Weaklings the world over should thank Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis for setting a new and perhaps unbeatable standard for cowardice.

Even by congressional norms, their vote to advance Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general represents a humiliating submission. The two Republicans became lame ducks because President Trump sidelined and betrayed them — and yet, amazingly, they continued to do Trump’s bidding.

These two could have left office with a shred of dignity by standing with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. They could have derailed Trump’s immoral campaign to weaponize the U.S. Justice Department. They could have said no to a brazenly corrupt deal with the Internal Revenue Service to shield Trump from tax liabilities.

Instead, you almost had to look away when Cornyn and Tillis covered their shame with a loophole-riddled fig leaf: Blanche had offered a written promise to shut down Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund.

Their craven behavior — more proof that Congress has surrendered not only its most of its power to the worst president in American history, but its dignity, too — brought to mind the contrasting story of Sen. Edmund G. Ross.

During the turbulent (and arguably unending) period known as Reconstruction, all eyes focused on Ross and his decisive role in the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. The fate of the presidency, perhaps even the separation of powers, hinged on Ross’s vote during the trial.

“I almost literally looked down into my open grave,” Ross later said.

Like millions of American kids in the 1960s, I first came across Ross’s story in middle school when a history teacher handed me a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which was ghostwritten by aide Theodore C. Sorensen, was less a work of scholarship than a crafty piece of image-building for an ambitious politician. But the story-telling was first rate, and the tale of Ross’s courageous act stayed with me.

The nation had just fought a civil war, the bloodiest conflict in its history. Partisanship rent the country into factions, and factions into smaller factions. Threats of violence were common.

Then, as now, the nation’s fundamental divisions could be broadly traced to the legacy of slavery and the enduring social conflicts between north and south, and urban and rural Americans. Then, as now, radical Republicans had gained the upper hand. The Executive Branch and the Congress battled for supremacy.

As Kennedy tells it, President Andrew Johnson sought to follow President Abraham Lincoln’s magnanimous policies of reconciliation toward the South.

But Congress, particularly the Radical Republicans, had other ideas. They believed more drastic measures, including martial law, were needed to bring the rebellious South to heel and remake a society built on the enslavement of four million people.

The final showdown between Johnson and Congress began in 1867 with passage of the Tenure in Office Act, which forbid the president from removing any federal official whose appointment required Senate confirmation unless the Senate consented. Johnson saw the measure as an unconstitutional encroachment on executive power.

The test came when Johnson tried to can Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a holdover from Lincoln’s cabinet. Johnson suspected Stanton of colluding with Radical Republicans and undermining his policies. When Stanton refused to go, Johnson ultimately fired him.

Johnson’s congressional foes reacted with fury. Though two previous attempts to impeach Johnson had failed, the House finally succeeded on Feb. 24, 1868, with eleven articles of impeachment. The Senate trial began March 5 with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. (Johnson, though, remained absent throughout.)

Washingtonians flocked to the Capitol for a glimpse of the hottest show in town. Each day, a thousand gallery tickets were handed out.

Radical Republicans, needing a two-thirds majority for conviction, could spare no more than six votes among their own members. But six Republican senators had already signaled their intention to acquit, believing the case for impeachment was weak. Only Ross’s vote was in doubt, and he gave no hint as to how he would go.

Like other Republican holdouts, Ross was deluged by telegrams and mail from members of the public urging, and sometimes threatening him, to vote for conviction.

Rumors of bribes circulated. The president’s foes, including military figures rounded up by Stanton, camped outside Ross’s door and buttonholed him on the street. Spies kept him under watch, noting those with whom he met. His brother received an offer of $20,000 to reveal the senator’s intentions. He knew that Republicans opting for acquittal might be burned in effigy or worse.

“Great danger to the peace of the country and the Republican cause if impeachment fails,” a group of lawmakers warned Ross in a note.

On May 16, 1868, the climactic moment arrived for Ross to cast his vote. As the gallery fell silent, he became hyper-aware of everything around him.

“Every fan was folded, not a foot moved, not the rustle of a garment, not a whisper was heard,” he recalled later.

“Mr. Ross, how say you?” the Chief Justice inquired.

Ross peered into the abyss.

“Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever,” he later wrote.

His reply was so faint almost no one heard him at first.

“Not guilty,” Ross said again, and a buzz rumbled through the Senate. Johnson’s presidency had survived by a single vote.

Ross later explained that Johnson hadn’t been on trial, the independence of the Executive Branch was. Defenestrating the president on such flimsy evidence would damage the country, imbalance the three branches of government and create a “partisan Congressional autocracy,” Ross wrote.

But that’s not how his enemies saw it at the time.

A Kansas Supreme Court justice telegrammed him, saying that although “the rope with which Judas Iscariot hanged himself is lost” the pistol his predecessor in the Senate had used to commit suicide was “at your service.”

Newspapers denounced him as a “traitor,” “a miserable poltroon,” and “a shriveled wretch” who “lied to his friends, shamefully violated his solemn pledge . . .[and] signed the death warrant of this country’s liberty.” Ross himself reported that fellow members of Congress and the public now shunned him like a leper, “with averted face and every indication of hatred and disgust.”

History, however, belatedly acknowledged his wisdom. The Tenure of Office act was repealed twenty years later and repudiated by the Supreme Court. The Kansas editorial pages that once vilified him eventually praised him for his courage.

F.H. Hodder, a professor of history at the University of Kansas quoted in Kennedy’s book, characterized Ross’s deed as “the most heroic act in American history, incomparably more difficult than any deed of upon the field of battle.”

In recent years, historians have taken a more measured look.

J.F.K.’s account leaned heavily on the now-discredited Dunning School of history, which too easily credited Johnson with defending the independence of the Executive Branch and minimized the role of black Americans in creating, if only briefly, an interracial democracy during Reconstruction. Later historians argued that Johnson’s motives were shaded by racism and excessive leniency for white supremacists.

David O. Stewart, an attorney who served as defense counsel during a judge’s 1989 impeachment and wrote a book on Johnson’s trial, went so far as to call Ross “a profile in corruption, not courage.”

Maybe so. But it’s doubtful that anyone looking back on the Trump era will see Cornyn’s and Tillis’s — or really any Republican’s — role in the Blanche saga as anything other than profiles of cowardice.

A hundred years ago, a novel about a sexual cripple appeared that shook up not just the literary world but American culture.

The Sun Also Rises — with its sly pun in the title and roman a clef gallery of hard-drinking, hard-living characters on Paris’s Left Bank — became an instant hit. In no time, the book entered the American canon.

The same was true of its young author, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway, then 27, would soon become an international celebrity both because of his lyrically elemental prose and the mythic style in which he lived.

Hem’s white-knuckled ride through wars and wives and safaris and blue marlins and bull rings thrilled and engaged the public right up until the moment when the Nobel laureate — exhausted by booze and impotence, of both the sexual and literary varieties — blew his brains out with both barrels of a double-barreled shotgun.

Hemingway’s debut novel and his ghost live in us today, even if the illusions they promoted about inner moral fiber or stoicism in the face of disaster have since been shattered. Few these days know what grace under pressure means. Even nature itself, always present in Hemingway’s work as an abiding force of redemption, has been lost to this generation.

A few months back, I happened to notice that The Sun Also Rises had disappeared from my personal library, probably misplaced or given away. So I bought a used paperback online (not from Amazon). I chose the same edition with the same cover illustration — a painting of the European countryside by husband and wife team James C. and Ruth McCrea — that I had read in college and a few times since.

When the book arrived in the mail, I opened it, read a couple pages and couldn’t stop. It blew me away — the genius of Hemingway’s writing, the precision and accuracy of his vision in words, the sure plunge into deeply imagined characters.

There were dated and cringey moments along the way, especially in passages touching on race and homosexuality that could be misread or get him canceled if he were writing today.

But there were also pages and pages of unparalleled energy and beauty: indelible snapshots of bohemian Paris in the Roaring Twenties; the tottering bus ride into Spain as passengers pile onto the roof and share freely from their wineskins; trout fishing in the Irati River in the mountains near Burguette; and the climactic bullfight during the Fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona.

And, of course, one of literature’s best concluding lines ever: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Here’s a simple, scene-setting paragraph, where the protagonist, Jakes Barnes, saunters around nighttime Paris after a dinner and several rounds of drinks with his best friend:

We walked on and circled the island. The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.

Amazing what he captures in five sentences — landscape, movement, light, darkness — with simple but exacting words. Without being explicit, the passage also speaks to what Jake feels in the company of an old friend, perhaps the only friend he actually trusts. And by depicting Notre Dame not in the majestic language that so often swaddles the ancient cathedral, but as “squatting against the night sky,” the prose hints at the way church and religion have been humbled and diminished like everything else after the carnage of World War I.

Most of the book’s dialogue — even conversations overladen with insidery digs at the real people its characters are modeled on — zings along, often rising off the page with verisimilitude and wit.

The principal characters were daring for the their time, and might be even now. Lady Brett Ashley, the “damned good-looking” and beguiling androgyne at the heart of the narrative, certainly reads with more intensity these days given our discussions and debates over gender identity.

And then there’s Jake Barnes, the walking wounded.

Kenneth S. Lynn, in his 1987 biography Hemingway, puzzled out Jake Barnes’s name as an intricately drawn, sexually loaded allusion to Djuna Barnes, the American writer whom Hemingway met in Paris and whose novel Nightwood became a cult classic of lesbian writing. Lynn argues that Hemingway obliquely inscribed Barnes and another lesbian in the text because of his lifelong fascination and anxiety about gender-bending roles and transexual identities.

But it’s also possible that Hemingway — who knew the Bible well from his somber Protestant upbringing and often combed its pages for titles — christened his protagonist Jacob because, like his biblical namesake, he contends in the solitude of night with a God that has left him with a mysterious injury below the waist.

Both narratives speak of existential struggle; the Old Testament’s story is not the only one where God or his agents play dirty tricks on us. (The “man” or angel that wrestles Jacob in Gen. 32.24-32 hits below the belt, putting the “hollow of Jacob’s thigh” out of joint in an effort to overmaster him.)

Whatever the case, Hemingway’s alter ego — an injured WWI vet, foreign correspondent, aficionado of blood sport and fine food who appears as “Hem” in early drafts of the novel — lives beyond the page like maybe a handful of characters in world literature such as Anna Karenina, Huck Finn or Dorothea Brooke.

It’s even more true of Hemingway’s style. Hemingway, building on Mark Twain, taught Americans how to write. Brevity, compression and clarity — these became the hallmarks of modern style and remain so a century later. Among many novelists and short story writers, his most obvious heirs include George Orwell, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, Joan Didion and Richard Ford.

Lydia Davis’s work is worlds away in tone and focus, but her telegraphic prose seems indebted to Hemingway — which would be no surprise given that, when teaching creative writing, she asks students to impersonate his style as an exercise “to get rid of all the excesses.”

More conspicuously, Hemingway’s spirit animates Flesh, the 2025 Booker Prize-winning novel by British-Hungarian writer David Szalay — and not just in the book’s spare, lapidary prose. Hemingway’s influence shows in István, Szalay’s laconic and inwardly wounded protagonist who would be in good company among Jake, Nick Adams, Frederic Henry and some of Hemingway’s other male characters.

Yet, few writers have also complicated their work and their legacy by so entangling their lives with their fiction as Hemingway did. His compulsive, uber-macho posturing colored his fiction and sometimes tainted its reception, especially in recent years, such that the merits of the work can be almost obscured by the man.

Yet this was always a loosely fitted mask, as became more obvious after the posthumous appearance of The Garden of Eden, an unfinished novel that explored the fluidity of sexual identity and gender roles. About the same time, Lynn’s biography revealed new details about how Hemingway’s overbearing mother had dressed him as his sister’s twin when he was young and otherwise emasculated him.

All of that would come later, though, long after The Sun Also Rises had streaked into the firmament. The novel hit book stores Oct. 22, 1926 and by mid-December sold out its first run of 5,090 copies, according to Lynn’s biography. The novel also triggered something of a Roaring Twenties craze.

Young people treated its portrait of the Left Bank as travelogue and Gospel, Harper’s reported. They learned the book “by heart” and began “deserting their families and running away from college . . .to Paris to be disciples of the new faith under the awnings of the Dôme and the Rotonde and the other sidewalk cafés.” Malcolm Cowley observed young women at Smith College modeling themselves on Lady Ashley, according to Lynn.

And of course the madness of Pamplona’s running of the bulls would not have become a destination for so many masses of tourists, particularly Americans, if not for The Sun Also Rises, as the Associated Press noted earlier this month.

No doubt the novel’s young fans from the Flapper Era found escape in what would be only a hectic pause between the world wars — but perhaps they also found a glint of hope within an unflinching account of wreckage and loss.

Reading the novel again recently, I realized that I had not appreciated when I was younger the quieter, second part of the book when — after the boozy disasters at Pamplona — Jake finds himself on his own again in the Basque resort of San Sebastian.

He bathes, he reads, he walks barefoot on the smooth sand. He observes young people in love. He dives deep into the ocean and himself and through this immersion becomes subtly transformed and centered again, somehow inwardly buoyed and strengthened. The afflictions in his life — Lady Brett foremost among them — have not changed, but Jake has.

It turns out that Hemingway’s view that the best fiction is like an iceberg — where the unspoken, unseen material carries the work with more mass and gravity than what appears on the surface — might not be a bad metaphor for human strength.

We’re still a lost generation. The American Century has come and gone, modernity has come and gone and, arguably, post-modernism has come and gone, replaced by a profoundly cynical wasteland where nothing matters except the showy surface and nothing seems true including truth itself.

Hemingway’s achievement, though, was writing into life people who — even in a wasteland, even though lost in a world that’s become exhausted of meaning and maybe decency — discover that the human spirit remains, if not indefatigable, at least in tune with things that are capable of reviving and returning the spirit to itself: nature, reflective solitude and, above all, art in crystalline prose.

Like millions of Americans, I have almost zero interest in celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

I’m in no mood for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or foundational stories about Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or other towering figures in American history.

Everything they stand for has been subverted by Donald J. Trump, the worst president in U.S. history. Every day he further undermines the foundations of our democracy.

What I do want to celebrate this Fourth of July are ordinary Americans who defied Trump or other abuses of power, whether now or in the distant past. These are regular folks who were just minding their business until they felt called upon — sometimes at great risk — to stand up for justice and the core principles this country was founded upon.

So here’s an Independence Day list — a highly subjective, perhaps idiosyncratic list befitting Lit Savage — of unsung heroes (including one who actually sings):

AFROMAN

When law enforcement raided Afroman’s Ohio home — busting down his door, seizing cash, rifling his things, and sniffing around a cake on the kitchen counter — the Grammy-nominated rapper didn’t just get mad. He used art to get even.

Afroman — AKA Joseph Edgar Foreman — dropped “Lemon Pound Cake.” The album, whose title was a jab at one of the sheriff’s deputies who tore up his crib, roasted the officers in scurrilous style. His music, memes, merch and social media posts lampooned police for the 2022 raid that failed to turn up any evidence of a crime or result in any criminal charges.

But seven deputies in the Adams County Sheriff’s Office filed a $3.9 million defamation lawsuit, alleging serious butt-hurt. The video, they said, caused “humiliation, ridicule, mental embarrassment and loss of reputation.”

After a three-day trial, Afroman — dressed like Old Glory himself with aviator shades — emerged victorious, The Washington Post reported.

If anything, his pointed satire spread even farther. The BBC said that Lemon Pound Cake’s title track had been viewed more than 3.6 million times while another parody — “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” — had more than nine million views.

“I didn’t win. America won,” Afroman told reporters outside the courthouse. “America still has freedom of speech. It’s still for the people, by the people.”

LAWYER OYER

Justice Department pardon attorney Elizabeth G. Oyer was sacked early on in Trump’s second term. The reason?

Oyer refused to go along with restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson. Gibson, who’s pals with Trump, lost his right to own a firearm following a 2011 misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence, according to The New York Times.

Oyer had been a former federal public defender in Maryland before joining the Office of the Pardon Attorney, which reviews applications for clemency and possible action by the president. She objected to Gibson’s petition as a risk to public safety.

But Oyer and others became expendable as Trump refashioned the Justice Department as his own personal law firm and a vehicle for carrying out retribution against political enemies.

Within days, Oyer was up on social media. She became not just as a gadfly, but a guide to Trumpian corruption with inside knowledge and plenty of receipts.

“Hi, guys, I’m Liz Oyer,” she said in an Instagram post explaining how Trump had monetized the pardon process like never before.

Since then, Oyer, who lives in Washington, D.C., has kept up a steady stream of one-woman reports on Trump’s efforts to subvert justice. Her Instagram account — “Hardwired to stand up to bullies,” the profile says — now has 893,000 followers.

“Many of you have asked what we can do about the corrupt, unethical and unlawful actions of this administration,” Oyer said after filing a lawsuit against the Justice Department. “What I am doing is standing up and fighting back. Now is the time to be brave and try new things.”

U.S. ARMY PRIVATE HENRY JOHNSON

U.S. Army Private Henry Johnson showed uncommon valor as a soldier in World War I.

But Johnson, who was black, also had the unfortunate distinction of battling racial discrimination in the very country he fought for — and not only during his life, but long after his death. He is especially worthy of mention as the Trump administration undermines senior black military personnel and erases African American military achievements.

Johnson, a North Carolina native, had moved to Albany, N.Y. as part of the Great Migration. He worked as a railroad station porter, among other things.

When the Great War broke out, he enlisted in the predominantly black 369th Infantry Regiment headquartered in Harlem. Back then, the U.S. military was racially segregated. Back then, the gospel of white supremacy held that African Americans were suited for latrine duty, not combat.

But the French — in need of troops and willing to put blacks in combat roles — placed the Harlem unit under their command with U.S. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing’s blessing. The regiment would spend 191 days at the front, longer than any other American unit its size, and suffer more casualties than any other. They fought so fiercely the Germans called them “Höllenkampfer,” or “Hellfighters,” and the name stuck.

On May 15, 1918, Johnson and another soldier were on sentry duty in the Argonne Forest when a German patrol overran their position. With his foxhole comrade severely injured, Johnson battled alone, at one point using his rifle as a club, at another using a knife. He singlehandedly killed or injured as many as 20 German soldiers. He suffered 21 wounds himself.

That act of bravery earned him France’s highest military decoration, the Croix de Guerre, decades before his own country would get around to bestowing similar honors.

The Harlem Hellfighters, whose members had fought so well — and, incidentally, introduced jazz to France — were also honored by the French and celebrated with a parade back home. But their fame, and Johnson’s, quickly faded. His injuries made it hard for him to find work, and he died penniless and alcoholic.

Years later, however, an effort began to honor his service. In June 2015, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Medal of Honor.

DAVID STREEVER

After federal authorities fatally shot two American citizens in Minnesota earlier this year, David Streever had to speak up. He sent a message to officials in the U.S. government, asking them to think about the morality of their conduct.

“I want to be on the record,” Streever told NPR, recalling his thinking after the killings of demonstrators Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Streever, fearing the government was slipping into fascism, sent a strongly worded email to Todd Lyons, then-acting director of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“What’s next,” its subject heading said. Streever’s email compared Lyons to Reinhard Heydrich, a top official in Nazi Germany who orchestrated the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, and called Lyons “a monstrous human being.”

“The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall,” Streever wrote, according to NPR. “Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your pathetic weakness.

“You will never know peace,” his email continued. “You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yoruself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

Six months later, federal agents showed up at Streever’s door. He was away, on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter. But his wife, The Rev. Hilary Streever and their 2-year-old son, were home.

Two agents from the Department of Homeland Security had come to question him about his “threatening” email, the Streevers told NPR. The agents left a form for him to sign saying “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.”

“One powerless citizen yelled into the void with a stern email to the former director of this agency six months ago,” Streever told NPR. “And now there’s agents at his door.”

What’s worse, a third agent from DHS tracked him to his hotel after Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Other Americans have also been visited by federal agents in a similar attempt to intimidate Trump’s critics. But the Streevers remain unbowed.

Streever told NPR the feds’ ominous behavior lifted his heart in a way: “[I]t makes me feel like we do have a lot of power,” he said. “It makes me feel like they do care that we’re speaking up.”

SARAH BAGLEY

In the early 1800s, Sarah G. Bagley and thousands of other New England farm girls left home for factory jobs as the Industrial Revolution transformed the United States.

Drawn by the prospect of supporting themselves and their families, these young women flocked to Lowell, Mass., which was the nation’s earliest industrial city and considered a progressive compared with smoky hellholes like Manchester, England.

“Progressive” still meant 14-hour days, six days a week, factory floors choked with dust and deafening noise. The young women also lived under factory owners’ strict supervision in boardinghouses, two to a bed, earning maybe $14 a month, minus boardinghouse fees. On Sundays they were required to attend church.

Bagley, who documented her life in fiction and nonfiction, became a reformer. As mills became increasingly exploitive in the search for ever more profits, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association formed with Bagley as president. She pushed for the 10-hour day. She became a public speaker, as well as writer and editor for the Voice of Industry. Eventually, she left the mills to work full-time for organized labor, women’s rights and the abolition of slavery.

“It seems fitting that one of the first renowned activistsin the titanic struggle between labor and capital on this continent, Sarah G.Bagley, was an unassuming young woman off the farm,” Philip Dray describes her in his book There is Power in Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America.

FREE D.C.’s NEE NEE TAYLOR

Nee Nee Taylor grew up in Washington, D.C. in a family of civil rights activists.

As a child she handed out campaign flyers for Wilhelmina Rolark, a four-term D.C. Council member who was instrumental in achieving home rule. Taylor, in an interview with NBC News4, said her uncle once joined a civil rights march in a pickup carrying a black woman hanging from a cross — a symbol of what white supremacists have long been doing to black people in America.

Now Taylor’s leading the fight against ICE roundups and National Guard deployments under the Trump regime. She is a co-founder of Free DC, which launched with a noisy but peaceful march in January 2025 and has been a voice for D.C.’s residents at many protests since.

“It was just was a part of my life,” Taylor told NBC News4, wearing a splashy a hat on whose wide brim was written: “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” Footage rolled in the background showing her speaking at protests and rallies.

“This is how it worked,” Taylor said. “I don’t think anybody wanted to do the work we were doing but somebody had to do it.”

Taylor, who invokes the spirits of Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells and other figures in black history, co-founded Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a grass roots organization that trains volunteers to monitor the criminal justice system for fairness. The group has helped raise bail for female defendants and also teaches citizens how to lawfully observe and film law enforcement officials to hold them accountable.

For Taylor, the language Trump has used to justify the National Guard deployment in D.C. is all too familiar with its questionable claims of high crime to justify excessive policing.

“Trump is at the point where he wants to make up numbers and he wants to show like, yeah, D.C. is full of crime,” Taylor told Truthout in September, a month after Trump ordered more than 2,000 Guard members into the District.

In recent weeks, Guard patrols have been beefed up further for the Fourth of July — which, given the Declaration of Independence’s attack on an standing armies, suggests how MAGA is immune to irony.

But as the crackdown intensified, so has citizen pushback. Taylor told Truthout that 500 volunteers signed on as Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, while The Free DC project stepped up training sessions for activists on “Active Bystander Skills” and other topics.

While some of Taylors positions are a little far out — such as abolishing prisons — her aggressive but peaceful stance against Trump’s authoritarian deployments is exactly what the city needs.

“I didn’t choose the movement,” Taylor told NBC News4. “The movement chose me.”

SANDWICH GUY

“Sandwich Guy” will forever be remembered in D.C.’s annals for flinging a salami sandwich at a federal agent and unleashing an endless supply of puns.

Soon after Trump hijacked D.C.’s police force and ordered the National Guard into its streets, Sandwich Guy — in real life, Sean Charles Dunn — swung into action. He confronted the occupiers, face to face, armed only with a tasty footlong from Subway.

“F— you, fascists,” he screamed, before chanting “shame.”

Then Dunn chucked the sub at a group of about 20 agents, striking one smack in his bulletproof vest. Dunn tried to flee, sort of.

The Aug. 10, 2025 incident — caught on video that blew up Instagram — led U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to push for a felony assault charge with an eight-year prison sentence. Though Dunn had been charged that same night, federal law enforcement officials also mounted a ridiculously militarized show of force to re-arrest him days later. A federal grand jury downgraded Pirro’s dreams to a misdemeanor.

Yet, Dunn, a former Air Force member who deployed to Afghanistan, was also fired from his job as a paralegal in the Justice Department.

Memes soon flew, transforming Sandwich Guy into a folk hero. T-shirts saluted his act of resistance with a cartoon hoagie in an eye patch. A woman moved more than $4,300 of merch on Etsy — the D.C. flag reimagined as three stars over two lines replaced by submarine sandwiches — and donated the money to Food Not Bombs and other city charities. Sandwich Guy posters went up, modeled on Banksy’s “Flower Thrower,” arm back quarterback-style, about to let fly.

And those puns.

“D.C. ‘sandwich guy’ goes on trial, says prosecution is half-baked,” ran a headline in The Washington Post.

“[H]is lawyers blasted the Justice Department for what they described as ham-fisted policing,” the story continued, noting that “Trump declared a crime emergency on Aug. 11, the day after the sandwiching.”

The sandwiched G-man — easily the government’s meatiest witness — testified that the hoagie had “exploded” all over his uniform.

“It smelled of mustard and onions,” he said, although it wasn’t clear from his testimony whether the onions produced tears.

Dunn’s attorneys shredded the prosecution like so much cheese. The defense submitted a photo as evidence to show the sub still in its wrapper, its fuse apparently undetonated.

And the verdict? The jurors found the U.S. government to be full of baloney.

MITSUYE ENDO

Mitsuye Endo’s courageous stand against the U.S. government helped end one of the most shameful episodes in American history: the wartime internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Like the late Sen. John McCain, Endo even turned down an offer to secure her own freedom if she would drop her legal challenge against the federal government. Instead, she fought on in the name tens of thousands of others.

But, perhaps because Endo was shy, perhaps because she was a woman, her pivotal role in closing the detention camps remained mostly in the shadows.

Endo was 22 years old when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, drawing the United States into World War II and forever changing her life.

Endo was fired from her job as a typist in the California Department of Motor Vehicles, one of the few jobs open to Japanese Americans in those days, she later told the author of an oral history.

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 ordering the internment of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The federal government sent Endo and her family first to the Tule Lake internment camp in California and later moved them to another in Topaz Utah.

It made no sense: Endo, whose parents were Japanese immigrants, had been born in Sacramento as one of three children and attended public schools. She had never stepped foot in Japan. They also were members of a local Methodist church. But their loyalty was deemed suspect.

James Purcell, an attorney seeking to challenge the internment order, persuaded Endo to become a plaintiff, thinking her a good candidate to reverse the policy. Besides her own background, her brother — drafted in 1941 before Pearl Harbo — was actually fighting for the U.S. with the other Japanese Americans in Europe. And she had signed what was the equivalent of a loyalty oath.

“[C]an’t you have someone else do it first?” she wondered.

“I was very young, and I was very shy, so it was awfully hard to have this thing happen to me,” The Washington Post quoted her as telling oral historian John Tateishi, author of “And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps.”

In July 1942, attorney Purcell filed a habeas corpus petition on Endo’s behalf, the only legal challenge against Japanese interment camps to reach the Supreme Court brought by a woman.

She won, too — but narrowly, in a ruling that sidestepped underlying constitutional issues.

On Dec. 18, 1944, the Supreme Court held that “loyal” Japanese American citizens — that is, someone like Endo who had signed a questionnaire on national allegiance — could not be imprisoned without cause.

Yet the very same day the high court upheld the detention of Korematsu and others as a war necessity — a decision that would not be overturned until 1984.

VISIBILITY BRIGADE

You’ve probably seen them wherever there’s a highway overpass in the United States: huge protest signs spelled out by the Visibility Brigade, a grassroots group of people determined to speak up loudly and often about the Trump administration’s abuses of power.

Hours after ICE agents killed Renee Good, the Missoula Visibility Brigade appeared on the South Reserve Pedestrian Bridge with signs made of black foam and bungee cords saying: “ICE THUGS KILL CITIZEN” and “DHS LIES.”

Bonnie Connery, one of the Missoula Visibility Brigade’s members. told The Guardian chose the spot where they hoped the message would reach motorists heading home to red areas of Montana from blue Missoula.

Оther signs and brigades popped up in Palo Alto, Ca.; Paramus, N.J.; St. Paul, Minn.; Louisville, Kentucky; and, of course, the Beltway around Washington, D.C.

“People only act accordingly when they’re constantly faced with the fact that there’s a huge problem,” Dana H. Glazer, a national leader of Visibility, was quoted by the Guardian as saying.

More than 250 Visibility Brigades have formed across Blue and Red America since Trump began his second term.

U.S. ARMY CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER HUGH C. THOMPSON, JR.

If ever there were a figure for our times, it might be someone like Army helicopter pilot Hugh C. Thompson, Jr.

That’s because Chief Warrant Officer Thompson honored himself and his country at the very moment that fellow soldiers were bringing shame and dishonor on themselves.

On March 16, 1968, Thompson and two crew members were skimming the treetops for reconnaissance the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when a horrifying sight came into view: dozens of bodies lying in a ditch. Civilians, not soldiers. As many as 500 dead Vietnamese men, women, and children.

“Every time we made a pass through the area, there were more bodies,” Thompson told The Post. He said he had seen a soldier kill a woman in cold blood.

Thompson — with a courageous assist from door-gunner Lawrence Colburn and crew chief Glenn Andreotta - intervened.

Thompson landed the helicopter in the line of fire between the Americans and the fleeing civilians. They trained their weapons at their fellow soldiers to cover Thompson as he confronted the Lt. William L. Calley, Jr., the platoon leader on the ground.

Thompson later led Vietnamese civilians from a bunker so they could be evacuated, and landed again to pick up a wounded child and transport the child to a hospital.

Thompson, in a rage, also reported what he saw to his superiors, who ordered all action in the sector to halt, thus ending the massacre.

“These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them,” Thompson told the Associated Press years later.

Thompson later testified before Congress, a military inquiry and Calley’s court martial. But he would also be snubbed for many years, the target of death threats because of his supposed lack of patriotism. One congressman suggested that Thompson was the only serviceman deserving of punishment for that day.

Initially, the Army even attempted to cover up the atrocity. For decades, Thompson’s official commendation honored him for saving civilians from the Viet Cong.

“You can’t imagine what courage it took to do what he did,” said Seymour M. Hersh, who won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of the massacre.

In 1998 the Army honored Thompson and his crew members with the Soldier’s Medal, the highest award for bravery that doesn’t involve enemy conflict. (Andreotta’s medal was awarded posthumously, as he had been killed in battle weeks after My Lai.)

Thompson and his fellow crew members “set the standard for all soldiers to follow,” Army Maj. Gen. Michael Ackerman was quoted by the AP as saying at the ceremony, which was held at the Vietnam National Memorial.

His story takes on even more significance when you consider that Trump’s authoritarian second term has already included several military engagements, including a war against Iran, that were initiated with little or no Congressional oversight; that more than 200 people have been killed by military strikes on alleged drug boats off Latin America in apparent violation of international law; and that Trump and members of his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to use U.S. troops to impose order on America’s streets.

During the awards ceremony that righted Thompson’s Vietnam military record three decades later, he offered words of wisdom: “Don’t do the right thing looking for a reward, because it might not come.”

But history’s judgment will.

Another year, another Bloomsday has gone by, and with nary the sort of observance that James Joyce and our nation’s capital deserve.

There were, as far as Lit Savage could tell, only two Bloomsday events in Washington on June 16, the day when readers all over the world celebrate Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses. As they should.

The novel, easily the most influential of the 20th century, focuses on the events of a single day and a singular Everyman —Leopold Bloom — during a mock heroic odyssey through Dublin on June 16, 1904.

It’s a fictional world structured episodically like Homer’s epic poem and crammed with history, theology, philosophy and literary arcana — but also music, poetry, sex, bodily functions, love and loss.

And laughter. Page after page of Joycean jokes and laughter.

Mr. Bloom — a Jew by birth and a Christian convert more or less by choice — is its unlikely hero, and something of an outcast in Catholic Ireland.

He starts his day serving breakfast in bed to his slugabed wife, Molly, and a milk-filled saucer to the cat (“Milk for the pussens”). For himself, he serves a pork kidney, though he prefers mutton ones, among other offal (“He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes.”)

He explains for Molly the meaning of a jawbreaker she found in one of her racy, dimestore pulps (“metempsychosis”); he visits the outhouse (“The king was in his countinghouse”); he purchases a cake of soap (“sweet lemony wax”), which remains in his pocket for the rest of the day and takes on a Pynchonesque life of its own; he canvasses ads (“HOUSE OF KEY[E]S”); he attends Paddy Dignam’s funeral (“In the midst of death we are in life”); and ogles about for glimpses of women’s Victorian delectables (“Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!”).

Bloom inadvertently touts the winning horse in the Ascot Gold Cup (“Throwaway”); grabs lunch at Davy Byrne’s public house (“God made food, the devil the cooks”); frets over his wife’s planned assignation with a gadabout cad named Blazes Boylan (“Woman. As easy stop the sea”); indulges in some auto-eroticism at the beach (“O Lord, that little limping devil”); triggers an antisemitic tirade from an Irish nationalist (“Three cheers for Israel!”); and rescues Stephen Dedalus — Joyce’s alter ego — from a bordello, guiding the drunken lad in fatherly manner back to the Blooms’ residence at No. 7 Eccles Street.

Last but not least, Bloom tucks himself into bed beside Molly with a highly unusual kiss (“He rests. He has travelled”). She takes over from there, in one of the greatest internal monologues ever written.

One might argue that Ulysses is not merely a lyrical tribute to Dublin, but to any city and the vibrant communities they create. It’s a democratic tribute, too, centering the ordinary in extraordinary fashion.

“Ulysses was written to celebrate the reality of ordinary people’s daily rounds,” writes Declan Kiberd, a professor at University College Dublin, in Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece.

Kiberd’s book seeks to reclaim the novel from the rarified clutches of Joycean specialists. He argues that the narrow focus on its writerly pyrotechnics and recondite allusions can overshadow its value as “wisdom literature” affirming common, humane virtues.

“It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people,” Kiberd says.

What better way to do that than a Bloomsday celebration?

Dublin, of course, goes all out every year, with people in costume on its streets re-tracing Bloom’s steps and other events. New York City’s James Joyce Society this year presented “Ulysses in Nighttown,” a stage adaptation the “Circe” episode. (Symphony Space, which launched “Bloomsday on Broadway,” in 1983, “stepped away” from the tradition this year, a producer said by email, adding the staff were “excited to see all the other Bloomsday events popping up around the city.”)

In Los Angeles, the Hammer Museum has kept the tradition alive for seventeen years, this time with a dramatic performance of Molly’s “Penelope” episode. Philadelphia, too, was in on the act, with the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s six-hour public reading this year.

In 2015, I attended part of a marathon Bloomsday celebration at the Petworth Citizen, a book-themed bar and restaurant in D.C. I arrived about 9:00 PM — in the middle of the “Ithaca” chapter — ordered a pint of ale, and drank everything in.

There were about thirty people. Most were in their thirties or younger, carrying newer editions of the book than mine, and they were a good audience. Readers sometimes fail to appreciate how damn funny Joyce is, but not that crowd.

I returned the next day, this time with my youngest daughter in tow. She was then in high school and hadn’t read a lick of Ulysses, but we stayed through Molly’s mindgush. My daughter loved it. Unfortunately, Petworth Citizen closed in 2020.

This year, I went to the only Bloomsday observances I could find in the District.

Politics and Prose gave a public reading in its Connecticut Avenue store at midday that lasted an hour or so. American University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute offered a bigger bite of Joyce, but also mixed in readings from other works of his, including “The Dead” and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Each event drew thirty people or so, some of whom read aloud.

At Politics and Prose, participants were given maybe two pages to read, which had the effect of chopping the book up into bitty little sound bites.

At AU, volunteers read longer, more satisfying passages, but the formal setting — a small lecture hall — was perhaps a bit too Anglo Saxon for an Irish revel.

Not to be too critical, but let’s just say reading skills varied. Some volunteers put their hearts into the work and read beautifully. Some mumbled. Others, though very audible, might as well have been reading a bus schedule, sucking the very life out of some of the most beautiful and hilarious prose ever written.

For a major city that has periodically boasted of being the most literate or best educated urban area in the United States, we can do better. And we have.

In June 1954, The Washington Post reported on Bloomsday in Dublin and other cities marking the fiftieth anniversary of the day memorialized in the novel, though D.C. had none.

It wasn’t until June 1981 that the Post’s community events calendar noted that the James Joyce Society of Washington would hold the first ever local Bloomsday at Garvin’s Grill. The program was to be “accompanied by music from the Emerald Isle” and corned beef and cabbage. Admission cost $2.

The tradition caught on quickly, though, because three years later the Post’s Henry Allen caught a glimpse of the sort of party Bloomsday can be. The Joyce society held a round-the-clock reading at Kramerbooks, along with a treasure hunt. Top prize was a case of Jameson whiskey and pair of Aer Lingus tickets to Ireland.

By 1990, D.C.’s Bloomsday moved to the Irish Times, a pub near Union Station. The event — put together by the Washington Literary Council — kicked off with a Bloom-worthy breakfast (Irish sausage, black pudding, white pudding, three fried eggs and rashers of Irish bacon) and ran thirty-four hours straight.

The Post’s Gabriel Escobar, whose lede riffed on the novel’s opening sentence, said forty people were on hand for the start and it wasn’t unusual to see “several hundred” at the finale.

“The purpose, after all, is to make ‘Ulysses’ accessible,” organizer Herbert Guggenheim was quoted as saying.

Why does this even matter? Perhaps it doesn’t, given the tragicomic and nonfictional story unfolding daily in Washington as an openly fascist and incompetent regime subverts democracy. Fewer of us even read books these days, hypnotized as we are by whatever our smartphones are regurgitating.

And yet one could argue that these are precisely the reasons to bring people together to breathe life into one of our greatest works of literature — to encourage each other to shut off the phone, to read more broadly and deeply, to dig down in a shared attempt not just to figure out how we landed in this mess, but how to get out of it.

The Odyssey gave Greeks their notions of what gods they could make their own, Kiberd says, and Joyce had something like that in mind as he drew from the virtues in Homer, the Bible, Dante and Shakespeare to write Ulysses.

“Joyce knew that national epics give people their ideas of what sort of persons they should be,” Kiberd says.

Yes, of course.

It’s even better as symbol of the long-running battle over American masculinity, particularly the throwback version of machismo and misogyny that helped bring Trump to power.

“This will be the greatest show on earth,” Trump told reporters. “These are real warriors. When we talk about warriors, these are warriors.”

Tomorrow’s Ultimate Fighting Championship event, which coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday, has already shamed the nation and disfigured the nation’s capital. Long after the blood dries, the octagon-shaped cage will have left a stain on the South Lawn. The “UFC Freedom 250” is supposedly a nod to the 250th anniversary of American independence this Fourth of July, too — thus “The Claw,” a bubble-shaped superstructure swaddled in red, white and blue.

Trump, the tough-talking draft dodger who urged his MAGA fans to rough up protesters, will likely be planted at ringside — just close enough to associate himself with manly combat without putting his orange corpus in danger. The cankle-dragger cheering on the knuckle-draggers. Happy Birthday, America!

But it all makes sense when you consider that the UFC’s journey from gutter to mainstream happened around the time national discussion shifted to a supposed “masculinity crisis” in the final decade of the 20th century.

A search of major newspaper archives before then turns up almost nothing. Midway through the decade, however, just about everybody was asking what the hell had happened to our men and boys.

The American poet Robert Bly got things going with his 1990 bestseller, Iron John: A Book About Men. Susan Faludi followed up with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which theorized that a vast cultural shift had transformed America from a society of manly doers and makers to one driven by more feminine preoccupations like image and celebrity.

More books appeared, such as “American Manhood,” “The End of Manhood,” “Myths of Masculinity,” “Why Men Hate Women,” “Real Boys,” and “Not Guilty: The Case in Defense of Men.” The Chicago Tribune banged out a three-part series on the “new masculism.” The Washington Post asked any reader bearing a Y chromosome: “Are you the Sensitive Male, the Post-Sensitive Male, the Involved Dad, the Macho Man or the Terminator?”

Enter the cage-fighter. Or MMA — “mixed martial arts” — as the business later preferred to style itself.

When cage-fighting debuted on national TV more than thirty years ago, its feature selling point was its macho savagery.

No judges, no scoring system, no limits — just KO or surrender. Plenty of Bruce Lee-style windmilling kicks to the head. Elbow shots. Head-butting. Hair-pulling. Body fluids spurting and leaking and oozing from furious two-man scrums between fighters with names like Lights Out, The Beast, Tank, and Serial Killer. Spectators drooling for blood. Or drooling blood.

Only eye-gouging and “fish-hooking” — ramming fingers in the other guy’s mouth and yanking — were prohibited. The only concession to civilization was allowing beaten fighters to “tap out.”

Cage-fighting mixed several styles of combat — kickboxing, kung fu, Brazilian jujitsu, judo and street-fighting — to the point that style itself vanished. Unlike boxing, there was no sweet science to the violence, and zero art. The spectacle harked back to gladiator fights and other ancient blood sports.

MMA, promoting itself as “the bloodiest, most barbaric show in history,” grabbed a target audience of teenage boys weaned on “Mortal Kombat” and other violent video games. Not just any teenage boys, either — but a generation of males shaken to the core by the growing awareness that thousands of years of patriarchal rule and traditional notions of masculinity seemed about to vanish.

No wonder then that as Bly and Faludi et al. plumbed the fragile male psyche in the post-feminist era, MMA started making its way onto American televisions. By 1996, some 250,000 had signed up for cage-fighting through pay-per-view.

Others were aghast, though, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), an actual war hero who had boxed at the Naval Academy. McCain saw MMA as “human cockfighting” and campaigned to stop it. Thirty-six states enacted bans.

The sport appeared down for the count when a former amateur boxer name Dana White stepped in. He bought the franchise in 2001 with visions of transforming cage-fighting into the next big NASCAR.

White pitched casino owners like Donald Trump, who was then known only as the tacky New York City real estate mogul often on Page Six. Trump agreed to host cage-fighting at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. White would later campaign for Trump as president.

White also wooed state athletic commissions and revised the rules of his game. He signed deals for film and a reality TV show. “The Ultimate Fighter” helped make Spike TV one of the most popular cable networks for young men. By 2006, the UFC had beat out the NBA, NHL, and MLB in cable ratings among young viewers, according to The New Yorker.

Even the conservative Evangelical movement saw an opening. Several churches, such as Xtreme Ministries in Memphis, embraced UFC-style combat as a way of putting fannies in the pews, The New York Times reported. The Times said churches hoped to “inject some machismo into their ministries and into the image of Jesus in the hope of making Christianity more appealing.” Turning the cheek can mean slipping a punch, right?

Today all fifty states sanction MMA. New York, the final holdout, lifted its ban ten years ago. In 2018 UFC inked a deal with ESPN under the Walt Disney Company, becoming part of the entertainment colossus that gave us Mickey Mouse.

And yet cage-fighting is still an awful thing to behold, having been described variously as “mayhem for sale,” “a violent playground brawl,” and something “primitive [and] more elemental than any other sport in how it measured a man.”

It’s jackassery at best. Watching an MMA fight feels utterly impersonal, savage and robotic — just nonstop pummeling and wallowing and thrashing and an absence of art or wit. You might get the same adolescent jollies by feeding G.I. Joes or other plastic action figures into a garbage disposal.

But it’s perfect for a U.S. president who channels “Clockwork Orange” in more ways than one. As always with Trump and his followers, MAGA is eager to showcase an extreme, dystopian, comic book version of masculinity that relies on the tritest, most sentimental and retrograde fantasies.

It’s the only way these men know how to mask the vast bubble of anxiety and sexual insecurity they carry around inside — not unlike the airy, red-white-and-blue bubble-shaped arena now defacing the White House.

This, too, will someday burst.

The Trump administration’s arrest of protesters who targeted a Minnesota church — and, more ominously, the arrest of journalists who covered them — was meant to send a message to Americans about dissent.

Here’s the message I hope people get: We need more such protests, especially at Evangelical churches that brought us Christian Nationalism and President Trump.

Even now, the Rev. Franklin Graham and other prominent religious figures cheer Trump on. Violent roundups by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are part of God’s plan, they tell us.

But just because Christians claim a cause to be holy doesn’t make it so. The Ku Klux Klan also wrapped itself in the trappings of Christianity.

Though rare, there’s even a long and honorable history of protesting within churches for justice and social change.

A federal grand jury last week indicted former CNN anchor Don Lemon and another independent journalist, bringing to nine the number of people charged with civil rights offenses for protesting at Cities Church in St. Paul.

The Jan. 18 demonstration was intended to call out David Easterwood, a pastor at the church who’s also acting chief of an ICE field office, after an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good in cold blood.

The protesters disrupted Sunday morning services, chanting “ICE out!” It was all over by the time local police arrived.

But not for U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. The regime — having cast itself as guardian of the faith — fired up a federal grand jury to charge Lemon and others, attacking the First Amendment in the name of defending it.

Several Evangelical leaders condemned the church protest while egging ICE on.

“I don’t care how much they scream,” William Wolf, a former Trump administration official at the Center for Baptist Leadership, said on a show sponsored by Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center. “[I]f you’re a Republican, you voted for the biggest mass deportation in American history. . . [I]t’s going to look like this and it’s going to be ugly because if we win, we take this country back.”

The Rev. Franklin Graham, who recycled government-issued falsehoods about Good’s killing, urged Christians to pray not for her and others targeted by ICE goons but their boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“[S]he’s a wonderful lady who loves God,” Franklin said in a Jan. 14 interview on CBN.

Calvinist minister Andy Naselli, a theology professor at Minneapolis’ Bethlehem College and Seminary, cited Psalm 58 in beseeching God to “break the teeth” of those who have taken to the streets to protest ICE.

Joel Webbon, senior pastor of the Covenant Bible Church outside Austin, Texas and an exemplar of Christofascism, thought ICE’s killing of Good and Alex Pretti was worth a joke for his MAGA followers.

“ICE is doing Pretti Goode [sic]. It must do far more,” Webbon said in a post on X.com that’s since been removed.

History has seen this sort of thing before.

Whenever a fanatical, unquestioning religious faith merges with nationalist political movements, disaster usually follows. The most appalling example is the Protestant church’s role in preparing the way for Nazi Germany, and it’s arguably the one Christians have been most eager to cover up.

Richard Steigmann-Gall, a history professor at Kent State University, has been instrumental in rethinking Christians’ role in the Third Reich and challenging the popular view that Nazism was non-Christian or anti-Christian.

Through his work and others’, a clearer picture has emerged of the ways in which Nazism drew on Germany’s deeply rooted Protestant culture to shape its own quasi-religious political movement.

Protestantism nurtured a deep yearning for national unity and spiritual rebirth, along with a belief that the German Volk were chosen by God to carry out His mission — themes key to Hitler’s rise. Above all, the Protestant church carried a vicious strain of antisemitism bequeathed by Martin Luther.

More than ninety-percent of the German population identified themselves as Christians in 1939, and of those, Protestants were twice as likely as Catholics to back Hitler’s party. (Secular, urban working-class voters, by the way, were least likely to support his movement.)

At least eighty-percent of the Protestant Women’s Service, a church activist group, became Nazi party members. Their slogan — Küche, Kinder, Kirche (Kids, Kitchen, Church) — might sound familiar to anyone in Turning Point USA.

Prominent German religious figures also aligned themselves with the Nazis, including Wilhem Kube, who oversaw the nazification of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union and, later, the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe.

Some church leaders, including Otto Dibelius, the Bishop of Brandenburg, continued to support Hitler’s government even after its brutality could no longer be ignored.

In a famous sermon, Dibelius invoked the Bible’s Romans 13 in urging Christian obedience to their government — one of the very same verses cited by House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to defend Trump’s policy on mass deportation.

“[W]hen it is a matter of life and death for the nation, then the power of the state must be applied thoroughly and energetically,” Dibelius said. “We have learned from Martin Luther that the church cannot get in the way of state power when it does what it is called to do. Not even when [the state] becomes hard and ruthless.”

Dibelious could be a featured speaker at Liberty University or on the pulpit of many another whited sepulcher headed by American Evangelicals these days. That’s why it’s not just necessary, but urgent that these Evangelical churches feel the heat of protest now, preferably from dissenters within their congregations.

Besides, churches have been noisy, disputatious places from the beginning.

The Book of Acts tells us that the apostles Peter and Paul traveled to the Jerusalem church in 49 A.D. to deal with “no small dissension and disputation” over whether Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry should apply only to Jews. Paul’s and Peter’s view carried the day, allowing Christianity to become a universal religion.

And then there’s Martin Luther, whose protests against the Roman Catholic Church’s corrupt and autocratic practices included publicly torching a papal bull. Where would Evangelicals be today if not for Luther and his heretical — even scatological — attacks on the papacy?

American churches, too, have also been fierce centers of protest over slavery, Jim Crow and other injustices. Consider the radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay, the “Quaker Comet” whose protests would be viral if they happened today.

In 1738, Lay arrived at the Yearly Meeting in Burlington, N.J. wearing a great coat to hide a military uniform and sword. He also carried a hollowed-out book concealing a bladder containing pokeberry juice.

When the time came to speak, he delivered a tirade against his fellow Quakers who owned or traded slaves. Then he plunged his sword into the book, spattering attendees with bright red berry juice.

“Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures,” Lay thundered, according to an account in Smithsonian Magazine. Lay also briefly kidnapped a slaveowner’s child to teach him a lesson about slavery’s cruelty.

The religious battle over slavery continued right up until the Civil War and broke denominations apart. Both sides cited the same Bible for their cause. Proslavery preachers wrote more defenses of slavery than secular Southerners, according to William W. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion.

In our Civil Rights era, African Americans used “kneel-ins” at all-white churches to fight segregation.

“[S]ometimes the group was welcomed inside, sometimes ushered into a separate auditorium, sometimes barred entirely and, occasionally, arrested and thrown in jail,” according to George Washington University professor Joseph Kip Kosek’s article in Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation.

The campaign against “the un-Christian Christian” — The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s term for them — included a protest on the steps of Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. A kneel-in at Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, the largest in the Southeast, became national news.

Fast forward to the Reagan era, when the Aids Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) became one of the rowdiest and most consequential protest movements ever.

The gay-rights group’s “zaps” often targeted the Catholic Church, including a massive demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York in 1989. About 4,500 protesters filled the street outside during Mass. Police arrested 111 people, including 43 inside the cathedral.

We could use some of that “zap” energy now, especially at the Rev. Graham’s church and others whose perversion of Jesus’s message has given us President Trump and the quasi-religious cult of MAGA.

The stakes for American democracy have seldom been higher. It’s past time that true Christians and others come together to drive white Christian Nationalism back into whatever Hell it came from.

As the United States spirals ever faster toward autocratic rule under President Trump, American labor must take a stand and do something it’s seldom been able to do: call a general strike that brings the nation to its knees, if not its senses.

No work. No shopping. No school. Peacefully.

Minneapolis is trying this tactic today after a coalition of unions, religious leaders and others called for a broad economic shutdown to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) crackdown there. Dozens of businesses and organizations plan to close for a “A Day of Truth and Freedom.” Others will remain open but pledged to donate their revenues to charity.

“We need to suspend the normal order of business and demand the immediate end of ICE actions in our state,” Lisa Erbes, co-leader for Indivisible Twin Cities, an organizer of the event, told The St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Minneapolis’s call for an economic blackout is welcome, if overdue.

But American labor must go further, using the city’s example as a foundational step toward planning a general strike nationwide. ICE’s murder of Renee Good, 37, should be the rallying cry.

True, it’s been 70 years or more since the last general strike. It’s also true that Labor has become weaker in that time, and not just in the United States.

But the threat to American democracy has rarely been so dire. The list of Trump’s outrages has become almost too long to recite since the Mad King’s second term began more than a year ago.

In the past month alone the Trump administration has: attacked Venezuela and abducted its leader without consulting Congress — and not to stop deadly drug trafficking but to grab that country’s oil and bank the proceeds in Qatar; threatened to seize Greenland, further alienating NATO allies while Europe is fighting Russian aggression in Ukraine; and unleashed its masked ICE goons on the streets of Minneapolis with impunity.

Authoritarian rule under Trump is not just a theoretical anymore. It’s here, as Steven Levitsky, Lucan A. Way and Daniel Ziblatt argue in the January issue of Foreign Affairs.

Trump’s America has all the characteristics of “competitive authoritarianism,” a term Levitsky and Way coined years ago to describe nations in which democratic institutions still exist but a single leader or party abuses power to tilt elections and consolidate its rule. In their most recent essay, the authors also describe how opponents can fight back and rescue democracy.

Labor plays a key role and the strike above all.

The strike is almost as old as civilization itself. The first strike in recorded history occurred in Ancient Egypt when craftsman building the royal tombs laid down their tools because grain rations failed to appear, historian Charles Freeman says in Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean.

General strikes — defined as work stoppages involving workers across several industries in a bid to achieve economic or political objectives — are rarer but even more consequential. They are perhaps the most powerful weapon ordinary people have to confront autocratic rule in the workplace or society at large, and to effect change.

In the United States, general strikes have flared only briefly. The first occurred during the Great Strike of 1877, which began when railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia walked out to protest a 10-percent wage cut. (I wrote about this some years ago for The Washington Post.)

The strike followed the rail lines to Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Chicago, leading to increasingly violent clashes. Authorities deputized militias and mobilized the National Guard. President Rutherford B. Hayes reluctantly sent troops to Martinsburg. Twenty people died in Pittsburgh when the National Guard opened fired on crowd of strikers.

Yet only St. Louis — then one of the nation’s busiest ports — came to a complete standstill as workers across all industries walked out, according to Philip Dray’s There is Power in a Union.

“Unlike Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, there was no street fighting in St. Louis, but because the general strike — probably the country’s first — so thoroughly choked off the town’s commerce and industry, it was the more frightening to established interests,” Dray writes.

Seattle’s general strike in 1919 occurred against a backdrop of international turmoil following World War I, the Russian Revolution, and a global pandemic.

Shipyard workers, seeking to reverse years of artificially suppressed wages during the war, had become militant.

Fearful of unrest, the federal government and local authorities intensified roundups of “undesirable elements” and “enemy aliens,” according to according to Robert L. Friedheim, a professor of government at Purdue University, who wrote a history of Seattle’s general strike.

The authorities even enlisted officially sanctioned “patriotic groups,” including the Minuteman, Proud Boys-like vigilantes with the American Protective League, to join the crackdown against socialists, immigrants and others. When the strike began, U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker sent troops who deployed machine guns around the city, Friedheim wrote for Pacific Northwest Quarterly.

The strike brought Seattle to a standstill—but peacefully so. Labor leaders policed their ranks to maintain calm. They arranged for essential services to continue: people were fed, milk was delivered, and fuel and food arrived at hospitals. And yet the city shut down so completely otherwise that it was said the elevators stopped running.

We need that now. Thankfully, more and more union activists are talking about a general strike even as they acknowledge the difficulty in pulling one off.

Peter Olney, a former organizing director of the Longshore Workers (ILWU), and Rand Wilson, who worked as a union organizer, laid out a number of strategies to in a recent essay in Labor Notes.

“Despite the unevenness of labor’s response to MAGA, this is no time for caution,” they write.

Mobilizing for mid-terms, turning out for electoral battles over redistricting and driving participation in protests such as No Kings Day — all go without saying. Unions should also urge consumers to pull support from corporations controlled by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have become Trump’s courtiers.

Last year, while celebrating the 2023 “stand-up strike” against the Big Three Automakers, United Autoworkers President Shawn Fain urged all labor unions to begin laying the groundwork for a national “day of reckoning” when those contracts simultaneously expire on May 1, 2028.

A May Day 2028 general strike is a great idea — it’s just that we just can’t wait that long.

Years ago, when American labor was in its prime, Eugene V. Debs said the movement could transform “a republic in name into a republic in fact.”

If only we had listened. But there’s another chance now.

Sometimes I think we should ban hunting because almost no one does it anymore.

As in, actually hunt. As in, inhabit nature for a time as animals inhabit the world. Or stalk wild game as our forebears stalked wild game, with a semblance of respect for the animal and the concept of fair chase.

Hunting has been a lifelong passion of mine, and I want the sport to remain part of our heritage for years to come. But whenever I venture into the woods to hunt, as I did earlier this month, I find something very different from what I’ve known, practiced or read about in the works of Richard Ford, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy.

In our time, the average American hunter has transformed the art and ancient rite of hunting into something passive, mindless and thoroughly suited to a culture sedated by smart phones and consumerism.

They hunt from deer shacks, sometimes elaborate ones towering two stories above ground. They hunt from factory-made tree stands with 20-foot metal ladders and platforms, and from tent-like blinds made of polyester. They put out feeding stations before opening season to lure deer within shooting range. They rig trail cams to track animal movements from home. They chatter on walkie-talkies while driving deer. They hunt from QuadRunners and other ATVs. They clutter the natural landscape everywhere you look, even on public hunting lands.

These deer shacks are often visible from major highways, rising like watchtowers in open fields. There are plenty of hunters who don’t even walk to their deer shacks, who commute to them instead with 4x4s. They often brag about their amenities, such as propane heaters and stoves, easy chairs and, of course, double-hung windows with generous fields of fire.

The market for this stuff is huge. Sales of hunting blinds hit $13.6 billion in 2024, up from $13.2 billion in 2023, according to Polaris Market Research. There’s Muddy Outdoors’ Bull Steel Hunting Box Blind (6ft by 6ft by 6.5ft high), with its Elite 10-foot Tower for $3,979.99; Cabella’s Ram 650 Blind 700 Hunting Blind with tinted windows at $1,799.99; or the Maverick Blinds XL Hunting Blind — their biggest — which holds two hunters plus gear for $1,399.99. The Maverick blind is made of “UV-stabilized rotomolded polyethylene construction” so it can be left out all year.

The hunting stories that emerge from these deer shacks and plastic cabins generally go like this: “I woke up from a nap to find a 6-point buck standing about 30 yards away, laid the .308 Winchester across the window sill and, boom, dropped him.”

Years ago, The Wall Street Journal profiled a Minnesota hunter in what he called his “Taj Mahal.”

“My buddies say this isn’t really hunting,” the guy told the Journal, while dealing cribbage with his wife beside a fire, warming chicken noodle soup on a stove, and waiting to blast any buck that wandered too close to his condo-sized stand.

This is a long way from Theodore Roosevelt, the patron saint of American hunting and conservation. T.R., as co-founder of the Boone and Crocket Club, laid down the principles of fair chase in 1893, according to James A. Swan’s In Defense of Hunting, who summarizes:

“[T]he goal of the true sportsman of the blood sports is to give the game the greatest chance possible to escape, and then, if caught, to kill the animal as quickly and humanely as possible.”

T.R. drew up these principles based on his own experience as a big game hunter and also on one of the most influential books of the day on the subject: The Still-Hunter, published in 1882 by Theodore Strong Van Dyke, a Princeton-educated lawyer and deer hunter. By “still-hunting,” Van Dyke meant slipping through the woods and stalking deer, as opposed to using dogs to drive them toward hunters.

The Still-Hunter was the first American book on field sport and defined the meaning of hunting for readers in the Progressive Era, according to Tara Kathleen Kelly’s study in the Journal of Sport History.

For me, still-hunting, or stalking, is the only way to hunt, as I wrote in an essay for The Washington Post some years ago. The op-ed stirred more response than almost anything else I wrote in my two and a half decades there, including a friendly but admonishing note from Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Until recently, though, I wasn’t aware how old or pervasive this ethos about still-hunting was.

Something different occupies many of the 14.4 million Americans who hunt these days. Instead of allowing the outdoors to alter their experience, modern American hunters alter the environment, sometimes permanently. It’s an attitude that has drained whatever poetry was left in our most ancient of blood sports. The modern American hunt has become so domesticated and suburbanized that when some hunters leave the couch and head for the woods they take the couch with them. It’s like a video game, with real blood.

The consumerist approach to hunting not only further alienates us from the outdoors but arguably feeds into other casually wanton behavior, too. I once found the carcass of a huge buck that had been left to rot. Only its antlers had been taken, as a trophy.

I have also heard hunters admit that they can’t be bothered to track a wounded animal.

“The coyotes have to eat,” one told me after he intentionally abandoned a wounded animal to die a lingering death.

Why does this matter? I suppose it doesn’t, especially for those who abhor hunting in any form.

Yet, the woods are now littered with metal tree stands and deer shacks. Wildlife biologists also believe that the use of feeding stations by hunters and others have contributed to the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a fatal disease that attacks the central nervous system in deer, elk, moose and similar animals. Known as “zombie deer disease,” CWD has not spread to humans but there is concern it might.

But how we hunt also speaks to who we are. One of the most beautiful stories ever written about hunting is Richard Ford’s “Communist,” even though — or perhaps because — the fragile beauty of a snow goose hunt is all but destroyed by the wanton cruelty of one of the hunters. Ford — whose love of hunting appears elsewhere in his fiction and in essays — interrogates this passion in stark, precise prose:

          "[T]he lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I never heard so close, a sound with size to it -- though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things. . ."

Ford first subtly anthropomorphizes the geese, then drives them through the narrator’s heart.

            "And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting,            as if the wind had changed again and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a boom. And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot."

The story becomes an elegy for hunting, the American West, an antiquated ideal of masculinity and for the loss of many things in the narrator’s life, including innocence. Above all, it’s a reminder that the men who mean to teach us that the world is a cruel and wicked place are often the cruelest and wickedest among us. The weakest, too.

Earlier this month, I spent three days alone in the woods in western Pennsylvania, stalking a single buck. I first jumped him while following fresh tracks in snow through a dense stand of Eastern hemlocks and boulders left by the last Ice Age on a hillside above Little Mahoning Creek. I missed a shot with my 7mm magnum rifle as he skedaddled.

The next day I sneak-hunted the same area and maybe half a mile more along the river. I saw red squirrels and a kestrel but not a hair — until two does pussyfooted by, obviously on alert.

Then a I saw a third deer, bigger than the others and hidden in brush. This one hung back, as if allowing the other two to scout ahead. And then I caught a glimpse of his antlers, just two fork-like tines on the left side. He slipped away before I could get a shot.

The next morning, I returned to the spot where I had first jumped him. At first light I saw two does again, like shadows gliding over the snow. Then came the buck, his 7-point rack unmistakably outlined in the wintry twilight, and I killed him.

In the 1930s, Soviet ruler Josef Stalin’s drive for unchallenged control led to a purge of the military’s highest ranks.

His shakeup of the Soviet Union’s officer corps was massive and bloody, and effectively decapitated the nation’s ability to defend itself on the eve of a world war.

Why Stalin would run such risks in the face of imminent conflict is a question still debated today, but historians generally agree he had one overriding aim: ensuring military obedience to him and him alone.

A different kind of purge of the military has been under way in the United States. Since President Trump returned to the White House, his administration has sacked or pushed aside more than two dozen senior military officers while offering little public explanation or transparency even with Congress, The New York Times has reported.

Unlike Stalin’s purge, the Pentagon shake-up hasn’t been massive or violent, but it’s just as dangerous. It’s also part of a similar — if unprecedented — campaign by Trump to undermine the military’s loyalty to the Constitution.

That battle for the U.S. military’s heart broke into the open in spectacular fashion when six Democratic members of Congress dropped an online video urging members of the armed forces to remember where their allegiance should lie.

Organized by Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served in Iraq, the video reminded the military and intelligence community that they not only have a right to disobey unlawful orders, they have an obligation to do so.

“You must refuse illegal orders,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Pennsylvania Democrat who took turns reading a statement with Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Slotkin and the others, all of whom had served in the armed forces or intelligence community.

The lawmakers did not indicate specifically what laws might be illegal, but their video appeared amid the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against suspected narcotics traffickers in Latin America and other abuses of military power.

At a time when Trump has ordered National Guard troops into cities and warned the nation’s senior military officers of an “enemy within,” the most shocking thing might be that only six Democrats have spoken up. And they were merely reminding armed forces personnel about core principles taught in basic training.

Stephen Miller and other MAGA fanatics reacted with predictable fury.

“Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” Miller said on X, formerly Twitter.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dubbed them the “Seditious Six” and announced that the Pentagon would investigate whether Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, could face charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Trump’s response against the Democrats was, if anything, even more unhinged.

“SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump wrote in a social media post.

Trump’s over-the-top, Gen. Jack D. Ripper-worthy response might be amusing if not for his blatant efforts to politicize the military and purge its ranks of those perceived as disloyal to him.

Just last month, Lt. Gen. Joe McGee, a three-star general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was pushed out after he “pushed back” on issues ranging from Russia and Ukraine to the boat strikes in the Caribbean, according to CNN. Adm. Alvin Holsey, who led the U.S. Southern Command, stepped down, reportedly because of his concerns about the legality of blowing up suspected narcotics traffickers.

Their departures are the latest in an unprecedented purge that started soon after Trump’s inauguration with the firing of Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and five other admirals and generals.

Military purges go hand in hand with authoritarian regimes, and may be the most ominous and dangerous sign of a society’s turn toward repression. Examples range from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Syria’s Hafez al Assad to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and China’s Xi Jinping.

The majority of such purges also happen to be peaceful, according to Jun Koga Sudduth, an associate professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington who compiled a database tracking more than 1,000 military purges between 1965 and 2005.

Erdogan carried out sweeping purges of Turkey’s military and national security apparatus after escaping a short-lived, poorly planned coup in 2016. What’s less well known is that Erdogan had initiated a shakeup of the officer corps prior to the 2016 coup that destabilized the military and helped create the conditions for a coup in the first place, according to a paper published by the U.S. War College.

Victor Orbán, an authoritarian leader whose playbook Trump seems to have studied most closely, purged Hungary’s military to consolidate power and realign the nation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And of course there is Stalin, the granddaddy of dictators whose sweeping, bloody purge of the military set up his nation not only for repression but military disaster.

When war with Nazi Germany finally came, the USSR paid dearly for Stalin’s attempt to remake the Soviet military in his image. Even in areas where the Soviets enjoyed battlefield superiority — such as in the number of tanks and their design — the Germans rolled over them, largely because of green or incompetent leadership, as told in Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

Stalin’s shakeup was arguably even less irrational than Trump’s. The Soviet dictator had reason to worry about the military’s allegiance after years of revolution, counterrevolution and civil war.

The Trump administration has rattled the chain of command based on little more than frothing about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s (DEI) and suspected disloyalty to Trump (not to mention disrespect for the late Charlie Kirk).

Trump and Hegseth are playing with fire at a time when the world seems more dangerous than usual — though one would never know given the silence from much of Congress and the entire Republican Party.

But it’s no surprise that the boldest, most direct warning has come from a handful of Democrats who have known what it means to go into harm’s way to defend the Constitution.

Zohran Mamdani has already struck a blow against the vast economic inequality that’s poisoning this country, simply by virtue of his improbable victory in New York City’s mayoral race.

His underdog campaign tapped the hunger many Americans feel for new leadership and for reasonable social welfare initiatives on affordable housing, day care and mass transit. He showed how such issues can triumph at the ballot box.

Picking up where Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I) presidential campaign left off, the 34-year-old Democratic Socialist has put a target on the oligarchy that hijacked our democracy from middle- and working-class Americans years ago.

But Mamdani’s victory poses a threat to another group of people, many of whom have historically aligned themselves with social democratic goals: Jews.

That’s not because Mamdani happens to be Muslim or because of the Islamophobic hysteria attending his campaign. MAGA, which has been even more unhinged since Mamdani’s victory, has relentlessly caricatured him as a jihadist bent on imposing sharia or blowing up Freedom Tower.

Mamdani embodies a different sort of threat to Jews — one that undercuts perhaps their most astonishing success in the past hundred years or so: the idea that the state of Israel should exist as a Jewish homeland.

Though Mamdani has been careful to focus his sharpest criticism on Israel itself and vowed to fight antisemitism against Jewish New Yorkers, critics say his demonizing of the Jewish state is a sure way to fuel such hatred. As if on cue, swastikas appeared on a Brooklyn yeshiva hours after the Nov. 4 vote was counted.

And yet despite his professed hostility to Zionism, Mamdani won backing from nearly a third of the city’s Jewish voters — an indication of the complex issues his candidacy raised (not to mention how terrible the alternatives were, including disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo).

In a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, Mamdani won in no small part because of support from a younger generation who have little understanding or feel for why Israel’s creation was even necessary.

Above all, Mamdani’s victory represents the mainstream embrace of the Edward W. Said school of postcolonial history — an ideology that at its simplest divides the world into white European oppressors and oppressed peoples of color everywhere else.

Said, a professor at Columbia University, wrote about the way in which Europe created stereotypes of other cultures in order to dominate them. By exposing the injustices built into colonial rule, he also hoped to advance human rights everywhere. He became a lifelong advocate for Palestinian independence, serving on the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, and allied himself for a time with Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Yasir Arafat.

Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, who was a colleague of Said’s on the Columbia faculty, covered similar ground in his own work.

In other words, postcolonial ideology has played an enormous role in shaping Zohran Mamdani’s identity and career. He ate it up as a young man, almost literally, at family dinners, where Said was a frequent guest.

Yet critics have argued that Said’s ideology is not only a bad fit for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but has gone a long way toward delegitimizing Israel. It’s a way of thinking that equates Zionism with racism; dismisses the Jewish people’s ancient and indigenous claims to the land as a myth or modern irrelevance; reduces thousands of years of Jewish history and yearning to a form of settler colonialism sanctioned by force of arms and the Balfour Declaration; and sees the state of Israel as little more than a consolation prize for European guilt over the Holocaust.

It’s a frame of mind whose hostility toward Israel isn’t even new. As far back as the 1940s, the British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote off Jewish Zionists as “disciples of the Nazis.”

Zohran Mamdani just happens to be the smiling, young face for a movement that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy — or necessity — of Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland, and he has made that movement the focus of his energies.

As an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, Mamdani promoted the campaign to boycott Israel, established chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and devoted his major’s thesis to Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born philosopher whose work on the evils of colonialism has often been read as a defense of violence against oppression.

“Fanon did not rejoice at acts of armed struggle he might have found reprehensible, but he did not condemn them either,” The Nation said in a recent appraisal of his work.

As a state assemblyman, Mamdani introduced the Not on Our Dime! act, which would have prohibited New York nonprofits from financially supporting illegal settler activity in Israeli occupied territory — but also, critics said, would have blocked Jewish organizations and charities from assisting victims of terrorism or providing support for Israel Defense Force units.

Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 surprise attack, Mamdani’s first public statement criticized Israel’s decision to declare war, not Hamas’ massacre of civilians, and called on Israel to begin “dismantling apartheid.”

His posting on X, formerly Twitter, didn’t even mention Hamas by name and could have been written Fanon — whose work, incidentally, popped up all over social media in the days after Hamas launched the war to justify the attack.

What’s more, Mamdani embraced the view that Israel’s war on Hamas was a war of “genocide,” not self defense, and was evasive when asked whether Hamas should disarm or be removed from leadership in Gaza. He also weaseled on criticism for his use of the phrase, “globalize the intifada” when the subject was raised at a meeting with the city’s most influential business leaders.

Pressed by Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla — whose parents were Holocaust survivors — Mamdani said he would avoid using the specific language, but not necessarily the concept, The Wall Street Journal reported.

As The Times of Israel founding editor David Horovitz wrote in an op-ed last week, a central part of Zohran Mamdani’s identity has been his refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy as a state, and that does not bode well for Jewish New Yorkers — or Jews anywhere else for that matter.

Mamdani should be trusted when he says that as mayor he will fight antisemitism. And yet the problem is that his core beliefs and much of what he’s worked for have supplied plenty of oxygen to those who deny Israel’s right to exist or see Israelis as Nazis. As far as Jews are concerned, it’s not what Mayor Mamdani might do, but what he already represents.

To understand the Trump administration’s deadly campaign against alleged drug traffickers, we must go back to 1890 and another shameful moment in American history.

That’s because Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth took us there with his recent announcement that the U.S. soldiers who massacred hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee will get to keep their Medals of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration.

“[A]nd we’re making it clear that they deserve those medals,” Hegseth said in a Sept. 25 social media post.

The former Fox News host’s decision to uphold the honors for Wounded Knee’s killers sent a powerful message to the world — and above all, to U.S. military personnel blasting away at suspected drug boats — that the U.S. government will look the other way on war crimes. Not only that — Hegseth insists that we honor the perpetrators of war crimes, too.

Hegseth made this announcement three weeks or so after U.S. armed forces blew up the first drug boat, and the timing now seems like more than a coincidence. On Saturday, the military destroyed another vessel, killing three.

The Pentagon has yet to offer evidence to support its allegations, while family members and Latin American officials have said some of the dead were fishermen. On Friday, the United Nations’ human rights chief said that the military strikes violate international law and amount to “extrajudicial killings.”

The Trump administration’s body count now stands at more than 60 — which is lower than at Wounded Knee, but still.

In his Sept. 25 announcement, Hegseth claimed to be acting on the findings of a panel appointed by former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to review the military honors given to soldiers at Wounded Knee. Hegseth went on to say that the panel completed its review in October 2024 and that Austin sat on the results for “politically correct” reasons.

Hegseth offered no evidence to back up this assertion, just a hunch. When I asked for a copy of the panel’s report, the Pentagon’s media office said in an email that, “We have nothing beyond” the secretary’s post on X, formerly Twitter.

“This decision is now final, and their place in our nation’s history is no longer up for debate,” Hegseth said. “We salute their memory, we honor their service, and we will never forget what they did.”

That’s probably the truest thing Hegseth said.

What happened on that bitterly cold morning at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota nearly 135 years ago will forever be a stain on our nation’s history. It was the culmination of nearly three decades of violent conflict between the United States and the Plains Indians, as American History magazine put it in 2005.

The U.S. military — fearful of a religious movement known as Ghost Dancing that stirred Native Americans with the promise of deliverance from their European invaders — was eager to put down any disturbances before they spread.

Backed by the hard-nosed Maj. Gen. Nelson A. Miles, federal authorities set out to arrest Sitting Bull, the most influential of the Lakota (Sioux) leaders. Instead, federal authorities killed him in the attempt.

Two days later, the War Department — as it was then known and as Trump has restyled it now — ordered the arrest of Big Foot, another prominent Lakota leader also known as Spotted Elk.

Big Foot, having learned of Sitting Bull’s death, started his group of several hundred Minneconjou Lakota people toward the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the hopes of finding safety there. He had severe pneumonia and was traveling in the back of a wagon when the U.S. 7th Cavalry caught up to him.

The soldiers, under Maj. Samuel Whitside, had orders to take Big Foot into custody, disarm his people, and conduct them to an army encampment at Wounded Knee Creek. Big Foot, who had raised a white flag after the cavalry had been sighted, agreed to move his people there.

Whitside decided it would be better to seize guns and horses from the Minneconjous once they reached their destination, and the group of Native Americans — 120 men and 230 women and children — set off under military escort.

More U.S. cavalry converged on Wounded Knee that night, bringing the detachment’s strength to about 500 soldiers. Among their armaments were four, rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns. These were light cannons capable of firing explosive shells or canister, a kind of buckshot designed to mow down the enemy at close quarters.

What triggered the next day’s bloodshed remains a matter of dispute.

John W. Comfort, a member of the 1st Artillery Division, said the Native Americans opened fire while faking surrender. Comfort, who received a Medal of Honor for his deeds that day, recorded his version in a letter to family that did not become public for more than a century.

But Native American survivors — whose stories appear in Dee Brown’s landmark book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee— said many Minneconjous had already laid down their arms when a young, deaf member of the group became angry about surrendering his rifle. A scuffle occurred, and a gun went off.

What is not in dispute is that the heavily armed 7th Cavalry far outnumbered the Minneconjous and had them surrounded when the killing started. The Hotchkiss guns rained deadly fire on the tent camp at a rate of almost a shell a second.

“We tried to run but they shot us like we were buffalo,” Louise Weasel Bear is quoted as saying in Brown’s book. Those who tried to flee or shelter in a nearby gulch were ridden down and slaughtered by soldiers.

“Sometimes they were in heaps because they had huddled together, and some were scattered all along,” said Black Elk, an Oglala Lakota spiritual leader who related his story in Black Elk Speaks. “I saw a little baby trying to suck its mother, but she was bloody and dead.”

More than half of the Native Americans fell on the spot, with estimates as high as 300 men, women and children killed. Twenty-five soldiers also died, and dozens were injured. The New York Times hailed the 7th Cavalry as heroes in an account headlined, “A Fight with the Hostiles; Big Foot’s treachery precipitates a battle.” Nineteen soldiers received Medals of Honor.

Of course, this was also a time when white Americans liked to say the only good Indian was a dead Indian — a phrase tossed around so often during the Indian Wars that no one’s sure who said it first, though it’s usually attributed to Lt. Gen. Philip Sheridan. It’s the sort of thinking that thoroughly demonizes and strips certain people of their humanity until it’s okay to kill them on sight.

But that appears to be Trump’s thinking now. In making America great again, his administration has taken us back in time to a place where certain lives are cheap and the only good drug dealer is a dead drug dealer.

In the late 1950s, as murderous gangs terrorized New York City’s streets, the nation became transfixed by the trial of seven teenagers charged with the brutal killing of another.

Americans recoiled at the senseless violence that took the life of Michael Farmer, who was 15 years old and partially disabled from polio. Many wrote his killers off as the worst of the worst.

But the Rev. David R. Wilkerson saw something different in these boys: the possibility of redemption.

Wilkerson sold his own television to raise money and, with the blessing of his tiny church in Pennsylvania, headed to New York to save them. He recounted his ministry in “The Cross and the Switchblade,” a 1963 best seller that became a Hollywood movie, launched a youthful “Jesus Movement” and popularized Christian evangelism.

But a different sort of Christianity is at work in the nation today, one that has helped keep President Donald Trump in power and so far remained silent while his administration brazenly kills gang members of another sort.

As of Friday, the U.S. military has struck 10 alleged drug-carrying boats, killing at least 43 people since the campaign against narco traffickers began last month, The Washington Post reported. The latest military strike occurred in the Caribbean and killed six people, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday on social media.

Trump has compared the campaign to previous administrations’ war against Al Qaeda. Yet his administration has failed to offer evidence to support its allegations or properly brief Congress.

Victims’ families and neighbors, Latin American officials and local news media have challenged the Trump administration’s claims, saying some of the victims were fishermen. No matter — Trump is ready to expand the campaign on land.

“We’re just going to kill all the people bringing drugs into our country,” Trump told reporters.

The military attacks on alleged drug traffickers are only the latest example of Trump’s broad assault on laws and norms, and his casual way of dehumanizing his enemies.

It’s also part of Trump’s not-so-subtle grooming of the military, as he co-opts the armed forces into partisan stunts and tests their loyalty with legally dubious orders. How far will they go before they have to choose between him and the Constitution?

Even if the vessels were smuggling drugs, the unprovoked use of deadly military force against them would be unlawful, according to Walter Olson, a senior legal scholar at the Cato Institute. Olson, in a press release, characterized the military strikes as extrajudicial killings. He also warned that the strikes run the risk of triggering a war.

“Imagine if a foreign government struck at U.S. boats and citizens this way!” Olson is quoted as saying.

To no one’s surprise, the Trumpublican Party has been silent about the killings, with one exception. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has said the strikes are illegal and “go against all of our tradition.”

“You have to present evidence,” Paul said on NBC News’ Meet the Press last week. “So these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime.”

Odds are that some of those sent to the bottom of the ocean were innocent people, Paul said, citing Coast Guard data. About a quarter of all vessels suspected of trafficking drugs turned out to have no contraband after U.S. authorities legally stopped and searched them.

Paul also noted that the administration repatriated two survivors of a strike, rather than detaining them and taking them before a court of law — another sign that the U.S. likely acted without sufficient evidence.

But to judge from the Trump administration’s conduct — and Trump’s almost flippant statement about killing people — who cares?

“There will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a posting on X, formerly Twitter, on Oct. 22 following a strike.

Life is apparently cheap for the former Fox News host who, like so many others in the administration, almost literally wears his cross on his sleeve. Besides sporting Crusader tattoos, Hegseth has made much of his intent to infuse the Pentagon with good ol’ Christian spirit.

How far we’ve come from the values that animated the Rev. Wilkerson, who saw humanity even in the most hardened killers. Incidentally, he also warned about the false kind of Christianity — the Prosperity Gospel, the powerseekers, grasping con men posing as televangelists — that helped put Trump in office and now justify everything he does.

Besides “The Cross and the Switchblade,” which was made into a 1970 movie starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada, Wilkerson launched a teen mission that still exists. He also opened a church in Times Square that welcomed the homeless, AIDS patients and drug addicts. He battled against the idea that even God didn’t care about the worst of the worst.

Of course, no one’s saying we should be sending preachers into Latin America to deal with violent drug cartels. That’s what the Drug Enforcement Administration and other law enforcement are for.

But under Trump, top U.S. officials have apparently decided that suspected drug traffickers are not deserving of arrest, due process and a day in court. They have made themselves judge, jury and executioner — which, by the way, is not so different from the way some criminals think.

Why bother with the law when murder will do?

[This essay was previously published on Sept. 16 but had to be taken down for technical reasons that neither Lit Savage nor Substack’s AI “Help” bot understands.]

Charlie Kirk was about as American as you can get.

At a young age he reinvented himself to fulfill an outsize ambition, discovered how to distill this country’s obsession with wealth, power and violence, and bottled his elixir in a sublime vessel of celebrity and religion.

With boyish looks, a vaguely James Dean-like haircut, and a youthful eagerness to take on any subject and any opponent in debate, Kirk peddled his brand to the masses with the relentless efficiency of a modern ad campaign. He was online, on radio, in bookstores, in podcasts and, of course, all over social media.

Kirk understood that in a postmodern culture where everything has been permitted, tried, packaged and sold, the most reliable way to gain attention was through shock and provocation. His nonprofit political outreach organization, Turning Point USA, enlisted millions of young adults in the conservative movement and its related PAC would rake in revenues of more than $92 million just seven years after he founded it.

By the age of 31, Charlie Kirk had become a success, a political force to be reckoned with and, above all, America’s most charming minister of hate. His preeminence, almost unrivaled in what’s now a very crowded field, landed him in Donald Trump’s inner circle and made him a key ally of the cruelest, most corrupt and most incompetent president in American history.

But Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die at the hands of an assassin. No matter how many young minds he poisoned, no matter how consequential he was in bringing to power a corrupt and immoral regime, Kirk should never have been silenced through violence. That’s not only because violence is counterproductive, or that his murder will likely elevate him as a far-right martyr. It’s because any political violence, let alone murder, is profoundly wrong. It violates every moral code on the planet, and only begets more violence. It’s wrong to celebrate his death, too.

Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10 has rightly shaken the nation. Those who loved and admired him are still grieving. I empathize with them — even though it’s difficult for me to understand why they looked up to him and admired what he had to say in the first place. (Kirk, of course, famously disparaged the very idea of empathy itself.)

What Kirk stood for was repugnant, and we should not sugarcoat his ideology. Ezra Klein went too far when he said, “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk with him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” — as if it’s remarkable for zealots to mix with the public and spread their views. George Will compared Kirk to William F. Buckley, Jr. — which to me seems more like an unintentional if damning assessment of Buckley than praise for Kirk. A Boston Globe’s editorial went so far as to say, “We Need More Charlie Kirks.”

No, we do not.

Kirk’s message was utterly toxic, even if the package was as shiny and innocuous as a loaf of Wonder Bread. Kirk trafficked in racism, sexism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia and anti-Islamic bigotry. He spread misinformation about Covid and climate change and, at times, shrugged off America’s epidemic of gun violence. He attacked Martin Luther King Jr., suggested black Americans had it better under Jim Crow and seemed to take particular delight in disparaging black women.

In recent years, Kirk also wrapped himself around the cross. He became a hero to millions of Christian Evangelicals, which has become something of an oxymoron in the Trump era. He helped build Christian Nationalism into the most fanatic voting block this country has seen in a while.

If there’s anything certain, though, it’s that Charlie Kirk — who once fantasized about forcing children to watch public executions — would gleefully have cast the first stone. He would not only have taken up the challenge, Kirk would also have memed it, live-streamed it, posted the finished video on YouTube and auctioned off the stone that landed the fatal blow.

Snakes, too, sometimes wrap themselves around the cross.

Since his death, the Guardian, Reuters and others have put together a collection of Kirk’s more odious remarks, many of which are familiar by now. Here’s a sampling:

ON RACE:

=> “If I see a black pilot, boy, I’m going to be like, ‘I hope he’s qualified.’ “

=> “No one cared when it was just kind of paper shufflers or even engineers, but now it’s ‘Hold on a second — you’re going to remove my appendix and you’re a black lesbian?’

=>“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

=> “[It’s] happening all the time in urban America [that] prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”

=> “Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us,” [referring to former First Lady Michelle Obama; Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other prominent black women]. “They’re coming out and they’re saying, ’I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s spot to be taken somewhat seriously.”

ON ISLAM:

“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

ON LGBTQ PEOPLE

Transgender people are “a throbbing middle finger to god” and “should be taken care of the way we used to in the 50s and 60s.”

ON GUN VIOLENCE:

“I think it’s worth it . . to have a cost, unfortunately, of some gun deaths every year, so we can have a Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS:

“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge,” [while discussing Taylor Swift’s and NFL football player Travic Kelce’s engagement].

“Women should not work but instead serve their husbands and raise children.”

Finally, when it came to political violence — the demon that has found victims on both sides of the partisan divide and eventually took his own life — Kirk laughed it off, urging people to bail out the man who attacked and nearly killed Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.

It’s not surprising to me that a nation this size would cough up a grifty sleazeball who spews this kind of stuff. Or that the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front and the other brown shirts of our time would cheer him on.

What’s surprising is how many otherwise decent Americans embraced him for spouting abhorrent views like these and made him rich and famous for doing it. (Those who call themselves Christians should perhaps read Kirk’s remarks again and see how they fit with Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 5:3-10, John 8.3-7 or Matthew 22:39.)

Even more surprising now is that in the name of a free speech crusader, his admirers are seeking to punish those who denigrate him. Trump is just itching to make this his Reichstag fire.

We are better than this. Charlie Kirk had a right to live and a right to speak his mind, no matter how disagreeable his views might have been. Every single American shares this right. The First Amendment’s genius was the idea that speech and ideas — no matter how foul — should be given free expression. He should have been driven from public with better arguments, not bullets.

If we grieve for anything, it should be that American democracy has suffered another deadly blow. Kirk’s assassination is a calamitous event that threatens to drag us back to a time when Americans used violence instead of persuasion to settle conflicts. His death is another warning that we must change course.

Oklahoma is hardly the place one would expect to find resistance to Trumpism and all the awful things that go with it.

Oklahoma ranks in or around the top 10 of the nation’s most conservative states, and its voters backed the King of MAGA by margins of at least 33 percent every time his name has befouled the ballot. Seventy-percent of the population identify as Christians; 47 percent of those Sooners are evangelical.

So it was a big deal when Gov. Kevin Stitt, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, spoke out against President Trump’s decision to send Texas National Guard troops into Chicago despite the objections of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzer.

“We believe in the federalist system — that’s state’s rights,” Stitt told The New York Times on Thursday. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.” (A federal appeals court has since ruled that the Texas Guard may remain in Illinois for now but cannot be deployed.)

Never mind that Stitt’s objection is narrowly drawn. He apparently endorses Trump’s beta-testing of martial law by sending military personnel into America’s streets under the pretext that local law enforcement are incapable of protecting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or that these masked goons can’t protect themselves.

Stitt said only that one state should not deploy its Guard into another state without that governor’s approval.

But at a time when profiles in courage are scarce, we’ll take it. Stitt, who chairs the National Governors Association, said what no other Republican governor has had the guts to say so far.

Why, though, have so many other Red State governors remained silent?

And where are all the red-blooded, Red America gun owners who live in those states, the ones I grew up with? The tough-talking, tobacco-chewing, pickup-driving, gun-slinging patriots who argued that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own firearms because an armed citizenry kept tyranny at bay?

Where’s the National Rifle Association — that hypervigilant organization that once produced a video entitled “It Can Happen Here” and called federal agents “jackbooted fascists”?

In 1989, the NRA ran ads arguing that China’s government might not have massacred pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square if the Chinese people had a Second Amendment. The ads, which were so controversial that Newsweek and Time refused to print them, argued that free speech alone was inadequate in the face of dictators who were “quick to send their soldiers against speechmakers.”

“The students of Beijing did not have a Second Amendment when the soldiers came,” the ad says. “The right to own a firearm is a statement about freedom.”

Hello? “Soldiers against speechmakers?” Why have we not heard a peep from the NRA and other gunnies about the outrages that Trump has visited on the Constitution such as sending the military into our cities? Ordering British troops to occupy Boston helped ignite the American Revolution.

Charlie Kirk, MAGA’s recently sainted martyr, once said we should accept a certain amount of American carnage — nearly 47,000 gun deaths at last count and countless school shootings — as the price of liberty. Yet, Trump has attacked several freedoms in the Bill of Rights, and the folks who blather about how the Second Amendment protects all other ones have been silent.

If the Second Amendment is not a hedge against authoritarian rulers then — and I say this as a lifelong gun owner — we should repeal it. What’s the point of putting up with lax gun laws and so much daily bloodshed if the Second Amendment’s rationale is phony?

At Thanksgiving dinner, my father and uncles often trotted out a new gun — maybe a .300 Weatherby Magnum rifle, a double-barrel shotgun, or a Remington .30-06 pump carbine — and handed it around as show and tell while the hunting stories flowed.

My friends sometimes did the same, and many knew the Second Amendment by heart. I often sat at my grandfather’s kitchen table leafing through his Guns and Ammo magazines and their dire editorials about how Washington, D.C. politicians were scheming to take our firearms. Only the Second Amendment stood between gun grabbers like Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and our liberty.

Back then, Red America was nearly alone in its understanding of the Second Amendment. Mainstream media carried countless editorials and slanted stories on gun control. The Los Angeles Times ran editorials calling for a handgun ban and arguing that the Second Amendment protected only the states’ right to raise militias. Law school elites not only pooh-poohed the idea of an individual right to own firearms, but said the question had long ago been settled by a single case, United States v. Miller. Gun-owning rubes, you see, had simply misinterpreted the Constitution.

In 1976, the year my father gave me a bicentennial edition Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun for Christmas, the District of Columbia passed a law banning handguns. The D.C. law also required that shotguns and rifles to be kept in an inoperable state and prohibited the use of those firearms for anything other than recreational purposes.

“In other words, even if you owned a shotgun, you couldn’t use it against a burglar coming through the window,” Adam Winkler writes his book Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

The Washington Post, where I wound up working as a staff writer for more than 20 years, applauded D.C.’s new gun law in an editorial that nonetheless admitted the measure would have almost no impact on crime.

This same law would one day land before the Supreme Court as District of Columbia v. Heller with explosive impact. In a sweeping decision that vindicated gun-rights advocates’ view of the Bill of Rights, the court found that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to own firearms as a form of self defense and a check on tyranny.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, traced the amendment’s origins to the 17th century English Bill of Rights. After the crown had used “select militias” to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming them, British citizens demanded recognition of their right to bear arms. The Founders knew this.

“The framers believed it was important for the people to have weapons that were good for killing because they thought it essential for the populace to be able to defend itself against an oppressive government,” Sanford Levinson, a liberal constitutional scholar, wrote in the Yale Law Journal, marking a turning point in the debate years before Heller.

Heller was a victory long in the making for gun-rights advocates — but to what end? What has U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, become, if not a “select militia” set loose by a would-be king and his deplorable crew?

This is not to say that armed American citizens should start confronting ICE agents in the street or carry AR-15s during “No Kings” demonstrations planned for this weekend. We should avoid political violence even when the government is promoting it. An armed citizenry might be a check on tyranny, but it should also be only as a last resort.

And yet it’s also past time that gun-owning Americans and gun-rights organizations like the NRA, who have gone on and on about bearing arms as a check on tyranny, recognize the abuses happening daily and speak up.

Justice Joseph Story, whose 1833 book Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States is cited in Heller, described an armed citizenry as the “natural defence [sic] of a free country,” Levinson says. It not only stood ready to defend liberty against foreign threats, but against “domestic usurpations of power by rulers.”

That moment is here.

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Dear MAGA,

We call you fascists because you are. We call you fascists because President Donald Trump and his administration have been enacting a demonstrably fascist program for nearly a year, and you continue to support them.

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We do not use the word fascist lightly, though for much of its history it’s been tossed around as a casual epithet. Also, keep in mind that calling someone a fascist is not the same as painting a target on the person’s back. The word is a summons to action, not a call for violence.

We use this word because we must. Finding a cure requires us to identify the condition by name. If anything, some institutions — The Washington Post’s recently neutered Opinions section comes to mind — have been reticent about such matters, lest speaking the truth offend power, the Post’s owner’s power (and wealth) above all.

Yet, every day of Trump’s presidency brings new evidence that fascism is here. This week’s performance by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth topped them all.

Clownish and demented as it was, Trump’s speech to the nation’s top military commanders was a trip wire, the most alarming evidence yet that Trump contemplates using military violence against Americans who dissent or threaten his rule.

“We’re under invasion from within,” Trump said. “No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”

As the nation’s best military officers sat stonily before him, Trump added: “[W]e should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard, but military — because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

Trump’s remarks were vile. Fascist. Worse, it seems as if the purpose of the Quantico, Va. assembly was an oblique demand for a loyalty oath from the military.

Though no one asked the admirals and generals on Tuesday to raise their right hands and swear fealty to Trump and his regime, you can bet that any officer who criticizes the latest stunt from him and his lightweight Pentagon sidekick will be targeted for demotion or worse. You can also bet that the crew who brought you DOGE has already fired up AI-enhanced search engines to scour Pentagon servers for the merest hint of disloyalty among US military personnel.

Some Republicans and their propaganda outlets have warned that using the word “fascist” provokes violence. Their complaints grew loudest after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

“Democrats refuse to tone down rhetoric on ‘fascists’ after killings,” the Washington Examiner proclaimed. The Federalist, always good for laugh, said, “This isn’t random name-calling. It’s an assassination prep campaign.”

Vice President JD Vance, speaking at a North Carolina rally after a fatal attack on an ICE facility in Dallas, weighed in, too.

“If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you politically is a Nazi,” Vance said.

Never mind that it was Vance who compared Trump to Hitler once upon a time, or that conservatives used to criticize lefties for suggesting that critical speech could trigger “stochastic terrorism.”

Vance and other Republicans seem remarkably clueless about actual cause and effect when it comes to inciting violence. The single greatest provocation for violence has been unleashing mobs of masked ICE agents to racially profile and abduct people off the street, threaten bystanders and attack journalists.

That’s fascism. So is threatening free speech. So is attacking the news media. So is ignoring court orders. So is upending the constitutional order.

Using democratic means for illiberal ends is fascism in its purest form.

The word, by the way, comes from fasces, a bundle of rods bound around an axe that was Ancient Rome’s symbol for divine authority in all political, military and religious affairs, according to Charles Freeman’s book, Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean.

The fasces, which likely originated with the Etruscans, was carried before Roman kings in ceremonial processions as an emblem of their imperium or supreme powers — not unlike the ceremonial mace symbolizing the authority of our now-irrelevant Congress. Fasces also adorn the Speakers rostrum in the House of Representatives as symbols of civil authority borrowed from the Roman Republic.

Alas, Benito Mussolini ruined the the symbol for everyone, not unlike the way Hitler ruined Chaplin’s mustache.

Robert O. Paxton, a professor of history and author of The Anatomy of Fascism, has spent a lifetime studying the subject. In an influential paper on “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Paxton surveyed fascist and proto-fascist movements in different countries and at various stages of history, tracing its birth to the American South and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

Paxton, the Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Columbia University, characterizes fascism as an opportunistic and reactionary political phenomenon more than a coherent ideology.

“Fascism can appear wherever democracy is sufficiently implanted to have aroused disillu­sion,” he writes.

Among fascism’s most salient features are extremist thought and rhetoric; a belief that a group — say, white Christian nationalists — is superior to any individual or individual right; that the group has been victimized, thereby justifying forceful action against its enemies; and that moral decay — almost always a consequence of the sort of cosmopolitan liberalism we find in Blue America — poses a threat to the nation.

Other common threads among fascist movements include anti-intellectualism, a preoccupation with “blood and historic destiny,” and the habit of mobilizing tribal passions around a single leader. A nearly universal trait, Paxton says, is the project for the “macho restoration of a threatened patriarchy.”

There is even the fascist custom of using exotic dress or colorful shirts as emblems of tribal unity: violent agrarian Greenshirts in France during the 1930s; Mussolini’s Black Shirts, whose followers consciously harked back to Ancient Rome; Nazi Brown Shirts, of course; and the Silver Shirts, or “S.S.,” set loose by William Dud­ley Pelley, an American fascist who ran for president in 1936 on the Christian Party ticket. And now we have MAGA’s red baseball caps, often accessorized with plenty of red, white and blue.

“New functional equiv­alents of fascism would probably work best, as George Orwell reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time,” Paxton writes. “An authentically popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black; in Western Europe, secular and antisemitic, or more probably, these days, anti-Islamic; in Russia and Eastern Europe, religious, antisemitic, and Slavophile.”

In other words, check, check, check and check — every single item on Paxton’s list has been in place since Trump’s first escalator ride. The only surprise — almost remarkable, actually — is that Paxton prophesied all this nearly 30 years ago in the Journal of Modern History.

There was a time when Paxton thought the word “fascist” was overused and might not apply to Trumpism. After Jan. 6, Paxton changed his mind.

In a lengthy New York Times profile before last year’s election, Paxton worried not only that Trump might win, but that he had something Hitler and Mussolini lacked: a much more substantial base of popular support.

That’s another reason we use the word fascist. To shame you, MAGA — and to shame any American who has endorsed, empowered and cheered on Trump and his form of governance.

Shame has a way of bringing people to their senses, often leading to repentance and change. So you could even say that when we call you a fascist, we still have hope.