#1,036: Unquiet Thoughts

When I started writing this blog back in early February, 2005, I believed it would serve several purposes. First and foremost, it would force me to discipline myself to research, contemplate, and most importantly, write about contemporary events on a weekly basis, thus creating a chronicle-in-brief of the early 21st century. Little did I know then, that a hefty percentage of these posts would highlight a man and a movement I truly execrate . . . so much so that I have done my level best to skirt even having to write his name.

But alas, another week, another post dealing with the treacherous buffoonery of POTUS and his cowardly enablers. But what aspect of this past week’s category of sins and outrages should I write about? That’s the problem I face every weekend: so many villainies and outrages to consider, so little time and space. I mean, in just the past 168 hours (i.e. one week), IT has:

Given refugee status to white South Africans, giving the reason that they are victims of “genocide,” a claim not supported by police data. At the same time, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem formally announced that the regime is ending Temporary Protected Status for Afghans in the United States. Sec. Noem justified the policy change by saying that Afghanistan “. . . has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them [the refugees] from returning to their home country.”
Publicly said that he would be “stupid” not to accept a luxury 747 that the Qatari royal family planned to donate as a temporary Air Force One . . . and then be handed over to his presidential library after his term was over. Estimated cost of this gift? $400 million before retrofitting. Seems to me to be a case of “One man’s gift is another man’s bribe.”
Unless there will be an act of G-d - or an act of Congress - IT will get his $92 million parade on his 79th birthday (June 14) which also happens to be “Flag Day,” and supposedly, the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. This is what autocrats, not small-d democrats do. He has been lusting after a parade in his honor ever since, during his first term, e proposed having a parade after watching the two-hour procession along the famed Champs-Elysees in July 2017. After witnessing it, he began saying he wanted an even grander one on Pennsylvania Avenue. Here’s an idea: get his billionaire friends who are making out like bandits purchasing his STRUMP meme coins to cough up the $92 million AND guarantee to cover the costs of repairing and repaving all the streets that will be mangled by the tanks and transports moving through the streets of the Nation’s Capital.
Fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress . . . the first woman and first African American to hold the post. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” (It should be noted that the Library of Congress does not lend books to adults or children.) As her temporary replacement, POTUS named Todd Blanche, the No. 2 official at the DOJ, who, who defended IT at his criminal trial last year.
IT withdrew the nomination of interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Ed Martin, a former conservative podcaster after he came into the cross-hairs of Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who said he would refuse to vote for him, citing “friction over how Martin viewed those involved in the January 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol.” POTUS quickly replaced Martin with Fox News host and former New York prosecutor Jeanine Pirro. Pirro is perhaps best known for making repeated false statements about the 2020 election . . . which led to her employers being sued and settling with a voting machine company for more than $787 million. And, by no means last, an act which is likely to have repercussions for both IT, his allies in Congress, and ultimately, the future of America:
Just a few days ago, Felon47 fired several members of the board that oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The fired members included Doug Emhoff, the husband of former VP Kamala Harris; Ronald Klain, former President Joseph Biden’s first chief of staff; Tom Perez, the former Secretary of Labor; Susan Rice, the national security advisor to former POTUS Obama and Mr. Biden’s top domestic policy adviser who led a major strategic effort to combat antisemitism; Anthony Bernal, a senior adviser to FLOTUS Dr. Jill Biden, and David Cicilline the former 6-term representative from Rhode Island who is both Jewish and gay. What they all have in common, obviously, is that they were appointed by President Joe Biden.

New York Times writers Katie Glueck and Tyler Pager noted: “While it is not surprising that Mr. Trump would look for any chance to remove senior Democrats from positions of influence, the moves underscore the extraordinary power he is exerting over traditionally apolitical institutions as he carries out a campaign of retribution.” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, urged a full explanation and “even a reconsideration” of the decision, stressing that the museum must remain nonpartisan. One of former President Biden’s museum board appointments, Kevin Abel circulated a scathing letter to his colleagues, invoking the Holocaust as he denounced the museum’s silence on ITs firings of board members. In the letter, Abel, a highly successful businessman from Georgia and former Congressional candidate, wrote that ITs “campaign of retribution” had been met with troubling “public silence” by both the museum and members of Congress:

"At this juncture of rising threats and a swirling atmosphere of hatred, it is ever more imperative that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the one institution that can most credibly call out the administration’s attack of its Council for what it is, not choose to remain silent.”

On the ensuing email chain, board member Daniel Huff - who was one of ITs board appointees from his first term - objected to Mr. Abel’s invocation of Dietrich Bonhoffeur (picture above), a German pastor and theologian who was one of the earliest and most vehement critics of the Nazi regime - and paid the ultimate price: he was hanged (along with his brother Klaus and his brothers-in-law) at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria. He was just 39. The Bonhoeffer quote (his best known) that so riled board member Huff simply stated “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” In his letter, Mr. Huff also alluded to another prominent Lutheran pastor of the Nazi era, Martin Niemöller, whose most famous quote is on the wall of the Museum’s permanent exhibition.

It seems to me the trenchant words of Pastors Bonhoeffer and Niemöller, as well as the exiled German novelist (and 1929 Nobel laureate) Thomas Mann should adorn the walls of every office on Capitol Hill . . . as well as the Oval Office. Mann (1875-1955), best known for the novels Buddenbrooks (1900), Death in Venice (1912), The Magic Mountain (1924) and Joseph and His Brothers (published as a tetralogy between 1933 and 1943), was exiled from Germany in the early days of the 3rd Reich. In 1943, then living in California, Mann delivered anti-Nazi addresses on the BBC as part of the Allied propaganda effort, which were then broadcast in Germany. These addresses were collectively called “Listen, Germany!” and were aimed at demoralizing the German population and encouraging them to reject the Nazi regime. In one of the broadcasts . . . each of which ranged from 5 to 8 minutes in length . . . Mann told his former landsleute (countrymen) “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” Nobody ever said it better.

At a time when our politics seem more like a boulder careening lethally down a hellish escarpment than a balloon gently wafting its way into the heavenly skies, we do well to remember - and put into practice - the wisdom of Herren Bonhoeffer, Niemöller and Mann. To wit, that sitting on our hands and keeping our eyes, ears and mouths tightly shut provides the fuel that energizes evil; that the so-called “leaders” who, like the three monkeys “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” (unless it is against what they claim is necrotic liberalism) are, by their very silence and cowardly reticence, part of that lethal boulder. When leaders employ fear to buy silence, they are then able to incrementally isolate, demonize and then remove those who are standing in their way. This, at last, is the lesson of Bonhoeffer, Niemöller and Mann.

We do not have to wait until November 2026 to express our disgust and revulsion with the regime. On the same day (June 14, 2025) that IT will likely be sitting upon his throne, watching the tanks and troops pass by, there will be another series of parades and gatherings across the United States . . . and Canada and Mexico and only G-d knows where else. It is called “NO KINGS!” On that day literally hundreds of thousands of people will be gathering in all 50 states to declare that the United States is US . . . . a representative democracy, and neither an autocracy or a monarchy. Just follow this link to find out what’s going to be happening in your community.

This is not the time for unquiet thoughts . . . We need LOUD DEEDS.