Scopes At 100

On this date a century ago, the trial of John Scopes began in Clarksville, Tennessee.  The Scopes Monkey Trial, as it became known, was a national sensation at the time, given fodder for many books, and was the source material for the play, and later film, Inherit The Wind.  How the case is now remembered in many ways erases the nuances and complexity of the issues and people involved.

I first wrote about the case in 2015, with an update in 2022.  At the time of the 2015 post there were still some efforts to insert creationism into public school curriculum.  Those efforts seems to have ceased, but evolutionary biology now appears under assault from different quarters, it seems an appropriate date on which to post again.

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Rather than the often repeated adage that the victors write the history of an event, the story of anything is actually determined by the unswerving adoption of one version of it, and the telling of that version by a determined cadre of writers. In time, the version with the most persistent adherents becomes the “truth.” – David & Jeanne Heidler in Henry Clay: The Essential American (2010)

I still recall the family getting in the car for the drive to Hartford, Connecticut. It was the late 1950s, and my father was taking us to pick up a monkey. He had a small role as an Italian organ-grinder in a play put on by a local community theater group. The director wanted to use a prop monkey, but dad insisted on the real thing. We housed that monkey for the next week; I remember it as nasty and mean-tempered, but the audience loved it, as well as dad in his bit part (he always had a knack for showmanship). The play was Inherit The Wind, based on a 1925 event in Tennessee that became popularly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Seeing the play and, later, the movie, I accepted its narrative of the forces of enlightenment, reason, heroism, and tolerance (represented by Spencer Tracey in the movie, playing a character based on Clarence Darrow) against the forces of narrow-mindedness, mean-spiritedness, repression, and unthinking old-fashioned religion (represented by Frederic March playing a character based on William Jennings Bryan); a morality play of liberal versus conservative written during the McCarthy years. The play is still staged frequently by regional theaters (here’s a recent Wisconsin production), has gone through several Broadway revivals, most recently in 2007, with Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy. There was even a London production, in 2009, with Kevin Spacey. In most cases, it is widely accepted by audiences as historically accurate.

It was only years later, prompted by reading Edward Larson’s Summer For The Gods and doing related research that I appreciated how much more complex and interesting the real story was. American history is much more fascinating and instructive when you don’t try to neatly shoehorn it into boxes labeled “liberal,” “conservative,” “progressive,” and “reactionary” as Inherit The Wind did, aided by influential mid-20th century historians and literary critics such as Richard Hofstadter. Throughout our history, you’ll see prominent people with constellations of political views that are unrecognizable in today’s categories (see Sam Houston as an example).  I support the teaching of evolutionary theory but the full story behind the Scopes Trial is more interesting than the caricature of Inherit The Wind and, as I learned, the main character in this drama, William Jennings Bryan, would not neatly fit into any political classification in modern-day America.

The Background

Dayton in 1925

The early 20th century saw an explosion in the growth of public high schools. In 1890, there were fewer than 200,000 public high-school students nationwide; by 1920, more than two million. In Tennessee, fewer than 10,000 in 1910, but more than 50,000 by 1920. What were they to be taught?

At the same time, battles were heating up between Darwinists and some religious denominations over the teaching of evolution. State legislative fights over its inclusion in educational curriculum became common.

Legislative efforts barring the teaching of evolutionary theory were successful in a small number of states, including Tennessee, which passed its law in early 1925. It was part of a larger package of laws in a massive education reform bill that laid the foundation for state-supported public schools. It was signed into law by progressive Governor Peay. Violation of the ban on teaching evolution carried a $100 fine, but no jail. Bryan supported the bill, but unsuccessfully lobbied against having any fine attached to violating the evolution provision, though no one at the time expected any prosecutions under the statute.

John Scopes

Looking for a test case, the American Civil Liberties Union placed advertisements in Tennessee papers offering to defend anyone prosecuted under the Act. Leading citizens of the town of Dayton decided to take them up on it. While some were interested in challenging the law, many others just saw it as a good opportunity to create publicity and generate business for the town. Rather than showcasing a contentious, divided populace, as portrayed in the play, the actual trial took place in a festive atmosphere, according to reporters like H.L. Mencken. The key players in Dayton recruited John Scopes, a young, part-time schoolteacher, to be the defendant and agreed to pay any penalty imposed on him.

Dayton was a small town in East Tennessee, and part of the only Republican enclave in the state. Bryan won every southern state in each of his three presidential runs, but never carried Rhea County where Dayton was located. The town was also heavily Methodist in a state dominated by Baptists (the Baptist Convention, meeting in Memphis just before the trial, refused to add an anti-evolution plank to the denomination’s statement of faith).

Once the ACLU came into the case, Bryan — the country’s leading opponent of the teaching of evolution — agreed to become part of the prosecution’s team. And through some very complicated machinations, Clarence Darrow, the most famous criminal defense lawyer in America, joined the defense team. When this happened, the trial became the biggest story in the country, and was also followed heavily in Europe. A deluge of reporters descended on Dayton.

Why Evolution? Why Bryan?

 
In 1925, 65-year-old William Jennings Bryan was well known to every American, having run unsuccessfully three times as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate (1896, 1900, and 1908). A remarkable orator — his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 convention secured him the nomination — he is considered to be the first populist to run for President. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed him Secretary of State, a post he resigned in 1915 when the pacifist Bryan became convinced Wilson was maneuvering the country into entering the First World War.

Bryan campaigned successfully in support of four constitutional amendments: direct election of senators, the Federal income tax, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition.  So why, in the 1920s, did he undertake leadership of the crusade against the teaching of Darwinism, and why did he think it was consistent with his other views?  From today's perspective, it doesn't seem to make sense.

Bryan believed in “popular sovereignty", always campaigning against big business and the banks and on behalf of the common people. When the Supreme Court overturned some of the early progressive labor laws, Bryan supported (unsuccessful) legislation to limit judicial review, and backed the Progressive use of popular referendums. He believed the people were entitled to what they wanted, and saw the evolution issue in the same way. According to Bryan:

It is no infringement on their freedom of conscience or freedom of speech to say that, while as individuals they are at liberty to think as they please and say what they like, they have no right to demand pay for teaching that which parents and the taxpayer do not want taught.

The deeper reason was Bryan’s concerns about the implications of Darwinism. Bryan was a committed Christian and pacifist. He rejected evolutionary theory as a matter of religious faith, but also believed Darwinism and its doctrine of “survival of the fittest” threatened the dignity and perhaps even the very existence of the weakest of the human flock. Bryan saw a direct connection between the excesses of capitalism and militarism — which he had denounced throughout his career — and Darwinism, which, as early as 1904, he had called “the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak.”

The concerns Bryan raised in 1904 were reinforced by recent events. The slaughter of WWI appalled Bryan. He saw German militarism as Darwinian selection in action; this was a common view at the time, as reflected in the words of Vernon Kellogg in his book Headquarters Nights: “Natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the gospel of the German intellectuals.”

Bryan saw the modernist wing of the Progressives, led by Woodrow Wilson, willing to go down the same road. It is striking to see how much Darwinism was in the air of politics at the time. Wilson’s key 1912 campaign speech, “What is Progress?” espoused a Darwinian approach to American government:

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of the The Federalist to see that fact written on every page. They speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system — how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system. …

Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when “development” “evolution,” is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine. [emphasis added]

The new science of eugenics greatly troubled Bryan. The high school textbook used by John Scopes was A Civic Biology by George William Hunter, which defined eugenics as “the science of improving the human race by better heredity.” Hunter wrote,

If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading … Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibility of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.

The prior edition of Hunter’s textbook had contained language specifically citing biological deficiencies of African races.

Eugenics had many scientist adherents in the United States and England who believed that the human race could be made better via selective breeding to create a better and more progressive world. One of those scientists, A.E. Wiggam, expressed the connection between the teaching of evolution and eugenics:

“until we can convince the common man of the fact of evolution … I fear we cannot convince him of the profound ethical and religious significance of the thing we call eugenics.”

Holmes

During the 1920s and 30s, the eugenics movement gained momentum. By 1935, more than 30 states had laws mandating sexual segregation and sterilization of persons regarded as eugenically unfit. The most notorious expression of support for eugenics came in 1927 from the leading Social Darwinist on the Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who, in his opinion for the Court upholding Oklahoma’s sterilization law, exclaimed “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The only dissenting vote was cast by Pierce Butler, the lone Catholic on the Court.

Within a few years, WWII and the revulsion against Nazi law and experimentation would put an end to the eugenics movement (though a revival of eugenics under another name seems to be arising based upon  modern advances in biology and genetics). The heyday of the eugenics movement and the rise of anti-evolutionary forces led to the Dayton trial in 1925. Bryan expressed his pithy view of the whole matter when commenting on the latest discovery of purported early human remains: “Men who would not cross the street to save a soul have traveled across the world in search of skeletons.”  In his closing argument at trial, Bryan explained that evolutionary theory:

". . . if taken seriously and made the basis of a philosophy of life, it would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw."

The Trial and its Aftermath
The ACLU and Darrow differed on trial strategy. The ACLU considered it a free speech case, but that was not Darrow’s interest.  As a militant atheist who did not believe in free will, he wanted to use the trial as an opportunity to directly assault Christianity and its beliefs about the creation of the universe and the human race. This discomfited many ACLU supporters, but — through a complicated series of maneuvers — Darrow seized control of the defense strategy and was cleverly able to lure Bryan to the stand, where he cross-examined him viciously on Biblical inconsistencies. (Darrow might have been a terrible person, but you’d want him defending you if you were on trial). This prompted a Congregational Church official who supported the legal challenge to send a note to the ACLU: 

“May I express the earnest opinion that not five percent of the ministers in this liberal denomination have any sympathy with Mr Darrow’s conduct of the case.”

Edwin Mims of Vanderbilt University, another supporter of the ACLU, wrote:

 “When Clarence Darrow is put forth as the champion of the forces of enlightenment to fight the battle for scientific knowledge, one feels almost persuaded to become a Fundamentalist.”

The jury quickly returned a verdict finding Scopes guilty. Bryan offered to pay the $100 fine, and the local school board offered to renew his contract for another year, but Scopes decided to go to graduate school, attending the University of Chicago and becoming a petroleum engineer.  The fine was ultimately rescinded and the Butler Act was repealed in 1967.

Five days after the end of the trial, William Jennings Bryan passed away while taking his afternoon nap.

 

In today's Wall St Journal, playwright David Mamet has a piece with observations on Inherit The Wind, noting that: 

The play and film were intended as ripostes to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s persecution of those accused of communist sympathies.

As such, the play had to tailor the story from 1925 into a narrative usable for a 1950s audience. It also reflects intellectual currents of the mid-century: 

"Inherit the Wind” paints the contest between reason and religion as zero-sum. Religion is a metaphysical concept. It can’t be observed as part of the physical world. But a little reflection must suggest that reason is equally metaphysical. Where does it exist save for in the human mind, which can be inaccurate, uninformed, depraved or plain wrong, and in which “the reasonable” changes through maturity and over time. 

The truth is both are necessary.  

The factors potentially mitigating the horrors wrought by our corruptible human feelings, and our equally defective reason are two. One is religion, which is to say our avowal of our imperfection. The other is the law, the attempt to codify religious intuition mechanically. There will always be an unresolved remainder in an arbitration between justice and fairness, reason and folly. This dissatisfaction is the human condition, the subject of the actual drama, and that which differentiates it from pageant, propaganda or mere entertainment. The hero of “Inherit the Wind” is Darrow but at the play’s end, he has learned nothing. And, so, neither have we.  

As Mamet points out, reason and faith operate in different ways.  I've read articles in which it is said that Saint Aquinas should be read to understand how faith and reason can be reconciled.  I don't think they need to be as each stand on their own.  They may overlap at times but they also exist parallel to each other.  One can understand a reasoned analysis and nonetheless have faith in a certain outcome.  I don't feel any need to reconcile those aspects.  They just exist. 

Wicked Messenger

The soles of my feet, I swear they're burning 

For the first track on their first album, released in 1969, The Faces decided to cover Bob Dylan's Wicked Messenger.  The Small Faces were reconstituting themselves after lead singer Steve Marriott left to form Humble Pie, so the three remaining members joined with two refugees from the Jeff Beck Group, Rod Steward and Ronnie Woods, and christened themselves The Faces.

Wicked Messenger, from Dylan's 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, was a dramatic change from his previous albums, Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited.  Harding, recorded in Nashville, was a sedate and reflective record, with Biblical references strewn throughout, including I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine, All Along The Watchtower, and Dear Landlord, along with Wicked Messenger. The Faces version is a lot more raucous.  Wicked Messenger is one of three memorable rock covers from the Harding album, the others being Watchtower (Jimi Hendrix) and Dear Landlord (Joe Cocker).

And remember:

If you cannot bring good news, then don't bring any 

Vanity

What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people. Can't stop what's coming. Ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity. 

- Cousin Ellis to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country For Old Men 

When I saw No Country For Old Men during its 2006 theatrical run, I came away believing it was a great film but one I never wanted to see again.  Over the years I've come to change my mind and even read the Cormac McCarthy novel on which it is based.  Maybe it's because I'm now an old man.

I've written about the novel and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's musing on the times in "What Is To Come" and "Carryin' Fire",  the terrifying and tense coin flip scene, "Friendo", and Anton Chigurh's probing inquiry about the use of following rules in Au Contraire.  In the scene below, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) goes to see his Cousin Ellis (Barry Corbin), also a lawman and one crippled by a criminal, at his isolated mobile home in West Texas.

Sheriff Bell is struggling with the evil he sees growing around him, feeling unable to contain it, and has decided to retire.  He's come to his cousin seeking answers though he is not sure what the questions are. The sheriff feels overwhelmed and overmatched by what he is witnessing in the world.  Bell expresses his disappointment with God while acknowledging God's disappointment with him, causing Ellis to wave his hand dismissively, saying "you don't know what he thinks".

Everything about this scene is superb and reinforces the nature of the conversation.  The casting and cinematography are outstanding and Jones and Corbin convey so much with their faces, looks, and pauses.  They start with casual banter and only slowly get down to the matter at hand.  Watch Jones' eyes at 1:00 and at 3:00.  

There is no music in this movie.  Other than the actor's voices the only thing you hear are the ambient sounds of West Texas.  

Maybe He's Not His Bro . . . Today

But who knows what tomorrow may bring?  For reference see He's Not Your Bro. 

 

President Trump: "We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless." pic.twitter.com/VMnXSTuCiK

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 8, 2025

The Diagonal Of Emptiness

No, this post is not about existentialism, although I've recently learned the term was invented by French geographers (for the essence of the true French existential experience read Henri Ennui).

The geographical diagonal of emptiness refers to a large zone running from the northeast to the southwest of France in which the population is significantly less dense than on either side of the zone.  We've traveled through much of this zone and greatly enjoy it.  The zone includes our favorite area, the Dordogne.  Full of small towns, villages, hamlets, and twisty roads which are fun to drive.  Maybe more fun if you are the driver than the passenger. 

French geographers, however, generally identify an area called "la diagonale du vide" (the diagonal of emptiness), running from the northeast to the southwest of France, which is less populated than on either side. pic.twitter.com/8kfshGClXO

— Yann Robichon (@YannRobichon) December 18, 2024

The "emptiness" from the Dordogne town we stayed at in 2022.

 

Cause We've Ended As Lovers

In the mid-70s Stevie Wonder composed this song for Jeff Beck, allowing the guitarist a showcase to demonstrate his instrumental mastery.  Beck employs a variety of tones and techniques, giving a lyrical feel to this wordless tune.  At times it's as if he is caressing the guitar.  This is a concert version from 2006.  The phenomenal bass solo is by 19 year old Australian Tal Wilkenfeld, invited to join Beck on tour after he heard her audition tape.  Since then Wilkenfeld has had a solo career and played with Eric Clapton, Prince, Mick Jagger, and Herbie Hancock among others.

Zaamurets

 

On July 6, 1918 the Czechoslovak Legion declared Vladivostok, Russia's port on the Pacific Ocean, an Allied Protectorate.  What was a Czechoslovak Legion doing there in the first place?

It's tied up with the story of an armored train, Zaamurets, pictured above in Vladivostok with soldiers of the Czech Legion.  That story is part of the tale told in "A Remarkable Armored Train Fought Its Way Across Eurasia" by David Axe.

Zaamurets was built during 1916 in Odessa, as one of 75 armored platforms constructed by Russian railyards during the First World War.  According to Axe:

Zaamurets was the king of the mechanical beasts. It had two fully-traversible 57-millimeter Nordenfelt gun turrets—and eight machine guns for close-in protection.

Three to four inches of armor protected the vessel’s carriage and crew from incoming fire. Underneath the armor, two Italian Fiat 60 horsepower petrol motors could push the railcar to a top speed of 28 miles per hour.

In September 1917, Zaamurets returned to Odessa for a refit. Workers mounted square fire-control pillars to both turrets, and raised the turrets for better clearance when firing.

Before the second revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the first democratic government in Russian history, the Zaamurets served on the Galician Front supporting the Russian army against the forces of Austria-Hungary.

After the Bolsheviks seized power they also seized Zaamurets and used the train in support of efforts to gain control over Ukraine amidst Germany's efforts to assert control of the region and with a local independence movement also in the mix. 

At the start of WW1, the lands of the Czechs and Slovaks were part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but there were strong movements for more autonomy and even independence in both areas.  Within Russia, Czech and Slovak emigres were allowed to form their own military unit to support Russia and, after the February 1917 revolution, this unit was allowed to recruit from Czech and Slovak POWs held in Russian camps.  By the end of 1917 the Czech Legion was 50,000 strong.

As the new Soviet leaders and Germany neared completion of peace negotiations in February 1918, the Czech Legion was given permission by the Bolsheviks to leave and go to France where they could fight the Central Powers on the Western Front.  The route chosen for the evacuation was the 6,000 mile Trans-Siberian railroad, bringing the Legion to Vladivostok from where they could take ship to France.

To learn how it all went wrong, and how the Czech Legion became involved in the Russian Civil War, seizing most of Siberia and Russia's gold reserve, and how the Zaamurets ended up in Manchuria as a Japanese operated train, read Axe's article. 

Death Of The Dialectic

 Jacob Shell, Professor of Geography at Temple University about why he writes on X:

Some people are wondering why I write my thoughts about academia here (and sometimes on Substack or Compact), and not in the publishing organs of my discipline. That's because during the late 2010s when I tried to voice any objections or critiques to anything I saw happening in Geography, the only response I received from Geog's professional outlets and orgs was stone-cold silence. Not disagreement. Just silence. The death of dialectic. That's why I'm here. 

I don't know how Shell would categorize himself, but as a reader of his over the past three years, I believe he is an anti-woke liberal and definitely not a conservative, who like many in that category, now found themselves intellectually homeless.  He wants to restore sanity and liberal values to academia.

By death of the dialectic he is referring to the suppression of dissent.  What those who have seized control of the institutions recognize is that they can use their power to simply ignore dissent by refusing to platform opposing views.  There is no need to engage directly, instead they can construct strawman arguments to destroy at their leisure.

Thanks, America

On July 4, 1905, 120 years ago today, my paternal grandfather Louis landed in Boston, having escaped from Russia.  Six weeks later he enlisted in the United States Army, joining the 23rd Infantry Regiment.  Louis served two 3 year enlistments, being discharged with the rank of sergeant and gaining his U.S. citizenship about which he was very proud.

Happy birthday, America. 

The photo below is the only one we have from his military days.  Louis is on the far left.  You can read more about Louis here.

 

Reassessing The Assessment

The CIA has publicly released, with some small redactions, a report, dated June 26, 2025, Tradecraft Review of the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Election Interference.  

I first wrote about the ICA report, released publicly on January 6, 2017, on February 10 of that year in Finding Real News.  In that post I summarized the findings of the ICA as:

The election vote was not hacked (though based on at least one poll, more than half of Democrats believe, based on media coverage, that Russia actually did hack into the vote counting).

Moscow was trying to influence the election, as Russia and its Soviet predecessor have done in the past.

In doing so, Russian cyber operations were directed against both parties.

Moscow's goal varied from undermining Clinton's credibility in light of her expected election to helping Trump win the election. 

I then posed six questions based upon my reading of the report, none of which seemed to be of interest to the press and largely remain unanswered to this day.  One of those relates to the final point in my summary:

2.  Regarding the Kremlin's goals in 2016, the phrasing of the report is puzzling.  The report states that Russia "aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible" but also that when it appeared Clinton would win the election, "the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency".  The language seems to imply that there was an early period when Russia was trying to help Trump win, followed by a switch when the Kremlin thought Clinton would win.  Is this a correct reading?  Can the agencies tell us when this switch occurred and why?  Did it occur before or after Wikileaks released the DNC and Podesta emails (disclosures which the report concludes "did not contain any evident forgeries")?  Since Trump trailed consistently in all polls from the time he clinched the Republican nomination through election day, on what basis did the Kremlin make a different assessment at some point?  When did the Kremlin not think Clinton was likely to win the election? In other words, during which periods was the Kremlin trying to help Trump win, as opposed to damaging a future Clinton presidency?

Last year I added a note to the 2017 post regarding the process by which the ICA was generated:

UPDATE (October 1, 2024) - I am adding this note regarding information I came across back in 2020 because it is directly related to the odd circumstances around the Intelligence Community Assessment released publicly in January 2017.  

The five analysts who compiled the report were personally selected by DNI Clapper, contrary to normal practice which is designed to prevent undue influence towards desired outcomes by those assigning the task.  One of those excluded from involvement with the report was the CIA's National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Russia!  NIO's are appointed by the Director of the CIA, report directly to the Director, and are responsible for all intelligence matters within their geographical area.

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on December 5, 2016, the NIO stated her conclusions regarding the election:

"In terms of favoring one candidate or another, you know, the evidence is a little bit unclear."

"It's unclear to us that the Kremlin had a particular - that they had a particular favorite or they wanted to see a particular outcome.  That is what the reporting shows."

Before discussing the recently released reassessment of the 2016 assessment, some context is needed. 

The question about whether Putin had a preference in the 2016 election and whether, and how, Russia interfered is separate and distinct from whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the campaign (it did not, though there is substantial suggestive evidence that the Russians were able to influence the contents of the Steele Dossier, which was funded by the Clinton campaign, a subject I've written about on several occasions, most recently in He's Not Your Bro).  However, for the reasons discussed below, these issues ended up merged in the public mind due to the collusion of the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, and the New York Times(1) and Washington Post.

The fact that Russia, and its predecessor the Soviet Union, had preferences and interfered in past U.S. presidential elections is not unique, and is directly acknowledged in the 2016 ICA.  It's also something I referenced in my February 2017 post:

3.  The report places the Kremlin's 2016 influence campaign in an historical context, citing prior Russian and Soviet efforts to influence American presidential elections, though it also concludes the Kremlin took this to an unprecedented level in 2016.  I would have liked to see some questions about this aspect of the report.  Did the Kremlin seek to influence the 2012 election and, if so, in whose favor?  Did the Kremlin seek to influence the 2008 election and, if so, in whose favor (we know that Kremlin spokespersons denounced John McCain, and Republicans in general, during the course of that election)?  Do the intelligence agencies have information they can release about the reported contacts in 1983 between Senator Edward Kennedy and Communist Party Secretary Andropov regarding coordinating efforts to defeat President Ronald Reagan in his re-election bid? The report contains this disclosure:

In the 1970s, the KGB recruited a Democratic Party activist who reported information about then presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter's campaign and foreign policy plans . . .  

Can the intelligence agencies shed any additional light on this incident?  Is there additional information regarding past Russian and Soviet election influencing that can be publicly shared?

In 2008 and 2012 the Kremlin openly supported Barack Obama over his opponents, John McCain and Mitt Romney.  In 2012, President Obama was caught on an open mic telling then Soviet Premier Medvedev to let "Vladimir" know he'd have more flexibility on policy after the election (a reference to his post-election reneging on commitments to send missile defense systems to Poland and Romania).

In addition, the 2016 ICA directly asserts as firm conclusions that, more recently, the Kremlin supported the 2011 Occupy Wall Street demonstrations as well as the ongoing anti-fracking efforts of U.S. environmental organizations.

This was my own assessment as of February 2017:

I think it probable that the Kremlin favored the election of Donald Trump.  I base that on:

• Trump's favorable personal comments about Putin.

• Trump's history of favorable views of authoritarian strongmen.

• His refusal to condemn Russia for aggression in Crimea and Ukraine or murdering its political opponents.

• Trump's view of Russia as a potential ally in the Middle East and the fight against ISIS. 

• The presence, in the early stages of his campaign, of senior aides known to have favorable views of current Kremlin leadership.

Factors countering that view:

• The Clinton Foundation ties to shady Kremlin associated businessmen and the deal regarding Russian control of uranium reserves important to the United States.

• The widespread assumption in the American intelligence community that the Kremlin is in possession of the Hillary Clinton emails giving them potential leverage if she were elected.

• The controversial dossier about Donald Trump's activities in Russia that was purported to come from Russian intelligence sources and which, though it did not become public until after the election, was in widespread circulation among media hostile to Trump prior to the election. 

A possible factor countering that view:

• How did the Kremlin rate the chances that a Clinton presidency would continue the policies of the Obama presidency which was ineffective in opposing Russia?

Despite these counter factors, if I were betting, I'd bet on the Kremlin favoring Trump, though I don't consider it a certainty.  

I am less certain of that judgement in light of what I've learned reading thousands of pages of source documents since that time, though if I had to make a bet it would still be on favoring Trump at least at some point in the campaign. 

Another factor in tempering my earlier judgement is that in February 2017 I did not know that the Clinton campaign had paid for the production of the Steele Dossier, that the contractor (FusionGPS), Steele himself, and the sources for most of the allegations (none of which were ever corroborated) were either actively employed at the time by Putin-connected oligarchs or had close associations with Russian intelligence, and that an internal FBI review in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report" (of course the FBI then instructed its analysts to remain silent about this), raising the possibility that Putin was willing to put into the hands of the Clinton campaign wild stories designed to damage Donald Trump.

What I remain confident of is that Putin's overriding strategy has been to disrupt and weaken American institutions and public confidence in those institutions, regardless of who was president.  He has largely achieved that goal with the help of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff(1), and the leading prestige legacy media outlets(2).  

The 2025 Reassessment

The eight page reassessment addresses the process by which the ICA was hastily put together.  The document begins by discussing the origin and context of the ICA.  During the 2016 campaign there were "conflicting public and private statements" by IC officials about Russia's activities.  This prompted President Obama on December 6, 2016 to direct DNI James Clapper to conduct an assessment.(3)  The reassessment goes on to state:

However, before work on the assessment even began, media leaks suggesting that the IC had already reached definitive conclusions risked creating an anchoring bias.

On 9 December, both the Washington Post and New York Times reported the IC had concluded with high confidence that Russia had intervened specifically to help Trump win the election. The Post cited an unnamed US official describing this as the IC’s “consensus view". 

The new review "identified multiple procedural anomalies in the preparation of the ICA. These
included a highly compressed production timeline, stringent compartmentation, and excessive
involvement of agency heads" leading to "departures from standard practices in the drafting, coordination, and reviewing of the ICA. These departures impeded efforts to apply rigorous tradecraft, particularly to the assessment's most contentious judgment" [that Putin "aspired" to help Trump win election]. 

You can read the report to get the details of these anomalies, so I will focus on just a few. 

Generating a final ICA usually take months, not two weeks as this one did.  To do so, there were unusual restrictions on the normal process of participation as well as abnormal involvement by agency heads.

While agency heads sometimes review controversial analytic assessments before publication, their direct engagement in the ICA's development was highly unusual in both scope and intensity. This exceptional level of senior involvement likely influenced participants, altered normal review processes, and ultimately compromised analytic rigor.  

From the outset, agency heads chose to marginalize the National Intelligence Council (NIC), departing significantly from standard procedures for formal IC assessments. Typically, the NIC maintains control over drafting assignments, coordination, and review processes.

These departures from standard procedure not only limited opportunities for coordination and thorough tradecraft review, but also resulted in the complete exclusion of key intelligence agencies from the process. While sensitive counterintelligence information in community assessments often requires restricted access, the decision to entirely shut out the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from any participation in such a high-profile assessment about an adversary’s plans and intentions was a significant deviation from typical IC practices.

The exclusion was not just of other agencies; as noted above, Clapper and CIA Director Brennan shut the CIA's own National Intelligence Officer for Russia out of the process.  Indeed the reassessment notes:

The two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia argued jointly against including the “aspire” judgment. In an email to Brennan on 30 December, they stated the judgment should be removed because it was both weakly supported and unnecessary, given the strength and logic of the paper’s other findings on intent. They warned that including it would only “open up a line of very politicized inquiry.” 

The other important aspect was the decision to include a summary of the Steele Dossier in the appendix of the ICA.  Even by that date, the CIA knew that the dossier allegations were unsubstantiated and initially resisted including it in the ICA.  However, according to the reassessment:

FBI leadership made it clear that their participation in the ICA hinged on the Dossier’s inclusion and, over the next few days, repeatedly pushed to weave references to it throughout the main body of the ICA.

The ICA authors and multiple senior CIA managers—including the two senior leaders of the CIA mission center responsible for Russia— strongly opposed including the Dossier, asserting that it did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards.  

However, CIA Director Brennan overruled his subordinates:

Brennan showed a preference for narrative consistency over analytical soundness. When confronted with specific flaws in the Dossier by the two mission center leaders—one with extensive operational experience and the other with a strong analytic background—he appeared more swayed by the Dossier's general conformity with existing theories than by legitimate tradecraft concerns. Brennan ultimately formalized his position in writing, stating that “my bottom line is that I believe that the information warrants inclusion in the report.”

The reassessment concludes:

. . . by placing a reference to the annex material in the main body of the ICA as the fourth supporting bullet for the judgment that Putin “aspired” to help Trump win, the ICA implicitly elevated unsubstantiated claims to the status of credible supporting evidence, compromising the analytical integrity of the judgment. 

It was important for Brennan and the IC leadership to have a reference to the Steele Dossier somewhere in the report.  At that point, many publications had the dossier, but while stories based on individual allegations contained therein had been published, the actual dossier was not yet publicly available.  Reference to it helped bolster its credibility with media outlets and because its focus was on the alleged active collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin it allowed the issue of influence to be merged with collaboration.

Bottom line - the 2016 ICA was intended to be a political, not analytical, document. 

---------------------------------------------------------------

(1) The new California senator continues to lie about this, stating on CNN in January 2025 that  "the fact that we didn't find proof beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean there wasn't evidence of conspiracy."  I've read the same testimony he heard as ranking member of the House Intelligence Community.  He knew then, and knows now, that not only was there not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that there was NO evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, though we now know there is evidence of a possible conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and Russia.  Part of the disgrace of the Russia Collusion Hoax was that those who promoted it have never paid any price for the damage they've done to this country.  In fact, Schiff leveraged his role to advance from Representative to Senator.  For more on Schiff and the testimony he heard read Right Move and the 53 Transcripts series.

(2) The New York Times continues its mendacious role in the collusion hoax.  Its headline on the new report reads, 

C.I.A. Says Its Leaders Rushed Report on Russia Interference in 2016 Vote

But the new review of the earlier assessment does not dispute the conclusion that Russia favored the election of Donald J. Trump.

The subheading is not supported by the text of the report.

I've been unable to find any coverage of the CIA report by the Washington Post. 

(3) The language here is directly from the reassessment.  However, my own take is a bit different.  What prompted the 2016 ICA was the unexpected election of Donald Trump and the alarm it raised in the White House and the IC.  The information contained in the IC was already known prior to the election and had been the subject of ongoing discussions between the IC and the White House during the campaign.  I think the White House and IC were genuinely concerned about the prospect of a Trump presidency and the purpose of the ICA was to prepare a document that could be quickly released publicly and be used to undermine the incoming administration.  I believe that is the best explanation for the deficiencies noted by the 2025 reassessment.   

Luka On Steroids

Enjoy Larry Bird touch passes.  Today you hear a lot about how slow Larry Bird was.  Bird was never really fast but in his first 7 seasons, before hurting his back, he was much faster than either Luka or Jokic to whom he is often compared.

Larry Bird was like Luka on steroids

pic.twitter.com/GnkdDrNCjQ

— Hoop Herald (@TheHoopHerald) March 8, 2025

Good Eating

This would actually be on the expensive side compared to what this menu would have looked like when I was 12.  You don't see Turkey Log or Bologna on many lunch menus anymore.  Food quality has certainly improved over my lifetime.

Anytime you see a menu that looks like this you know you’re in for some good goddamn eating. pic.twitter.com/3CXwdYN0fP

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 11, 2025

Thought For The Day

 

Good morning. I have reached an age where I realize time travel is real. I’m a person from a bygone era living in an unfamiliar future. pic.twitter.com/tEhTORrhPj

— Dr. Holly A. Bell ☕️ (@HollyBell8) April 19, 2025

Sun On A House

Sun On A House, Dieppe (1937) by Scottish painter James Proudfoot (1908-71) I really find his use of light here captivating.  However, unlike a couple of other artists I've come across recently, John Atkinson Grimshaw and Joseph Wright, I've not found any of Proudfoot's other work appealing.

 

Stagecoach

John Ford's 1939 film, Stagecoach, made John Wayne a star and got Ford an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.  It's also the first of Ford's many films set in Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation along the Arizona-Utah border.  This shot from the movie captures the spectacular setting, which I have visited twice and plan on returning to again.

 

A heart-stoppingly sweet shot from 1939's Stagecoach directed by John Ford: pic.twitter.com/6GyrHzOdEl

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) May 2, 2025

(2019)

Mark It 8, Dude

 

I missed it when Smokey turned 80 on May 6 (hat tip to Traces of Texas).  Smokey is Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a singer-songwriter from Texas who has been performing with the Flatlanders since 1972 and been nominated for three Grammys.

For most of us, however, Jimmie is best known as Smokey in The Big Lebowski, his only acting role (other than playing himself in a couple of films).  Playing an aging, pacifist bowler he is drawn into a dispute with Walter Sobchak about whether his foot slipped over the line.  Smokey's request that the Dude mark his score as 8 triggers a response from Walter, in which the latter prevails and the Dude marks it zero.  It is Jimmie's only scene in the movie and it is quite memorable. 

Polo Grounds

The Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan was the home of the New York Giants from 1891 through 1957 and of the New York Mets in 1962 and 1963.  I only saw one game there, on June 3, 1962, the day Willie Mays returned with the San Francisco Giants to play the Mets, three days before I met Willie at Wrigley Field during batting practice.

Baseball History Nut recently featured a day devoted to the Polo Grounds from which the depictions below are taken.  Here's a piece I did on Mel Ott, the great Giant slugger in the 30s and 40s.

This colorized photo is from before 1920 and shows Coogan's Bluff looming above the park.  There was an elevated subway station atop the bluff, at which you would disembark and walk down to the stadium.

 

This shows the unusual configuration and dimensions of the playing field.

 

 What that configuration looked like:

 

Stan Musial at the Polo Grounds, his favorite park for hitting home runs: 49 in 171 games while also batting .343.  Because of its unusual configuration, the Polo Grounds was the only one of the ten parks in which Stan had at least 100 at bats where he had fewer doubles than home runs - 24 v 49.  It's also the place where he had the second highest on base (.438) and slugging percentage (.633) of the ten.  Ebbetts Field was his favorite - Stan the Man had 100 extra base hits in 161 games at the home field of the Dodgers, batting .359 with a .660 slugging percentage.

 

Roots And Trees

On how new DNA findings reinforce a linguistic hypothesis about the origin of Indo-European languages and of the peoples behind that origin and growth.  From Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, We are what we speak: Indo-European phylogenetic and linguistic trees concur.

Here's the opening:

The ancient-DNA era for the human species is not yet 15 years old. It kicked off with the 2010 paper Paleo-Eskimo genome (followed by blockbusters on Neanderthals and Denisovans). Today, remains from tens of thousands of ancient humans offer us decipherable DNA information, each contributing to fill in gaps in our understanding of prehistory.

No matter the brilliance and insight of its practitioners and theorists, human prehistory’s age of genetic inference, when we were limited to examining modern genomes to learn about ancient peoples, was like trying to comprehend the world’s oceans solely from the activity observable in its brightly lit uppermost layers, the photic zone that reaches down at most about 200 meters. Though some key insights date to the before times, the paleogenomic era after 2010 has been absolutely revolutionary and transformative. Name a superlative, and it probably isn’t strong enough.

Razib's essays on human origins are uniformly well written and informative.  His podcasts are less well organized and his political ones not particularly well done. 

 

Words Of Wisdom

Endorsed 100%

Once I felt like an unprincipled hack

Now just by not jumping into every single stupid ideological scrum I feel like a man of reason

— CTIronman (@CTIronman) May 24, 2025

You Don't Know Me

Ray Charles' groundbreaking 1962 album, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, spawned four hit singles.  The album was Charles' reworking of country and western songs into a new vocabulary.  In an interview years later Ray remarked about the album, "You take country music, you take black music, you got the same goddamn thing exactly."

The album went to the top of the charts, while I Can't Stop Loving You topped the singles chart.  You Don't Know Me, composed by country artists Eddy Arnold and Cindy Walker in 1955, hit number two. Beautiful arrangement by Ray and his vocal perfectly conveys the pathos of the lyrics.  

Watching the video you have to get past it is Jamie Foxx from the movie Ray playing Ray Charles in most of the photos. 

Rainbow Effect

Landscape with a Rainbow Effect is one of the last paintings of Joseph Wright (1734-1797).  I enjoy the use of light and contrast.  Wright lived in Derby and among his patrons were some of the early manufacturers of the Industrial Revolution, which he also depicted in his art.

 

They Will Never Reform Themselves

I've commented frequently on the deterioration of academia and its inability to reform itself, most recently in An Urgent Problem.  Here's another example.

In March of this year, Yale Law School terminated the contract of Helyeh Doutaghi, an Iranian-Muslim, after it was alleged she was associated with a terrorist network.  An embarrassed Yale then did enough investigation to decide to terminate her. The Law School hired her to be Deputy Director the Law and Political Economy Project and an Associate Research Scholar. But here are the bigger questions.  Below is Doutaghi's Yale bio.  Why would anyone hire someone with this resume?  What need did it fulfill?  What intellectual contribution would be made to a law school by someone with this background?  Who did they reject in the hiring process?

The Yale bio: 

Her research explores the intersections of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), encompassing Marxian and postcolonial critiques of law, sanctions, and international political economy.  Helyeh's doctoral dissertation draws on the mechanisms, harms, and beneficiaries of the sanctions regime imposed on Iran, centering questions of value transfer and wealth drain. Additionally she is interested in International Humanitarian Law (IHL), having written about its history, practice, and the production of knowledge (and ignorance), particularly in the context of the U.S. military. 

Doutaghi received a Doctorate in Legal Studies from Carleton University in Canada.  She came to Canada because her father worked at the Islamic Republic's embassy in Ottawa before being expelled in 2012 by the Canadian government because “the Islamic regime is using its mission here to monitor the activities of Iranian-Canadians.”  He is currently acting head of the Iranian consulate in Hong Kong.  His daughter remained in Canada after he left. She does not appear to be an American citizen.

Just within the past few days, Doutaghi tweeted in response to a tweet saying "Iran has a right to defend itself":

"including targeting all US military bases in the region, the occupied Palestinian territories, and any state that enables aggression by allowing its airspace or territory to be used for attacks on Iran." 

When Doutaghi was let go by Yale, many "scholars" came to her defense, claiming she was "an internationally recognized and published scholar of international law, political economy, and armed conflict" and that "she has always advocated for the rights and self-determination of oppressed people, including Palestinians".

Doutaghi is indeed internationally recognized and published, which is an indictment of the extent of corruption in the disciplines of international law and political economy. 

This is how the Yale Law and Political Economy Project describes itself, using all the usual cliche phrases of progressive thought:

The Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and law. Our work is rooted in the insight that politics and the economy cannot be separated and that both are constructed in essential respects by law. We believe that developments over the last several decades in legal scholarship and policy helped to facilitate rising inequality and precarity, political alienation, the entrenchment of racial hierarchies and intersectional exploitation, and ecological and social catastrophe. We aim to help reverse these trends by supporting scholarly work that maps where we have gone wrong, and that develops ideas and proposals to democratize our political economy and build a more just, equal, and sustainable future. 

And this is its Manifesto:

This is a time of crises. Inequality is accelerating, with gains concentrated at the top of the income and wealth distributions. This trend – interacting with deep racialized and gendered injustice – has had profound implications for our politics, and for the sense of agency, opportunity, and security of all but the narrowest sliver of the global elite. Technology has intensified the sense that we are both interconnected and divided, controlled and out of control.

New ecological disasters unfold each day. The future of our planet is at stake: we are all at risk, yet unequally so. The rise of right-wing movements and autocrats around the world is threatening democratic institutions and political commitments to equality and openness. But new movements on the left are also emerging. They are challenging economic inequality, eroded democracy, the carceral state, and racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination with a force that was unthinkable just a few years ago.

Meet the Executive Director of the Project:

Corinne Blalock is the Executive Director of the Law and Political Economy Project and a Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar at Yale Law School. Her research draws on her education in both law and critical theory to explore how our political economy and market logic transform and limit the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. 

In other words, the Law and Political Economy Project is designed to expand the role of government so that people like Blalock and Doutaghi and their acolytes can dictate how we should live our lives and ensure no one has "bad" ideas.  For a more detailed critique of the LPE Project read “Law and Political Economy”: A Solution in Search of a Problem".

Ah, now I know why they hired Doutaghi.  She's now gone but the LPE Project is still there. Yale Law School is fundamentally anti-American.  Why should it receive one dollar of public funding?  Not seeing much diversity in thought in this corner of academia. 

This is also a reminder of the need for a strict vetting process for visas.  Doutaghi, who appears to have entered the country in 2023 when hired by Yale, should never have been admitted to the United States. 

Gonna Miss This

The NBA on TNT was a joy to watch.  This is one of my favorite segments.  A Shaq-Kenny Smith colloquy on the strategy of filling a gas tank.  Ernie Johnson can only shake his head while, astonishingly, a stunned Charles Barkley remains silent for the entire two and a half minutes, a rare occurrence.

And a fun NBA Finals between the Pacers and Thunder.  Too bad Tyrese Haliburton went down in the first quarter of Game 7, but Indiana gave it a good try before running out of gas.  Had not seen much of Haliburton before the playoffs but was really impressed by him.  Unfortunately, an Achilles injury means he may miss all of next season.  

This is on my Mount Rushmore. Shaq was deadass lmfaooo 😂😂😂😂😂pic.twitter.com/XB7LFfV8Zr https://t.co/lrCTRzbC1r

— Lion (The System) (@Champ_Lion) June 1, 2025

The Raiding Zone

Came across this map of Comancheria, the homeland of the Comanche, showing the extent of the tribe's raiding areas into the 1870s.  The tribe dominated this region for almost two centuries, holding off the Spanish, Mexicans, and Anglos.  Their arrival in the early 18th century also drove the Apaches off the plains and into the mountains of New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.

The deeper red area, covering the Texas panhandle, the Midland-Odessa area, and slices of New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas was the heart of Comancheria, a no-go zone for outsiders.  The raiding area is much larger, in the east extending to Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio.  In the 1840s, a Comanche raid even reached the Gulf Coast near Corpus Christi.  Comanche raids also extended well into Mexico.

In 2018 we visited the homestead of Lyndon Baines Johnson's parents and grandparents, about 60 miles west of Austin, and learned how family members narrowly escaped capture during a Comanche raid in the early 1870s. 

 

An Urgent Problem

The entire New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece on anti-semitism in the June 14 issue of the paper.

It is welcome to see the Times address this issue, but how the Board chose to do so illustrates the shortcomings of its blinkered worldview and why, at the end of day, it amounts to a bunch of meaningless words because of the Board's refusal to even mention the underlying causes in today's America, including the role of the Times in fomenting that hate among its heavily progressive readership.

I also see that the structure of the editorial which, as always with the Times, starts with an attack on Trump, is done in the hope that their left-leaning readers will pay attention to what follows. 

For these reasons, the Board uses tortured language and phrasing throughout.

My interests are not in defending either party.  I've voted in every presidential election since 1972, but in 2024 left the presidential line blank because both Trump and today's Democratic Party were unacceptable to me, albeit for very different reasons.  A former long time reader, I've written about my own discouragement with the Times here.

Below is the editorial in full, with my comments entered in brackets and boldface. 

 

Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem.  Too Many People Are Making Excuses. 

The list of horrific antisemitic attacks in the United States keeps growing. Two weeks ago in Boulder, Colo., a man set fire to peaceful marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Less than two weeks earlier, a young couple was shot to death while leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington. The previous month, an intruder scaled a fence outside the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and threw Molotov cocktails while Mr. Shapiro, his wife and children were asleep inside. In October, a 39-year-old Chicago resident was shot from behind while walking to synagogue.

[Important to note that all of these incidents were by supporters of Hamas, who are also linked to the Left, a fact admitted by the Times later in this article.] 

The United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in 2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups.

American Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the country’s population, are well aware of the threat. Some feel compelled to hide signs of their faith. Synagogues have hired more armed guards who greet worshipers, and Jewish schools have hired guards to protect children and teachers. A small industry of digital specialists combs social media looking for signs of potential attacks, and these specialists have helped law enforcement prevent several.

[The Jewish population of the U.S. was at its peak in 1940 when Jews constituted about 3.7% of the nation's population. Relative to America's overall population, the Jewish population has been shrinking which has societal and political consequences.  Even with this decrease in relative population, demographic changes since WW2 have resulted in 80-85% of the world's Jews living in just two countries, the U.S. and Israel, with about equal populations.  The next three largest populations, about 400,000 each in the UK, Canada, and France, constitute about 7-8% of the world's Jews. The first two countries are governed by political parties hostile to Jews.  In France, the governing party is not hostile but although Jews constitute less than 1% of the population they are the objects of more than 60% of hate crimes.  And all three countries have large and rapidly growing Muslim populations, which the governing parties are desperate to placate.  It looks like the Jewish population will become even more concentrated in Israel and the U.S.  Overall, since the Holocaust, the global Jewish population has, at best, been restored to its pre-1940 numbers even as the world's population has more than tripled.]

The response from much of the rest of American society has been insufficient. The upswing in antisemitism deserves outright condemnation. It has already killed people and maimed others, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in Boulder. And history offers a grim lesson: An increase in antisemitism often accompanies a rise in other hateful violence and human rights violations. Societies that make excuses for attacks against one minority group rarely stop there.

Antisemitism is sometimes described as “the oldest hate.” It dates at least to ancient Greece and Egypt, where Jews were mocked for their differences and scapegoated for societal problems. A common trope is that Jews secretly control society and are to blame for its ills. The prejudice has continued through the Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the worst mass murder in history, the Holocaust, which led to the coining of a new term: genocide.

In modern times, many American Jews believed that the United States had left behind this tradition, with some reason. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” It tends to re-emerge when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened. The anger pulsing through society has manifested itself through animosity toward Jews.

The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

[What the Times describes as a "pretext" for a "campaign against the independence of higher education", is actually an attempt by the administration to stop blatant violations of the Civil Rights Act by academic institutions, violations that have led to the outbreak of antisemitic incidents at the most progressive universities in this country.  It's not Donald Trump that created a partisan issue. The partisan issue was created by progressives turning much of academia and other institutions into platforms where only their opinions are considered legitimate, where dissent is suppressed, and where discrimination is rampant against disfavored groups.  In fact, the Supreme Court case that gave birth to "diversity" used the term because of the perceived importance of diversity of opinion, which is not allowed today on most campuses. Without addressing these violations, which the Times apparently supports, antisemitism in academia will never be effectively curtailed, because it is embedded in the very essence of academia.  I discussed this at exhaustive (and probably exhausting) length in The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]

[Donald Trump can be, and has been, reckless and careless at times in his actions and rhetoric, as I've pointed out at length in numerous posts, but it is his administration that has tried to dismantle the ideological framework leading to the increase in antisemitism.  In contrast, while a number of Democratic politicians have voiced support for Israel and/or opposition to antisemitism, I don't know of any prominent figure in the party who objected to the Biden administration's goal of embedding this hateful ideology into the federal government and American society as a whole.]

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.

["Even worse, Mr Trump had made it normal to hate".  Doesn't the Editorial Board read its own newspaper?  According to the 1619 Project, which the Times published to much fanfare, America from its inception has been a nation founded on the principle of whites hating others.  According to the Times, we've always been a horrible country.  And, if you don't accept the Times characterization of this country, let's look at another indicator of hate and race relations.  Since the early 1970s the Gallup organization has been regularly polling white and blacks on the status of race relations, asking whether they are good, okay, or bad.  Over four decades, starting in 1972, those of both races responding good or okay had slowly but steadily climbed, reaching in 2012 to 72% of whites and 67% of blacks.  And then the trend began reversing, well before Trump's appearance on the scene.  By 2022, the figures were 42% for whites and 33% for blacks.  You can now look at numerous surveys of use in the media of terms like "racism", "white supremacy", and see an enormous upturn in their use during the second Obama administration.  Fomenting racial tension and resentment has been part of the declared mission of the Times over the past decade.] 

[The term "Since he entered the political scene" is doing a lot of work here.  According to the FBI data there was no increase in hate crimes for much of Trump's first term.  There is a huge surge during the George Floyd riots of summer 2020 (make of that what you will), and while it is followed by a rapid decrease, hate crimes during the Biden administration occur at a rate of about double that of the Trump administration.  The increase in Asian attacks is, uncomfortably, attributed to a highly disproportionate number of assaults by blacks, which is why it has attracted less attention after an initial outburst aimed at alleged white anti-Asian hate. Perhaps the Biden administration's relentless emphasis on race essentialism and promoting the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have plotted to maintain White Supremacy may also have had something to do with the increase.] 

[By citing the Charlottesville quote, the Times shows it is a prisoner of its own false narrative.  It is part of the "unexamined life" of those that work at the Times.  The full transcript of Trump's remarks show that right after he says "very fine people", he goes on to state he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists.  Later in the same ramblings, he restates he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, adding "they are bad people".  In the context of his remarks it is clear Trump is referring to the debate over what to do with the Lee statue and clear he condemned those the press explicitly and repeatedly  said he refused to condemn.  In 2024, the leftist "fact checker" Snopes finally acknowledged that the prevailing media use of the term was misleading and false. Nonetheless, President Biden, VP Harris, and former President Obama all used the false accusation during the 2024 campaign, with Biden saying it was the reason he decided to run in 2020.

The Charlottesville incident also demolished the last bit of lingering respect I held for the traditional news media.  While, by 2017, I mistrusted most of what I heard and read from those sources, I still felt that they could get the basics right.  My mistake.  When I first heard about Trump's Charlottesville remarks my reaction was "Well, the guy's an idiot" and assumed he said it and meant exactly what the media told me he meant.  It was only a couple of years later when I came across a full transcript of the press conference that I realized I had been lied to.] 

["On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said."  Oh, my God, one rioter!!  And the source is Chuck Schumer?  The Times is really reaching here for examples.  Here's something we do know about Senator Schumer.  In 2024, confident that the Dems would hold regain the House, and hold the Senate and the Presidency, he reassured Columbia University, in an email obtained by a Congressional committee, that it could ignore all those Republicans pestering the school about antisemitism because it would all go away after the election.  I don't think the Times wrote a story about that email.]

The problem extends to popular culture. Joe Rogan, the podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, “They run everything.” In the Trumpist right, antisemitism has a home.

It also has a home on the progressive left, and the bipartisan nature of the problem has helped make it distinct. Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism. College campuses, where Jewish students can face social ostracization, have become the clearest example. A decade ago, members of the student government at U.C.L.A. debated blocking a Jewish student from a leadership post, claiming that she might not be able to represent the entire community. In 2018, spray-painted swastikas appeared on walls at Columbia. At Baruch, Drexel and the University of Pittsburgh, activists have recently called for administrators to cut ties with or close Hillel groups, which support Jewish life. In a national survey by Eitan Hersh of Tufts University and Dahlia Lyss, college students who identified as liberal were more likely than either moderates or conservatives last year to say that they “avoid Jews because of their views.”

["Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism."  Can we please stop with this progressive self-congratulation?  How many articles has the NY Times published in the past decade about white people, that had it been done regarding any other race would be promptly denounced as racist?  Answer: A google search in October 2023 on 'NY Times Whiteness" came up with 5.6 million results. The Times supported continuing the documented Ivy League practice of discriminating against Asians in admissions and denounced the Supreme Court decision banning the practice. And have you read the outpouring of hate by some progressives against Hispanics because of their increased support for Trump in 2024?] 

[And progressives don't just "tolerate antisemitism", they encourage it with the ideology they promote.]  

[Notice how all the college examples they give are of students, none of administrators or the institutions themselves, despite many well-documented incidents.  There is no mention of the recent report on Harvard's blatant anti-semitism.  That's because mentioning antisemitism condoned or practices by the institutions would be seen as pro-Trump and lead to bigger questions about what is happening more broadly in education.  Both college and K-12 education is failing on many fronts, but regarding Jews, unless there is radical reform soon, the doctrines being taught to our children will increase antisemitism, making this country increasingly hostile to Jewish life, a point the Times refuses to address.] 

One explanation is that antisemitism has become conflated with the divisive politics of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is certainly true that criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism. This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians. Since the current war began, we have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza. Israel’s reflexive defenders are wrong, and they hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism. But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction. They have engaged in whataboutism regarding anti-Jewish hate. They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.

[There are many Jews, including me, who don't like Netanyahu and think at least parts of the settlements policy in the West Bank are bonkers.  But there are vanishingly few Jews who do not support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.  The small cadre of anti-Zionist Jews can be found primarily in academia or the NGO community where their real religion is Progressivism.  We see a recent example in the proud announcement of Harvard Divinity School regarding its first Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Shaul Magid, an anti-Zionist Jew.  A reviewer accurately calls his most recent anti-Zionist book "an intellectual crime". The school boasts of Magid, “His disciplinary range stretches from Hasidic mysticism and American Judaism to critical Black studies and political theology".  We know what that phrasing really means.  This is Harvard Divinity School saying to those protesting Harvard's antisemitism, "screw you Jews, you better know your place." It also illustrates why institutions like Harvard are incapable of reforming themselves without outside pressure being brought to bear.  Otherwise they will succeed in their strategy of waiting things out until a Democratic administration, tolerant of their discrimination, is back in power.] 

["This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians."  This is a joke.  Yes, the Times defends Israel's right to exist but it opposes both editorially and, more importantly, in its news sections, anything Israel does to ensure its continued existence.  The slant of the Times news section regarding Israel has been evident for years.  Remember when one of their most experienced reporters wrote an article casting doubt on whether a Jewish temple ever existed on the Temple Mount, endorsing an outrageous claim made by the Palestinians?  I do. More recently, since October 7, the Times news staff credulously reports any claim made by Hamas and continues to do so no matter how many lies Hamas is caught in, while treating any Israeli claim cautiously, inserting every possible caveat and doubt.  The Times problem is not just with Israel.  The Sulzberger family have always been uneasy around "Jewish" Jews and Jews who dress "funny" and in recent years the paper launched a full scale assault on those "embarrassing" Jews, starting a jihad against Hasidic Jews, based on alleged defects in the education provided to Hasidic children.  The Times campaign is illustrative because it combines several elements.  

It targets distinctively Jewish looking Jews.  They seem odd even to many other Jews.

The created narrative is those greedy Jews (Oppressors) are stealing state education funds from black kids (Oppressed).  Well, what else do you expect from privileged Jews? (Let's ignore that the Hasidic community is poorer in general than non-Hasidic Jews).

State support should be reduced and Hasidim schools must be made to conform their instructional programs to state requirements, which include equity.  In other words, Hasidic children must be taught their parents are racist White supremacists and they should be ashamed of them and of their religion.

To allow educational flexibility by these schools would make other children feel unsafe, cause harm, and encourage racism.  It's why the progressive state must control every aspect of life.

Bigger message - all private schools must be either abolished or under close State control to ensure conformity.

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

Looking at the support for the allegations made by the Times, I would have sent the reporters back to answer a dozen questions about methodology and have them do a comparison with the performance of New York City public schools before proceeding with publication.  The Times, interested only in creating narratives to support its preferred policies, would not take the risk of finding anything that would disrupt that narrative.] 

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years. “Americans generally have greater ability to identify Jew hatred when it comes from the hard right and less ability and comfort to call out Jew hatred when it comes from the hard left or radical Islamism,” said Rachel Fish, an adviser to Brandeis University’s Presidential Initiative on Antisemitism.

["Hard right" and "hard left" are false equivalencies. The "hard left" includes the most progressive universities in this country, as well as publications like, well, like the New York Times.  And all of this antisemitism is nested within the broader race essentialism promoted as its top domestic priority by the Biden administration and embraced by many of our leading institutions. These are power centers within our country.  There is also a growing and very disturbing trend towards antisemitism in the "hard right".  Some of it from those who've gone insane over the past few years like Tucker Carlson, some from grifters like Candace Owens, some from nasty pieces of work like Nick Fuentes, among others.  They do have a lot of followers but where do they rate against the institutional strength of the "hard left"?  Another way to look at it is polling data regarding Jews and Israel, which demonstrate a lot more support from Republicans and conservatives, with less and rapidly eroding support from Democrats and progressives.] 

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

[Glad for the Times to say that last sentence clearly.  On the other hand, why does the Times consistently refer to Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student the administration seeks to deport, and who enthusiastically supports the murder of Zionists, as simply "a Columbia pro-Palestinian activist"?  To be fair, Khalil is consistent as he also supports the destruction of the U.S. as a settler-colonist entity.  A good example of why it is important to rigorously review people before they are admitted in to this country.]

Historical comparisons can also be instructive. The period since Oct. 7, 2023, is hardly the first time that global events have contributed to a surge in hate crimes against a specific group. Asian Americans were the victims in 2020 and 2021 after the Covid pandemic began in China. Muslim Americans were the victims after Sept. 11, 2001. In those periods, a few fringe voices, largely on the far right, tried to justify the hate, but the response from much of American society was denunciation. President George W. Bush visited a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001, and proclaimed, “Islam is peace.” During Covid, displays of Asian allyship filled social media.

Recent experience has been different in a couple of ways. One, the attacks against Jews have been even more numerous and violent, as the F.B.I. data shows. Two, the condemnation has been quieter and at times tellingly agonized. University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks, they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism. Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.

["University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia".  This is a misunderstanding about why university leaders are uncomfortable.  They are uncomfortable because the principles of critical race theory are so embedded in curriculum and the very ethos of progressive universities that antisemitism cannot be denounced unequivocally because it would undermine the entire oppressor/oppressed analytical structure the universities have embraced without reservation.]

Alarmingly, the antisemitic rhetoric of both the political right and the left has filtered into justifications for violence. But there has been an asymmetry in recognizing the connections. After a gunman murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, observers correctly noted that he had become radicalized partly through racist right-wing social media. There has been a similar phenomenon in some recent attacks, this time with the assailants using the language of the left.

The man who burned marchers in Colorado shouted “Free Palestine!” and (awkwardly) “End Zionist!” The man charged with killing the young Israeli Embassy workers in Washington last month is suspected of having posted an online manifesto titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.” His supporters have since published a petition that includes “Globalize the Intifada.” The demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the right bore some responsibility for the Pittsburgh massacre; the demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the left bears some responsibility for the recent attacks.

Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group. Many Jews live with fears that they never expected to experience in this country.

[These sentences reveal the Times worldview; "It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America".  In other words, racism is America's real problem while antisemitism is a problem for Jews and one that distracts from America's real problem which is why antisemitism needs addressing.  This means that Times has learned nothing, or wants to learn nothing, about the ideology and fake history, as in the 1619 Project, it has promoted in recent years.  In that respect, the Times continues to endorse a racist ideology in which the only reason for any discrepancy between races and ethnic groups in our society is because of white and Jewish supremacy.  The Times will never escape its contradictions until it repudiates racial essentialism.]

No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry. The choice is between denouncing it fully and encouraging an even broader explosion of hate.

The position of the Times reminds me of the recent book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in which they breathlessly report how the media, including Tapper, were hoodwinked by the Biden administration into believing Joe Biden was actually functioning as president.  The truth, as anyone observing Biden during the 2020 campaign and his presidency could see, was that he had severe difficulty in functioning, leading many of us to wonder who was really running the White House.  The legacy media including Tapper, wanted to be mislead because reporting honestly would have helped the Republicans and avoiding that was much more important than the truth, and that part of the story is ignored in Original Sin.

Same thing with the Times.  This editorial studiously avoids examining the paper's role in its reporting, and that of progressive institutions, in support of the poisonous ideology of critical race theory in leading to the eruption of antisemitism among those who share the beliefs of the Times own staff.  Instead it is all attributable to this mysterious "hard left", about which the Times gives us no details as to constitutes this faction.

The closing words of the Times editorial are meaningless.  Just words.  I guess it now allows them to say they denounced antisemitism even on the left and now they can go back to doing exactly what they've been doing all along.

You can read all of my reporting on the Times here.