TRUMP 2024

 

My friend Jo Boaler at Stanford posted this on LinkedIn:I have always appreciated the reporting of the Guardian newspaper in the UK. This is their analysis of recent events.I am writing to you on an ominous day for America, and for the world.Last night, in his victory speech, Donald Trump called the free press "the enemy camp". Intimidating words. But we believe that, as journalists, we can't afford to be intimidated. We have a duty to tell the truth about the man the United States has just elected as president - a man who tried to overturn a democratic election the last time he was in office, whose supreme court appointees gutted women's reproductive rights, who calls climate change a hoax, who falsely claims mass deportations will solve our economic problems, who threatens jail for his political opponents, who lies reflexively and shamelessly, and whose second administration imperils our democracy, freedoms and planet.I replied:I experienced the first ripples heralding last night's red tidal wave during the last decades of my teaching career among my students and especially among college administrators. This of course in the shifting political climate of the 1990s and thereafter. Last night would not have surprised de Tocqueville who predicted that if America ever "turned" it would turn right rather than left. Education, already long fractured by this country's predisposition to know-nothingness, is now more at risk than ever. More generally, the very idea of truth is and has been for some time at risk. Do we still have the resources for eternal vigilance and resistance?

 

In the wake of the Nov. 5 election, many celebrities and politicians have been remarking on the American way being realized in this peaceful transition of power.  They have pointed out that we won’t always agree with our opposition but we are obliged to acknowledge their right to rule.  But this has not been the kind of peaceful transition we saw Nixon beat Johnson, Truman replaced Roosevelt.  Transitions involve actions and rhetorics and this transition was not peaceful – it was ominous.  

 

If this were the '60s I can imagine getting ready to march in the streets with signs announcing the birth of the Unazi States of Amerikkka.