (257) And finally: “all this diabolical madness gives us a chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same. No one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.” (270)

Perhaps most pitifully, there’s GW’s attempt to wipe the slate clean with his “greatest film,” Der Fall Molander.

PLAYING THE GAME

Art is only a pretext, of course, for GW’s compulsive need to make movies, the only endeavor that made him feel truly alive and of value to the world. A similar subterfuge underpins the ethical compromises of the so-called “stay-behinds” (Dagebliebene): film people and other prominent figures who chose to remain in Nazi Germany for career and/or ideological reasons.

Those we meet in the book, besides the execrable Riefenstahl, are actor-director Wolfgang Liebeneiner and movie stars Werner Krauß, Heinz Rühmann, Hans Albers, and Henny Porten. Kehlmann’s brief coverage of this more flagrant type of Nazi stooge gives an indication, if somewhat hit and miss, of the stay-behinds’ complexity.

Riefenstahl receives a well-deserved shellacking, but Liebeneiner is cut a bit too much slack for someone who thrived during the Nazi period and directed Ich Klage An (I Accuse, 1941), which promoted the Nazi’s eugenics-inspired euthanasia program.[4] Krauß’s antisemitism is duly exposed in his bragging about playing six Jewish caricatures in 1940’s Jud Süß, the Nazis’ Antwortfilm (answer film) to 1934’s philosemitic British film Jew Süss, based on German Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel.[5]

Rühmann, on the other hand, had a Jewish wife, for which he was given special dispensation as a star, though he ultimately divorced her, he says, so he could continue to work.[6] And what we don’t learn, besides Liebeneiner’s unforgivable lapse, is that Albers and Porten also had Jewish spouses, and that Albers also eventually felt pressured to divorce his wife, though they maintained a secret relationship; while Porten remained illegally intermarried to her Jewish husband, but her career apparently suffered.[7]

For Trude, herself an actor, playwright, and screenwriter, neither her husband’s nor the stay-behinds’ self-deceptions lightened her load. She dutifully played by the rules, as when she “passed the test” (166) at a book club with the wives of Nazi bigwigs, but her deep-seated trauma is expressed in private in her alternately laughing hysterically, then bursting into tears, and with GW in her “air of silent reproach.” (244)

And she wasn’t always silent: as in her sarcastic take on the “always in a bind” refrain, her disputing GW’s “Art above Everything” contention, and in her snide response to the British writer’s calling Paracelsus a masterpiece: “Yes, another masterpiece. . . . If there were one less in the world, I shouldn’t miss a thing.” (237).

In the postwar period Trude gains a measure of revenge: in her screenplay for GW’s postwar film Geheimnisvolle Tiefe (Mysterious Shadows, 1949), about a speleologist (studier of cave systems) who “lives only for his profession” and gets “lost in the depths of the earth” (308).

And it’s during the filming of Geheimnisvolle Tiefe (literally, “mysterious depths”) that Trude makes her, and perhaps the book’s, most telling observation. Going off together to explore the ancient cave paintings, she and GW come upon one with men paying obeisance to a headless, hunchbacked creature, whom both she and GW instantly “recognize” as their antisemitic, since-imprisoned castle caretaker, Jerzabeck.

For Trude this is an epiphany, which speaks to the Nazi phenomenon but also to our own soul-trying times and others stricken with the “strongman” syndrome: “It wasn’t Hitler who ruled. Not Goebbels or Göring or any of the rest of them. It was always him”—meaning, as I take it, the MGGA (Make Germany Great Again) element that enabled the Führer’s rise and propped him up thereafter. (314)

Okay, but what about young Jakob, an adolescent when the family ran aground in Ostmark? Turns out, from peer pressure, he more than played the game, eagerly joining the Hitler Youth and enlisting in the Wehrmacht, where he saw battle and was maimed, but survived. His naively patriotic attraction to Nazism as a youth is understandable, as is his parents not wanting to get him, and them, into trouble by dissuading him.

What’s missing for me is a deeper understanding of Jakob’s postwar reaction to his and his family’s ordeal. And the set-up is provided, when as a 45-year-old, in the penultimate chapter, he goes to New York to give Louise Brooks a gift from his deceased father—a cigarette case, of all things, given to GW by DW Griffith, of Birth of a Nation infamy!

As for his state of mind, the only thing the battle-scarred Jakob gives Brooks (and the reader) is his trotting out the family’s lame excuse for their predicament, “it was just a string of misfortunes” (319), and a hint that he’s falling off the wagon, when he first turns down Brooks’ offer of a drink, then drains it, and another, because, “it doesn’t matter anymore.” (320) [8]

Then again, leaving Jakob’s story open-ended is in keeping with the various puzzles The Director poses. And his resignation resoundingly echoes Franz’s lament, pre-dementia, about the mistreatment of the Romani extras on Tiefland: “Nothing can be done.” (187)

Come the Midterms, we shall see.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

Thanks to friends Stan Weisner and Chava Bahle: to Stan for turning me on to the book and spurring me to write about it, and to Chava for supplying valuable supportive information.

[1] Kehlmann appears to resort to poetic license in claiming that GW’s last film in France was cancelled in 1938 or 39. He actually made Jeunes filles en détresse (Girls in Distress), released in 1939.

[2] GW and Trude actually had two sons: Peter, 1924-1992, close to Jakob’s age, who was an assistant director on two of GW’s postwar films and a director of one of his own; and Michael, 1941-2008, who ran a Munich gallery, similar to Jakob’s later working in a Munich museum.

[3] David Atfield, “Fascinating Movie-Star Wartime Stories,” in “ACTORS VS NAZIS: THE TAUSSIG COLLECTION,” https://www.nfsa.gov.au/latest/actors-vs-nazis-stories-taussing-photo-collection.

[4] Hans-Michael Bock and Tim Bergfelder, The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema (Berghahn Books, 2009), 283.

[5] While Krauß did play several “Jewish” roles in Jud Süß, the exact number is debated and ranges widely: from three or four to thirteen in William R. Elwood, “Werner Krauß and the Third Reich,” in Glen W. Gadberry, Theatre in the Third Reich, the Pre-War Years: Essays on Theatre in Nazi Germany (Greenwood Publishing Group, Incorporated, 1995), 95.

[6] Rühmann’s wife, Maria Herbot, claims that marital problems rather than career concerns caused their divorce. See Franz Josef Görtz and Hans Sarkowicz, Heinz Rühmann, 1902-1994: Der Schauspieler Und Sein Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 2001), 193.

[7] On Albers: Matthias Wegener, Die Hans Albers Biographie (Vol. 1 ed.) (Ellert & Richter: 2005); on Porten: Cynthia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich (Perseus Books Group: 1992), 33–35.

[8] G.W. Pabst died in 1967 at age 82. Jakob tells Louise Brooks he was 45 at their fictionalized meeting. Given that he must’ve been around 12 when the war broke out in 1939/1940, this would make it about 1972/1973 when he gives GW’s gift to Brooks. What took him so long to fulfill his father’s wishes? Was he in rehab, still working things out in therapy, or was he lying about his age? Any thoughts?

Portrait of Lorenz Hart with his trademark cigar (source: Masterworks, Broadway)

* * * * * * * * * *

Blue moon,

you saw me standing alone

without a dream in my heart

without a love of my own.

The opening lines of the classic song “Blue Moon,” written by Lorenz Hart (to music by Richard Rogers), perfectly capture the “bittersweet nature of many of Hart’s love songs,” of Hart himself, and of Richard Linklater’s love letter to Hart in his 2025 masterpiece of the same name.[1] The film may not attain the ethereal brilliance of Linklater’s “Before” trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013) or the epic scope of Boyhood (2014), but for a work in a much lower key, it shines nonetheless.

In several ways Blue Moon is the direct opposite of these other gems, which roam freely through space and across time. Much like Hitchcock, who switched on rare occasions from broad canvases to miniatures, as in Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1954), Blue Moon takes place almost entirely in Sardi’s restaurant and bar on a single New York night.

Two printed quotes precede the action and sum up Hart’s bittersweetness: lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II’s comment, “He was alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret singer Mabel Mercer’s assessment, “He was the saddest man I ever knew."

Two brief opening scenes, the only ones to break the confined-space/real-time rule, tilt to the bitter side while also revealing, in retrospect, the film’s main themes.

The first takes place in November 1943 and shows Hart (Ethan Hawke, in a bravura performance) stumbling along a dark alley in the rain, muttering the lyrics from “Everything Happens to Me” as he passes a couple of tall sailors and glances back at them.[2] “I fell in love just once, and it had to be with you,” he sputters, before collapsing to the puddly ground and harumphing an agonized “Fuck!” A radio announcer then reports in voice-over that the famed, 48-year-old song writer died, one presumes soon thereafter, from complications of pneumonia.

The second scene, in a flashback seven months prior, finds Hart catching the end of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma! (music by his longtime creative partner Richard Rogers, now teamed with Oscar Hammerstein) and heading in a huff to Sardi’s where the remainder of the film is set.

The scene with the sailors covers a lot of ground: inferring Hart’s alcoholism, sexual proclivities, and unfulfilled love life, with an added allusion, for the ardent cineaste, to Kenneth Anger’s 1947 experimental short film Fireworks, which revels in gay sex with sailors. As for Hart’s less than enthusiastic response to Oklahoma!, this literally sets the stage for what follows.

Lorenz Hart, 1936 (World Telegram staff photographer, Public Domain)

Hitchcock’s Rope was based on a play, but its stage-like format wasn’t central to the narrative. Blue Moon, to the contrary, is all about the theater and the people whose lives revolve around it, making the film’s play-like presentation and focus on dialogue, often by Hart in direct address, doubly apropos.

Hart was known as a great wit, as song writer and conversationalist, and his love of language is on scintillating display as soon as he enters Sardi’s and begins boozing and schmoozing with down-to-earth Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), the bartender he knows all too well. It’s more soliloquy than exchange, however, with Eddie offering an occasional monosyllable to Hart’s polysyllabic riffs.

Hart’s linguistic tour de force—both highbrow and low, replete with everything from Shakespear to cock sucker—ricochets round Sardi’s for a good 15 minutes, interspersed with a flirtatious aside to Sven (Giles Surridge), a flower delivery boy, and pitter-patter with the bar’s military-uniformed piano player, Morty Rivkin (Jonah Lees). All of which, on a slightly broader scale, can’t help but bring to mind Wallace Shawn’s 1981 play-like miniature extraordinaire, My Dinner with André.

A full-length pas de deux between fictionalized versions of the actual Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, the resemblance to Blue Moon extends to the co-stars’ professional attachment to the theater and to Shawn’s diminutive stature that matches the 5-foot Hart’s to a tee.[3] Also, as with Shawn and Gregory’s tête-à-tête, there’s method to Hart’s monologue-ness.

His interplay with Rifkin, a soldier on leave, reminds us of the wartime backdrop, which Hart’s banter and Broadway musicals sought to euphemize. While Rifkin’s plan to change his name to Rafferty leads to a foray into Jewish name changing, an obligatory practice at the time in the heavily Jewish entertainment industry (viz. Richard Rogers, né Rogazinsky). Hart, however, whose German Jewish father changed the family name from Hertz, meaning “heart,” counsels Rifkin not to bother, “They’ll still know your Jewish”—a quip that takes a swipe at antisemitism writ large but more caustically conjures Hitler and the Holocaust.

Hart’s erudite dissing of Oklahoma!, meanwhile, destined to be a smash hit and subsequently hailed as a “watershed in American musical theater history,” is more than just sour grapes over Rogers’ dumping him after a quarter-century collaboration.[4] Hart’s critique of Oklahoma!’s exclamation-point pandering to a fantasy of Americana that never existed, strikes a strong progressive chord, especially at a time when white-washing US history has become Trump’s and his MAGA minions’ favorite pastime.

And with Oklahoma! Hart’s point is particularly well taken. The musical utterly fails to reckon with the long-term effects of the “Trail of Tears” of Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi to Oklahoma, after President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced their migration. Sloughing off this travesty led cultural critic Soraya Nadia McDonald, in her 2019 essay “The unbearable whiteness of Oklahoma!,” to condemn the show, which features not a single Indigenous character, for its “willful erasure and ahistorical mythmaking.”[5]

And the historical denial is even more pronounced in regard to the “Reign of Terror” against Oklahoma’s s Osage Indians in the 1920s and 30s, mounted by whites to gain control of the huge oil deposits on tribal land, as documented in David Grann’s heart-breaking 2017 book (and Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film) Killers of the Flower Moon. Though Oklahoma! is set in 1906, the Reign of Terror had been front-page news not long before the musical’s premiere.

Book cover (Fair Use)

But Hart’s beating a retreat to Sardi’s wasn’t only to drown his sorrows and disparage Oklahoma! before its producers’ triumphant arrival. His prime motive was a tryst later that night with Elizabeth Weiland, a 20-year-old Yale student, aspiring poet and set designer. Befitting a man of letters, his love for Elizabeth, sparked by their meeting at a rehearsal, was kindled by a lively correspondence. The heat was turned up at a weekend twosome in Vermont, which ended chastely but with the promise of reaching the boiling point this very night.

When Eddie is surprised at this straight turn for the man who’d just joked that a tireless, relentless homosexual is “indefagitable,” Hart waxes pantheistic about omnisexuality, which he extols as the broadening of love between both sexes to encompass other, if not all, living things.

This is the cue for the one-man play on words to expand as well, and voilà—Elizabeth makes her entrance, stage left. The rendezvous will have to wait, however, as she needs to get ready for the party for Oklahoma! But before flitting off, she breathlessly tells him of almost making it with her college crush and seems more interested in Hart’s introducing her to Rogers than in their consummation. Yet the love-struck Hart remains unfazed, continuing to effuse about his “irreplaceable Elizabeth” and the “extrasensory link” between them.

Next, the spotlight turns to E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), nursing a drink at a nearby booth, whom Hart turns to for the mot juste to describe Elizabeth’s extraordinary beauty. Already a noted wordsmith, though not yet a household name for Elements of Style and the children’s books Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, White suggests “ineffable” as Elizabth’s descriptor, which hits the mark—for the moment. Though his later quip, that “ineffable,” with a slight twist, becomes “un-F-able,” more aptly suits Hart’s chances of scoring with Elizabeth, given that besides her much younger age, striking beauty, and ulterior motives, the statuesque blonde towers over the blue-moonish five-footer like the noonday sun.

Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth and Ethan Hawke as Hart in the film poster (Fair Use courtesy of Funny Valentine, LLC and Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Before his climactic colloquy with Elizabeth, Hart is pummeled with humiliation in the jubilant celebration for Rogers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and again when the rousing reviews start pouring in for Oklahoma! He does manage to slip in a snide remark that since the show is “much more goyish, it can tour.”

But the final blows come when, after Hart professes his love for Elizabeth, she tells him that she loves him, too, “just not that way,” then runs off (in more ways than one) with the tall, dark, and handsome Rogers, after Hart introduces her and praises her to the skies.

A broken-hearted Hart is left to wipe the floor with a dropped stack of cards, from which it wouldn’t take a psychic to foretell his forthcoming doom. And yet—he still holds out hope that Elizabeth might still come around. And Eddie plays along, pouring them both a drink and personalizing the famous closing line from 1943’s Oscar-winner, Casablanca: “Larry, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

And when Rifkin—whose music from the great American songbook had served as a Greek chorus throughout—launches into the film’s theme song and the Sardi’s staff starts singing along, Hart knows, as do we, that if nothing else, “We’ll always have . . . ‘Blue Moon.’”

SIR ETHAN HAWKE

I hope I’ve given some indication why the Motion Picture Academy’s snubbing of Blue Moon for Best Picture is unforgiveable. But the august institution did at least manage to nominate Ethan Hawke for Best Actor, along with Robert Kaplow for Best Original Screenplay (inspired by Elizabeth Weiland’s letters to Hart). Even if Hawke receives the Oscar, however, which would be his first win in 6 tries, it wouldn’t be enough. He really should be knighted!

Hawke’s phenomenal performance, a career-best in my estimation, is the crowning touch (so far) to a remarkable range of critically acclaimed roles over a prolific 40-year span, in film and on stage. While his 9-film collaboration with Linklater, including in the “Before” trilogy and Boyhood, surely ranks among the greatest actor-director partnerships in cinema history.

In Blue Moon, old-school camera tricks rather than CGI enabled the 5’10” Hawke to squeeze into Hart’s barely 5-foot frame. [6] And makeup artists magically transformed the actor’s ruggedly handsome face into a striking facsimile of the unprepossessing song writer. But Hawke’s task was to become this brilliant, bittersweet, “omnisexual,” ultimately tragic figure; to inhabit his tortured soul and reveal, in spite and because of it, his ineffable gift of gab. All of which Hawke manages to do, as one reviewer raved, “with aplomb.”[7]

So by all means kudos to Linklater, Kaplow, the entire cast and crew. But it’s Ethan Hawke, above all, who gets to the Hertz of Hart.

Ethan Hawke in 2009 with his wife, Ryan Shawhughes, an actor and vice-president of his company Under the Influence Productions (photo by Nicolas Genin, CC BY-SA 2.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/lorenz-hart-residence-at-the-beresford-apartments.

[2] “Everything Happens to Me” was written in 1940 by Tom Adair (lyric) and Matt Dennis (music).

[3] NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project

[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Oklahoma-musical-by-Rodgers-and-Hammerstein.

[5] Soraya Nadia McDonald, September 19, 2019, https://andscape.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway.

[6] Anna Menta, https://decider.com/2026/02/14/how-did-they-make-ethan-hawke-look-short-in-blue-moon-movie-netflix-ethan-hawke-how-tall.

[7] Alissa Wilkinson, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/movies/blue-moon-review-ethan-hawke.html.

A sign posted at Rafael’s home in his and my Silver Lake neighborhood (photo by the author)

* * * * * * * * * *

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

—“Fire and Ice,” by Robert Frost

An anti-ode to ice written by Robert Frost is ironic enough. And the content couldn’t be more resonant with Trump’s jack boots currently running rampant across the country. Most pertinent about the poem, however, is its historical context.

Fire and Ice was written in 1920, just after “the war to end all wars.” But another possible inspiration—one uncannily analogous to the ICE assaults of today—were the Palmer Raids of 1919/1920, named for then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

The late 1800s and early 1900s were a time of unprecedented immigration to the US by largely poor, southern and eastern Europeans (read: Italians, Greeks, and Jews). It was also a period of unprecedented political agitation and progressive social reform, but also of anti-leftist/anti-immigrant hysteria, heightened in the 1910s by World War I and the Russian Revolution.

“Keeping Warm,” by Gale for the “Los Angeles Times,” November 20, 1919 (Public Domain)

In response to the turmoil, Palmer appointed J. Edgar Hoover to head the newly created General Intelligence Division in the Bureau of Investigation (later FBI), which from November 1919 to January 1920 arrested roughly (in both senses) 10,000 people across 70 cities, many of whom were deported. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in response to the raids.[1]

The bulk of those arrested, again largely Italian and Jewish immigrants, had been deemed racially inferior by eugenicists and dubbed “hyphenated Americans” by presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson for their alleged suspect loyalty to the US.[2]

Ring a bell?

In October 2025, Florida GOP Congressman Randy Fine introduced the Disqualifying Dual Loyalty Act, which prohibits anyone with dual American and foreign citizenship from serving in Congress. Allegiance must be sworn to the US and the US alone.[3]

While the measure didn’t pass, its ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, and racist sentiments have been echoed and acted upon ad nauseum by President Trump. After riding to reelection on the promise of ridding the US of the purported millions of violent criminals and freeloaders dumped on us by Mexico and other brown-skinned countries, the Dictator in Chief unleashed ICE on the invading horde.

Yet by late 2025, of the approximately 66,000 immigrants detained by ICE, only 5% had previously been convicted of violent crimes (about the same percentage as in the general population), while 73% had no criminal records and the other 22% had committed only minor infractions. [4] A manufactured travesty to be sure, but one that accords almost to a tee with the Palmer raids, where approximately “75 percent of those arrested were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and many were quickly released.”[5]

On the point of early release, of course, the stats sadly differ, mainly because the illegal immigration issue in the Trump era places his victims in double jeopardy. Even if they were innocent of any major crime, had lived in the US for years, had started families, formed ties to their communities, and contributed massively to the local and national economy, their lack of legal documentation dooms most detainees to lengthy confinement or deportation.[6]

Not one to leave ill enough alone, Trump also issued a travel ban on people mainly from African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern nations, issued an executive order slashing legal immigration by up to 50%, and threatened the loss of legal protections from 2.7 million lawful, asylum-seeking immigrants.[7]

Nor have naturalized and birthright citizens been spared. Trump’s latest plan calls for establishing a quota this year “to denaturalize up to 200 American citizens per month.” And the Supreme Court will soon rule on perhaps his most draconian measure: to deny or revoke birthright citizenship, a seemingly sacrosanct provision of the 14^th Amendment.[8]

On the anti-leftist front, Palmer in 1919 told Congress that the raids were necessary because leftist radicals would “on a certain day . . . rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”[9] Exaggeration, surely, but at a time actually rife with riots and radical-incited violence, mainly from the left, much like in the 1960s and 70s, such overblown rhetoric carried some weight. But in Trump’s case, violence from the left is not the problem. Rightist radicals had stormed the halls of Congress and later been given pardons and even encomiums by their Führer, who now stooped to calling liberal protestors “domestic terrorists” and even elected Democrats “radical left scum.”[10]

Yet another resemblance between Palmer’s and Trump’s mishigas is the hoary legal precedent each has trotted out to justify it: Palmer, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and Trump, the Insurrection Act of 1807. Palmer’s attempt largely backfired, as most of the arrestees were released on constitutional (due process) grounds or because (sound familiar) they’d committed no violent acts.[11]

In Trump’s case, it’s been touch and go. Judges have consistently ruled against his federalizing the National Guard. And while the Supreme Court has often sidestepped the issue until appeals courts have weighed in, it recently let stand, in a surprising 6-3 vote, a Chicago judge’s barring Trump from deploying the National Guard to Illinois.[12]

As for ICE blatantly defying due process in its abductions, several judges have decried the tactics and it’s doubtful the Supreme Court will ultimately take kindly to it. Especially after a leaked “internal ICE memo” revealed that its agents were “authorized” to break into suspected illegal immigrants’ homes without a judge’s warrant, thus arguably turning their own actions into criminal offenses.[13]

THEN THERE’S THE PERSONAL SIDE

Rafael Vela, the abducted person referenced in the opening image (photo by Jamess Bernal)

A well-liked, 64-tear-old Salvadoran immigrant and 30-year resident of my Silver Lake neighborhood, Rafael was dragged from his home on January 9th, without a warrant, and hauled into custody in downtown Los Angeles. After his arraignment the next day, he was whisked to the notorious Adelanto detention center in the Mohave desert, 85 miles NE of LA, where he resides as of this posting, with a court hearing scheduled shortly.

Rafael had long been living with close friends, all US citizens. He’d been acting as a breadwinner and caregiver for the family matriarch, Vivian, and according to Destiny, a grandniece of Vivian’s, had become “like family.” [14] He was also a fixture in the community. Always ready with a smile and an easy laugh, he’d greet and chat with those he knew as he collected cans and did odd jobs or walked his German Shepherd, Chico, up and down the steep Silver Lake hills.

Rafael’s kidnapping struck the neighborhood like a thunderbolt, and many of us quickly came together to support him and Vivian’s family as best we could. Destiny, with the help of Rafael’s niece, Ashley, launched a GoFundMe campaign to help with legal expenses and in less than a week raised close to $40,000.

We held a vigil outside his house a week after the abduction. Ashley, Vivian, Destiny’s mother, Michelle, and several other members of the families attended, as did our district councilmember, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and his field deputy, Laila Molina.

Michelle speaking at the vigil. Standing behind her are Councilmember Soto-Martinez and Field Deputy Molina (photo by Marc Milkin)

Hugo, as we call him, Field Deputy Molina, and neighborhood members Ianthe Zevoz and Chris Wood passed out information about how to deal with ICE and reminding those likely to be targeted of their civil rights (even if ICE disregarded them). The Rapid Response Network hotline is listed in the black rectangle below.

It was also good to learn from Ashley, who’d visited Rafael in Adelanto, that he was being treated surprisingly well and was very grateful for how the neighborhood was standing up for him. As for his and Vivian’s family, the whole ordeal has been “terribly difficult emotionally,” Ashley explained, but “our main focus remains keeping Rafael safe and working toward bringing him home.”[15]

For most of the neighbors, deep concern remains for Rafael’s and his loved ones’ well-being. But we all can’t lose sight of the larger crisis of democracy unfolding before us. And not only in Minneapolis, as the list below of kidnappings—the same day as Rafael’s and in the Echo Park/Silver Lake area alone—makes abundantly clear.

Recent polls do offer a glimmer of hope. A CBS News/YouGov poll in mid-January showed 61% of Americans opposed to ICE’s excesses, a healthy jump from a November poll already showing 53% opposed.[16] Grassroots resistance in the No Kings Day and other demonstrations, sure to grow in response to the Minneapolis killings, is extremely heartening. And we can’t overlook the solidarity shown in communities like mine, against ICE and for a neighbor in need—a monumental contrast from the complacency and complicity of most Germans when the jack boots began marching in their country close to a century ago.

Poster by Monique Mares (incorporating James Bernal’s photo of Rafael) for the Silver Lake vigil on January 18, 2026.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] https://immigrationhistory.org/item/the-palmer-raids/#:~:text=Between%20November%201919%20and%20January,10%2C000%20people%20in%20seventy%20cities; May 27, 2025, https://www.history.com/articles/palmer-raids. Estimates on the number of people arrested and cities affected vary widely.

[2] https://www.onthewing.org/user/Pol_Hyphenated-Americans%20-%20T_Roosevelt.pdf; https://web.archive.org/web/20140711161353/https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wilsonleagueofnations.htm.

[3] https://fine.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=105.

[4] David J. Bier, November 24, 2026, https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions.

[5] Christopher Finan, August 18, 2025, https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/the-palmer-raids-and-suppression-of-dissent.

[6] Jeffrey S. Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us; Alex Nowrasteh, https://web.archive.org/web/20220709030043/https://www.immigrationresearch.org/system/files.

[7] Mariel Ferragamo, January 14, 2026, https://www.cfr.org/articles/guide-countries-trumps-travel-ban-list; https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/01/20/trump-and-miller-slashing-legal-immigration-by-33-to-50.

[8] Lilly Quiroz, https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administration-wants-to-set-quota-for-denaturalizing-american-citizens; Josh Gerstein, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/05/supreme-court-trump-birthright-citizenship-00678828.

[9] Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 229-230.

[10] J. Craig Anderson, https://www.pressherald.com/2026/01/26/did-donald-trump-repeatedly-call-anti-ice-protesters-domestic-terrorists-fact-brief; Seth Abramovitch and Alex Weprin, December 26, 2025, https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-christmas-chaos-hosting-rebranded-195151298.html.

[11] Finan; https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/trumps-threat-to-invoke-the-insurrection-act-explained.

[12] Amy Howe, December 23, 2026, https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/12/supreme-court-rejects-trumps-effort-to-deploy-national-guard-in-illinois.

[13] Rebecca Santana, January 21, 2026, https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-trump.

[14] Understandably, given the present Reign of Terror, the parties most personally affected by Rafael’s adduction requested that their last names not be used.

[15] Email by Ashley to the author on January 24, 2026.

[16] Sarah Fortinsky, January 18, 2026, https://thehill.com/national-security/5694787-americans-criticize-ice-tactics-poll.

US soldiers patrol near a burning oil well in Iraq on April 3, 2003, shortly after the US invasion (Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Arlo K. Abrahamson, Public Domain)

APOLOGY: You might have received this same post previously, but due to an email glitch, most of my subscribers did not. If you did receive it before, please excuse the redundancy. Otherwise, read on!

The brazen intervention in Venezuela is a work in progress, with a Putin-like takeover of Greenland imminent as of this post. And while Congress dithers at reining in the Dictator in Chief, a couple of things to remind ourselves about regarding this unholy mess:

FIRST: A brief overview of the sordid history of US imperialism:

• In the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, motivated by land and resource lust but “justified” as America’s God-given right through Manifest Destiny: the US gobbled up Indigenous people’s remaining territory and after the Mexican American War confiscated half of Mexico, including present-day California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

• In the late 19^th century, motivated again by access to resources and to establish strategic naval bases but “justified” as liberating colonized peoples in the Spanish American War: the US took control or possession of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island and separately took control of and later annexed the sovereign nation of Hawaii.

• In the 20^th century, motivated by corporate greed but “justified” by the Monroe Doctrine or Cold War rivalry: the US expanded its control of Latin American countries through gunboat diplomacy, economic domination, and covert or overt regime change; messed around in Africa and the Middle East; and went to outright war with North Vietnam, leading to the deaths of millions of Vietnamese and 60,000 Americans.

• In the new millennium, motivated by Iraq’s rich oil deposits and gaining another foothold in the Middle East but “justified” by regime change and the disarming of Saddam Husein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction: the US invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, and after the deaths of 100s of 1000s of Iraqis and 5,000 Americans, a military presence remains there to this day.[1]

SECOND: An analysis of the Venezuelan fiasco, so far:

The nighttime raid and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, and the buildup to it, clearly resonates with the motivation (oil), “justification” (WMDs), and tactics (gunboat diplomacy, economic domination, regime change) of previous interventions. But it also bears Trump’s inimitable stamp. The other more recent forays were often undertaken “behind the scenes,” via the CIA. Or if more openly, as with Vietnam and Iraq, domestic and international support was courted and a coalition of allies was formed.

Trump’s approach was openly and proudly unilateral and foreshadowed even before his inauguration, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and threatened to take over Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.[2] At the time this just seemed like more ultra-nationalist blather, but not anymore. For when Trump’s Tariff War flopped, his Gestapo-like attacks on immigrants and vindictive suits against US institutions alienated many of the voters who barely got him elected, and even his shot at a Noble Peace Prize came to naught, a bigger distraction from the slumping economy, the Epstein files, and cratering polls was required.

“Oil and Distraction: Trump Attacks Venezuela,” by Anne Telnaes (https://substack.com/@anntelnaes)

Thus began months of planning for the mission to capture the sitting Venezuelan president, with the even more outrageous and illegal longer-term goal, as Trump boasted at the time, “to run the country.” And not just any country, but one with the largest known oil reserves in the world, whose “broken” oil infrastructure we would “fix” and “make money for the country.” Mainly ours, of course, though only after US tax-payer money, Trump later suggested, was used to reimburse the oil companies![3]

But the road to taking over a sovereign nation and exploiting its resources had to be built as well. So in September 2025 the propaganda barrage began, with a flurry of Trumped-up charges against Maduro. The admittedly corrupt and repressive dictator without portfolio was caricatured as a mega-narco-trafficker smuggling masses of fentanyl into the US. Fentanyl was then recast as not just a dangerous narcotic but a chemical “weapon of mass destruction” that was killing “two to 300,000 Americans each year.” Altogether, Maduro’s “narco-terrorism” had wrought havoc “in the hemisphere and at our borders” and the entire situation “posed a national security threat.”[4]

There were more falsehoods to come about the oil distraction. But first let’s unpack the drug-related lies:

1) Fentanyl overdose deaths rose from 2013 to 2022, when close to 74,000 succumbed—tragic enough but nowhere near the 300,000 Trump had claimed. And the number dropped to 48,000 in 2024 (under Biden), a 27% reduction from the year before.[5]

2) More significantly, Venezuela has never been the prime smuggler of the drug. Mexico replaced China in 2019 as “the main source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl.”[6] Plus, the boats the US military attacked and whose crews we killed were found not to be smuggling fentanyl at all but rather “cocaine, marijuana, and some heroin.”[7]

3) So after all the whoop-de-doo and realizing that the fentanyl charge didn’t hold water, the indictment against Maduro made no mention of fentanyl but solely the “importation of cocaine”—in whose trade, however, Venezuela is also considered only a minor player. And to top it off, much of the coke confiscated in the extrajudicial raids was headed for Europe, not the US![8]

4) As if this tragicomedy of errors wasn’t impeachable enough, in early December 2025, with full knowledge of Maduro’s abduction to come, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a notorious narco-terrorist who’d been convicted in March 2024 of drug trafficking and arms conspiracy from 2004 to 2022.[9]

HOW MUCH CRUDER CAN IT GET?

A whole lot, given that the knowingly bogus charges that “justified” regime change were from the start only a smoke screen for the US gaining access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which Trump then lied had been stolen from the US and Energy Secretary Chris Wright said we will “control indefinitely.”[10] And then the kicker, that the Venezuelan escapade had also been a proving ground for further US expansionism. For soon after the Maduro abduction, Trump suddenly added Cuba, Colombia, Iran, and Mexico to his mafia hit list because, sayeth the Lord, “Nobody Can Stop Us!”[11] As for Greenland, the Don added on January 9th, we will do something there “whether they like it or not.”[12]

Leaving aside the slippery slope to World War III, let’s investigate Trump’s claim about Venezuela’s theft of US oil, which besides eliding the fact that the oil has never been owned by any US or other foreign oil company, strikes at the heart of US imperialist history in the region.[13]

US involvement with Venezuela began in 1908, when the US navy helped Vice President Juan Vicente Gómez seize power in a coup. Then, after oil was discovered in 1914, despite Gómez’s corrupt and brutal despotism (he ruled until 1935), the US took advantage of his “highly lucrative concessions” to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now Exxon Mobil) and Royal Dutch Shell.[14]

This led to more than half a century of “foreign control of the Venezuelan economy” and, as became a US pattern throughout Latin America, to support of other ruthless Venezuelan dictators such as Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948-1958). Even after the nationalization of the oil industry under social democratic president Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1974, “contracts and laws continued to largely benefit the U.S. companies.”[15]

Relations soured in 1998 under authoritarian socialist Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, but Venezuela still exported large quantities of crude to refineries in the US. In 2007, however, legal wrangling with US companies over Chávez’s assuming majority control of the industry led to an exodus of all the companies except Chevron. Playing the “long game,” which might now be paying off, Chevron has stayed despite Chávez’s and Maduro’s mismanagement and an unstable economy exacerbated by US sanctions begun under President Trump in 2019.[16]

So where do we go from here?

Experts contend that bringing the oil reserves up to snuff won’t be an easy matter. Most of the black gold is so-called “heavy-sour crude,” a thick, high-sulfur substance that’s difficult and costly to refine.[17] Nor will stabilizing the country after the rupture of its leadership be a snap, as the US has seen in its other foreign escapades such as Iraq and Afghanistan. All of which has led to hesitance from the prospective incoming oil companies about investing in Venezuela.[18]

As for the underlying distraction motivation for Trump playing Alexander the Great, it seems to have floundered so far. Diehard Republicans appear enthused, but many America Firsters are non-plussed by the foreign exclusions, and Trump’s overall low approval ratings have barely budged. Perhaps most worrisome for the now admitted dictator—who boasts that the only limit to his global power is his “own morality”—72% of Americans, according to a recent poll, worry about the US getting bogged down in another Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan-like morass.[19]

Seems Trump’s fate is more likely to resemble—let’s fervently hope—that of another Greek figure who, if only mythic, was far less successful than Alexander in his lofty pursuits.

16^th-century print of Icarus falling, by Hendrik Goltzius / after Cornelis van Haarlen (CC BY-SA 4.0)

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] On the WMDs: Tim Wheeler, February 4, 2024, https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/iraq-weapons-of-mass-destruction-remembering-the-lies-of-wars-past; on the fatalities: Nicholas Anastacio and Mark Murray, March 20, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/iraq-war-numbers.

[2] Dana Allin, https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/survival-online/2025/01/from-the-archives-donald-trumps-greenland-affair.

[3] Ana Faguy, January 4, January 4, 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9enjeey3go; https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/06/trump-us-taxpayers-oil-firms-venezuela-investment.

[4] Callum Jones, January 5, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/03/us-oil-trump-venezuela.

[5] Brian Mann, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/designating-fentanyl-as-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction.

[6] August 6, 2025, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product.

[7 January 3, 2026, https://www.wmur.com/article/polifact-donald-trump-venezuela-maduro-claims; Jeffrey A. Singer, December 3, 2025, https://www.cato.org/blog/trumps-venezuela-gambit-incoherent-encore-failed-drug-war.

[8] Julie Webb, January 3, 2025, https://www.wcvb.com/article/venezuela-drug-trafficking-cocaine-fentanyl; Dan De Luce, et al., November 21, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/drug-boats-venezuela-are-mainly-moving-cocaine-europe-not-fentanyl-us-rcna.

[9] Greta Bjornson, January 5, 2026, https://people.com/trump-threatens-to-come-for-cuba-colombia-greenland-iran-and-mexico-next.

[10] Alexandra Hutzler, January 9, 2026, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-us-greenland/story.

[11] December 8, 2025, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12621.

[12 Darrian Woods, et al., January 8, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5670419/venezuela-didnt-steal-u-s-oil-heres-what-happened; Ari Natter, et al., January 7, 2026, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-says-control-venezuela-oil-145310649.html.

[13] Woods, et al.

[14] Brett Wilkins, January 28, 2019, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14263.

[15] Ibid.; Eyanir Chinea, https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-01-04/why-oil-has-been-a-longstanding-source-of-tension-between-venezuela-and-the-united-states.html.

[16] Ibid.; Jack Dolan, “Chevron’s enduring Venezuelan legacy,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2026, A1-4.

[17] Woods. et al.

[18] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-oil-companies-say-they-need-guarantees-invest-venezuela-ft-reports-2026-01-08.

[19] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/only-33-americans-approve-us-strike-venezuela-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2026-01-05; Isabella Murray and Michelle Stoddart, January 8, 2026, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-morality-limit-global-power/story?