Search
840 results for “leafless”
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: Everything is Awful, As Usual
Good Afternoon!!
Shared Reflections, by Rebecca Aldernet
I can’t find any good news this morning–what else is new? The “president” is dangerously demented, his cabinet is full of kooks, his economy is going down the tubes, and he seems determined to start a war in Venezuela. Anyway, here are the stories that caught my attention today.
Venezuela Boat Strikes
I’m sure you’ve heard the reports about Pete Hegseth’s campaign of war crimes against alleged drug boats. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an exclusive report by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima (gift link): Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Use the gift link to read the rest. We’re going to need prosecutions if we ever get rid of Trump and his goons.
Phillip M. Bailey at USA Today: Pete Hegseth lashes out at ‘kill them all’ report on boat strikes.
U.S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is lashing out at a report that he ordered military officials to “kill them all” during one of the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean aimed a boat allegedly carrying drug cargo.
Nataliya Bagatskaya, Echo of the black cats
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth, 45, said in a Nov. 28 post on X.
The defense secretary was responding to a Washington Post story citing two anonymous sources that claimed he ordered troops to leave no survivors after a missile struck the vessel, which was traveling off the Trinidad coast, as two individuals were clinging to the smoldering wreckage.
Since September, the Trump administration has attacked at least 21 boats traversing international waters, killing 83 people. Trump and other officials defend the boat strikes as an attempt to crackdown on illegal narcotics flooding into the U.S., but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration for providing no intelligence briefings or other evidence about what the vessels are carrying.
“At this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during an Oct. 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers − they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who shared the story about Hegseth’s alleged order, raised similar concerns about the constitutionality of the strikes in an Nov. 28 post on X.
“If you want to know why Hegseth is panicking about reminders that there is accountably for giving or carrying out illegal orders, it’s likely because he knows he has given illegal orders to murder people,” Murphy said.
Victoria Bisset, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson at The Washington Post: Senate committee vows ‘vigorous oversight’ in killing of boat strike survivors.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.”
The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
If Trump is so concerned about drugs coming into the U.S. from Latin America, why did he just pardon a Honduran drug kingpin?
The New York Times: Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
By Louis Valtat
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
There’s probably a bribe involved.
War in Venezuela?
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: Trump tells airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed as US military buildup continues in region.
President Donald Trump told airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed, days after he vowed to take action on land “very soon.”
Following dozens of strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 80 people since September, Trump suggested to military service members in a Thanksgiving Day phone call that the U.S. would soon take action “on land.”
On Saturday, he urged the clearing of the airspace near the South American country. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned airlines to “exercise caution” when flying over Venezuela “due to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity.”
Several airlines cancelled their flights as a result of the FAA’s warning.
By Salah Hefney
Can he do that? A bit more from the Independent story:
Last week, the White House was reportedly considering having U.S. military planes drop leaflets — containing details about the $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Nicolás Maduro — over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the Washington Postreported.
For months, the U.S. government has been building up a military presence in the region to curb what Trump administration officials call “narco-terrorists” and has also made it clear it wants to oust Maduro.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, following the death of Hugo Chavez. The U.S. is among more than 50 countries that have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state, claiming he lost the 2024 presidential election. The State Department has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan president since 2020; the Trump administration raised the reward to $50 million this year.
The U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which Trump alleges are fueled by Maduro’s government. Last month, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” claiming it’s headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his “illegitimate” regime.
There’s more at the link.
Attacks on National Guard in DC
Jenny Gathright, Emily Davies, and Olivia George at The Washington Post: D.C. police to begin patrolling with National Guard after fatal attack.
National Guard troops patrolling in D.C. will be paired with local law enforcement personnel, at least temporarily, in the wake of the Wednesday attack that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and two D.C. police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning that is still in progress.
“Officers will conduct high-visibility patrols with the National Guard and provide assistance as needed,” said the email, which was sent to D.C. police leadership Wednesday evening. The email said the situation was “fluid,” and adjustments to the staffing plan could be made in the coming days.
Fabrice Backès, Sandie
If enacted on a long-term basis, the change would significantly shift the way National Guard troops have worked with local and federal law enforcement in the District since their arrival in August. Trump administration officials have credited the troops for helping reduce crime in the city — in part, they argued, because the troops’ presence at Metro stations and on National Park Service lands frees up law enforcement to police other areas of the city. Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would do essentially the opposite by siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods.
The email said the new pairing would start Thursday and Friday.A D.C. police official said some officers had been temporarily detailed to accompany the troops, and a more long-term policy change was under discussion.
The official, who stressed that the discussions were still preliminary, said D.C. police, Metro Transit Police, U.S. Park Police and several other law enforcement agencies were having conversations with the National Guard task force in D.C. about pairing the troops with police officers while they are on city streets. Since their deployment to D.C., groups of National Guard troops have largely operated unaccompanied by police, the official said.
A judge has already said that putting National Guard Troops in DC was illegal, but Trump filed an “emergency appeal.” Meanwhile, two members of the West Virginia National Guard have been shot. One has died and the other is still in critical condition.
NPR: Where things stand with the National Guard shooting in D.C.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, W.Va., joined the service in 2023. Beckstrom’s father, Gary, called her his “baby girl” and said she had “passed to glory” in a Facebook post on Thursday.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey on Friday called for residents to hold a moment of silence for the two victims of the shooting, as both were deployed as part of that state’s National Guard.
Morrisey said in a statement Friday that Beckstrom had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in service to her state and the nation. He added that both Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, had stepped forward and volunteered for the mission in D.C.
Morrisey also said that Wolfe remains in “very critical condition.”
“These two West Virginia heroes were serving our country and protecting our nation’s capital when they were maliciously attacked,” Morrisey said. “Their courage and commitment to duty represent the very best of our state.”
Trump’s Attacks on Woman Journalists
Corbin Bolies at The Wrap: Trump Calls CBS News Correspondent ‘Stupid Person’ in 4th Attack on Female Reporters in 2 Weeks.
President Donald Trump attacked another female reporter on Thursday after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person.”
CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes questioned Trump about reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged gunman who entered the U.S. as part of a Biden-era program for Afghan refugees who fled the nation in 2021, was vetted before he allegedly shot at the National Guardsmen on Wednesday.
By Rebecca Aldernet
Reports indicated that Lakanwal was vetted either through his time working with the CIA in Afghanistan, during the removal process from Afghanistan or during his 2024 asylum application, which the Trump administration approved earlier this year.
Cordes, therefore, asked Trump why he blamed the Biden administration if U.S. officials confirmed vetting of the refugees took place. Trump didn’t enjoy the line of questioning.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump asked. “Because they came into on a plane along with 1000s of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person. And we — there’s a law passed that it’s almost impossible not to get to get them out. You can’t get them out once they come in. And they came in and they were unvetted. They were unchecked. There were many of them, and they came on big planes, and it was disgraceful.”
The attack was the latest in a series of swipes at female reporters. Trump on Wednesday described a New York Times reporter as “ugly, inside and out” over a reported story on his age. He also called a Bloomberg News reporter a “piggy” and an ABC News reporter a “terrible person” for her questioning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Niece Exposes Why Her Uncle Keeps Attacking Female Reporters.
Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, says one of the reasons the president seems to be increasingly lashing out at female reporters is because he is “rattled.
Mary, 60, discussed the rise in incidents on the Wednesday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live. She noted the 79-year-old president calling a reporter “piggy” while telling her to be quiet during a gaggle aboard Air Force One, and a Truth Social post in which he insulted a New York Times reporter’s looks.
“His misogynistic attacks against reporters in particular are increasing and that means a couple of things,” she explained. “It means that he’s increasingly comfortable lodging such attacks, as he’s been openly misogynistic, as he’s been openly racist and openly Islamophobic and openly anti-immigrant and openly antisemitic. There’s no hiding it anymore.”
”I think it’s also a sign that he’s a little rattled. He’s also never clearly heard of the Streisand effect,” Mary said, referring to the internet phenomenon where somebody inadvertently draws further attention to something while attempting to hide it from the public.
“When you call attention to the thing you want people to ignore, it’s probably a terrible idea.”
Trump’s Ballroom Obsession
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times (gift link): Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible.
I posted about Trump’s conflicts with his architects on Wednesday. This is an extension of that story. After he met with architect James McCreary in August,
McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.
Black cat with cat lady, Dee Nickerson
It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.
That’s when things got tricky.
In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.
The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.
The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)
In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.
Trump has destroyed our government; now he’s working on destroying the White House. Use the gift link to read the whole awful story.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think?
#andrewWolfe #donaldTrump #honduras #juanOrlandoHernandez #nationalGuardInDc #nicolasMaduro #peteHegseth #sarahBeckstrom #trumpAttacksOnWomenJournalists #trumpsBallroomObsession #venezuela #venezuelaBoatStrikes
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: Everything is Awful, As Usual
Good Afternoon!!
Shared Reflections, by Rebecca Aldernet
I can’t find any good news this morning–what else is new? The “president” is dangerously demented, his cabinet is full of kooks, his economy is going down the tubes, and he seems determined to start a war in Venezuela. Anyway, here are the stories that caught my attention today.
Venezuela Boat Strikes
I’m sure you’ve heard the reports about Pete Hegseth’s campaign of war crimes against alleged drug boats. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an exclusive report by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima (gift link): Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Use the gift link to read the rest. We’re going to need prosecutions if we ever get rid of Trump and his goons.
Phillip M. Bailey at USA Today: Pete Hegseth lashes out at ‘kill them all’ report on boat strikes.
U.S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is lashing out at a report that he ordered military officials to “kill them all” during one of the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean aimed a boat allegedly carrying drug cargo.
Nataliya Bagatskaya, Echo of the black cats
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth, 45, said in a Nov. 28 post on X.
The defense secretary was responding to a Washington Post story citing two anonymous sources that claimed he ordered troops to leave no survivors after a missile struck the vessel, which was traveling off the Trinidad coast, as two individuals were clinging to the smoldering wreckage.
Since September, the Trump administration has attacked at least 21 boats traversing international waters, killing 83 people. Trump and other officials defend the boat strikes as an attempt to crackdown on illegal narcotics flooding into the U.S., but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration for providing no intelligence briefings or other evidence about what the vessels are carrying.
“At this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during an Oct. 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers − they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who shared the story about Hegseth’s alleged order, raised similar concerns about the constitutionality of the strikes in an Nov. 28 post on X.
“If you want to know why Hegseth is panicking about reminders that there is accountably for giving or carrying out illegal orders, it’s likely because he knows he has given illegal orders to murder people,” Murphy said.
Victoria Bisset, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson at The Washington Post: Senate committee vows ‘vigorous oversight’ in killing of boat strike survivors.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.”
The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
If Trump is so concerned about drugs coming into the U.S. from Latin America, why did he just pardon a Honduran drug kingpin?
The New York Times: Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
By Louis Valtat
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
There’s probably a bribe involved.
War in Venezuela?
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: Trump tells airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed as US military buildup continues in region.
President Donald Trump told airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed, days after he vowed to take action on land “very soon.”
Following dozens of strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 80 people since September, Trump suggested to military service members in a Thanksgiving Day phone call that the U.S. would soon take action “on land.”
On Saturday, he urged the clearing of the airspace near the South American country. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned airlines to “exercise caution” when flying over Venezuela “due to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity.”
Several airlines cancelled their flights as a result of the FAA’s warning.
By Salah Hefney
Can he do that? A bit more from the Independent story:
Last week, the White House was reportedly considering having U.S. military planes drop leaflets — containing details about the $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Nicolás Maduro — over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the Washington Postreported.
For months, the U.S. government has been building up a military presence in the region to curb what Trump administration officials call “narco-terrorists” and has also made it clear it wants to oust Maduro.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, following the death of Hugo Chavez. The U.S. is among more than 50 countries that have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state, claiming he lost the 2024 presidential election. The State Department has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan president since 2020; the Trump administration raised the reward to $50 million this year.
The U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which Trump alleges are fueled by Maduro’s government. Last month, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” claiming it’s headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his “illegitimate” regime.
There’s more at the link.
Attacks on National Guard in DC
Jenny Gathright, Emily Davies, and Olivia George at The Washington Post: D.C. police to begin patrolling with National Guard after fatal attack.
National Guard troops patrolling in D.C. will be paired with local law enforcement personnel, at least temporarily, in the wake of the Wednesday attack that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and two D.C. police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning that is still in progress.
“Officers will conduct high-visibility patrols with the National Guard and provide assistance as needed,” said the email, which was sent to D.C. police leadership Wednesday evening. The email said the situation was “fluid,” and adjustments to the staffing plan could be made in the coming days.
Fabrice Backès, Sandie
If enacted on a long-term basis, the change would significantly shift the way National Guard troops have worked with local and federal law enforcement in the District since their arrival in August. Trump administration officials have credited the troops for helping reduce crime in the city — in part, they argued, because the troops’ presence at Metro stations and on National Park Service lands frees up law enforcement to police other areas of the city. Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would do essentially the opposite by siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods.
The email said the new pairing would start Thursday and Friday.A D.C. police official said some officers had been temporarily detailed to accompany the troops, and a more long-term policy change was under discussion.
The official, who stressed that the discussions were still preliminary, said D.C. police, Metro Transit Police, U.S. Park Police and several other law enforcement agencies were having conversations with the National Guard task force in D.C. about pairing the troops with police officers while they are on city streets. Since their deployment to D.C., groups of National Guard troops have largely operated unaccompanied by police, the official said.
A judge has already said that putting National Guard Troops in DC was illegal, but Trump filed an “emergency appeal.” Meanwhile, two members of the West Virginia National Guard have been shot. One has died and the other is still in critical condition.
NPR: Where things stand with the National Guard shooting in D.C.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, W.Va., joined the service in 2023. Beckstrom’s father, Gary, called her his “baby girl” and said she had “passed to glory” in a Facebook post on Thursday.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey on Friday called for residents to hold a moment of silence for the two victims of the shooting, as both were deployed as part of that state’s National Guard.
Morrisey said in a statement Friday that Beckstrom had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in service to her state and the nation. He added that both Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, had stepped forward and volunteered for the mission in D.C.
Morrisey also said that Wolfe remains in “very critical condition.”
“These two West Virginia heroes were serving our country and protecting our nation’s capital when they were maliciously attacked,” Morrisey said. “Their courage and commitment to duty represent the very best of our state.”
Trump’s Attacks on Woman Journalists
Corbin Bolies at The Wrap: Trump Calls CBS News Correspondent ‘Stupid Person’ in 4th Attack on Female Reporters in 2 Weeks.
President Donald Trump attacked another female reporter on Thursday after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person.”
CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes questioned Trump about reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged gunman who entered the U.S. as part of a Biden-era program for Afghan refugees who fled the nation in 2021, was vetted before he allegedly shot at the National Guardsmen on Wednesday.
By Rebecca Aldernet
Reports indicated that Lakanwal was vetted either through his time working with the CIA in Afghanistan, during the removal process from Afghanistan or during his 2024 asylum application, which the Trump administration approved earlier this year.
Cordes, therefore, asked Trump why he blamed the Biden administration if U.S. officials confirmed vetting of the refugees took place. Trump didn’t enjoy the line of questioning.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump asked. “Because they came into on a plane along with 1000s of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person. And we — there’s a law passed that it’s almost impossible not to get to get them out. You can’t get them out once they come in. And they came in and they were unvetted. They were unchecked. There were many of them, and they came on big planes, and it was disgraceful.”
The attack was the latest in a series of swipes at female reporters. Trump on Wednesday described a New York Times reporter as “ugly, inside and out” over a reported story on his age. He also called a Bloomberg News reporter a “piggy” and an ABC News reporter a “terrible person” for her questioning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Niece Exposes Why Her Uncle Keeps Attacking Female Reporters.
Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, says one of the reasons the president seems to be increasingly lashing out at female reporters is because he is “rattled.
Mary, 60, discussed the rise in incidents on the Wednesday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live. She noted the 79-year-old president calling a reporter “piggy” while telling her to be quiet during a gaggle aboard Air Force One, and a Truth Social post in which he insulted a New York Times reporter’s looks.
“His misogynistic attacks against reporters in particular are increasing and that means a couple of things,” she explained. “It means that he’s increasingly comfortable lodging such attacks, as he’s been openly misogynistic, as he’s been openly racist and openly Islamophobic and openly anti-immigrant and openly antisemitic. There’s no hiding it anymore.”
”I think it’s also a sign that he’s a little rattled. He’s also never clearly heard of the Streisand effect,” Mary said, referring to the internet phenomenon where somebody inadvertently draws further attention to something while attempting to hide it from the public.
“When you call attention to the thing you want people to ignore, it’s probably a terrible idea.”
Trump’s Ballroom Obsession
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times (gift link): Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible.
I posted about Trump’s conflicts with his architects on Wednesday. This is an extension of that story. After he met with architect James McCreary in August,
McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.
Black cat with cat lady, Dee Nickerson
It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.
That’s when things got tricky.
In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.
The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.
The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)
In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.
Trump has destroyed our government; now he’s working on destroying the White House. Use the gift link to read the whole awful story.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think?
#andrewWolfe #donaldTrump #honduras #juanOrlandoHernandez #nationalGuardInDc #nicolasMaduro #peteHegseth #sarahBeckstrom #trumpAttacksOnWomenJournalists #trumpsBallroomObsession #venezuela #venezuelaBoatStrikes
-
Lazy Caturday Reads: Everything is Awful, As Usual
Good Afternoon!!
Shared Reflections, by Rebecca Aldernet
I can’t find any good news this morning–what else is new? The “president” is dangerously demented, his cabinet is full of kooks, his economy is going down the tubes, and he seems determined to start a war in Venezuela. Anyway, here are the stories that caught my attention today.
Venezuela Boat Strikes
I’m sure you’ve heard the reports about Pete Hegseth’s campaign of war crimes against alleged drug boats. Yesterday, The Washington Post published an exclusive report by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima (gift link): Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which has not been previously reported, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers. Some current and former U.S. officials and law-of-war experts have said that the Pentagon’s lethal campaign — which has killed more than 80 people to date — is unlawful and may expose those most directly involved to future prosecution.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Use the gift link to read the rest. We’re going to need prosecutions if we ever get rid of Trump and his goons.
Phillip M. Bailey at USA Today: Pete Hegseth lashes out at ‘kill them all’ report on boat strikes.
U.S Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is lashing out at a report that he ordered military officials to “kill them all” during one of the Trump administration’s strikes in the Caribbean aimed a boat allegedly carrying drug cargo.
Nataliya Bagatskaya, Echo of the black cats
“As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland,” Hegseth, 45, said in a Nov. 28 post on X.
The defense secretary was responding to a Washington Post story citing two anonymous sources that claimed he ordered troops to leave no survivors after a missile struck the vessel, which was traveling off the Trinidad coast, as two individuals were clinging to the smoldering wreckage.
Since September, the Trump administration has attacked at least 21 boats traversing international waters, killing 83 people. Trump and other officials defend the boat strikes as an attempt to crackdown on illegal narcotics flooding into the U.S., but lawmakers from both parties have criticized the administration for providing no intelligence briefings or other evidence about what the vessels are carrying.
“At this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said during an Oct. 26 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This is akin to what China does, what Iran does with drug dealers − they summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who shared the story about Hegseth’s alleged order, raised similar concerns about the constitutionality of the strikes in an Nov. 28 post on X.
“If you want to know why Hegseth is panicking about reminders that there is accountably for giving or carrying out illegal orders, it’s likely because he knows he has given illegal orders to murder people,” Murphy said.
Victoria Bisset, Alex Horton, Ellen Nakashima, and Noah Robertson at The Washington Post: Senate committee vows ‘vigorous oversight’ in killing of boat strike survivors.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.”
The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
If Trump is so concerned about drugs coming into the U.S. from Latin America, why did he just pardon a Honduran drug kingpin?
The New York Times: Trump Announces Pardon for Honduran Ex-President Convicted in Drug Case.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
By Louis Valtat
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández “a two-faced politician hungry for power” who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers. And prosecutors had asked the judge to make sure Mr. Hernández would die behind bars, citing his abuse of power, connections to violent traffickers and “the unfathomable destruction” caused by cocaine.
The prosecution stretched across Mr. Trump’s first term and concluded during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s time as president. In the end, Mr. Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison in Federal District Court in Manhattan, capping what prosecutors had presented as a sprawling conspiracy.
Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the same agency, also reacted with disbelief to the news of the pardon. Mr. Vigil said the move imperiled the reputation of the United States and its international investigations into drug trafficking.
“This action would be nothing short of catastrophic and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,” Mr. Vigil said on Friday.
Mr. Trump’s vow to pardon such a high-profile convicted drug trafficker appeared to contradict the president’s campaign to unleash the might of the American military on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that his administration says, without evidence, are involved in drug trafficking. That campaign has so far killed more than 80 people since it began in September.
There’s probably a bribe involved.
War in Venezuela?
Kelly Rissman at The Independent: Trump tells airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed as US military buildup continues in region.
President Donald Trump told airlines to consider Venezuela’s airspace closed, days after he vowed to take action on land “very soon.”
Following dozens of strikes against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that have killed more than 80 people since September, Trump suggested to military service members in a Thanksgiving Day phone call that the U.S. would soon take action “on land.”
On Saturday, he urged the clearing of the airspace near the South American country. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” the U.S. president wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning.
Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned airlines to “exercise caution” when flying over Venezuela “due to the worsening security situation and heightened military activity.”
Several airlines cancelled their flights as a result of the FAA’s warning.
By Salah Hefney
Can he do that? A bit more from the Independent story:
Last week, the White House was reportedly considering having U.S. military planes drop leaflets — containing details about the $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Nicolás Maduro — over Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the Washington Postreported.
For months, the U.S. government has been building up a military presence in the region to curb what Trump administration officials call “narco-terrorists” and has also made it clear it wants to oust Maduro.
Maduro has been in power since 2013, following the death of Hugo Chavez. The U.S. is among more than 50 countries that have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state, claiming he lost the 2024 presidential election. The State Department has offered rewards for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan president since 2020; the Trump administration raised the reward to $50 million this year.
The U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which Trump alleges are fueled by Maduro’s government. Last month, the State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” claiming it’s headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his “illegitimate” regime.
There’s more at the link.
Attacks on National Guard in DC
Jenny Gathright, Emily Davies, and Olivia George at The Washington Post: D.C. police to begin patrolling with National Guard after fatal attack.
National Guard troops patrolling in D.C. will be paired with local law enforcement personnel, at least temporarily, in the wake of the Wednesday attack that killed one National Guard member and critically injured another, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post and two D.C. police officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss planning that is still in progress.
“Officers will conduct high-visibility patrols with the National Guard and provide assistance as needed,” said the email, which was sent to D.C. police leadership Wednesday evening. The email said the situation was “fluid,” and adjustments to the staffing plan could be made in the coming days.
Fabrice Backès, Sandie
If enacted on a long-term basis, the change would significantly shift the way National Guard troops have worked with local and federal law enforcement in the District since their arrival in August. Trump administration officials have credited the troops for helping reduce crime in the city — in part, they argued, because the troops’ presence at Metro stations and on National Park Service lands frees up law enforcement to police other areas of the city. Diverting local police to accompany Guard members would do essentially the opposite by siphoning them from other tasks in D.C. neighborhoods.
The email said the new pairing would start Thursday and Friday.A D.C. police official said some officers had been temporarily detailed to accompany the troops, and a more long-term policy change was under discussion.
The official, who stressed that the discussions were still preliminary, said D.C. police, Metro Transit Police, U.S. Park Police and several other law enforcement agencies were having conversations with the National Guard task force in D.C. about pairing the troops with police officers while they are on city streets. Since their deployment to D.C., groups of National Guard troops have largely operated unaccompanied by police, the official said.
A judge has already said that putting National Guard Troops in DC was illegal, but Trump filed an “emergency appeal.” Meanwhile, two members of the West Virginia National Guard have been shot. One has died and the other is still in critical condition.
NPR: Where things stand with the National Guard shooting in D.C.
Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of Summersville, W.Va., joined the service in 2023. Beckstrom’s father, Gary, called her his “baby girl” and said she had “passed to glory” in a Facebook post on Thursday.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey on Friday called for residents to hold a moment of silence for the two victims of the shooting, as both were deployed as part of that state’s National Guard.
Morrisey said in a statement Friday that Beckstrom had made the “ultimate sacrifice” in service to her state and the nation. He added that both Beckstrom and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, had stepped forward and volunteered for the mission in D.C.
Morrisey also said that Wolfe remains in “very critical condition.”
“These two West Virginia heroes were serving our country and protecting our nation’s capital when they were maliciously attacked,” Morrisey said. “Their courage and commitment to duty represent the very best of our state.”
Trump’s Attacks on Woman Journalists
Corbin Bolies at The Wrap: Trump Calls CBS News Correspondent ‘Stupid Person’ in 4th Attack on Female Reporters in 2 Weeks.
President Donald Trump attacked another female reporter on Thursday after she asked him about the vetting of the suspect in a Washington, D.C., shooting that killed a National Guardsman, calling her a “stupid person.”
CBS News’ chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes questioned Trump about reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the alleged gunman who entered the U.S. as part of a Biden-era program for Afghan refugees who fled the nation in 2021, was vetted before he allegedly shot at the National Guardsmen on Wednesday.
By Rebecca Aldernet
Reports indicated that Lakanwal was vetted either through his time working with the CIA in Afghanistan, during the removal process from Afghanistan or during his 2024 asylum application, which the Trump administration approved earlier this year.
Cordes, therefore, asked Trump why he blamed the Biden administration if U.S. officials confirmed vetting of the refugees took place. Trump didn’t enjoy the line of questioning.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” Trump asked. “Because they came into on a plane along with 1000s of other people that shouldn’t be here, and you’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person. And we — there’s a law passed that it’s almost impossible not to get to get them out. You can’t get them out once they come in. And they came in and they were unvetted. They were unchecked. There were many of them, and they came on big planes, and it was disgraceful.”
The attack was the latest in a series of swipes at female reporters. Trump on Wednesday described a New York Times reporter as “ugly, inside and out” over a reported story on his age. He also called a Bloomberg News reporter a “piggy” and an ABC News reporter a “terrible person” for her questioning of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Catherine Bouris at The Daily Beast: Trump’s Niece Exposes Why Her Uncle Keeps Attacking Female Reporters.
Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, says one of the reasons the president seems to be increasingly lashing out at female reporters is because he is “rattled.
Mary, 60, discussed the rise in incidents on the Wednesday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live. She noted the 79-year-old president calling a reporter “piggy” while telling her to be quiet during a gaggle aboard Air Force One, and a Truth Social post in which he insulted a New York Times reporter’s looks.
“His misogynistic attacks against reporters in particular are increasing and that means a couple of things,” she explained. “It means that he’s increasingly comfortable lodging such attacks, as he’s been openly misogynistic, as he’s been openly racist and openly Islamophobic and openly anti-immigrant and openly antisemitic. There’s no hiding it anymore.”
”I think it’s also a sign that he’s a little rattled. He’s also never clearly heard of the Streisand effect,” Mary said, referring to the internet phenomenon where somebody inadvertently draws further attention to something while attempting to hide it from the public.
“When you call attention to the thing you want people to ignore, it’s probably a terrible idea.”
Trump’s Ballroom Obsession
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times (gift link): Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible.
I posted about Trump’s conflicts with his architects on Wednesday. This is an extension of that story. After he met with architect James McCreary in August,
McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.
Black cat with cat lady, Dee Nickerson
It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.
That’s when things got tricky.
In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.
The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.
The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)
In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.
Trump has destroyed our government; now he’s working on destroying the White House. Use the gift link to read the whole awful story.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What do you think?
#andrewWolfe #donaldTrump #honduras #juanOrlandoHernandez #nationalGuardInDc #nicolasMaduro #peteHegseth #sarahBeckstrom #trumpAttacksOnWomenJournalists #trumpsBallroomObsession #venezuela #venezuelaBoatStrikes
-
@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ Was ist faktisch passiert? Amerikanische Bundesbehörden haben sich unter merkwürdigen Namen bei Bluesky angemeldet und Statements gebracht wie "nah Bluesky, wir haben gehört das ist ein schöner Platz". Es hanelt sich also offenbar um ein politisch gezieltes Trolling einer linksliberalen Plattform, die aufgrund ihrer Struktur technisch keine Möglichkeit bietet, von autoritären Strukturen oder Einzelpersonen übernommen zu werden.
Ich empfehle die ersten Minuten vom Podcast #hakendran. @Gavin Karlmeier spricht hier, wenn ich es richtig in Erinnerung habe, von "kollaborierten Trolling". Es ist also eher ein Aktion, die Bluesky torpedieren soll, weil es eben ein Dorn im Auge ist. Dass damit die ganzen Leute, die jetzt an dem Aufschrei beteiligt sind, eigentlich im Sinne der amerikanischen Regierung agieren und freiwillige Helfershelfer, "nützliche Idioten", sind, merken sie gar nicht.
#^
Trollenspiel und Gesichtsverlust (mit Dennis Horn)
by Haken dran – das Social-Media-Update der c't on YouTube
An dem ganzen Aufschrei beweist sich aber vor allem eines: Gar nicht mal so sehr, dass das Mastodon Umfeld eben doch mehr Twitter/X ist als es immer selbst zu glauben scheint, weil es sich nämlich einfach aufscheuchen lässt, sondern es zeigt, dass die allgemeine Vorstellung von Nerds auf Mastodon völlig verkehrt ist. Anhand der Bluesky Diskussion würde ich sagen, basiert das technische Verständnisse auf der Ebene, das auch mein Hund hat. Paradoxerweise erwartet diese Bubble, die sich jetzt empört, ein zentralistisches Eingreifen, dabei haben sich objektiv gesehen einfach nur Regierungsbehörden angemeldet, die als Regierungsbehörden mit einem Haken verifiziert wurden.
Technisch zu Bluesky. Die Mastodon Bubble beweist ihr technisches Unverständnis, und es schwappt auch zu anderen Bubbles im Fediverse rüber, ich lese auch von Leuten, die bei Sharkey sind, einfach nur Dinge, wo ich den Kopf schütteln muss. Was ist denn überhaupt Bluesky? Bluesky ist der Name der Firma, die das AT Protokoll entwickelt und die erste Applikation geschrieben hat. Das AT Protokoll, das sie entwickeln, ist aber unabhängig von der Firma. Dieses Protokoll war die Antwort auf ActivityPub, bei dem klassisch wie bei X/Twitter und anderen alten Socialmedia Systemen der Nutzer seine Beiträge, Follower, Likes etc, bei einer konkreten Firma bzw. der angebotenen Socialmedia Plattform speichert. Geht jemand von X weg, sind seine Beiträge verloren. Alles, was er geschrieben hat, ist verloren. Bei Mastodon ist es sehr ähnlich. Die Nutzer melden sich bei einer Instanz an und überlassen dann ihre Beiträge und die Moderation vollständig dem Instanzinhaber. Mittlerweile wurde das Problem erkannt:
#^http://tiny.cc/392u001
Beim AT Proto ist das gänzlich anders. Die persönlichen Daten, also alles, was Du schreibst, gehört Dir, nicht Bluesky. Man ist auch nicht "auf Bluesky", sondern die eigenen Daten sind getrennt von Anbieter, Firma und deren Strukturen. Man spricht hier von "personal data server" (PDS). Diesen PDS kann ich natürlich von Bluesky verwalten lassen, aber auch von Alternativen wie Blacksky, und derzeit in Arbeit Northsky oder Eurosky. Ich kann diesen PDS aber auch zu Hause auf einem Server liegen haben oder mir irgendwo einen Server anmieten, wo ich meine Daten lagere. Mein PDS liegt auf dem gleichen Server wie meine Hubzilla Instanz. Wenn Bluesky ausfällt oder mir eben die Moderation nicht gefällt, kann ich über Blacksky ins AT Proto Netzwerk gehen, oder eine andere Alternative. Ich kann beim Ausfall aller derzeitigen Zugänge für "Bluesky" auch einfach meinen PDS liegen lassen und irgendwann wieder ins AT Proto gehen und bin eben Herr meiner Daten, was Mastodon Nutzerinnen eben so nicht kennen.
Deswegen entstehen allerdings auch Besonderheiten in der Moderation, Paul Frazee hat dazu geschrieben.
#^Update on Protocol Moderation - Paul's LeafletsWhere account takedowns happen is important
Die Moderation verläuft im ATProto nach einem Labelsystem. Beiträge werden gelabelt und die Nutzerin kann entscheiden, welche Beiträge sie mit einer Verwarnung versehen lassen oder ganz ausblenden möchte. Die Moderationsservices sind zudem unabhängig von Bluesky, ich kann z.b. einen Moderationsservice der schwarzen Community abonnieren, weil ich den begründeten Verdacht habe, dass die Member dieses Teams ein besseres Verständnis von Diskriminierung haben als das wohl mehrheitlich weiße Bluesky Team. Ich kann auch den Moderationsservice von medizinischen Teams abonnieren, die medizinische Falschinformationen als solche labeln. Kurzum, bei "Bluesky" ist also nicht nur der eigenen Datenserver völlig unabhängig von Bluesky, auch die Moderation ist unabhängig.
Mastodon Nutzerinnen, die von "Bluesky" zu Mastodon wechseln, machen also etwas kurioses: sie geben ihren "personal data server" und die Möglichkeit kompetenter Moderation auf und wechseln zu einem System, wo sie dem Instanzinhaber nicht nur ihre Daten zuschreiben, sondern auch die Moderationskompetenz in allen Bereichen zutrauen. Es ist eben ein viel stärkerer Rückfall in Twitter/X Strukturen. Wären sie wenigstens zu Hubzilla oder (streams) gegangen, wo man mit der nomadischen Identität die Kontrolle behält, oder hätte eine eigene Fedinstanz aufgesetzt, um Herr ihrer Daten zu bleiben, aber diejenigen, die jetzt einfach zu einer Mastodon Instanz wechseln und auf Bluesky schimpfen, haben offensichtlich gar nicht das AT Proto System verstanden und Twitter/X steckt tatsächlich noch mehr in ihnen drin als ihnen lieb ist.
Dabei könnte man auch einfach sagen: Mir gefällt das Fediverse besser, deshalb bin ich da. Aber das wäre natürlich zu einfach.
#ATProto #Bluesky #Socialmedia #NomadicIdentity -
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
Politics• 8 min read
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 6 hr ago
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein / ReutersA version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams. Library of CongressCongress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Students greet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the St. James Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, after a federal judge enjoined the city school board from expelling them for participating in civil rights demonstrations.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNPolitics #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
-
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
Politics• 8 min read
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 6 hr ago
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein / ReutersA version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams. Library of CongressCongress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Students greet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the St. James Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, after a federal judge enjoined the city school board from expelling them for participating in civil rights demonstrations.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNPolitics #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
-
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
Politics• 8 min read
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 6 hr ago
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein / ReutersA version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams. Library of CongressCongress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Students greet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the St. James Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, after a federal judge enjoined the city school board from expelling them for participating in civil rights demonstrations.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNPolitics #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
-
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
Politics• 8 min read
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 6 hr ago
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein / ReutersA version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams. Library of CongressCongress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Students greet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the St. James Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, after a federal judge enjoined the city school board from expelling them for participating in civil rights demonstrations.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNPolitics #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
-
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
Politics• 8 min read
Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, 6 hr ago
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable at the White House on Wednesday. Evelyn Hockstein / ReutersA version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
The Alien and Sedition Acts made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams. Library of CongressCongress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Students greet Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the St. James Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, after a federal judge enjoined the city school board from expelling them for participating in civil rights demonstrations.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech backflip was 250 years in the making | CNN Politics
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNPolitics #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Fwd: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making – CNN – What Matters
October 10, 2025
: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making
“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” then-candidate Donald Trump said in a campaign video.
But less than nine months into his second term, he was explaining his administration’s stance this this way:
“We took the freedom of speech away,” he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.
Trump’s complete turnabout on speech is indicative of the contradictions and ironies in the bedrock principle of the American liberties in the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment.
While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US:
► A Ronald Reagan-appointed judge accused Trump’s administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment” for targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics.
► Conservative Supreme Court justices were skeptical at oral arguments over a Colorado law that bans debunked LGBT conversion therapy, suggesting it may step on the free speech rights of therapists.
► Trump wants colleges and universities to clamp down on campus speech in exchange for federal funding.
► He applauded his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, for trying to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled by ABC, an effort that backfired.
► His lawsuits against media companies and law firms, none of which appear to stand on firm legal ground, have nonetheless been wildly successful in extracting settlement payments and sending a message to firms that would oppose him.
► Companies like YouTube have reinstated accounts or made plans to do so for members of his administration, such as FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who were suspended for spreading misinformation during the pandemic.
► His attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to go after “hate speech” by people who she perceived as celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
The hate speech element is particularly concerning to experts because in recent decades, it has become a tenet of Supreme Court cases and free speech advocates that “hate speech” is such a nebulous term that leaving it unprotected would invite exactly the type of selective viewpoint-policing that the administration now stands accused of.
The hate speech in question was not any obviously repugnant White supremacist or racist ideology, but rather comments related to Kirk’s death, potentially including those who celebrated it. But we don’t really know since Bondi has not been specific.
Congress undercut the First Amendment almost immediately
US history is full of pendulum swings back and forth between freedom and restriction of speech.
The First Amendment, adopted shortly after the Constitution, guarantees Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
But within a few years, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the president, then John Adams, during the undeclared Quasi War between the US and France.
“The sad truth is, free speech has always been a weaponized slogan, right from the outset, when it’s first invented in the early 18th century,” according to Fara Dabhoiwala, a historian at Princeton University and author of the recent book “What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea.”
Benjamin Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache was among those arrested for “libeling” Adams under the law. Federalists also threw a Vermont publisher and congressman, Matthew Lyon, in jail for criticizing Adams in print.
(Among other things, Lyon wrote that Adams had “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp,” and, separately, started a fight on the House floor over Adams’ foreign policy. Lyon, attacked with a cane after he spat tobacco juice at a fellow lawmaker, defended himself with fire tongs.)
Far from silencing Lyon, however, the Sedition Act backfired. Lyon ran a successful campaign for Congress from jail. The unpopularity of the clampdown on speech helped lead to Adams’ defeat in the election of 1800.
Running for president from prison
Another wartime restriction on speech, the Sedition Act of 1918, led to the conviction and sentencing to 10 years in prison of the socialist Eugene Debs for his criticism of the draft during World War I.
The Supreme Court upheld his conviction, but Debs ran a presidential campaign from his jail cell in 1920 and got nearly 1 million votes. President Warren G. Harding later commuted Debs’ sentence.
Marketplace of ideas
Courts and people have complex and nuanced views on free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the unanimous majority opinion upholding Debs’ conviction, but he also wrote a key dissent in a case involving the conviction of Russian immigrants who distributed leaflets calling for a general strike in the US to interrupt the war effort.
In that 1919 dissent, he espoused what would become a more absolutist view of the benefits of free speech. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” he wrote.
Free speech and civil rights
In the US, the evolution of speech has also turned on issues of race.
“If you go to the 1830s you would see that abolitionism was brutally suppressed in many Southern states,” according to Jacob Mchangama, executive director at the Future of Free Speech, a think tank at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
“You would face jail if you spread abolitionist writings, so that was an attempt to try and contain abolitionists in the North from spreading their ideas to the South,” he told me in a phone interview.
Generations later, it was the civil rights movement that helped secure more and more protections for speech.
“The steady expansion of the First Amendment was to a very large extent accomplished by civil rights groups; you had the NAACP and Jewish organizations who were persuaded that adopting laws against group libel, as hate speech was often called, was detrimental to minorities,” Mchangama said.
Those protections have also helped protect the type of hateful speech that civil rights groups would abhor. Thurgood Marshall argued in favor of school desegregation at the Supreme Court as an NAACP lawyer in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
Later, as a Supreme Court justice, he ruled against an Ohio law in favor of KKK member Charles Brandenburg’s right to free speech.
It’s an important distinction between the US and much of the rest of the world, where laws are more likely to restrict speech. Mchangama points to people in European countries who have been jailed over Facebook posts, for instance.
Those cases are why Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both sought to lecture European countries about free speech — lectures that have not aged well as the Trump administration now tries to clamp down on dissent on college campuses and on television, among other places.
A third Red Scare
Dabhoiwala fears the US is entering a disturbing new period where speech is in danger.
Protections we enjoy today, he said, come out of the Red Scares of the late 1910s and the 1950s, “when government was trying to shut down socialist and communist speech and the speech of homosexuals and the speech of other kind of progressives.”
“And yet what we’re seeing is really a third Red Scare where once again, we have an authoritarian government trying to shut down political voices that it disagrees with,” Dabhoiwala said.
Flaw in the First Amendment?
The larger issue may be what Dabhoiwala sees as a major flaw in the First Amendment, which protects speech from the government but is narrowly drawn.
“The government may not censor you, but any private corporation can sack people for putting a bumper sticker on their car or for posting something online, and that’s that,” he said.
To that point, Kimmel was put back on the air not because of a definitive government action, but because ABC’s parent company, Disney, made a business decision.
ABC needs its broadcast licenses, although fewer and fewer people watch TV over the air. Tech companies jealously guard their exemption from liability for what’s posted on their platforms, a relic of telecommunications law that was passed in the 1990s before the Internet was much of a thing. If you’ve heard the term “section 230,” that’s what people are talking about.
“We’re in such a mess because these providers don’t have any legal responsibility to the truth or to the common good, and they are happily monetizing and making giant amounts of profit out of spreading lies and untruths alongside truth and deliberation of a serious kind,” Dabhoiwala said.
The problem of misinformation vs. the problem of misinformation correction
Mchangama agrees that untruths can spread quickly online, but he thinks the effects can be blown out of proportion and would be impossible to stop through content moderation.
“If you believe that everyone with an internet connection should be able to participate in the public sphere, then I think it’s impossible to try and combat mis- and disinformation through content moderation, because what constitutes mis- and disinformation is often very difficult to determine,” he said.
Dabhoiwala sees things differently. He wants more out of social media platforms because misinformation spreads quickly, but fact checking takes time.
“The moment we say this is all just the same and free speech, say what you like, you open the door to vast quantities of misinformation, to manipulation by hostile outside actors, by politicians just bullshitting their way to power,” he said.
Mchangama, on the other hand, hopes the American left will look at the Trump administration today and dial back on efforts to control speech.
“Power changes hands,” Mchangama said.
New leaders have new ideas about which groups are worthy of protection, and which should be targeted, which is what we’re seeing right now with Trump.
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s free speech back flip was 250 years in the making.
#2025 #America #CNN #CNNWhatMatters #DonaldTrump #Education #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates #WhatMatters
-
Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism: Martin Sostre, 1975
“The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism?”
One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre ’s essay, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross , Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of “repressive fascist measures” were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to “ infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.”
In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be “multi-dimensional,” “complex,” and able to meet people where they are.
Born in East Harlem on March 20, 1923, Martin Ramirez Sostre , was an Afro-Puerto Rican revolutionary anarchist. After a short stint in the army and a longer period of hustling, Sostre opened the legendary Afro Asian Book Shop at 1412 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, NY. The bookstore became a political and pedagogical refuge for many during the urban strife and whitesupremacist warfare that rocked the city in the late 1960s. In 1967, Sostre and co-worker Geraldine Robinson were arrested on COINTELPRO fabricated drug charges. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty to forty years in prison. Sostre spent the next decade in prison, often in solitary confinement, regularly humiliated and tortured by guards.
While incarcerated , Sostre became a successful “jailhouse lawyer” using legal appeals for his own rights. He also advocated for the religious and political rights of all prisoners and for the end of draconian policies of censorship, solitary confinement, and invasive bodily exams. As the editors of the North Carolina Central Law Review note in their introduction to Sostre’s 1973 essay “The New Prisoner” Sostre was also “the moving force behind the formation of a prisoners’ union in New York State and an advocate of minimum wages for inmate workers.” Sostre also introduced figures like Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchist theory and practice. Sostre was released from prison in 1976 through a combination of his own efforts and of the Free Martin Sostre campaign. He died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92.
A visionary with a highly attuned sense of both justice and praxis, Martin Sostre had the mind of a political strategist. These qualities are demonstrated in his essay “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism.” We reprint it below.
Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism
Martin Sostre
Sisters and Brothers:
The escalating repression by this predatory, racist and sexist capitalist system makes glaringly clear to all but the most politically backward that the dire predictions that U.S. capitalism would evolve into fascism have come to pass. Restoration of the death penalty, life sentences for drugs, recent supreme Court rulings upholding the denial of the right to live in communes, the right to privacy and human dignity (by granting police the right to arbitrarily invade peoples’ persons and homes and use as evidence in court anything seized during the illegal search), police electronic eavesdropping, infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide are some of the repressive fascist measures now being implemented.
The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism? Shall we continue spouting revolutionary rhetoric without commensurate deeds and passively stand by like sheep while our comrades are framed by the gestapo police kidnapped off the streets and murdered one by one? Must we passively wait our turn to be led to the oppressors’ cages, brutalised or murdered? Or shall we oppose the choking fascist oppression which if allowed to continue encroaching on what is left of our personal freedoms will eventually convert us into de-humanised mindless robots? The answer is obvious. Indeed, to defend ourselves by all means necessary against the destruction of our human rights and personhood not only is the natural right to self-defence but a human duty.
By what means then shall we resist the fascist oppressors? The answer to this is determined by the means employed to press us. Our oppression is multi-dimensional. We are oppressed economically, legally, psychologically, culturally, physically and by all other means deemed necessary by the criminal ruling class to maintain themselves in power. Since oppression is multi-dimensional, does not common sense dictate that resistance to it be multi-dimensional with each level of oppression challenged by a commensurate level of revolutionary resistance?
For example, the fascist lies propagated by the controlled media press must be challenged with revolutionary truth disseminated by the movement press, tapes, films, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, etc. Not too many revolutionaries and militants will disagree with this. Only when the same common-sense is applied to opposing fascist violence with revolutionary armed resistance do many of them become horrified. Witness the reaction of most of the movement people to SLA’s [Symbionese Liberation Army] revolutionary response to fascist repression.
The current revolutionary action of the SLA is the correct and inevitable response to the countless kidnappings, frame-ups, brutalisations and murders perpetrated by the ruling class members upon resistors of oppression. At long last the individual members of this exploitative-racist-sexist system are being subjected to revolutionary justice. As Malcolm X said, “It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” I extend my revolutionary love and solidarity to my SLA comrades and wish them every success.
Why then are so-called militants and revolutionaries so horrified when armed fascist repression is resisted by the armed might of the people? Do they expect the people to revert to the turn-the-other-cheek state of the 1950s and respond to fascist murder, sadistic brutalisation, frame-ups and tortures with passive acquiescence, love for our fascist enemies and cooperation in our own oppression?
Or is it that these horrified so-called militants and revolutionaries see the liberation struggle as one dimensional, to be fought solely on the level of consciousness they happen to be on? Surely they cannot be so politically retarded [sic] as to believe that in a liberation struggle the enemy should be fought on only one level – that approved by the enemy.
It is just as absurd to propose that everyone resist fascist oppression through peaceful means as to propose armed resistance for everyone. Just because I’m a revolutionary anarcho-communist who believes in armed struggle does not dogmatize me to propose that everyone arm and go underground. Nor would I denounce those who refuse to do so.
Paradoxically, though these leftists bitterly denounce all violence by US revolutionaries against the US ruling class, they highly praise as “heroic” the armed violence of the revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, Ireland, the Middle-East and Latin America. The rule seems to be that armed violence is an acceptable form of revolutionary struggle except when employed by US revolutionaries against the fascist ruling class of the US. In effect, it’s as if the role of these left groups is to protect the ruling class from violence and confine the liberation struggle to the boundaries of legal activities approved by the ruling class.
However, the irrefutable truth is that a liberation struggle is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war is a complicated process of mass struggle, armed and unarmed, peace and violent, legal and clandestine, economic and political, where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axle of armed struggle. Anyone who by now has not grasped these basic facts does not know what liberation struggle is – or is trying to palm off reformism for liberation struggle.
A distinction must be made between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists seek merely to reform through legal means, and not overthrow the existing fascist system. That’s why they panic when the people exercise their right to armed self-defence against the genocidal violence of the fascist ruling class. Revolutionaries seek the complete overthrow of the fascist system by all means necessary including armed struggle. Revolutionaries seek, moreover, to subject to peoples’ justice individual members of the ruling class for their many crimes against humanity.
The spreading of the East and West coasts of the philosophy of subjecting members and agents of the ruling class to people’s justice attests to how widespread this revolutionary concept has become. It can never be erased from the consciousness of the people, the revolutionary clock.
At long last the peoples’ armed force has emerged within the United States to oppose the gestapo of the ruling class. The balance of power has radically shifted. Gone forever are the days when fascists could prepare every conceivable crime with impunity. The price of oppression has been raised and shall soon become prohibitive.
The stolen billions of dollars possessed by members of the criminal ruling class shall soon become a liability. They’ll be forced to convert their mansions into fortresses protected by round the clock armed guards and electronic protective devices. Every venture outside the besieged fortress will require escorts of armed guards. Even this will not guarantee safety. For revolutionary justice shall stalk the fascist criminals at every turn. Already the people’s army has sent shivers of fear through the spine of the criminal ruling class who clearly recognise the signs as meaning: the beginning of the end.
Conversely, the people’s armed self-defence force has created new hope in the hearts of the oppressed – particularly revolutionary comrades held hostage in fascist prisons serving long sentences. Soon the fascist ruling class will be forced to free these prisoners of war in exchange for captured members of their own class.
The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Indeed, some movement papers quoted statements from the controlled press to support their claim that the people rejected the kidnapping. The criminal ruling class rubbed their hands in glee and publicised how divided the left was over the SLA. Each left organisation seemed to be competing with the others for legitimacy by denouncing the SLA. It was utterly disgusting, reactionary and opportunistic.
Nor were the denunciations made in a spirit of constructive criticism by fellow comrades. No attempt was made by the movement press to publicise the SLA’s programme, analyse it and point out where it was erroneous. The criticism was deliberately hostile and designed to isolate the SLA by poisoning people’s minds against them.
Conspicuously absent from the denunciations of the SLA in the movement press is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. The impression given is that armed struggle is not an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, that revolutionary violence is something repulsive which should be shunned. The left movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations, protest and repeat revolutionary slogans. Even after Chile (the lates of a series of tragedies where thousands of defenceless comrades were slaughtered because of the criminal refusal of leftist leaders to arm the people against the armed might of the ruling class) the movement in the United States still follows the same ill-fated line of Allende – as evidenced by the bitter denunciations of the armed action of the SLA.
Most movement organisations are so busy following their dogmatic party lines, repeating revolutionary cliches and downing other movement groups that they’re unable to see the self-evident. Were their natural powers of perception and consciousness not stultified by party-lineism they would know that a revolutionary liberation movement must deal with the enemy concurrently on all levels, including armed violence. Otherwise when the inevitable showdown with the ruling class comes, the revolution will be left defenceless and the lives of our beloved comrades needlessly sacrificed.
The SLA is the armed resistance of the people to the exploitative, racist and sexist fascism which is now upon us. All resistors of oppression, on whatever level of conscience they may be, should rejoice at the SLA’s existence, at their successful deeds and the fear they put in the hearts of the criminal ruling class. It’s therefore the duty of us all to support by all means necessary, our SLA comrades. We must close ranks with them and give them the support they need. Let’s not fall for the malicious lies spread by agents of the FBI about the SLA which are designed to isolate the SLA from the people to make it easier to capture and murder them.
I have carefully studied the Declaration of the Revolutionary War and the Symbionese Liberation Army and find it generally sound. It incorporates much of our historical revolutionary experience. I believe that the Symbionese Liberation Army has one of the most advanced revolutionary programmes for liberation in operation within the United States of America.
The SLA represents the greatest challenge to fascist power because it objectifies the nucleus of the people’s army which as history shows is necessary to deliver the death-blow to the military arm of the fascist parasitic class.
Your comrade in struggle,
Martin Sostre
Martin Sostre, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross 4 no. 3 (August 1975)
source: Black Agenda Report
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18127
#armedStruggle #blackLiberation #martinSostre #northAmerica #revolution
-
Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism: Martin Sostre, 1975
“The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism?”
One might not guess it from its title, but Martin Sostre ’s essay, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” is a nuanced, careful, and eloquent consideration of political strategy in the context of repressive, totalitarian rule. Published in 1975 in the magazine Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross , Sostre’s essay is partly a response to leftist critiques of the strategies of the controversial Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA, whose acts of assassination, kidnapping, and armed-robbery were often deemed vanguardist, tactically-ill thought, and politically disastrous. Yet Sostre reads the theoretical manifesto of the SLA against the real-world political conditions in the United States, where in the 1970s, just as now, a set of “repressive fascist measures” were being implemented—from restoration of the death penalty to a system of total surveillance to “ infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide.”
In this light, Sostre asks, what should the popular response to fascism look like? If the political rhetoric of fascism is white supremacy and its primal political program is violence, can it only be challenged via appeals to humanity, calls for reform, or prayers for peace, democracy, and non-violence? Sostre is also clear, however, that the fight against fascism demands not a single strategy, but a range of strategies: the anti-fascist response must be “multi-dimensional,” “complex,” and able to meet people where they are.
Born in East Harlem on March 20, 1923, Martin Ramirez Sostre , was an Afro-Puerto Rican revolutionary anarchist. After a short stint in the army and a longer period of hustling, Sostre opened the legendary Afro Asian Book Shop at 1412 Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, NY. The bookstore became a political and pedagogical refuge for many during the urban strife and whitesupremacist warfare that rocked the city in the late 1960s. In 1967, Sostre and co-worker Geraldine Robinson were arrested on COINTELPRO fabricated drug charges. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty to forty years in prison. Sostre spent the next decade in prison, often in solitary confinement, regularly humiliated and tortured by guards.
While incarcerated , Sostre became a successful “jailhouse lawyer” using legal appeals for his own rights. He also advocated for the religious and political rights of all prisoners and for the end of draconian policies of censorship, solitary confinement, and invasive bodily exams. As the editors of the North Carolina Central Law Review note in their introduction to Sostre’s 1973 essay “The New Prisoner” Sostre was also “the moving force behind the formation of a prisoners’ union in New York State and an advocate of minimum wages for inmate workers.” Sostre also introduced figures like Black anarchist Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchist theory and practice. Sostre was released from prison in 1976 through a combination of his own efforts and of the Free Martin Sostre campaign. He died on August 12, 2015 at the age of 92.
A visionary with a highly attuned sense of both justice and praxis, Martin Sostre had the mind of a political strategist. These qualities are demonstrated in his essay “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism.” We reprint it below.
Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism
Martin Sostre
Sisters and Brothers:
The escalating repression by this predatory, racist and sexist capitalist system makes glaringly clear to all but the most politically backward that the dire predictions that U.S. capitalism would evolve into fascism have come to pass. Restoration of the death penalty, life sentences for drugs, recent supreme Court rulings upholding the denial of the right to live in communes, the right to privacy and human dignity (by granting police the right to arbitrarily invade peoples’ persons and homes and use as evidence in court anything seized during the illegal search), police electronic eavesdropping, infiltration, frame-ups, assassinations, brutalisations, de-humanisations, behaviour modification, and genocide are some of the repressive fascist measures now being implemented.
The question now is: What are we going to do about this murderous fascism? Shall we continue spouting revolutionary rhetoric without commensurate deeds and passively stand by like sheep while our comrades are framed by the gestapo police kidnapped off the streets and murdered one by one? Must we passively wait our turn to be led to the oppressors’ cages, brutalised or murdered? Or shall we oppose the choking fascist oppression which if allowed to continue encroaching on what is left of our personal freedoms will eventually convert us into de-humanised mindless robots? The answer is obvious. Indeed, to defend ourselves by all means necessary against the destruction of our human rights and personhood not only is the natural right to self-defence but a human duty.
By what means then shall we resist the fascist oppressors? The answer to this is determined by the means employed to press us. Our oppression is multi-dimensional. We are oppressed economically, legally, psychologically, culturally, physically and by all other means deemed necessary by the criminal ruling class to maintain themselves in power. Since oppression is multi-dimensional, does not common sense dictate that resistance to it be multi-dimensional with each level of oppression challenged by a commensurate level of revolutionary resistance?
For example, the fascist lies propagated by the controlled media press must be challenged with revolutionary truth disseminated by the movement press, tapes, films, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, etc. Not too many revolutionaries and militants will disagree with this. Only when the same common-sense is applied to opposing fascist violence with revolutionary armed resistance do many of them become horrified. Witness the reaction of most of the movement people to SLA’s [Symbionese Liberation Army] revolutionary response to fascist repression.
The current revolutionary action of the SLA is the correct and inevitable response to the countless kidnappings, frame-ups, brutalisations and murders perpetrated by the ruling class members upon resistors of oppression. At long last the individual members of this exploitative-racist-sexist system are being subjected to revolutionary justice. As Malcolm X said, “It’s a case of the chickens coming home to roost.” I extend my revolutionary love and solidarity to my SLA comrades and wish them every success.
Why then are so-called militants and revolutionaries so horrified when armed fascist repression is resisted by the armed might of the people? Do they expect the people to revert to the turn-the-other-cheek state of the 1950s and respond to fascist murder, sadistic brutalisation, frame-ups and tortures with passive acquiescence, love for our fascist enemies and cooperation in our own oppression?
Or is it that these horrified so-called militants and revolutionaries see the liberation struggle as one dimensional, to be fought solely on the level of consciousness they happen to be on? Surely they cannot be so politically retarded [sic] as to believe that in a liberation struggle the enemy should be fought on only one level – that approved by the enemy.
It is just as absurd to propose that everyone resist fascist oppression through peaceful means as to propose armed resistance for everyone. Just because I’m a revolutionary anarcho-communist who believes in armed struggle does not dogmatize me to propose that everyone arm and go underground. Nor would I denounce those who refuse to do so.
Paradoxically, though these leftists bitterly denounce all violence by US revolutionaries against the US ruling class, they highly praise as “heroic” the armed violence of the revolutionaries in Africa, Asia, Ireland, the Middle-East and Latin America. The rule seems to be that armed violence is an acceptable form of revolutionary struggle except when employed by US revolutionaries against the fascist ruling class of the US. In effect, it’s as if the role of these left groups is to protect the ruling class from violence and confine the liberation struggle to the boundaries of legal activities approved by the ruling class.
However, the irrefutable truth is that a liberation struggle is revolutionary war. Revolutionary war is a complicated process of mass struggle, armed and unarmed, peace and violent, legal and clandestine, economic and political, where all forms of struggle are developed harmoniously around the axle of armed struggle. Anyone who by now has not grasped these basic facts does not know what liberation struggle is – or is trying to palm off reformism for liberation struggle.
A distinction must be made between reformists and revolutionaries. Reformists seek merely to reform through legal means, and not overthrow the existing fascist system. That’s why they panic when the people exercise their right to armed self-defence against the genocidal violence of the fascist ruling class. Revolutionaries seek the complete overthrow of the fascist system by all means necessary including armed struggle. Revolutionaries seek, moreover, to subject to peoples’ justice individual members of the ruling class for their many crimes against humanity.
The spreading of the East and West coasts of the philosophy of subjecting members and agents of the ruling class to people’s justice attests to how widespread this revolutionary concept has become. It can never be erased from the consciousness of the people, the revolutionary clock.
At long last the peoples’ armed force has emerged within the United States to oppose the gestapo of the ruling class. The balance of power has radically shifted. Gone forever are the days when fascists could prepare every conceivable crime with impunity. The price of oppression has been raised and shall soon become prohibitive.
The stolen billions of dollars possessed by members of the criminal ruling class shall soon become a liability. They’ll be forced to convert their mansions into fortresses protected by round the clock armed guards and electronic protective devices. Every venture outside the besieged fortress will require escorts of armed guards. Even this will not guarantee safety. For revolutionary justice shall stalk the fascist criminals at every turn. Already the people’s army has sent shivers of fear through the spine of the criminal ruling class who clearly recognise the signs as meaning: the beginning of the end.
Conversely, the people’s armed self-defence force has created new hope in the hearts of the oppressed – particularly revolutionary comrades held hostage in fascist prisons serving long sentences. Soon the fascist ruling class will be forced to free these prisoners of war in exchange for captured members of their own class.
The denunciation of the SLA by the movement press is indistinguishable from that of the ruling class. Indeed, some movement papers quoted statements from the controlled press to support their claim that the people rejected the kidnapping. The criminal ruling class rubbed their hands in glee and publicised how divided the left was over the SLA. Each left organisation seemed to be competing with the others for legitimacy by denouncing the SLA. It was utterly disgusting, reactionary and opportunistic.
Nor were the denunciations made in a spirit of constructive criticism by fellow comrades. No attempt was made by the movement press to publicise the SLA’s programme, analyse it and point out where it was erroneous. The criticism was deliberately hostile and designed to isolate the SLA by poisoning people’s minds against them.
Conspicuously absent from the denunciations of the SLA in the movement press is any discussion of the role of armed struggle. The impression given is that armed struggle is not an essential part of the revolutionary struggle, that revolutionary violence is something repulsive which should be shunned. The left movement press would have one believe that to overthrow the criminal ruling class we have merely to organise mass movements, demonstrations, protest and repeat revolutionary slogans. Even after Chile (the lates of a series of tragedies where thousands of defenceless comrades were slaughtered because of the criminal refusal of leftist leaders to arm the people against the armed might of the ruling class) the movement in the United States still follows the same ill-fated line of Allende – as evidenced by the bitter denunciations of the armed action of the SLA.
Most movement organisations are so busy following their dogmatic party lines, repeating revolutionary cliches and downing other movement groups that they’re unable to see the self-evident. Were their natural powers of perception and consciousness not stultified by party-lineism they would know that a revolutionary liberation movement must deal with the enemy concurrently on all levels, including armed violence. Otherwise when the inevitable showdown with the ruling class comes, the revolution will be left defenceless and the lives of our beloved comrades needlessly sacrificed.
The SLA is the armed resistance of the people to the exploitative, racist and sexist fascism which is now upon us. All resistors of oppression, on whatever level of conscience they may be, should rejoice at the SLA’s existence, at their successful deeds and the fear they put in the hearts of the criminal ruling class. It’s therefore the duty of us all to support by all means necessary, our SLA comrades. We must close ranks with them and give them the support they need. Let’s not fall for the malicious lies spread by agents of the FBI about the SLA which are designed to isolate the SLA from the people to make it easier to capture and murder them.
I have carefully studied the Declaration of the Revolutionary War and the Symbionese Liberation Army and find it generally sound. It incorporates much of our historical revolutionary experience. I believe that the Symbionese Liberation Army has one of the most advanced revolutionary programmes for liberation in operation within the United States of America.
The SLA represents the greatest challenge to fascist power because it objectifies the nucleus of the people’s army which as history shows is necessary to deliver the death-blow to the military arm of the fascist parasitic class.
Your comrade in struggle,
Martin Sostre
Martin Sostre, “Armed Struggle: Natural Response to Fascism,” Black Flag: Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross 4 no. 3 (August 1975)
source: Black Agenda Report
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=18127
#armedStruggle #blackLiberation #martinSostre #northAmerica #revolution
-
ALEXANDERS: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERBAL HISTORY by Veronica Smith
In 2003, I wrote a piece for the Irish Garden Plant Society (newsletter No: 87) entitled “Alexanders and Archaeology?” It was prompted by articles published in “Archaeology Ireland” (issue nos: 53 & 54) in which experts argued that viable plant seeds could lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. It was suggested that archaeologists working on sites should take note of any strange plants, as these could give clues to historic land usage.
One plant mentioned was Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), imported by medieval monks for their vegetable plots. Alexanders rarely occurs naturally away from the sea, except at medieval sites, and yet my garden in the inland county of Carlow, Ireland, was full of it! Mind you, the place name of the area was “Kilknock”, from the Gaelic Cill Cnoc, which translates as “church on the hill”; so it is possible that my Alexanders was originally planted by medieval monks one thousand years ago!
Those articles whetted my appetite for more information but it was hard to find. Alexanders is no longer the popular plant it once was, and it is known by several different names. Evidently, it originates from south-west Europe, around the Mediterranean, and was officially recognised by the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus as early as 322BCE.
Alexanders is related to herb Lovage and is often called “Black Lovage”. Its generic name “Smyrnium” comes from the Greek word for Myrrh, because of its myrrh-like flavour. The specific name “olusatrum”, means “Black Pot Herb”, referring to the plant’s black seeds that can be ground up and used like pepper. However, its Medieval Latin name was “Petroselinum alexandrinum”, meaning “Parsley of Alexandria” and this is how we got the popular name of Alexanders.
The Romans introduced Alexanders to Britain, along with many other Mediterranean plants. Ireland had to wait another one thousand years, when medieval monks brought Alexanders with them for their monastery gardens, where it was used for flavouring and as an early spring vegetable. Later, the great herbalists Culpepper and William Coles included Alexanders in their list of useful plants for the kitchen garden. This is why so much Alexanders is found growing by the ruins of old abbeys and castles here in Ireland and in the west of England. It was still being cultivated up until the early 18th century, when it was replaced by Celery!
I can understand why Alexanders was so highly prized in the past. It is a strong, vigorous plant that seeds easily. The first leaves appear at the end of winter, when there is little else; they taste like parsley and can be used as such, while the real parsley is still limp with frost! As it grows, you can cook and eat the succulent stems, best taken from the bottom near the root. Later, the delicate lime-green flower buds can be cooked and added to salads. There’s a recipe from 1675 for “a grand sallet of Alexander Buds” by Robert May. Unfortunately, the Alexanders that grew in my Irish garden tasted more like turpentine than parsley or aniseed, so I can understand why the milder-flavoured celery replaced it in the kitchen!
Regardless of taste, Alexanders was accredited with many medicinal qualities. For example, the powdered seeds taken in wine could expel retained after-birth, relieve trapped wind and even neutralise snake-bite! The stewed roots would help digest a Lenten diet containing too much fish! The bruised leaves, when applied to wounds, would stop the bleeding. The list is long and varied. So no wonder it was grown in all the gardens of Europe.
Even earlier, in ancient Greece, it was revered as a Sacred Herb, favoured by the head of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus. Ruled by the planet Jupiter and the element of Fire, Alexanders represented the Male Force of the Universe. Used as a tea or as incense or added to the bath, it could help to explore one’s Masculine side and to connect with the God Principle, especially at Summer Solstice, when fiery Male Energy reaches its Zenith.
While Alexanders may have lost favour in the kitchen / herb garden, it is still a plant worth knowing. To identify it, Alexanders is a strong, bushy-looking biennial umbellifer, which grows up to 4 ft / 1.25 metres high. It has large, SHINY bright-green tri-foliate leaves, like Lovage, consisting of three broad, toothed leaflets with a veined membraneous bract enclosing the base of the leaf stalks. The flowers, growing in fat, round, tightly-massed umbels, are a vivid lime green and appear in the spring. When ripe, the globular seeds turn black, giving the plant the folk-name of “Black Pot Herb” and “Black Lovage”. I’ve also seen a variegated Alexanders grown in the RHS headquarters in Wisley Gardens, UK, showing that there are still some fans out there!
RECIPES FOR ALEXANDERS
ALEXANDERS SAUCE, (made in late winter).
A main attraction of this herb / vegetable is that it is one of the earliest “greens” to appear in the garden. The young bright green Alexander leaves have a fresh taste of parsley, long before the real parsley plants have come out of winter dormancy. You will need:
1 tablespoon butter;
1 tablespoon plain flour;
½ pint milk;
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped Alexanders leaves (about 2 handfuls of picked leaves);
salt, pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a low setting and carefully stir in the sifted flour. Gradually add the milk a little at a time, stirring continuously (preferably with a whisk), to make sure that it is smooth, not lumpy. When all the milk has been added and the mix is smooth, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth. At this point, add the chopped Alexanders leaves and condiments (salt and pepper). Serve at once. This sauce does the same job as parsley sauce, tasting delicious on fish, chicken, vegetables. You can even sprinkle fresh chopped Alexanders leaves as a garnish. Enjoy!
ALEXANDERS BUDS AS SALAD (Spring)
the delicate, lime-green flower buds of Alexanders taste very good in a mixed salad or served on their own with a French Dressing.
Serves 4 people.
1 pint of Alexanders buds;
3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar;
salt and pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.
Wash the buds and trim away any stalks. Cook them in a little boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, until tender. Drain and allow to cool. Toss the buds in the dressing and turn into a shallow dish or serve on top of a mixed salad. Enjoy!ALEXANDERS STEMS AS A VEGETABLE (spring, early summer)
The young stems of Alexanders are quite succulent (which is why they were used like modern celery before celery had been developed) and cooking removes the turpentine-like scent. The best part of the stem is at the bottom, so cut the stems as low to the ground as you can.
You will need:
1 double handful of Alexanders stems and some butter.
Trim away the leaves and green parts of the stems, keeping only the lower parts that are white and pale. Wash the stems thoroughly and cook in boiling salted water for 10 – 15 minutes, until a fork can easily pierce the thickest stem. Drain and serve with melted butter. Enjoy!CRYSTALLISED ALEXANDERS (Spring only)
Gather however many young Alexanders stems as you care to preserve. Then wash them and cut them into 3 inch pieces. Bring a preserving pan filled with water to the boil, add the stems to the boiling water and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, weigh and put into a large ceramic / glass dish. Add an equal weight of sugar to the cooked stems, cover and leave overnight. The next day, put the sugar-and- Alexanders mix back into the preserving pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the sugar-syrup has almost evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and ladle out the crystallised stems onto a wire rack. Leave them to set and then store in an airtight jar. Enjoy!Author: Veronica Smith first published on 13 April 2016 under the title “Alexanders: Medieval Monks’ Meal”.
References:
ALL GOOD THINGS AROUND US by Pamela Michael and Christabel King; published by Ernst Benn Ltd in 1980; ISBN: 0 510 00055 X
HERB CRAFT: A GUIDE TO THE SHAMANIC AND RITUAL USE OF HERBS by Susan Lavender and Anna Franklin; printed by Capall Bann Publishing, UK in 1996; ISBN: 1 898307 57 9
#AlexandersPlant #food #foraging #gardening #HerbAlexanders #herbalMedicine #PlantLore #recipe #recipes
-
ALEXANDERS: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERBAL HISTORY by Veronica Smith
In 2003, I wrote a piece for the Irish Garden Plant Society (newsletter No: 87) entitled “Alexanders and Archaeology?” It was prompted by articles published in “Archaeology Ireland” (issue nos: 53 & 54) in which experts argued that viable plant seeds could lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. It was suggested that archaeologists working on sites should take note of any strange plants, as these could give clues to historic land usage.
One plant mentioned was Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), imported by medieval monks for their vegetable plots. Alexanders rarely occurs naturally away from the sea, except at medieval sites, and yet my garden in the inland county of Carlow, Ireland, was full of it! Mind you, the place name of the area was “Kilknock”, from the Gaelic Cill Cnoc, which translates as “church on the hill”; so it is possible that my Alexanders was originally planted by medieval monks one thousand years ago!
Those articles whetted my appetite for more information but it was hard to find. Alexanders is no longer the popular plant it once was, and it is known by several different names. Evidently, it originates from south-west Europe, around the Mediterranean, and was officially recognised by the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus as early as 322BCE.
Alexanders is related to herb Lovage and is often called “Black Lovage”. Its generic name “Smyrnium” comes from the Greek word for Myrrh, because of its myrrh-like flavour. The specific name “olusatrum”, means “Black Pot Herb”, referring to the plant’s black seeds that can be ground up and used like pepper. However, its Medieval Latin name was “Petroselinum alexandrinum”, meaning “Parsley of Alexandria” and this is how we got the popular name of Alexanders.
The Romans introduced Alexanders to Britain, along with many other Mediterranean plants. Ireland had to wait another one thousand years, when medieval monks brought Alexanders with them for their monastery gardens, where it was used for flavouring and as an early spring vegetable. Later, the great herbalists Culpepper and William Coles included Alexanders in their list of useful plants for the kitchen garden. This is why so much Alexanders is found growing by the ruins of old abbeys and castles here in Ireland and in the west of England. It was still being cultivated up until the early 18th century, when it was replaced by Celery!
I can understand why Alexanders was so highly prized in the past. It is a strong, vigorous plant that seeds easily. The first leaves appear at the end of winter, when there is little else; they taste like parsley and can be used as such, while the real parsley is still limp with frost! As it grows, you can cook and eat the succulent stems, best taken from the bottom near the root. Later, the delicate lime-green flower buds can be cooked and added to salads. There’s a recipe from 1675 for “a grand sallet of Alexander Buds” by Robert May. Unfortunately, the Alexanders that grew in my Irish garden tasted more like turpentine than parsley or aniseed, so I can understand why the milder-flavoured celery replaced it in the kitchen!
Regardless of taste, Alexanders was accredited with many medicinal qualities. For example, the powdered seeds taken in wine could expel retained after-birth, relieve trapped wind and even neutralise snake-bite! The stewed roots would help digest a Lenten diet containing too much fish! The bruised leaves, when applied to wounds, would stop the bleeding. The list is long and varied. So no wonder it was grown in all the gardens of Europe.
Even earlier, in ancient Greece, it was revered as a Sacred Herb, favoured by the head of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus. Ruled by the planet Jupiter and the element of Fire, Alexanders represented the Male Force of the Universe. Used as a tea or as incense or added to the bath, it could help to explore one’s Masculine side and to connect with the God Principle, especially at Summer Solstice, when fiery Male Energy reaches its Zenith.
While Alexanders may have lost favour in the kitchen / herb garden, it is still a plant worth knowing. To identify it, Alexanders is a strong, bushy-looking biennial umbellifer, which grows up to 4 ft / 1.25 metres high. It has large, SHINY bright-green tri-foliate leaves, like Lovage, consisting of three broad, toothed leaflets with a veined membraneous bract enclosing the base of the leaf stalks. The flowers, growing in fat, round, tightly-massed umbels, are a vivid lime green and appear in the spring. When ripe, the globular seeds turn black, giving the plant the folk-name of “Black Pot Herb” and “Black Lovage”. I’ve also seen a variegated Alexanders grown in the RHS headquarters in Wisley Gardens, UK, showing that there are still some fans out there!
RECIPES FOR ALEXANDERS
ALEXANDERS SAUCE, (made in late winter).
A main attraction of this herb / vegetable is that it is one of the earliest “greens” to appear in the garden. The young bright green Alexander leaves have a fresh taste of parsley, long before the real parsley plants have come out of winter dormancy. You will need:
1 tablespoon butter;
1 tablespoon plain flour;
½ pint milk;
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped Alexanders leaves (about 2 handfuls of picked leaves);
salt, pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a low setting and carefully stir in the sifted flour. Gradually add the milk a little at a time, stirring continuously (preferably with a whisk), to make sure that it is smooth, not lumpy. When all the milk has been added and the mix is smooth, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth. At this point, add the chopped Alexanders leaves and condiments (salt and pepper). Serve at once. This sauce does the same job as parsley sauce, tasting delicious on fish, chicken, vegetables. You can even sprinkle fresh chopped Alexanders leaves as a garnish. Enjoy!
ALEXANDERS BUDS AS SALAD (Spring)
the delicate, lime-green flower buds of Alexanders taste very good in a mixed salad or served on their own with a French Dressing.
Serves 4 people.
1 pint of Alexanders buds;
3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar;
salt and pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.
Wash the buds and trim away any stalks. Cook them in a little boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, until tender. Drain and allow to cool. Toss the buds in the dressing and turn into a shallow dish or serve on top of a mixed salad. Enjoy!ALEXANDERS STEMS AS A VEGETABLE (spring, early summer)
The young stems of Alexanders are quite succulent (which is why they were used like modern celery before celery had been developed) and cooking removes the turpentine-like scent. The best part of the stem is at the bottom, so cut the stems as low to the ground as you can.
You will need:
1 double handful of Alexanders stems and some butter.
Trim away the leaves and green parts of the stems, keeping only the lower parts that are white and pale. Wash the stems thoroughly and cook in boiling salted water for 10 – 15 minutes, until a fork can easily pierce the thickest stem. Drain and serve with melted butter. Enjoy!CRYSTALLISED ALEXANDERS (Spring only)
Gather however many young Alexanders stems as you care to preserve. Then wash them and cut them into 3 inch pieces. Bring a preserving pan filled with water to the boil, add the stems to the boiling water and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, weigh and put into a large ceramic / glass dish. Add an equal weight of sugar to the cooked stems, cover and leave overnight. The next day, put the sugar-and- Alexanders mix back into the preserving pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the sugar-syrup has almost evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and ladle out the crystallised stems onto a wire rack. Leave them to set and then store in an airtight jar. Enjoy!Author: Veronica Smith first published on 13 April 2016 under the title “Alexanders: Medieval Monks’ Meal”.
References:
ALL GOOD THINGS AROUND US by Pamela Michael and Christabel King; published by Ernst Benn Ltd in 1980; ISBN: 0 510 00055 X
HERB CRAFT: A GUIDE TO THE SHAMANIC AND RITUAL USE OF HERBS by Susan Lavender and Anna Franklin; printed by Capall Bann Publishing, UK in 1996; ISBN: 1 898307 57 9
#AlexandersPlant #food #foraging #gardening #HerbAlexanders #herbalMedicine #PlantLore #recipe #recipes
-
ALEXANDERS: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERBAL HISTORY by Veronica Smith
In 2003, I wrote a piece for the Irish Garden Plant Society (newsletter No: 87) entitled “Alexanders and Archaeology?” It was prompted by articles published in “Archaeology Ireland” (issue nos: 53 & 54) in which experts argued that viable plant seeds could lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. It was suggested that archaeologists working on sites should take note of any strange plants, as these could give clues to historic land usage.
One plant mentioned was Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), imported by medieval monks for their vegetable plots. Alexanders rarely occurs naturally away from the sea, except at medieval sites, and yet my garden in the inland county of Carlow, Ireland, was full of it! Mind you, the place name of the area was “Kilknock”, from the Gaelic Cill Cnoc, which translates as “church on the hill”; so it is possible that my Alexanders was originally planted by medieval monks one thousand years ago!
Those articles whetted my appetite for more information but it was hard to find. Alexanders is no longer the popular plant it once was, and it is known by several different names. Evidently, it originates from south-west Europe, around the Mediterranean, and was officially recognised by the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus as early as 322BCE.
Alexanders is related to herb Lovage and is often called “Black Lovage”. Its generic name “Smyrnium” comes from the Greek word for Myrrh, because of its myrrh-like flavour. The specific name “olusatrum”, means “Black Pot Herb”, referring to the plant’s black seeds that can be ground up and used like pepper. However, its Medieval Latin name was “Petroselinum alexandrinum”, meaning “Parsley of Alexandria” and this is how we got the popular name of Alexanders.
The Romans introduced Alexanders to Britain, along with many other Mediterranean plants. Ireland had to wait another one thousand years, when medieval monks brought Alexanders with them for their monastery gardens, where it was used for flavouring and as an early spring vegetable. Later, the great herbalists Culpepper and William Coles included Alexanders in their list of useful plants for the kitchen garden. This is why so much Alexanders is found growing by the ruins of old abbeys and castles here in Ireland and in the west of England. It was still being cultivated up until the early 18th century, when it was replaced by Celery!
I can understand why Alexanders was so highly prized in the past. It is a strong, vigorous plant that seeds easily. The first leaves appear at the end of winter, when there is little else; they taste like parsley and can be used as such, while the real parsley is still limp with frost! As it grows, you can cook and eat the succulent stems, best taken from the bottom near the root. Later, the delicate lime-green flower buds can be cooked and added to salads. There’s a recipe from 1675 for “a grand sallet of Alexander Buds” by Robert May. Unfortunately, the Alexanders that grew in my Irish garden tasted more like turpentine than parsley or aniseed, so I can understand why the milder-flavoured celery replaced it in the kitchen!
Regardless of taste, Alexanders was accredited with many medicinal qualities. For example, the powdered seeds taken in wine could expel retained after-birth, relieve trapped wind and even neutralise snake-bite! The stewed roots would help digest a Lenten diet containing too much fish! The bruised leaves, when applied to wounds, would stop the bleeding. The list is long and varied. So no wonder it was grown in all the gardens of Europe.
Even earlier, in ancient Greece, it was revered as a Sacred Herb, favoured by the head of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus. Ruled by the planet Jupiter and the element of Fire, Alexanders represented the Male Force of the Universe. Used as a tea or as incense or added to the bath, it could help to explore one’s Masculine side and to connect with the God Principle, especially at Summer Solstice, when fiery Male Energy reaches its Zenith.
While Alexanders may have lost favour in the kitchen / herb garden, it is still a plant worth knowing. To identify it, Alexanders is a strong, bushy-looking biennial umbellifer, which grows up to 4 ft / 1.25 metres high. It has large, SHINY bright-green tri-foliate leaves, like Lovage, consisting of three broad, toothed leaflets with a veined membraneous bract enclosing the base of the leaf stalks. The flowers, growing in fat, round, tightly-massed umbels, are a vivid lime green and appear in the spring. When ripe, the globular seeds turn black, giving the plant the folk-name of “Black Pot Herb” and “Black Lovage”. I’ve also seen a variegated Alexanders grown in the RHS headquarters in Wisley Gardens, UK, showing that there are still some fans out there!
RECIPES FOR ALEXANDERS
ALEXANDERS SAUCE, (made in late winter).
A main attraction of this herb / vegetable is that it is one of the earliest “greens” to appear in the garden. The young bright green Alexander leaves have a fresh taste of parsley, long before the real parsley plants have come out of winter dormancy. You will need:
1 tablespoon butter;
1 tablespoon plain flour;
½ pint milk;
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped Alexanders leaves (about 2 handfuls of picked leaves);
salt, pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a low setting and carefully stir in the sifted flour. Gradually add the milk a little at a time, stirring continuously (preferably with a whisk), to make sure that it is smooth, not lumpy. When all the milk has been added and the mix is smooth, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth. At this point, add the chopped Alexanders leaves and condiments (salt and pepper). Serve at once. This sauce does the same job as parsley sauce, tasting delicious on fish, chicken, vegetables. You can even sprinkle fresh chopped Alexanders leaves as a garnish. Enjoy!
ALEXANDERS BUDS AS SALAD (Spring)
the delicate, lime-green flower buds of Alexanders taste very good in a mixed salad or served on their own with a French Dressing.
Serves 4 people.
1 pint of Alexanders buds;
3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar;
salt and pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.
Wash the buds and trim away any stalks. Cook them in a little boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, until tender. Drain and allow to cool. Toss the buds in the dressing and turn into a shallow dish or serve on top of a mixed salad. Enjoy!ALEXANDERS STEMS AS A VEGETABLE (spring, early summer)
The young stems of Alexanders are quite succulent (which is why they were used like modern celery before celery had been developed) and cooking removes the turpentine-like scent. The best part of the stem is at the bottom, so cut the stems as low to the ground as you can.
You will need:
1 double handful of Alexanders stems and some butter.
Trim away the leaves and green parts of the stems, keeping only the lower parts that are white and pale. Wash the stems thoroughly and cook in boiling salted water for 10 – 15 minutes, until a fork can easily pierce the thickest stem. Drain and serve with melted butter. Enjoy!CRYSTALLISED ALEXANDERS (Spring only)
Gather however many young Alexanders stems as you care to preserve. Then wash them and cut them into 3 inch pieces. Bring a preserving pan filled with water to the boil, add the stems to the boiling water and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, weigh and put into a large ceramic / glass dish. Add an equal weight of sugar to the cooked stems, cover and leave overnight. The next day, put the sugar-and- Alexanders mix back into the preserving pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the sugar-syrup has almost evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and ladle out the crystallised stems onto a wire rack. Leave them to set and then store in an airtight jar. Enjoy!Author: Veronica Smith first published on 13 April 2016 under the title “Alexanders: Medieval Monks’ Meal”.
References:
ALL GOOD THINGS AROUND US by Pamela Michael and Christabel King; published by Ernst Benn Ltd in 1980; ISBN: 0 510 00055 X
HERB CRAFT: A GUIDE TO THE SHAMANIC AND RITUAL USE OF HERBS by Susan Lavender and Anna Franklin; printed by Capall Bann Publishing, UK in 1996; ISBN: 1 898307 57 9
#AlexandersPlant #food #foraging #gardening #HerbAlexanders #herbalMedicine #PlantLore #recipe #recipes
-
ALEXANDERS: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERBAL HISTORY by Veronica Smith
In 2003, I wrote a piece for the Irish Garden Plant Society (newsletter No: 87) entitled “Alexanders and Archaeology?” It was prompted by articles published in “Archaeology Ireland” (issue nos: 53 & 54) in which experts argued that viable plant seeds could lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. It was suggested that archaeologists working on sites should take note of any strange plants, as these could give clues to historic land usage.
One plant mentioned was Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), imported by medieval monks for their vegetable plots. Alexanders rarely occurs naturally away from the sea, except at medieval sites, and yet my garden in the inland county of Carlow, Ireland, was full of it! Mind you, the place name of the area was “Kilknock”, from the Gaelic Cill Cnoc, which translates as “church on the hill”; so it is possible that my Alexanders was originally planted by medieval monks one thousand years ago!
Those articles whetted my appetite for more information but it was hard to find. Alexanders is no longer the popular plant it once was, and it is known by several different names. Evidently, it originates from south-west Europe, around the Mediterranean, and was officially recognised by the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus as early as 322BCE.
Alexanders is related to herb Lovage and is often called “Black Lovage”. Its generic name “Smyrnium” comes from the Greek word for Myrrh, because of its myrrh-like flavour. The specific name “olusatrum”, means “Black Pot Herb”, referring to the plant’s black seeds that can be ground up and used like pepper. However, its Medieval Latin name was “Petroselinum alexandrinum”, meaning “Parsley of Alexandria” and this is how we got the popular name of Alexanders.
The Romans introduced Alexanders to Britain, along with many other Mediterranean plants. Ireland had to wait another one thousand years, when medieval monks brought Alexanders with them for their monastery gardens, where it was used for flavouring and as an early spring vegetable. Later, the great herbalists Culpepper and William Coles included Alexanders in their list of useful plants for the kitchen garden. This is why so much Alexanders is found growing by the ruins of old abbeys and castles here in Ireland and in the west of England. It was still being cultivated up until the early 18th century, when it was replaced by Celery!
I can understand why Alexanders was so highly prized in the past. It is a strong, vigorous plant that seeds easily. The first leaves appear at the end of winter, when there is little else; they taste like parsley and can be used as such, while the real parsley is still limp with frost! As it grows, you can cook and eat the succulent stems, best taken from the bottom near the root. Later, the delicate lime-green flower buds can be cooked and added to salads. There’s a recipe from 1675 for “a grand sallet of Alexander Buds” by Robert May. Unfortunately, the Alexanders that grew in my Irish garden tasted more like turpentine than parsley or aniseed, so I can understand why the milder-flavoured celery replaced it in the kitchen!
Regardless of taste, Alexanders was accredited with many medicinal qualities. For example, the powdered seeds taken in wine could expel retained after-birth, relieve trapped wind and even neutralise snake-bite! The stewed roots would help digest a Lenten diet containing too much fish! The bruised leaves, when applied to wounds, would stop the bleeding. The list is long and varied. So no wonder it was grown in all the gardens of Europe.
Even earlier, in ancient Greece, it was revered as a Sacred Herb, favoured by the head of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus. Ruled by the planet Jupiter and the element of Fire, Alexanders represented the Male Force of the Universe. Used as a tea or as incense or added to the bath, it could help to explore one’s Masculine side and to connect with the God Principle, especially at Summer Solstice, when fiery Male Energy reaches its Zenith.
While Alexanders may have lost favour in the kitchen / herb garden, it is still a plant worth knowing. To identify it, Alexanders is a strong, bushy-looking biennial umbellifer, which grows up to 4 ft / 1.25 metres high. It has large, SHINY bright-green tri-foliate leaves, like Lovage, consisting of three broad, toothed leaflets with a veined membraneous bract enclosing the base of the leaf stalks. The flowers, growing in fat, round, tightly-massed umbels, are a vivid lime green and appear in the spring. When ripe, the globular seeds turn black, giving the plant the folk-name of “Black Pot Herb” and “Black Lovage”. I’ve also seen a variegated Alexanders grown in the RHS headquarters in Wisley Gardens, UK, showing that there are still some fans out there!
RECIPES FOR ALEXANDERS
ALEXANDERS SAUCE, (made in late winter).
A main attraction of this herb / vegetable is that it is one of the earliest “greens” to appear in the garden. The young bright green Alexander leaves have a fresh taste of parsley, long before the real parsley plants have come out of winter dormancy. You will need:
1 tablespoon butter;
1 tablespoon plain flour;
½ pint milk;
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped Alexanders leaves (about 2 handfuls of picked leaves);
salt, pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a low setting and carefully stir in the sifted flour. Gradually add the milk a little at a time, stirring continuously (preferably with a whisk), to make sure that it is smooth, not lumpy. When all the milk has been added and the mix is smooth, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth. At this point, add the chopped Alexanders leaves and condiments (salt and pepper). Serve at once. This sauce does the same job as parsley sauce, tasting delicious on fish, chicken, vegetables. You can even sprinkle fresh chopped Alexanders leaves as a garnish. Enjoy!
ALEXANDERS BUDS AS SALAD (Spring)
the delicate, lime-green flower buds of Alexanders taste very good in a mixed salad or served on their own with a French Dressing.
Serves 4 people.
1 pint of Alexanders buds;
3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar;
salt and pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.
Wash the buds and trim away any stalks. Cook them in a little boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, until tender. Drain and allow to cool. Toss the buds in the dressing and turn into a shallow dish or serve on top of a mixed salad. Enjoy!ALEXANDERS STEMS AS A VEGETABLE (spring, early summer)
The young stems of Alexanders are quite succulent (which is why they were used like modern celery before celery had been developed) and cooking removes the turpentine-like scent. The best part of the stem is at the bottom, so cut the stems as low to the ground as you can.
You will need:
1 double handful of Alexanders stems and some butter.
Trim away the leaves and green parts of the stems, keeping only the lower parts that are white and pale. Wash the stems thoroughly and cook in boiling salted water for 10 – 15 minutes, until a fork can easily pierce the thickest stem. Drain and serve with melted butter. Enjoy!CRYSTALLISED ALEXANDERS (Spring only)
Gather however many young Alexanders stems as you care to preserve. Then wash them and cut them into 3 inch pieces. Bring a preserving pan filled with water to the boil, add the stems to the boiling water and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, weigh and put into a large ceramic / glass dish. Add an equal weight of sugar to the cooked stems, cover and leave overnight. The next day, put the sugar-and- Alexanders mix back into the preserving pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the sugar-syrup has almost evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and ladle out the crystallised stems onto a wire rack. Leave them to set and then store in an airtight jar. Enjoy!Author: Veronica Smith first published on 13 April 2016 under the title “Alexanders: Medieval Monks’ Meal”.
References:
ALL GOOD THINGS AROUND US by Pamela Michael and Christabel King; published by Ernst Benn Ltd in 1980; ISBN: 0 510 00055 X
HERB CRAFT: A GUIDE TO THE SHAMANIC AND RITUAL USE OF HERBS by Susan Lavender and Anna Franklin; printed by Capall Bann Publishing, UK in 1996; ISBN: 1 898307 57 9
#AlexandersPlant #food #foraging #gardening #HerbAlexanders #herbalMedicine #PlantLore #recipe #recipes
-
ALEXANDERS: ARCHAEOLOGY AND HERBAL HISTORY by Veronica Smith
In 2003, I wrote a piece for the Irish Garden Plant Society (newsletter No: 87) entitled “Alexanders and Archaeology?” It was prompted by articles published in “Archaeology Ireland” (issue nos: 53 & 54) in which experts argued that viable plant seeds could lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. It was suggested that archaeologists working on sites should take note of any strange plants, as these could give clues to historic land usage.
One plant mentioned was Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), imported by medieval monks for their vegetable plots. Alexanders rarely occurs naturally away from the sea, except at medieval sites, and yet my garden in the inland county of Carlow, Ireland, was full of it! Mind you, the place name of the area was “Kilknock”, from the Gaelic Cill Cnoc, which translates as “church on the hill”; so it is possible that my Alexanders was originally planted by medieval monks one thousand years ago!
Those articles whetted my appetite for more information but it was hard to find. Alexanders is no longer the popular plant it once was, and it is known by several different names. Evidently, it originates from south-west Europe, around the Mediterranean, and was officially recognised by the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus as early as 322BCE.
Alexanders is related to herb Lovage and is often called “Black Lovage”. Its generic name “Smyrnium” comes from the Greek word for Myrrh, because of its myrrh-like flavour. The specific name “olusatrum”, means “Black Pot Herb”, referring to the plant’s black seeds that can be ground up and used like pepper. However, its Medieval Latin name was “Petroselinum alexandrinum”, meaning “Parsley of Alexandria” and this is how we got the popular name of Alexanders.
The Romans introduced Alexanders to Britain, along with many other Mediterranean plants. Ireland had to wait another one thousand years, when medieval monks brought Alexanders with them for their monastery gardens, where it was used for flavouring and as an early spring vegetable. Later, the great herbalists Culpepper and William Coles included Alexanders in their list of useful plants for the kitchen garden. This is why so much Alexanders is found growing by the ruins of old abbeys and castles here in Ireland and in the west of England. It was still being cultivated up until the early 18th century, when it was replaced by Celery!
I can understand why Alexanders was so highly prized in the past. It is a strong, vigorous plant that seeds easily. The first leaves appear at the end of winter, when there is little else; they taste like parsley and can be used as such, while the real parsley is still limp with frost! As it grows, you can cook and eat the succulent stems, best taken from the bottom near the root. Later, the delicate lime-green flower buds can be cooked and added to salads. There’s a recipe from 1675 for “a grand sallet of Alexander Buds” by Robert May. Unfortunately, the Alexanders that grew in my Irish garden tasted more like turpentine than parsley or aniseed, so I can understand why the milder-flavoured celery replaced it in the kitchen!
Regardless of taste, Alexanders was accredited with many medicinal qualities. For example, the powdered seeds taken in wine could expel retained after-birth, relieve trapped wind and even neutralise snake-bite! The stewed roots would help digest a Lenten diet containing too much fish! The bruised leaves, when applied to wounds, would stop the bleeding. The list is long and varied. So no wonder it was grown in all the gardens of Europe.
Even earlier, in ancient Greece, it was revered as a Sacred Herb, favoured by the head of the Greek Pantheon, Zeus. Ruled by the planet Jupiter and the element of Fire, Alexanders represented the Male Force of the Universe. Used as a tea or as incense or added to the bath, it could help to explore one’s Masculine side and to connect with the God Principle, especially at Summer Solstice, when fiery Male Energy reaches its Zenith.
While Alexanders may have lost favour in the kitchen / herb garden, it is still a plant worth knowing. To identify it, Alexanders is a strong, bushy-looking biennial umbellifer, which grows up to 4 ft / 1.25 metres high. It has large, SHINY bright-green tri-foliate leaves, like Lovage, consisting of three broad, toothed leaflets with a veined membraneous bract enclosing the base of the leaf stalks. The flowers, growing in fat, round, tightly-massed umbels, are a vivid lime green and appear in the spring. When ripe, the globular seeds turn black, giving the plant the folk-name of “Black Pot Herb” and “Black Lovage”. I’ve also seen a variegated Alexanders grown in the RHS headquarters in Wisley Gardens, UK, showing that there are still some fans out there!
RECIPES FOR ALEXANDERS
ALEXANDERS SAUCE, (made in late winter).
A main attraction of this herb / vegetable is that it is one of the earliest “greens” to appear in the garden. The young bright green Alexander leaves have a fresh taste of parsley, long before the real parsley plants have come out of winter dormancy. You will need:
1 tablespoon butter;
1 tablespoon plain flour;
½ pint milk;
2 – 3 tablespoons finely chopped Alexanders leaves (about 2 handfuls of picked leaves);
salt, pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.Melt the butter in a small saucepan on a low setting and carefully stir in the sifted flour. Gradually add the milk a little at a time, stirring continuously (preferably with a whisk), to make sure that it is smooth, not lumpy. When all the milk has been added and the mix is smooth, turn up the heat and keep stirring until the sauce has thickened and is silky smooth. At this point, add the chopped Alexanders leaves and condiments (salt and pepper). Serve at once. This sauce does the same job as parsley sauce, tasting delicious on fish, chicken, vegetables. You can even sprinkle fresh chopped Alexanders leaves as a garnish. Enjoy!
ALEXANDERS BUDS AS SALAD (Spring)
the delicate, lime-green flower buds of Alexanders taste very good in a mixed salad or served on their own with a French Dressing.
Serves 4 people.
1 pint of Alexanders buds;
3 parts olive oil to 1 part cider vinegar;
salt and pepper, whatever condiments you care to add.
Wash the buds and trim away any stalks. Cook them in a little boiling salted water for about 5 minutes, until tender. Drain and allow to cool. Toss the buds in the dressing and turn into a shallow dish or serve on top of a mixed salad. Enjoy!ALEXANDERS STEMS AS A VEGETABLE (spring, early summer)
The young stems of Alexanders are quite succulent (which is why they were used like modern celery before celery had been developed) and cooking removes the turpentine-like scent. The best part of the stem is at the bottom, so cut the stems as low to the ground as you can.
You will need:
1 double handful of Alexanders stems and some butter.
Trim away the leaves and green parts of the stems, keeping only the lower parts that are white and pale. Wash the stems thoroughly and cook in boiling salted water for 10 – 15 minutes, until a fork can easily pierce the thickest stem. Drain and serve with melted butter. Enjoy!CRYSTALLISED ALEXANDERS (Spring only)
Gather however many young Alexanders stems as you care to preserve. Then wash them and cut them into 3 inch pieces. Bring a preserving pan filled with water to the boil, add the stems to the boiling water and simmer for 20 minutes. Drain, weigh and put into a large ceramic / glass dish. Add an equal weight of sugar to the cooked stems, cover and leave overnight. The next day, put the sugar-and- Alexanders mix back into the preserving pan, bring to the boil and simmer until the sugar-syrup has almost evaporated. Remove the pan from the heat and ladle out the crystallised stems onto a wire rack. Leave them to set and then store in an airtight jar. Enjoy!Author: Veronica Smith first published on 13 April 2016 under the title “Alexanders: Medieval Monks’ Meal”.
References:
ALL GOOD THINGS AROUND US by Pamela Michael and Christabel King; published by Ernst Benn Ltd in 1980; ISBN: 0 510 00055 X
HERB CRAFT: A GUIDE TO THE SHAMANIC AND RITUAL USE OF HERBS by Susan Lavender and Anna Franklin; printed by Capall Bann Publishing, UK in 1996; ISBN: 1 898307 57 9
#AlexandersPlant #food #foraging #gardening #HerbAlexanders #herbalMedicine #PlantLore #recipe #recipes
-
Arm the Spirit Interview With Safiya Bukhari for International Women’s Day: 1995
Interview conducted in New York City, September 27, 1992 and distributed by Arm the Spirit via e-mail for International Women’s Day 1995.
Q: The first question I have is, how did you get involved with the Black Panther Party (BPP)?
I was going to college to be a doctor. The first year in college I was just into my studies. But it was right here in Brooklyn, actually, in New York City College, and the people on campus thought that I was stuck up because I didn’t associate – I was studying a lot. And so the second year, in order to break that mode, I pledged for a sorority called Hamilton House. That same year the sorority became integrated. We elected the first Black president. And one of the projects of the sorority was to adopt underprivileged children in foreign countries. Our President that year said we didn’t have to go any further than the United States to find underprivileged children. A lot of people didn’t believe that there were hungry children that needed to be fed right here in the U.S., even in New York.
So three of us were assigned to go investigate the situation and we ended up going to Harlem to see if there were really hungry children. It was Yvonne Smallwood, Wanda Davis and myself. And the first people we ran into when we got there were the Panthers. Wanda got totally involved from the beginning; she fell in love with a Panther and joined the Party and everything. I didn’t go that route. I simply didn’t believe the things that the Panthers were saying.
About the hungry children: we went back and reported that the result was that there were a lot of people who were eating out of garbage cans, that there were indecent conditions that they were living in, etc. The next question was what to do about it. Should we start our own program or should we get involved in the things that already went on – because the Panthers already had the Free Breakfast Program. So, in essence we elected to just assign various members of our sorority to work with the free Breakfast Program. We would collect the food, we cooked the food, we would help the children with their homework, things like that, but I still didn’t believe in what the Panthers were saying. I didn’t think that the violence was happening. I didn’t think that the conspiracies were going on. I didn’t believe that the police were doing what they said they were doing, etc.
Two incidents happened that made me start to think seriously about what the ideology of the Party was and take the rhetoric of the Party seriously. With the Breakfast Program, the police started putting out rumours. The children stopped coming to the breakfast program. And I wondered why – so I found out from talking to some of the parents that the police kept telling them that we were feeding the children poisoned food – so they were stopped from bringing their children to the program and that made me angry. I mean, we were getting up at outrageous hours in the morning to take care of this before going to school – I was still going to school full-time – I was cooking the food and we were eating it right along with the children. They didn’t have a breakfast program in the schools themselves, they were not making an effort to feed the children, but they didn’t want us to feed the children. And I was incensed about that.
Then, myself and my friend Wanda were walking on 42nd Street – I still hadn’t joined the Party, that still didn’t make me angry enough to join the Party – well, there we were on 42nd Street one day and going to times Square we saw this big crowd on the corner and so we went rushing to see what was going on. A Panther was on the corner selling papers and the police were harassing him. So, believing whole-heartedly in the Constitution, I asked him what he was doing. And the police said if I didn’t stop that they were going to arrest me, too. I said he had a constitutional right to sell the papers, actually, I said he had a constitutional right to disseminate political literature, and he didn’t take that too kindly. He asked me for my ID and told me to get up against the car and that he was going to arrest me for obstructing governmental process and inciting a riot. He handcuffed me, handcuffed the Panther, handcuffed Wanda and threw us into the police car and took us down to the 14th Precinct. In the back of the car they told my friend Wanda that if she didn’t shut up – she was just running off at the mouth, calling them a bunch of names – they were going to ram the night-stick right up her. That was their behaviour and when we got to the Precinct itself they talked about holding court in the Precinct. They did a search, threw us in a holding cell and kept talking … then they had a female guard come and strip-search us and they told her she should wear gloves and make sure she washes her hands afterwards because she could catch something from touching us. It was that experience that when they let me out, I called my mother and father at home and told them I was going to join the BPP. Because of the police, I told them that the police convinced me of the legitimacy of the truth of what the Panthers were saying.
I didn’t get arrested for anything from that point on. I never got arrested for anything trivial. But my friend Wanda, she never learned not to get arrested for talking, I was with her when she got arrested for selling wolf tickets and murdermouthing the police. But to me it was much more serious than that. It was more serious because they had this authority and they had the badges and they had the guns and they abused their power. And it’s what they say and what they do that carries more weight in a court of law than what the individual does. It was that kind of corruption that made me make the decision to join the BPP.
Q: When was that?
1969.
Q: And then you worked with the Panthers in New York?
I worked with the Panthers, I worked out of the Harlem office of the BPP, from then until I went underground in 1974.
Q: Why did you go underground?
From 1969 until 1971, before the split in the BPP, I had a section. My responsibility was for organizing and politicizing that section, selling papers, organizing the various cell units and just politically educating that community. I did everything from selling papers and handing out leaflets, drug-detox work and everything else. By 1971 when the split came down, right after the split, I became in charge of Information and Communications for the East Coast Panthers. One of my responsibilities was to hold the press conferences and release communiqués from the Black Liberation Army.
And so I became a direct threat to the establishment. They thought I had the information they needed to capture BLA members. So they subpoenaed me. But even prior to this they had done a number of articles on the fact that I was the only ranking member in the Party without a felony conviction. And since I had no felony conviction, I had a license to carry arms. And I carried arms openly in public because the law allowed you to. You could carry long arms or have a Paratrooper A-1. I had an 8mm Mauser and I had these long arms whenever we had a press conference. Or I kept it at home and walked with it, carried it back and forth to the office, in a holster on the street. So the media played it up like “the Panthers with guns”, but they didn’t bother to investigate that it was licensed. When they finally got to the point that they realized I was legal, then I was the only ranking Party member without a felony conviction.
I had done my work in the community so well that I had a lot of community support and so on that level had organized my base area and also had the political astuteness to in order to play the media. They thought the fact that I had the diplomacy to play the media made me a political threat. Then in 1970/71 we started the National Committee for the defense of Political Prisoners, in response to all the arrests across the country of Panthers and BLA members. I was working with the people in prison and they put the letters that I was sending inside to the prisoners. Our political stance was very clear, we were not about reformism or anything like that. It was about revolutionary political power and how it comes to revolution, and means a qualitative change in the living conditions of the people with us, and it was not about the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – oldest liberal Black civil rights organization in the U.S.) style politics or anything like that.
The Senate Committee in the US held hearings on the kind of political literature that was going into the prisons, so that part was a threat to them also. It was basically a lot of the political work that I was doing – back and forth to the prisons – myself and Yuri Kochiyama and many others like us. And in November 1973, myself and three other people who were part of the Harriet Tubman Brigade of the BLA were arrested for trying to break out some six members of the BLA out of the Tombs (pretrial detention prison in NYC). But the arrest was premature because even though they played it up to the media like “Great Tombs Escape Fails At The sewer”, they were not able to hold us because we weren’t doing anything. The only thing they could charge us with was third degree burglary on a sewer, which was laughed out of court. And they were very angry.
Outside the legitimate system, the Police Department put a $10,000 contract on me that I wasn’t supposed to be captured. I had gotten into the position to be killed on sight. That was outside the normal system. And inside it, I got a subpoena by the Federal government to the grand Jury – about 11 other people and myself. But the difference with my subpoena was that if I showed up at the Grand Jury I couldn’t take the Fifth Amendment and therefore for any question that I refused to answer I was facing felony contempt which carried a prison sentence.
So we discussed it, myself and Nuh (Nuh Washington – now one of the New York Three) and some other people and we decided that I shouldn’t go before the Grand Jury in April 1974, that I should go underground. And at that point I went underground with the Amistad Collective of the Black Liberation Army.
Q: In order to end the chronology – when did you get captured?
I was the unit coordinator of the Amistad Collective. So, basically I was the only female coordinator in a BLA unit. We were captured in a shoot-out in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 25, 1975. One of my co-defendants, Komposi Amistad, was killed and another one was shot in the face. For the first 30 days we were facing the electric chair for felony murder. The only reason why we got out from the electric chair is that the federal government and the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in Virginia at that time, saying it was unconstitutional. So we didn’t have to go to trial facing the death penalty.
But the state of Virginia asked for 900 years on the paratrooper A-1 I told you about, they didn’t care that I had a federal license. It was a one day trial, my bail was set at 1 million dollars on each count – we had five counts, which came to 5 million dollars.
They told them not to touch the bail issue, they picked the jury, they had the trial and they sentenced us all in one day and took us off to prison in one day. When they had the trial they threw me out of court before they started the trial. So I understand well Mumia not being in court during his trial, because I was not in court either.
I was in a cell in the back and it was cold and it had a loud-speaker, but I didn’t hear a thing, because it was nothing but static. But they brought me back in court for the sentencing phase and I was given 40 years. The jury wanted to run the time concurrently – I got 10, 10, and 20 – because it was the minimum on all the charges. And the judge told them they couldn’t do it, it was not up to them to determine how high it ran on the term on what I got and he ran it consecutive, and he told me I had to do every day of it. I told him, his momma was going to do it. (laughs) They sent us off to prison that night.
We both went together because they sent me to the penitentiary for men where my co-defendant was, and then I was taken by caravan to the women’s institution in Richmond, Virginia, and spent the next 21 days in maximum security segregation, because they didn’t want me on the outside where the other population was.
Q: How did you get out of segregation?
According to their own rules the only reason why you are supposed to be on maximum security segregation is when you violate one of their rules. So, I hadn’t violated a rule, So, when they took me down there I asked them why I was down there and they said because they didn’t have an empty room in the quarantine hall. And I asked them for a manual of their rules. I read it all and I told them, if that’s the case, in 21 days then you don’t have to worry about the room in the quarantine. Just that either I’ll be out of maximum security segregation or you’ll be in court.
And so on the 19th day they sent this correctional officer down there who said that she would accept me on her hall. She asked me what my intentions were while I was in prison and I told here that my intention was to do two years and leave. (laughs).
And she said they were concerned about me organizing in prison recruiting for the BLA, and I told them I had no intentions to recruit because I don’t really believe in recruiting. I believe if a person is going to do anything they need to make the decision based on their own conditions. If you have to recruit them, they haven’t made a decision on their own and if they don’t make it on their own they’re susceptible to back out and say somebody forced them to do things and stuff like that. But if they make a conscious decision on their own that the want to be involved in something then they have nobody to blame for anything that happens.
So, I told her I had no intention of recruiting. And she said then that she didn’t have any problems with me being in her hall. And so on the 21st day they moved me to the building where this correctional officer was, but I wasn’t allowed to go out into general population without handcuffs on and an armed guard with me. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. I wasn’t allowed to work in the kitchen or in the laundry or any other place where the women were working because they said I was a security risk. So, the only place I could be was in the hall, on the tier, in the cottage where I was housed. For everything you had to be right there at that complex.
After the first year I had to do the psychological evaluation, so that they could determine how they should handle you. The psychologist that I had to go see decided that I didn’t have to do all those little stupid tests, putting blocks together, etc. He asked a bunch of questions and then he said that he understood my political “beliefs”; at least how determined I was and stuff like that. And then he wrote this paper talking about that I believed wholeheartedly in the movement and that I was adamant about that, but I would not be a disciplinary problem if they called me by my Islamic name and dealt with me in a respectful manner and then he called me “paranoid” (laughs) – that I believed that people were out to get me. But he did say that I had no need for rehabilitation – rehabilitate from what, anyway. So he told them that they had to call me by my Islamic name or Ms. Bukhari and there will be no problems. But if they try to deal with me in any other manner then they did have a problem with me. And that was the psychological evaluation.
Anyways, after almost two years exactly I escaped. It was New Years Eve 1976. And the escape was really for two reasons. First, was that I just believed as a prisoner of war that a prisoner of war’s responsibility is to escape. So, from the very beginning we took the position that we were prisoners of war, and at the time of our capture we were soldiers in the Black Liberation Army. We gave a name, rank and serial number only and invoked that the court had no jurisdiction to try us. Therefore on that premise alone that the prisons had no jurisdiction over us and it is our responsibility as prisoners of war to escape – on that level I escaped. And that was one of the reasons.
The other reason was – one of the reasons why I was going South in the first place prior to the capture was because I had medical problems and I needed surgery. At the time of the capture I made known to them that I needed to have a surgery. They kept telling me that when I go over to the state custody it would be handled then. When I got to the prison they told me – after the examination – that I had fibroids the size of oranges or grapefruits in my uterus and asked me how much time I had. I told them I had 40 years. They then told me to come back in 10 years. I filed suit. The court said that it was just a difference of opinion between me and the doctor about how the medical treatment should be. I had asked to be able to pay for my own medical care, to have a doctor from the outside, etc. And they said no.
The month before my escape I started haemorrhaging so bad that at the time of my escape I was wearing three big sanitary napkins at the time. And I would have to change them every 2 hours. I was having my menstrual cycle for two weeks at the time, every other week. I was just bleeding horrendously. That day, when I made the decision that I couldn’t wait any longer to get medical care I was standing up in the middle of the floor in the unit where I was housed and all of a sudden – I mean nothing special happened – I just started haemorrhaging from the vagina. And I went to the clinic hall in the institution and they gave me Urgatrade, that was a medication to control the bleeding and told me to go and put my feet up. That was the extent of it – there was no recommendation for to take me to a doctor, to the hospital or anything. I just felt that they were not concerned about my health at all.
The doctor at the institution was not qualified to deal with women. And he had been so bad that in once case for example he had diagnosed just a sore throat when a woman had cancer. This other woman had one ovary left and he told here she had tumours on her right ovary – she didn’t have any right ovary. There was no way that you could have faith in the competency of this doctor. So, when they told me about this Urgatrade for the control of the bleeding and go and put my feet up, I decided that I had to make arrangements to take care of my own medical care.
Those of us who were in the BLA and who were incarcerated, we had a secure communication channel, so that we were still involved in what we called consolidation, organizing, structuring and stuff like that. I was in charge of Area 2 of the consolidation work in the unit and for the country. And as being in charge of Area 2 I was responsible for all the consolidation work in that area around BLA and BPP members, and outside building that whole network in that area. My second was Mark Holder who was in prison at Marion; and he was responsible for that area. So, between the two of us we had the whole Southern regional area of the East Coast in terms of our organizing efforts. Even while we were in prison, mind you…
Part of the CC, the Central Committee of the BLA, were on the streets. There were also members of the CC that were in prison and some were underground.
When I made the decision to escape I notified through secure channels the Central Committee that I was making a move. I notified my area coordinator and I notified the people in the area who needed to know that I was not going to be where they thought I was going to be. The night of the actual escape, we left and we made contact with the underground, and I was out roughly two months. I was captured on February 27th, 1977, and returned to prison in Virginia and went to trial where I was my own attorney at this point in the trial.
During the course of the trial I raised the issue of inadequate medical care and I pleaded not guilty for the reason of “duress and necessity” – that in order to save my own life I had to escape because of the medical conditions. That was also a way of raising the lack of adequate medical care for the women in the prison itself. The jury was very sympathetic and in the town a lot of the correctional officers and the head nurse for the correctional facility were very sympathetic because they knew this man was not qualified; that people in the town where the prison was located would not use him for anything. The only place he could practice was in the women’s institution, because nobody would allow him to practice on them. So during the course of the trial this was brought out.
By the time the trial was over, the judge had to threaten the jury with contempt charges if they didn’t find me guilty, because he said escape is like murder. And so they found me guilty of escape and they sentenced me to the minimum time which was one year. I was already doing 40 years, so one year didn’t make a difference. And the jury stood outside the courtroom and apologized when I was going out … (laughs). The upshot of it was that I was given a choice at that point about doctors – they picked three doctors outside that were not part of the prison system. And they took me to a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, and I picked a woman doctor and we talked about it and they did the examination. By this time it was two years after going into prison, my condition had worsened to the point where they said there strings all across that had pulled my uterus, the tubes and the ovaries all together. And Wanda said – my doctors’s name was Wanda too – that she would do everything possible to save something, but it would be a major piece of surgery. The upshot was that I ended up having a hysterectomy and that I have only one ovary left – and it’s because of the malpractice of that doctor.
I suffered severe postpartum depression. For whole year I was out of it. I was still in maximum security segregation for the escape. I spent three years and 7 months in maximum security segregation – that was the longest time anyone ever did for escape; before that the maximum for escape was 6 months in maximum security segregation. I had to go to court to come out of it and the court ordered me out of it at the end of the three years and 7 months, they had to phase me out. But during the course of the trial the Warden said that I was a threat to the security of the free world if the were releasing me from maximum security segregation. For a minute there I thought I was Russian (laughs) …
Anyway, I came out of maximum security segregation in 1981. After I came out of maximum security segregation we founded a little organization in prisons called “Mothers Inside Loving Kids” for people with a long time, to try to bridge that gap between the children and so that they can keep their family and that continuity with their children going. And then I made parole in 1983, and in August 1983 I was already free.
Q: Did they give you conditions for parole?
Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to associate with anybody – I wasn’t supposed to associate with folks. I wasn’t supposed to ever have a gun in my hands again. I wasn’t supposed to associate with any BLA or Panthers or anything like that. They asked me questions like: “Do you believe in violence or would you do what you did again?” And I told them that based on the conditions – no right-thinking person believes in violence for the sake of violence. But there are certain instances when you have no alternative, when you have exhausted everything else – then you have to resort to violence. And then they asked me: “Would I deal with things the same way again?” And I told them, no, I wouldn’t do it particularly that, because one of the things that is very clear is that we haven’t done the necessary education and organizational work in the streets in order to deal with a movement in the ways that we moved then. We were young, we were idealistic and we were impatient.
We have to build a foundation. And we have to organize not just 30,000 people. This country has 240 to almost 300 million people in it. And a lot of people in the rural areas, and even in some of the major cities and in the suburbs, don’t even know anything is happening because they are not exposed to the conditions – they just don’t know about it. It’s like when we talk about Mumia’s situation – people have never even heard his name – and we are talking about a major situation.
So, the educational phase has to be so that when you move from one level to the next in the struggle, that it is understood that the people know what we are doing. And you lay the foundation to the point where you are not leading the people to a slaughter. And they talked about not being around people who were in the BLA and the BPP and convicted felons. And I told them that it isn’t possible to live in the Black community and not be around convicted felons. To say that I won’t do that I’d be lying to you.
And the other part is that these people of the BPP and the BLA are not just comrades, they are my family. And to tell me that I cannot associate with my family is something I will not accept. So I told them if you give me parole be clear about the fact that I am going to associate with my family. (laughs) And I did from day one when I was walking out of the prison. I was shocked – everyone was shocked – that I made parole. (laughs) The consistence was that the state of Virginia just wanted to get rid of me because it was costing them too much money lately.
The only times I did a law suit against them was when they pushed me to the point where I had no other choice but to file a suit against them. At the last when I left the prison in Virginia they had just written the first infraction ticket that I had since my escape. I was on work release and they had written the ticket because I went outside on the ground of the place where I worked at to sit down to eat lunch on the bench. And the woman who was in charge of the house, the workpolice, wrote the ticket – she was already crazy about the fact that I was a Muslim and she was a Christian and she thought that everybody in the house should be Christian …
And I didn’t eat pork, and how could you be Black in the South without eating pork? She was really ridiculous with “this is my house” and this is a prison. But when she gave me the ticket, she confined me to the house, and the only thing I could come out for were meals. I didn’t mind because at this point I had already made parole, I was just waiting for the date. But at the same time I didn’t like that she had denied me religious freedom.
And I filed a law suit – I told her the next time she will talk to me, talk to my lawyer. I made parole and came home and the suit was still pending. Then I got a call from the lawyer to tell me that they had settled; they had fired her, they had settled the lawsuit and I hadn’t even asked for damages … I just wanted them to tell her that this was not her house and she couldn’t run it as if it were her house and that she couldn’t dictate what religion people could be … I just wanted to tell her that. Because other women were scared to say anything because she was threatening with taking their rights and privileges and they were not ready to deal with that. And I just didn’t think that these people should get away with running their own little prisons.
Anyway, I didn’t mean for her to get fired, because she was the only Black woman in that position. But she got herself into a position that there was nothing to do but to deal with it. And anyway, they gave me money damages and fired her.
Q: Can you talk about how it was to be the only woman unit leader underground?
(laughs) Sexism is regardless of how political you are – in the United States sexism is part of the culture of the U.S. and this is a sexist society.
In the Black Liberation movement sexism is a strong factor not only because of the sexist society in America, but because of the African culture itself, sexism is there. And it’s there in the black culture, because of the denial of their manhood in the acculturation and deculturation that came with slavery and everything else. When the Black Power movement cam into being in the 60s and even through the Garveyites (Marcus Garvey – Black nationalist leader in the 20s and 30s with a strong slogan “Back to Africa”), the Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam and all that other prior to that, there was a search for their manhood. You know, “Rise up you mighty Black men”, Garvey said, or in the BPP the slogan was “Stand up to be Men” and so forth. So, in the Black Power movement and the cultural nationalist movement they were really blatant by saying that the place of women was in the kitchen or on their backs and having children for building the Nation and so on.
One of the things that had developed in the Panther Party and in the BLA – for us, the BLA came out of the BPP because no Party member was allowed to join any armed force other than the Black Liberation Army – was the whole machismo thing. But at the same time there was an organizational position that was anti-sexist. But the individuals themselves still had a lot of sexism within. The Party only existed for about 7 years … there was never time. You had a cultural thing that never did have time to be dealt with.
So you had all the “leaders”, even though Kathleen Cleaver was on the Central Committee, she was just there, a figure-head most on the CC She was Eldridge Cleaver’s wife. So her role was not as a Communications Secretary in the sense that she was viable and working ahead, having an independent voice .. . her role was that of – since she was married to Eldridge Cleaver and he was Minister of Information, she was the Communication Secretary. And women were still viewed more or less as secretaries. There were a few of us on the political front and at political stands and doing the same work. We were basically doing the same work in the BPP. There were a few of us who not only would do the same work, but we would not accept the sexism.
And in the years when I joined the party in 1969, one of the things I tried to make clear was that I did not come into the Party to become somebody’s sexual toy. That, if I wanted to do that I could do it outside of the BPP. Also, I was in my second year at college when I joined the Party – I had already made determinations. I was raised in a family of six brothers and endless uncles … and my mother was very strong. So there was always that leadership position.
And when I made the determination that I was going underground, it was a determination that was based on that I knew this was the next step, this is what I wanted to do. And I had the experience of the collectives that I worked with. First it was the Harriet Tubman Brigade – their sole responsibility was to liberate P.O.W.s, and then it was the “Wretched of the Earth” – and we still wanted the liberation of the P.O.W.s. We saw ourselves as a collective in the sense of a collective. There were no real unit coordinators in those years.
By the time the Amistad Collective came together we decided that we wanted to organize it. We wanted responsibilities and discipline whereas a lot of other units did not have that organization. We wanted to set us a pattern. We had election based on qualifications – qualification and not sexuality – did we decide on who got what position. We had political education classes and we had everything – we even had “r and r” (rest and relaxation) because we found it was necessary that you had time to rest and recuperate.
Having the responsibility of a unit coordinator was more like keeping it all together and trying to make sure that decisions were made not on an emotional basis, that we looked at everything objectively in making those decisions. And making sure that there was a distribution of the work that didn’t see the women in the cell doing the “female” work and being seen as sex objects in the cells. That didn’t develop so we were able to maintain a position in our cell that we were comrades. We were comrades, we respected each other’s individuality and each other’s capabilities and we had the discipline that we didn’t violate no drug rules and not being intoxicated while carrying out our business and stuff like that. That was a very bad part of the movement, in the underground also, that developed in this country.
We had analyzed these things prior to us forming a cell. I think, that’s one of the things that came with being a female unit coordinator – it’s because women have a practical, a more practical approach to things than men do. (laughs). And that’s what I think made our cell different. Even though I was captured and my co- defendant was captured and the other unit member was killed – our unit was made up of 8 people – no one else ever got captured that was in our unit. And the person who talked, who allowed us to be captured, was eventually dealt with, so the person was incapable to put anybody else in the position to be captured. You know, my co-defendant was captured and a woman was killed and I was captured, but 5 other people survived it and were capable of moving.
And even though I didn’t particularly like being in prison, we, we were able to do work. And during the course of the trial, we were able to educate the community. The community was the support network that we had, and even when it came down to the escapes and everything else that happened in Virginia during that time – the people were there because the unit was able to continue to do the work and put the thing together.
Q: What happened to your co-defendant?
He’s out. He’s in Chicago. Yeah, after I got out first, the work to get him out was a thing that we continued. I carried it on – because one of the things I told people is that I was out, but as long as he was in, I really wasn’t out yet, you know. And that’s the kind of cohesiveness that we maintained. Because in a lot of other cases people who were co-defendants came out and they went on about their business and forgot about their co-defendants, the people that went in with them, and I think on that end our unit set a very good example, that we didn’t just walk away from the situation.
Q: And how was it for you – you already had your child before you went underground?
Yes, she was 4 years old when I went underground. Her father was killed during the split in the party. There were two casualties directly involved in the split. That was Robert Webb and Sam Napier on the East Coast, on the New York side of the split. Robert Webb, who is my daughter’s father, had been a body guard to Huey Newton. And when the split went down, because he surfaced – he had been underground – he was a liability for them. He was ordered assassinated by crews from that end.
In retaliation, people from the outside assassinated [Sam Napier]. The fratricide was the most .. the police just sat back and laughed; their thing was they didn’t have to get Panthers, the Panthers kill each other. That was a very crucial time for a lot of us. And when we look back at it – Sam was a loss to the movement itself because he was the circulation manager of the paper. And he lived and died for the paper. And Robert was a loss – just personally he was a loss, because of our relationship, but politically he was a loss, because he knew how to put together an apparatus. He had been in the armed forces of the U.S., he had come out and he was working for the liberation of our people. He had the information and the connections in order to do it; and he had the security mind – he was Deputy Field Marshal in the BPP. Anyway, at the time just before the split, my mother had taken custody of my daughter. I let her go and stay with my mother. And when Robert came back, we had intentions at the point to go back from the underground to get Wanda, my daughter – I named her Wanda too (laughs) – and to bring her back to stay with us and then he got killed, so it was very appropriate that she stayed with my mother. So, she stayed there and I would go and see her.
Robert was dead and I was in a very insecure position. By the time 1974 came around I and I already had the $10,000 contract on me, I had the Grand Jury subpoena and I had been busted in November 1973 for the other things. So I called my mother up and I told her that I wanted her to keep my daughter. And I signed guardianship over to her. One of the things the state was trying to do was to take Panther children away from their parents because they were unfit parents, etc. I didn’t want to take a chance, so I signed legal guardianship over to my mother. And I made arrangements for her schooling and everything else, and I went underground.
When I got captured, I could still see her and I had a lot of dealings with her schooling, etc. But even at that point, when the state found out about her they tried to take her, at one point just tried to kidnap her and use her for leverage against me to make me talk while I was in prison. In a lot of cases I would just call and make sure that my mother didn’t let her go with strangers or someone. One time this woman came by the house and told my mother that she will bring toys for Wanda, she will come and visit and stuff like that, told my mother that she was one of my best friends, and I had told her that Wanda could come spend the weekend with her. And it just so happened that that particular weekend I called home and Momma told me about it, and I told her that I had never heard that woman’s name before in my life. It was incidents like these that made us decide that she could go nowhere by herself, that she had to be taken to school and be picked up from school, and she couldn’t be allowed to just have a normal life really, because they were at the point where they were using children to get information from the parents. So it was very hard to do time in prison knowing that my daughter was the target for a whole lot of things.
Q: Did she understand what was happening?
She never understood. On a lot of levels she was angry because she thought my being in prison was an abandonment of her. And then she never really understood why she had to be kept under such strict surveillance or control. And even now, I tell her now it hasn’t really changed. I mean, I will get messages where someone has seen her here or done this. There is no place that she can go that people don’t know that she is my daughter, and so she has to watch herself very carefully about what she does and where she is and stuff like that.
Q: When we first started learning about the Black Panther Party and the BLA, the only woman’s name that was mentioned was Assata and no one else. Why is that?
That’s because of the media stuff. (laughs) I think the reason why you hear so much about Assata is basically because in 1973 with the shoot-out and everything that happened, the publicity was very high. So the media when they were looking for her, they called her the “soul of the BLA” and stuff like that. It was a lot of media hype and people have a tendency to deal with the media….
You know, she has survived a lot, she has learned a lot and she has studied and she has developed.
And I think on that end too, I have a real problem with the fact that people deal with Assata and there are a lot of other people out there in exile that no one ever mentions.
And then you have a bunch of them in various places that nobody knows their names. And that really works with me, because we have a tendency to build superstars and the superstars get the play. And the soldiers in the rank and file and the workhorses, whose names were never known, they languish on their own. That is not the way you build movements, if you don’t support the people in your movements who made the sacrifices then what incentive is there to anybody else to get involved. I have a real problem with that.
You know the names of Dhoruba bin-Wahad, or Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt and the New York Three, but all the other ones who are languishing in the prisons sit there with no attorneys, no nothing and no one knows their names. You can mention their names, and it goes in one ear and out the other. A lot of times they have no commissary, they don’t get visits, not even from their families do they get visits. But the families that weren’t involved in the struggles that they’re in prison for, they didn’t make the commitments. But the people who were involved in those struggles with them, they don’t even remember the names anymore.
Do you see anyone out there right now who is trying to rebuild the contacts with those comrades? It seems there are so many who need to come out just on the case that they’ve been involved in the struggle?
Well, that’s one of the reasons why we do the New York Three Freedom Campaign Newsletter, we mention those people every time we get information about them, where they are and their cases, what’s happening with them, we try to bring it up and build networking for different struggles around different political prisoners. We try and educate the people to get involved, educate them about the rank and file. And we try to raise not to get involved with the personality cult and deal with the whole issue of support for political prisoners rather than support for an individual political prisoner.
And even like dealing with the brothers inside right now – because it’s predominantly brothers that are inside, except for the MOVE prisoners and white anti-imperialists, there are more brothers; in the Black movement there are basically men that were involved at that time, especially Panthers and BLA members – to cross those boundaries and deal with the whole issue of political prisoners. They are pushing that now, too, that they went into prison as members of organizations and that they should be dealt with as members of organizations rather than as individuals.
There is a lot of work that has to be done – attorneys have to be found and our responsibility to ourselves is in building that foundation, because all of that is building foundations.
When you get involved in movements there should be a legal defense fund set up consistently and there. So when a bust goes down, there is an attorney available for the incarcerated comrade. There should be no question about having to raise defense money. It should be there. By the same token there should be a mechanism to liberate political prisoners. So, that if there is nothing to be won through the courts, there is an alternative already in place.
And for those that have done their time, there should be a fund or something set up for them. I know after 8 years and 8 months there was a lot of psychological damage done to myself personally in the time that I spent in prison. There has to be a mechanism set up so you have time to cool out and deprogram. Because that’s what time in prison is – it’s a time of programming. And so you have to be de-programmed. And after almost 9 years, it happened to me then … and those people who have done 15 and 17 and 20 or more years, they need it much more than I did – you know, to train them for things. And we don’t have those mechanisms in place.
So when I talk about the foundations that we need to build for the struggle I this country, we talk about the basic, elementary foundations to fill a military apparatus and a political struggle. On the political level, we need to have our own communication centres, so we don’t have to keep worrying and wondering about how we get information printed or how we are going to get this done or that done. Right now we should have the people with the necessary skills to put information out from the radio and television. And we have not pulled that together.
Q: This foundation, do you see it coming from people like yourself and people with a history in the BPP, or do you think there is that whole new generation that starts that on their own, or does the Nation of Islam do it? Who does it right now?
I don’t see it coming from the Nation of Islam. I don’t see it coming from any organised formation that is in existence at this point. Because there is a whole new level of thinking, a kind of way of thinking, that has to be developed. I think there are people within all those structures who have the innovative ideas and who have the foresight and who are capable of putting things together that are necessary and do it. But the question is whether or not they really know what they want.
There are a lot of times when we get thrown back in our community. In the years between elections our people see how bad the situation is and they get disenchanted with the elections and there comes along somebody saying all you have to do is to change the administration and things will be better. So they fall back into the same thing. Or you start off with leaders who are strong and audacious and they’re revolutionary or they mouth revolutionary slogans and then they find out that somebody offers them a piece of the pie and then they dilute their message. Like Sister Souljah recently, when she was busy talking about the need for a black army and so on, and then Bill Clinton attacked her about her statement about white people, that she said black people should have a week of killing white people. And her first thing was that she never had a gun, that she never advocated violence. Her whole spiel watered down to the point that we should build our own independent political party and with a technological approach to the situation.
So, even though I am not equating her with the revolutionary leaders, I am saying at that point where you have a voice and once you get attacked or anything like that or you get offered an entree into areas where you maintain your position and you can make a difference in what’s happening, you find out it was all about “this is the best for me at this point” and the amount of dollars, and it becomes different. I think we have a history of that. We have history of – when I made the door open for me, I am going through the door and then you forget about the other persons on the other side.
So, I really think that this new movement is going to be a mixture of people from the old school whose minds are open enough to recognize that they are not the end, that people do not have to come to them before they can move forward. They don’t have the absolute answer. Because some people who were in the Party think that if it isn’t done the way the party was doing it, then it ain’t rational. But it ain’t true. The Party made a lot of mistakes too.
A lot of us inside talked about how there was a need to find new blood. And if we don’t find that new blood and learn from our mistakes and build on them and move forward, then there is no hope for the struggle in this country. And if we continue to try to hold on to it and say: this is my struggle and nobody else can determine how and in which direction it goes, and you can’t do this without permission from me or this is my territory and you can’t walk on my territory. With that game turf mentality we are defeating our own purpose. I think, one of the things we have to do is to consolidate a lot of these organizations and we haven’t done this because egos are in the way.
Egos are a very, very large part of why we have such fragmentations in this movement and we are now moving apart, not moving further. And if you look at the heads of these organizations – they are all men and they splinter off from each other and form little groups with about 30 people in them and they speak to about the same constituency. We have to get past that.
What really gets me is that I hear the people saying that people are ready for this and people are ready for that and the same people who are ready for this and ready for that are the same people that they have been speaking to all the time and they haven’t educated anyone else. When you go outside a certain sector – you can’t even say all of Harlem knows what is going on. Just those people at that rally, or just those who listen to WLIB (NYC radio station) or just those people who call in might be ready. And they might be ready just to talk. And they are ready to do anything concrete. And then they assume just by listening to those few people that the masses are ready for armed struggle, which is not true. Because when you go out to the community, when I go to my mother’s house in Richmond Hill which is right here in Queens, I know they are not ready. But they travel in these little groups, these call these little demonstrations and these people come and they think that they are ready for armed struggle – it’s not true.
A lot of these people would not even know – if armed struggle broke out today – where would they go, how should you deal with treating the wounded, how would you deal with keeping the police from busting down the doors.
So, what you need to do is make those people find a way to take a victory out of the defeat. To turn it around and let people know that you don’t have to be a super-hero to be involved in the movement. But everyone wants people to believe that they’re such strong revolutionaries, that they never feel pain, they never cry, they never want to chuck it all and want to go up to the mountains and read a book or something. But it’s not true.
Jalil will tell you, with this New York Three case, I have been out of prison since 1983 and I have been on this case ever since, and on other cases and working on this and that. And sometimes I am going to say, I need a break, I am not going to do another day’s work on this. And I say that to them and I’m gone. And now, when I say that to them, they leave me alone for a couple of weeks and then they call back and say “are you ok now?” (laughs) Because you are human. You need to do these things in order to continue to be strong enough to handle the struggle. But we want people to believe that we are superhuman. We are not like everyone else…but we are. And we have to recognize that ourselves. And we need recharging. So, if I know that I am coming to the end of my rope, then I can take those precautions, so that I don’t fall a victim to the things that are out there.
Q: Is it really true that there has been no BLA since the 80s?
Not actually since, I would say, 1977/78. And what makes it so bad is that the government knew that. The government knew at that point that there was no political BLA happening out there, whose reason for being there was strictly to wage political and armed struggle in this country, where it was basically the military apparatus of the BPP.
I think you will get to the point where you recognize that in order to build a new movement that you have to expose the mistakes of the prior one, so that you don’t make those same mistakes again; that when you get to that point then we will be ready to move forward again.
Q: What happened to the women, I mean the other women, who were not under so much repression. Did they go back?
A lot of them got involved in community programs, community based work. A lot of us are in touch with each other when we do stuff around the different cases, etc. The women do the majority of that work from one end of the country to the other. Women are raising the children and making sure that they get the education, taking care of the families of the political prisoners, just surviving themselves, because they have been the victims of a lot of these conditions. And now they are educating the youth – in the schools, colleges, universities. So they are continuing the work through the community organizations, like homeless shelters, children’s programs, etc. And when we move from one point to the other we are in touch. And we talk about the women getting together and doing what need to be done. (laughs) We are starting to write books, we are doing more political speaking…
Q: It reminds me of a visit by a women comrade from the Tupamaros who came to the FRG in April, who described a similar development in Uruguay where the women are doing the community work and the men are mostly involved in the strategy discussions.
Because the real work is done by the women on a lot of occasions. The whole theory and sitting back and doing the armchair theory end – that ain’t giving anything to the children, it’s not educating them, that ain’t keeping them out of prison, it’s not doing that. And we have to keep our feet on the ground and keep moving and keep them alive while we build the movement.
Q: You said that you are involved with Islam. Does it interfere with your work at all?
I became a Muslim before I went into prison. I became a Muslim in 1971. It was in the Quran that said it was incumbent upon a Muslim to wage a struggle against tyranny and oppression wherever it may be found. That gave me the license to be a revolutionary and a Muslim at the same time.
And I take it to the extreme, to the extreme I think it is meant to be taken, that a true Muslim will not sit idly by and allow tyranny and oppression in whatever form to happen without waging struggle against it. So, I see no contradiction between being muslim and a revolutionary. I see a contradiction in the way that Islam is practiced in the world. I remember that when I was captured in Virginia, the Islamic community sent a representative to see me and told me that they would not support me as long as I did not veer my case from my co-defendant’s case. There was something totally wrong with them taking a position like that.
I know I came in a lot of conflict with people who thought because I was a woman and a Muslim that I shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that. And when someone is asking about my political beliefs and affiliations and how it’s not been according to the Quran, I refer right back to Sura 23.
Q: Well, I think in Europe we hear very little about the revolutionary writings in the Quran.
Well, that’s because they don’t want to do anything. The Muslims even here – for them it’s a way of separating themselves from society without taking on society. So they become different and say they are not governed by the laws, etc.
The worst thing that has ever happened is having four wives. It isn’t based on Islam, Islam is explained by men in the religion. And the women don’t read the Quran for themselves, so they are victimized by Islam. So, they don’t understand that the men cannot have four wives without the permission of the woman, you know. (laughs) So, if she doesn’t go along with it, it ain’t happening. That in order to have four wives, they have to be taken care of economically, psychologically, physically and spiritually. And I mean, I don’t know too many men who can deal with more than one woman and take care of her. (laughs) And that’s the case, and then there shouldn’t be four wives happening anyway. But these men get the women, put them on welfare and call themselves Muslims they have no understanding for themselves for they have never read the Quran.
Q: Do you want to add something to the interview?
Yes, I just want to reiterate the fact that everyone of us has weaknesses. So, the weakness that people fell into after the “leadership of the movement” went to prison or were wiped out – what you had left was a lot of people who could not function without organization. The organizations were destroyed, they were out there by themselves and then they got caught up in a lot of negative stuff.
Q: Actually, I have one more question. Do you feel you can work at all with what’s left of the white feminist movement or the white women’s movement? Is there any kind of working relationship or do you just say they don’t have a revolutionary program and so you can’t work with them?
It depends. I think in the beginning of the feminist movement in this country it was fairly progressive. Now the feminist movement in this country has just as many right-wing elements as you have revolutionary elements. As a matter of fact, I would say the right-wing elements outnumber the revolutionary elements in the feminist movement in the U.S.
And not just in the white feminist movement, but in the Black/Third World feminist movement also. Sometimes I think that they equate their individual issues with revolutionary struggle, which is not one and the same.
And even with the lesbian and gay community’s struggle in this country – a lot of them are just as conservative as their counterparts in the heterosexual community. And they don’t understand that the issue of sexuality itself is not a revolutionary issue. A lot of people don’t see the difference. They don’t see that that is not a revolutionary issue and that it is not an issue that you can impose and make it an issue of the Black Liberation movement.
When I address the issue of oppression based on sexuality, I make clear that oppression in and of itself, regardless of what reason you oppress people, is wrong. So, to oppress a person because of their sexuality, that in itself is something that we can’t contend to deal with.
Now, once you get past that, then it’s your personal choices. And I think that it doesn’t fall on the level of racism and it doesn’t on class oppression.
And then dealing with the feminist movement they have the question of reproductive rights or pro-choice, choice, and no choice. That is a movement by itself. On the Left, we take the position that a person’s body is their own; that there is a choice that they should make about themselves.
But when you get to the big question, you got just as many cops, female cops, and female judges, and female prosecuting attorneys and oppressive forces who are pro-choice and anything else. So, being pro-choice is not a revolutionary position. And so you can’t continue to equate and allow ourselves to be put in a position that we get dictated to by people who are in one-issue forces.
Q: Thank you for the interview.
Text taken from ATS-L Archives; e-mail Wed, 8 Mar 1995 17:22:29 -0500 (EST) from [email protected], Subject: IWD: Interview With Safiya Bukhari-Alston
More:
- Safiya: Lioness for Liberation, by Mumia Abu-Jamal
- Tribute to Safiya on her passing, from the NYC Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition
- Reminiscence of Safiya Bukhari from the Provisional Government, Republic of New Afrika
- Tributes from Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, Sally O’Brien, and Yuri Kochiyama
- Defending Kamau Sadiki, Safiya’s last project
- Safiya Bukhari, “Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary,” Notes from a New Afrikan P.O.W. Journal, Book 7 (Spear & Shield Publications, 1979). Reprinted with updates in Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Page maintained by Jericho Amnesty Movement, SF Bay Area. Updated October 12, 2003
source: Jericho Movement
Attached is a zine for printing.
Letter
A4https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=12747
#blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #feminism #newAfrikna #northAmerica #safiyaBukhari #us
-
Arm the Spirit Interview With Safiya Bukhari for International Women’s Day: 1995
Interview conducted in New York City, September 27, 1992 and distributed by Arm the Spirit via e-mail for International Women’s Day 1995.
Q: The first question I have is, how did you get involved with the Black Panther Party (BPP)?
I was going to college to be a doctor. The first year in college I was just into my studies. But it was right here in Brooklyn, actually, in New York City College, and the people on campus thought that I was stuck up because I didn’t associate – I was studying a lot. And so the second year, in order to break that mode, I pledged for a sorority called Hamilton House. That same year the sorority became integrated. We elected the first Black president. And one of the projects of the sorority was to adopt underprivileged children in foreign countries. Our President that year said we didn’t have to go any further than the United States to find underprivileged children. A lot of people didn’t believe that there were hungry children that needed to be fed right here in the U.S., even in New York.
So three of us were assigned to go investigate the situation and we ended up going to Harlem to see if there were really hungry children. It was Yvonne Smallwood, Wanda Davis and myself. And the first people we ran into when we got there were the Panthers. Wanda got totally involved from the beginning; she fell in love with a Panther and joined the Party and everything. I didn’t go that route. I simply didn’t believe the things that the Panthers were saying.
About the hungry children: we went back and reported that the result was that there were a lot of people who were eating out of garbage cans, that there were indecent conditions that they were living in, etc. The next question was what to do about it. Should we start our own program or should we get involved in the things that already went on – because the Panthers already had the Free Breakfast Program. So, in essence we elected to just assign various members of our sorority to work with the free Breakfast Program. We would collect the food, we cooked the food, we would help the children with their homework, things like that, but I still didn’t believe in what the Panthers were saying. I didn’t think that the violence was happening. I didn’t think that the conspiracies were going on. I didn’t believe that the police were doing what they said they were doing, etc.
Two incidents happened that made me start to think seriously about what the ideology of the Party was and take the rhetoric of the Party seriously. With the Breakfast Program, the police started putting out rumours. The children stopped coming to the breakfast program. And I wondered why – so I found out from talking to some of the parents that the police kept telling them that we were feeding the children poisoned food – so they were stopped from bringing their children to the program and that made me angry. I mean, we were getting up at outrageous hours in the morning to take care of this before going to school – I was still going to school full-time – I was cooking the food and we were eating it right along with the children. They didn’t have a breakfast program in the schools themselves, they were not making an effort to feed the children, but they didn’t want us to feed the children. And I was incensed about that.
Then, myself and my friend Wanda were walking on 42nd Street – I still hadn’t joined the Party, that still didn’t make me angry enough to join the Party – well, there we were on 42nd Street one day and going to times Square we saw this big crowd on the corner and so we went rushing to see what was going on. A Panther was on the corner selling papers and the police were harassing him. So, believing whole-heartedly in the Constitution, I asked him what he was doing. And the police said if I didn’t stop that they were going to arrest me, too. I said he had a constitutional right to sell the papers, actually, I said he had a constitutional right to disseminate political literature, and he didn’t take that too kindly. He asked me for my ID and told me to get up against the car and that he was going to arrest me for obstructing governmental process and inciting a riot. He handcuffed me, handcuffed the Panther, handcuffed Wanda and threw us into the police car and took us down to the 14th Precinct. In the back of the car they told my friend Wanda that if she didn’t shut up – she was just running off at the mouth, calling them a bunch of names – they were going to ram the night-stick right up her. That was their behaviour and when we got to the Precinct itself they talked about holding court in the Precinct. They did a search, threw us in a holding cell and kept talking … then they had a female guard come and strip-search us and they told her she should wear gloves and make sure she washes her hands afterwards because she could catch something from touching us. It was that experience that when they let me out, I called my mother and father at home and told them I was going to join the BPP. Because of the police, I told them that the police convinced me of the legitimacy of the truth of what the Panthers were saying.
I didn’t get arrested for anything from that point on. I never got arrested for anything trivial. But my friend Wanda, she never learned not to get arrested for talking, I was with her when she got arrested for selling wolf tickets and murdermouthing the police. But to me it was much more serious than that. It was more serious because they had this authority and they had the badges and they had the guns and they abused their power. And it’s what they say and what they do that carries more weight in a court of law than what the individual does. It was that kind of corruption that made me make the decision to join the BPP.
Q: When was that?
1969.
Q: And then you worked with the Panthers in New York?
I worked with the Panthers, I worked out of the Harlem office of the BPP, from then until I went underground in 1974.
Q: Why did you go underground?
From 1969 until 1971, before the split in the BPP, I had a section. My responsibility was for organizing and politicizing that section, selling papers, organizing the various cell units and just politically educating that community. I did everything from selling papers and handing out leaflets, drug-detox work and everything else. By 1971 when the split came down, right after the split, I became in charge of Information and Communications for the East Coast Panthers. One of my responsibilities was to hold the press conferences and release communiqués from the Black Liberation Army.
And so I became a direct threat to the establishment. They thought I had the information they needed to capture BLA members. So they subpoenaed me. But even prior to this they had done a number of articles on the fact that I was the only ranking member in the Party without a felony conviction. And since I had no felony conviction, I had a license to carry arms. And I carried arms openly in public because the law allowed you to. You could carry long arms or have a Paratrooper A-1. I had an 8mm Mauser and I had these long arms whenever we had a press conference. Or I kept it at home and walked with it, carried it back and forth to the office, in a holster on the street. So the media played it up like “the Panthers with guns”, but they didn’t bother to investigate that it was licensed. When they finally got to the point that they realized I was legal, then I was the only ranking Party member without a felony conviction.
I had done my work in the community so well that I had a lot of community support and so on that level had organized my base area and also had the political astuteness to in order to play the media. They thought the fact that I had the diplomacy to play the media made me a political threat. Then in 1970/71 we started the National Committee for the defense of Political Prisoners, in response to all the arrests across the country of Panthers and BLA members. I was working with the people in prison and they put the letters that I was sending inside to the prisoners. Our political stance was very clear, we were not about reformism or anything like that. It was about revolutionary political power and how it comes to revolution, and means a qualitative change in the living conditions of the people with us, and it was not about the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – oldest liberal Black civil rights organization in the U.S.) style politics or anything like that.
The Senate Committee in the US held hearings on the kind of political literature that was going into the prisons, so that part was a threat to them also. It was basically a lot of the political work that I was doing – back and forth to the prisons – myself and Yuri Kochiyama and many others like us. And in November 1973, myself and three other people who were part of the Harriet Tubman Brigade of the BLA were arrested for trying to break out some six members of the BLA out of the Tombs (pretrial detention prison in NYC). But the arrest was premature because even though they played it up to the media like “Great Tombs Escape Fails At The sewer”, they were not able to hold us because we weren’t doing anything. The only thing they could charge us with was third degree burglary on a sewer, which was laughed out of court. And they were very angry.
Outside the legitimate system, the Police Department put a $10,000 contract on me that I wasn’t supposed to be captured. I had gotten into the position to be killed on sight. That was outside the normal system. And inside it, I got a subpoena by the Federal government to the grand Jury – about 11 other people and myself. But the difference with my subpoena was that if I showed up at the Grand Jury I couldn’t take the Fifth Amendment and therefore for any question that I refused to answer I was facing felony contempt which carried a prison sentence.
So we discussed it, myself and Nuh (Nuh Washington – now one of the New York Three) and some other people and we decided that I shouldn’t go before the Grand Jury in April 1974, that I should go underground. And at that point I went underground with the Amistad Collective of the Black Liberation Army.
Q: In order to end the chronology – when did you get captured?
I was the unit coordinator of the Amistad Collective. So, basically I was the only female coordinator in a BLA unit. We were captured in a shoot-out in Norfolk, Virginia, on January 25, 1975. One of my co-defendants, Komposi Amistad, was killed and another one was shot in the face. For the first 30 days we were facing the electric chair for felony murder. The only reason why we got out from the electric chair is that the federal government and the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in Virginia at that time, saying it was unconstitutional. So we didn’t have to go to trial facing the death penalty.
But the state of Virginia asked for 900 years on the paratrooper A-1 I told you about, they didn’t care that I had a federal license. It was a one day trial, my bail was set at 1 million dollars on each count – we had five counts, which came to 5 million dollars.
They told them not to touch the bail issue, they picked the jury, they had the trial and they sentenced us all in one day and took us off to prison in one day. When they had the trial they threw me out of court before they started the trial. So I understand well Mumia not being in court during his trial, because I was not in court either.
I was in a cell in the back and it was cold and it had a loud-speaker, but I didn’t hear a thing, because it was nothing but static. But they brought me back in court for the sentencing phase and I was given 40 years. The jury wanted to run the time concurrently – I got 10, 10, and 20 – because it was the minimum on all the charges. And the judge told them they couldn’t do it, it was not up to them to determine how high it ran on the term on what I got and he ran it consecutive, and he told me I had to do every day of it. I told him, his momma was going to do it. (laughs) They sent us off to prison that night.
We both went together because they sent me to the penitentiary for men where my co-defendant was, and then I was taken by caravan to the women’s institution in Richmond, Virginia, and spent the next 21 days in maximum security segregation, because they didn’t want me on the outside where the other population was.
Q: How did you get out of segregation?
According to their own rules the only reason why you are supposed to be on maximum security segregation is when you violate one of their rules. So, I hadn’t violated a rule, So, when they took me down there I asked them why I was down there and they said because they didn’t have an empty room in the quarantine hall. And I asked them for a manual of their rules. I read it all and I told them, if that’s the case, in 21 days then you don’t have to worry about the room in the quarantine. Just that either I’ll be out of maximum security segregation or you’ll be in court.
And so on the 19th day they sent this correctional officer down there who said that she would accept me on her hall. She asked me what my intentions were while I was in prison and I told here that my intention was to do two years and leave. (laughs).
And she said they were concerned about me organizing in prison recruiting for the BLA, and I told them I had no intentions to recruit because I don’t really believe in recruiting. I believe if a person is going to do anything they need to make the decision based on their own conditions. If you have to recruit them, they haven’t made a decision on their own and if they don’t make it on their own they’re susceptible to back out and say somebody forced them to do things and stuff like that. But if they make a conscious decision on their own that the want to be involved in something then they have nobody to blame for anything that happens.
So, I told her I had no intention of recruiting. And she said then that she didn’t have any problems with me being in her hall. And so on the 21st day they moved me to the building where this correctional officer was, but I wasn’t allowed to go out into general population without handcuffs on and an armed guard with me. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. I wasn’t allowed to work in the kitchen or in the laundry or any other place where the women were working because they said I was a security risk. So, the only place I could be was in the hall, on the tier, in the cottage where I was housed. For everything you had to be right there at that complex.
After the first year I had to do the psychological evaluation, so that they could determine how they should handle you. The psychologist that I had to go see decided that I didn’t have to do all those little stupid tests, putting blocks together, etc. He asked a bunch of questions and then he said that he understood my political “beliefs”; at least how determined I was and stuff like that. And then he wrote this paper talking about that I believed wholeheartedly in the movement and that I was adamant about that, but I would not be a disciplinary problem if they called me by my Islamic name and dealt with me in a respectful manner and then he called me “paranoid” (laughs) – that I believed that people were out to get me. But he did say that I had no need for rehabilitation – rehabilitate from what, anyway. So he told them that they had to call me by my Islamic name or Ms. Bukhari and there will be no problems. But if they try to deal with me in any other manner then they did have a problem with me. And that was the psychological evaluation.
Anyways, after almost two years exactly I escaped. It was New Years Eve 1976. And the escape was really for two reasons. First, was that I just believed as a prisoner of war that a prisoner of war’s responsibility is to escape. So, from the very beginning we took the position that we were prisoners of war, and at the time of our capture we were soldiers in the Black Liberation Army. We gave a name, rank and serial number only and invoked that the court had no jurisdiction to try us. Therefore on that premise alone that the prisons had no jurisdiction over us and it is our responsibility as prisoners of war to escape – on that level I escaped. And that was one of the reasons.
The other reason was – one of the reasons why I was going South in the first place prior to the capture was because I had medical problems and I needed surgery. At the time of the capture I made known to them that I needed to have a surgery. They kept telling me that when I go over to the state custody it would be handled then. When I got to the prison they told me – after the examination – that I had fibroids the size of oranges or grapefruits in my uterus and asked me how much time I had. I told them I had 40 years. They then told me to come back in 10 years. I filed suit. The court said that it was just a difference of opinion between me and the doctor about how the medical treatment should be. I had asked to be able to pay for my own medical care, to have a doctor from the outside, etc. And they said no.
The month before my escape I started haemorrhaging so bad that at the time of my escape I was wearing three big sanitary napkins at the time. And I would have to change them every 2 hours. I was having my menstrual cycle for two weeks at the time, every other week. I was just bleeding horrendously. That day, when I made the decision that I couldn’t wait any longer to get medical care I was standing up in the middle of the floor in the unit where I was housed and all of a sudden – I mean nothing special happened – I just started haemorrhaging from the vagina. And I went to the clinic hall in the institution and they gave me Urgatrade, that was a medication to control the bleeding and told me to go and put my feet up. That was the extent of it – there was no recommendation for to take me to a doctor, to the hospital or anything. I just felt that they were not concerned about my health at all.
The doctor at the institution was not qualified to deal with women. And he had been so bad that in once case for example he had diagnosed just a sore throat when a woman had cancer. This other woman had one ovary left and he told here she had tumours on her right ovary – she didn’t have any right ovary. There was no way that you could have faith in the competency of this doctor. So, when they told me about this Urgatrade for the control of the bleeding and go and put my feet up, I decided that I had to make arrangements to take care of my own medical care.
Those of us who were in the BLA and who were incarcerated, we had a secure communication channel, so that we were still involved in what we called consolidation, organizing, structuring and stuff like that. I was in charge of Area 2 of the consolidation work in the unit and for the country. And as being in charge of Area 2 I was responsible for all the consolidation work in that area around BLA and BPP members, and outside building that whole network in that area. My second was Mark Holder who was in prison at Marion; and he was responsible for that area. So, between the two of us we had the whole Southern regional area of the East Coast in terms of our organizing efforts. Even while we were in prison, mind you…
Part of the CC, the Central Committee of the BLA, were on the streets. There were also members of the CC that were in prison and some were underground.
When I made the decision to escape I notified through secure channels the Central Committee that I was making a move. I notified my area coordinator and I notified the people in the area who needed to know that I was not going to be where they thought I was going to be. The night of the actual escape, we left and we made contact with the underground, and I was out roughly two months. I was captured on February 27th, 1977, and returned to prison in Virginia and went to trial where I was my own attorney at this point in the trial.
During the course of the trial I raised the issue of inadequate medical care and I pleaded not guilty for the reason of “duress and necessity” – that in order to save my own life I had to escape because of the medical conditions. That was also a way of raising the lack of adequate medical care for the women in the prison itself. The jury was very sympathetic and in the town a lot of the correctional officers and the head nurse for the correctional facility were very sympathetic because they knew this man was not qualified; that people in the town where the prison was located would not use him for anything. The only place he could practice was in the women’s institution, because nobody would allow him to practice on them. So during the course of the trial this was brought out.
By the time the trial was over, the judge had to threaten the jury with contempt charges if they didn’t find me guilty, because he said escape is like murder. And so they found me guilty of escape and they sentenced me to the minimum time which was one year. I was already doing 40 years, so one year didn’t make a difference. And the jury stood outside the courtroom and apologized when I was going out … (laughs). The upshot of it was that I was given a choice at that point about doctors – they picked three doctors outside that were not part of the prison system. And they took me to a hospital in Richmond, Virginia, and I picked a woman doctor and we talked about it and they did the examination. By this time it was two years after going into prison, my condition had worsened to the point where they said there strings all across that had pulled my uterus, the tubes and the ovaries all together. And Wanda said – my doctors’s name was Wanda too – that she would do everything possible to save something, but it would be a major piece of surgery. The upshot was that I ended up having a hysterectomy and that I have only one ovary left – and it’s because of the malpractice of that doctor.
I suffered severe postpartum depression. For whole year I was out of it. I was still in maximum security segregation for the escape. I spent three years and 7 months in maximum security segregation – that was the longest time anyone ever did for escape; before that the maximum for escape was 6 months in maximum security segregation. I had to go to court to come out of it and the court ordered me out of it at the end of the three years and 7 months, they had to phase me out. But during the course of the trial the Warden said that I was a threat to the security of the free world if the were releasing me from maximum security segregation. For a minute there I thought I was Russian (laughs) …
Anyway, I came out of maximum security segregation in 1981. After I came out of maximum security segregation we founded a little organization in prisons called “Mothers Inside Loving Kids” for people with a long time, to try to bridge that gap between the children and so that they can keep their family and that continuity with their children going. And then I made parole in 1983, and in August 1983 I was already free.
Q: Did they give you conditions for parole?
Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to associate with anybody – I wasn’t supposed to associate with folks. I wasn’t supposed to ever have a gun in my hands again. I wasn’t supposed to associate with any BLA or Panthers or anything like that. They asked me questions like: “Do you believe in violence or would you do what you did again?” And I told them that based on the conditions – no right-thinking person believes in violence for the sake of violence. But there are certain instances when you have no alternative, when you have exhausted everything else – then you have to resort to violence. And then they asked me: “Would I deal with things the same way again?” And I told them, no, I wouldn’t do it particularly that, because one of the things that is very clear is that we haven’t done the necessary education and organizational work in the streets in order to deal with a movement in the ways that we moved then. We were young, we were idealistic and we were impatient.
We have to build a foundation. And we have to organize not just 30,000 people. This country has 240 to almost 300 million people in it. And a lot of people in the rural areas, and even in some of the major cities and in the suburbs, don’t even know anything is happening because they are not exposed to the conditions – they just don’t know about it. It’s like when we talk about Mumia’s situation – people have never even heard his name – and we are talking about a major situation.
So, the educational phase has to be so that when you move from one level to the next in the struggle, that it is understood that the people know what we are doing. And you lay the foundation to the point where you are not leading the people to a slaughter. And they talked about not being around people who were in the BLA and the BPP and convicted felons. And I told them that it isn’t possible to live in the Black community and not be around convicted felons. To say that I won’t do that I’d be lying to you.
And the other part is that these people of the BPP and the BLA are not just comrades, they are my family. And to tell me that I cannot associate with my family is something I will not accept. So I told them if you give me parole be clear about the fact that I am going to associate with my family. (laughs) And I did from day one when I was walking out of the prison. I was shocked – everyone was shocked – that I made parole. (laughs) The consistence was that the state of Virginia just wanted to get rid of me because it was costing them too much money lately.
The only times I did a law suit against them was when they pushed me to the point where I had no other choice but to file a suit against them. At the last when I left the prison in Virginia they had just written the first infraction ticket that I had since my escape. I was on work release and they had written the ticket because I went outside on the ground of the place where I worked at to sit down to eat lunch on the bench. And the woman who was in charge of the house, the workpolice, wrote the ticket – she was already crazy about the fact that I was a Muslim and she was a Christian and she thought that everybody in the house should be Christian …
And I didn’t eat pork, and how could you be Black in the South without eating pork? She was really ridiculous with “this is my house” and this is a prison. But when she gave me the ticket, she confined me to the house, and the only thing I could come out for were meals. I didn’t mind because at this point I had already made parole, I was just waiting for the date. But at the same time I didn’t like that she had denied me religious freedom.
And I filed a law suit – I told her the next time she will talk to me, talk to my lawyer. I made parole and came home and the suit was still pending. Then I got a call from the lawyer to tell me that they had settled; they had fired her, they had settled the lawsuit and I hadn’t even asked for damages … I just wanted them to tell her that this was not her house and she couldn’t run it as if it were her house and that she couldn’t dictate what religion people could be … I just wanted to tell her that. Because other women were scared to say anything because she was threatening with taking their rights and privileges and they were not ready to deal with that. And I just didn’t think that these people should get away with running their own little prisons.
Anyway, I didn’t mean for her to get fired, because she was the only Black woman in that position. But she got herself into a position that there was nothing to do but to deal with it. And anyway, they gave me money damages and fired her.
Q: Can you talk about how it was to be the only woman unit leader underground?
(laughs) Sexism is regardless of how political you are – in the United States sexism is part of the culture of the U.S. and this is a sexist society.
In the Black Liberation movement sexism is a strong factor not only because of the sexist society in America, but because of the African culture itself, sexism is there. And it’s there in the black culture, because of the denial of their manhood in the acculturation and deculturation that came with slavery and everything else. When the Black Power movement cam into being in the 60s and even through the Garveyites (Marcus Garvey – Black nationalist leader in the 20s and 30s with a strong slogan “Back to Africa”), the Garvey movement and the Nation of Islam and all that other prior to that, there was a search for their manhood. You know, “Rise up you mighty Black men”, Garvey said, or in the BPP the slogan was “Stand up to be Men” and so forth. So, in the Black Power movement and the cultural nationalist movement they were really blatant by saying that the place of women was in the kitchen or on their backs and having children for building the Nation and so on.
One of the things that had developed in the Panther Party and in the BLA – for us, the BLA came out of the BPP because no Party member was allowed to join any armed force other than the Black Liberation Army – was the whole machismo thing. But at the same time there was an organizational position that was anti-sexist. But the individuals themselves still had a lot of sexism within. The Party only existed for about 7 years … there was never time. You had a cultural thing that never did have time to be dealt with.
So you had all the “leaders”, even though Kathleen Cleaver was on the Central Committee, she was just there, a figure-head most on the CC She was Eldridge Cleaver’s wife. So her role was not as a Communications Secretary in the sense that she was viable and working ahead, having an independent voice .. . her role was that of – since she was married to Eldridge Cleaver and he was Minister of Information, she was the Communication Secretary. And women were still viewed more or less as secretaries. There were a few of us on the political front and at political stands and doing the same work. We were basically doing the same work in the BPP. There were a few of us who not only would do the same work, but we would not accept the sexism.
And in the years when I joined the party in 1969, one of the things I tried to make clear was that I did not come into the Party to become somebody’s sexual toy. That, if I wanted to do that I could do it outside of the BPP. Also, I was in my second year at college when I joined the Party – I had already made determinations. I was raised in a family of six brothers and endless uncles … and my mother was very strong. So there was always that leadership position.
And when I made the determination that I was going underground, it was a determination that was based on that I knew this was the next step, this is what I wanted to do. And I had the experience of the collectives that I worked with. First it was the Harriet Tubman Brigade – their sole responsibility was to liberate P.O.W.s, and then it was the “Wretched of the Earth” – and we still wanted the liberation of the P.O.W.s. We saw ourselves as a collective in the sense of a collective. There were no real unit coordinators in those years.
By the time the Amistad Collective came together we decided that we wanted to organize it. We wanted responsibilities and discipline whereas a lot of other units did not have that organization. We wanted to set us a pattern. We had election based on qualifications – qualification and not sexuality – did we decide on who got what position. We had political education classes and we had everything – we even had “r and r” (rest and relaxation) because we found it was necessary that you had time to rest and recuperate.
Having the responsibility of a unit coordinator was more like keeping it all together and trying to make sure that decisions were made not on an emotional basis, that we looked at everything objectively in making those decisions. And making sure that there was a distribution of the work that didn’t see the women in the cell doing the “female” work and being seen as sex objects in the cells. That didn’t develop so we were able to maintain a position in our cell that we were comrades. We were comrades, we respected each other’s individuality and each other’s capabilities and we had the discipline that we didn’t violate no drug rules and not being intoxicated while carrying out our business and stuff like that. That was a very bad part of the movement, in the underground also, that developed in this country.
We had analyzed these things prior to us forming a cell. I think, that’s one of the things that came with being a female unit coordinator – it’s because women have a practical, a more practical approach to things than men do. (laughs). And that’s what I think made our cell different. Even though I was captured and my co- defendant was captured and the other unit member was killed – our unit was made up of 8 people – no one else ever got captured that was in our unit. And the person who talked, who allowed us to be captured, was eventually dealt with, so the person was incapable to put anybody else in the position to be captured. You know, my co-defendant was captured and a woman was killed and I was captured, but 5 other people survived it and were capable of moving.
And even though I didn’t particularly like being in prison, we, we were able to do work. And during the course of the trial, we were able to educate the community. The community was the support network that we had, and even when it came down to the escapes and everything else that happened in Virginia during that time – the people were there because the unit was able to continue to do the work and put the thing together.
Q: What happened to your co-defendant?
He’s out. He’s in Chicago. Yeah, after I got out first, the work to get him out was a thing that we continued. I carried it on – because one of the things I told people is that I was out, but as long as he was in, I really wasn’t out yet, you know. And that’s the kind of cohesiveness that we maintained. Because in a lot of other cases people who were co-defendants came out and they went on about their business and forgot about their co-defendants, the people that went in with them, and I think on that end our unit set a very good example, that we didn’t just walk away from the situation.
Q: And how was it for you – you already had your child before you went underground?
Yes, she was 4 years old when I went underground. Her father was killed during the split in the party. There were two casualties directly involved in the split. That was Robert Webb and Sam Napier on the East Coast, on the New York side of the split. Robert Webb, who is my daughter’s father, had been a body guard to Huey Newton. And when the split went down, because he surfaced – he had been underground – he was a liability for them. He was ordered assassinated by crews from that end.
In retaliation, people from the outside assassinated [Sam Napier]. The fratricide was the most .. the police just sat back and laughed; their thing was they didn’t have to get Panthers, the Panthers kill each other. That was a very crucial time for a lot of us. And when we look back at it – Sam was a loss to the movement itself because he was the circulation manager of the paper. And he lived and died for the paper. And Robert was a loss – just personally he was a loss, because of our relationship, but politically he was a loss, because he knew how to put together an apparatus. He had been in the armed forces of the U.S., he had come out and he was working for the liberation of our people. He had the information and the connections in order to do it; and he had the security mind – he was Deputy Field Marshal in the BPP. Anyway, at the time just before the split, my mother had taken custody of my daughter. I let her go and stay with my mother. And when Robert came back, we had intentions at the point to go back from the underground to get Wanda, my daughter – I named her Wanda too (laughs) – and to bring her back to stay with us and then he got killed, so it was very appropriate that she stayed with my mother. So, she stayed there and I would go and see her.
Robert was dead and I was in a very insecure position. By the time 1974 came around I and I already had the $10,000 contract on me, I had the Grand Jury subpoena and I had been busted in November 1973 for the other things. So I called my mother up and I told her that I wanted her to keep my daughter. And I signed guardianship over to her. One of the things the state was trying to do was to take Panther children away from their parents because they were unfit parents, etc. I didn’t want to take a chance, so I signed legal guardianship over to my mother. And I made arrangements for her schooling and everything else, and I went underground.
When I got captured, I could still see her and I had a lot of dealings with her schooling, etc. But even at that point, when the state found out about her they tried to take her, at one point just tried to kidnap her and use her for leverage against me to make me talk while I was in prison. In a lot of cases I would just call and make sure that my mother didn’t let her go with strangers or someone. One time this woman came by the house and told my mother that she will bring toys for Wanda, she will come and visit and stuff like that, told my mother that she was one of my best friends, and I had told her that Wanda could come spend the weekend with her. And it just so happened that that particular weekend I called home and Momma told me about it, and I told her that I had never heard that woman’s name before in my life. It was incidents like these that made us decide that she could go nowhere by herself, that she had to be taken to school and be picked up from school, and she couldn’t be allowed to just have a normal life really, because they were at the point where they were using children to get information from the parents. So it was very hard to do time in prison knowing that my daughter was the target for a whole lot of things.
Q: Did she understand what was happening?
She never understood. On a lot of levels she was angry because she thought my being in prison was an abandonment of her. And then she never really understood why she had to be kept under such strict surveillance or control. And even now, I tell her now it hasn’t really changed. I mean, I will get messages where someone has seen her here or done this. There is no place that she can go that people don’t know that she is my daughter, and so she has to watch herself very carefully about what she does and where she is and stuff like that.
Q: When we first started learning about the Black Panther Party and the BLA, the only woman’s name that was mentioned was Assata and no one else. Why is that?
That’s because of the media stuff. (laughs) I think the reason why you hear so much about Assata is basically because in 1973 with the shoot-out and everything that happened, the publicity was very high. So the media when they were looking for her, they called her the “soul of the BLA” and stuff like that. It was a lot of media hype and people have a tendency to deal with the media….
You know, she has survived a lot, she has learned a lot and she has studied and she has developed.
And I think on that end too, I have a real problem with the fact that people deal with Assata and there are a lot of other people out there in exile that no one ever mentions.
And then you have a bunch of them in various places that nobody knows their names. And that really works with me, because we have a tendency to build superstars and the superstars get the play. And the soldiers in the rank and file and the workhorses, whose names were never known, they languish on their own. That is not the way you build movements, if you don’t support the people in your movements who made the sacrifices then what incentive is there to anybody else to get involved. I have a real problem with that.
You know the names of Dhoruba bin-Wahad, or Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt and the New York Three, but all the other ones who are languishing in the prisons sit there with no attorneys, no nothing and no one knows their names. You can mention their names, and it goes in one ear and out the other. A lot of times they have no commissary, they don’t get visits, not even from their families do they get visits. But the families that weren’t involved in the struggles that they’re in prison for, they didn’t make the commitments. But the people who were involved in those struggles with them, they don’t even remember the names anymore.
Do you see anyone out there right now who is trying to rebuild the contacts with those comrades? It seems there are so many who need to come out just on the case that they’ve been involved in the struggle?
Well, that’s one of the reasons why we do the New York Three Freedom Campaign Newsletter, we mention those people every time we get information about them, where they are and their cases, what’s happening with them, we try to bring it up and build networking for different struggles around different political prisoners. We try and educate the people to get involved, educate them about the rank and file. And we try to raise not to get involved with the personality cult and deal with the whole issue of support for political prisoners rather than support for an individual political prisoner.
And even like dealing with the brothers inside right now – because it’s predominantly brothers that are inside, except for the MOVE prisoners and white anti-imperialists, there are more brothers; in the Black movement there are basically men that were involved at that time, especially Panthers and BLA members – to cross those boundaries and deal with the whole issue of political prisoners. They are pushing that now, too, that they went into prison as members of organizations and that they should be dealt with as members of organizations rather than as individuals.
There is a lot of work that has to be done – attorneys have to be found and our responsibility to ourselves is in building that foundation, because all of that is building foundations.
When you get involved in movements there should be a legal defense fund set up consistently and there. So when a bust goes down, there is an attorney available for the incarcerated comrade. There should be no question about having to raise defense money. It should be there. By the same token there should be a mechanism to liberate political prisoners. So, that if there is nothing to be won through the courts, there is an alternative already in place.
And for those that have done their time, there should be a fund or something set up for them. I know after 8 years and 8 months there was a lot of psychological damage done to myself personally in the time that I spent in prison. There has to be a mechanism set up so you have time to cool out and deprogram. Because that’s what time in prison is – it’s a time of programming. And so you have to be de-programmed. And after almost 9 years, it happened to me then … and those people who have done 15 and 17 and 20 or more years, they need it much more than I did – you know, to train them for things. And we don’t have those mechanisms in place.
So when I talk about the foundations that we need to build for the struggle I this country, we talk about the basic, elementary foundations to fill a military apparatus and a political struggle. On the political level, we need to have our own communication centres, so we don’t have to keep worrying and wondering about how we get information printed or how we are going to get this done or that done. Right now we should have the people with the necessary skills to put information out from the radio and television. And we have not pulled that together.
Q: This foundation, do you see it coming from people like yourself and people with a history in the BPP, or do you think there is that whole new generation that starts that on their own, or does the Nation of Islam do it? Who does it right now?
I don’t see it coming from the Nation of Islam. I don’t see it coming from any organised formation that is in existence at this point. Because there is a whole new level of thinking, a kind of way of thinking, that has to be developed. I think there are people within all those structures who have the innovative ideas and who have the foresight and who are capable of putting things together that are necessary and do it. But the question is whether or not they really know what they want.
There are a lot of times when we get thrown back in our community. In the years between elections our people see how bad the situation is and they get disenchanted with the elections and there comes along somebody saying all you have to do is to change the administration and things will be better. So they fall back into the same thing. Or you start off with leaders who are strong and audacious and they’re revolutionary or they mouth revolutionary slogans and then they find out that somebody offers them a piece of the pie and then they dilute their message. Like Sister Souljah recently, when she was busy talking about the need for a black army and so on, and then Bill Clinton attacked her about her statement about white people, that she said black people should have a week of killing white people. And her first thing was that she never had a gun, that she never advocated violence. Her whole spiel watered down to the point that we should build our own independent political party and with a technological approach to the situation.
So, even though I am not equating her with the revolutionary leaders, I am saying at that point where you have a voice and once you get attacked or anything like that or you get offered an entree into areas where you maintain your position and you can make a difference in what’s happening, you find out it was all about “this is the best for me at this point” and the amount of dollars, and it becomes different. I think we have a history of that. We have history of – when I made the door open for me, I am going through the door and then you forget about the other persons on the other side.
So, I really think that this new movement is going to be a mixture of people from the old school whose minds are open enough to recognize that they are not the end, that people do not have to come to them before they can move forward. They don’t have the absolute answer. Because some people who were in the Party think that if it isn’t done the way the party was doing it, then it ain’t rational. But it ain’t true. The Party made a lot of mistakes too.
A lot of us inside talked about how there was a need to find new blood. And if we don’t find that new blood and learn from our mistakes and build on them and move forward, then there is no hope for the struggle in this country. And if we continue to try to hold on to it and say: this is my struggle and nobody else can determine how and in which direction it goes, and you can’t do this without permission from me or this is my territory and you can’t walk on my territory. With that game turf mentality we are defeating our own purpose. I think, one of the things we have to do is to consolidate a lot of these organizations and we haven’t done this because egos are in the way.
Egos are a very, very large part of why we have such fragmentations in this movement and we are now moving apart, not moving further. And if you look at the heads of these organizations – they are all men and they splinter off from each other and form little groups with about 30 people in them and they speak to about the same constituency. We have to get past that.
What really gets me is that I hear the people saying that people are ready for this and people are ready for that and the same people who are ready for this and ready for that are the same people that they have been speaking to all the time and they haven’t educated anyone else. When you go outside a certain sector – you can’t even say all of Harlem knows what is going on. Just those people at that rally, or just those who listen to WLIB (NYC radio station) or just those people who call in might be ready. And they might be ready just to talk. And they are ready to do anything concrete. And then they assume just by listening to those few people that the masses are ready for armed struggle, which is not true. Because when you go out to the community, when I go to my mother’s house in Richmond Hill which is right here in Queens, I know they are not ready. But they travel in these little groups, these call these little demonstrations and these people come and they think that they are ready for armed struggle – it’s not true.
A lot of these people would not even know – if armed struggle broke out today – where would they go, how should you deal with treating the wounded, how would you deal with keeping the police from busting down the doors.
So, what you need to do is make those people find a way to take a victory out of the defeat. To turn it around and let people know that you don’t have to be a super-hero to be involved in the movement. But everyone wants people to believe that they’re such strong revolutionaries, that they never feel pain, they never cry, they never want to chuck it all and want to go up to the mountains and read a book or something. But it’s not true.
Jalil will tell you, with this New York Three case, I have been out of prison since 1983 and I have been on this case ever since, and on other cases and working on this and that. And sometimes I am going to say, I need a break, I am not going to do another day’s work on this. And I say that to them and I’m gone. And now, when I say that to them, they leave me alone for a couple of weeks and then they call back and say “are you ok now?” (laughs) Because you are human. You need to do these things in order to continue to be strong enough to handle the struggle. But we want people to believe that we are superhuman. We are not like everyone else…but we are. And we have to recognize that ourselves. And we need recharging. So, if I know that I am coming to the end of my rope, then I can take those precautions, so that I don’t fall a victim to the things that are out there.
Q: Is it really true that there has been no BLA since the 80s?
Not actually since, I would say, 1977/78. And what makes it so bad is that the government knew that. The government knew at that point that there was no political BLA happening out there, whose reason for being there was strictly to wage political and armed struggle in this country, where it was basically the military apparatus of the BPP.
I think you will get to the point where you recognize that in order to build a new movement that you have to expose the mistakes of the prior one, so that you don’t make those same mistakes again; that when you get to that point then we will be ready to move forward again.
Q: What happened to the women, I mean the other women, who were not under so much repression. Did they go back?
A lot of them got involved in community programs, community based work. A lot of us are in touch with each other when we do stuff around the different cases, etc. The women do the majority of that work from one end of the country to the other. Women are raising the children and making sure that they get the education, taking care of the families of the political prisoners, just surviving themselves, because they have been the victims of a lot of these conditions. And now they are educating the youth – in the schools, colleges, universities. So they are continuing the work through the community organizations, like homeless shelters, children’s programs, etc. And when we move from one point to the other we are in touch. And we talk about the women getting together and doing what need to be done. (laughs) We are starting to write books, we are doing more political speaking…
Q: It reminds me of a visit by a women comrade from the Tupamaros who came to the FRG in April, who described a similar development in Uruguay where the women are doing the community work and the men are mostly involved in the strategy discussions.
Because the real work is done by the women on a lot of occasions. The whole theory and sitting back and doing the armchair theory end – that ain’t giving anything to the children, it’s not educating them, that ain’t keeping them out of prison, it’s not doing that. And we have to keep our feet on the ground and keep moving and keep them alive while we build the movement.
Q: You said that you are involved with Islam. Does it interfere with your work at all?
I became a Muslim before I went into prison. I became a Muslim in 1971. It was in the Quran that said it was incumbent upon a Muslim to wage a struggle against tyranny and oppression wherever it may be found. That gave me the license to be a revolutionary and a Muslim at the same time.
And I take it to the extreme, to the extreme I think it is meant to be taken, that a true Muslim will not sit idly by and allow tyranny and oppression in whatever form to happen without waging struggle against it. So, I see no contradiction between being muslim and a revolutionary. I see a contradiction in the way that Islam is practiced in the world. I remember that when I was captured in Virginia, the Islamic community sent a representative to see me and told me that they would not support me as long as I did not veer my case from my co-defendant’s case. There was something totally wrong with them taking a position like that.
I know I came in a lot of conflict with people who thought because I was a woman and a Muslim that I shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that. And when someone is asking about my political beliefs and affiliations and how it’s not been according to the Quran, I refer right back to Sura 23.
Q: Well, I think in Europe we hear very little about the revolutionary writings in the Quran.
Well, that’s because they don’t want to do anything. The Muslims even here – for them it’s a way of separating themselves from society without taking on society. So they become different and say they are not governed by the laws, etc.
The worst thing that has ever happened is having four wives. It isn’t based on Islam, Islam is explained by men in the religion. And the women don’t read the Quran for themselves, so they are victimized by Islam. So, they don’t understand that the men cannot have four wives without the permission of the woman, you know. (laughs) So, if she doesn’t go along with it, it ain’t happening. That in order to have four wives, they have to be taken care of economically, psychologically, physically and spiritually. And I mean, I don’t know too many men who can deal with more than one woman and take care of her. (laughs) And that’s the case, and then there shouldn’t be four wives happening anyway. But these men get the women, put them on welfare and call themselves Muslims they have no understanding for themselves for they have never read the Quran.
Q: Do you want to add something to the interview?
Yes, I just want to reiterate the fact that everyone of us has weaknesses. So, the weakness that people fell into after the “leadership of the movement” went to prison or were wiped out – what you had left was a lot of people who could not function without organization. The organizations were destroyed, they were out there by themselves and then they got caught up in a lot of negative stuff.
Q: Actually, I have one more question. Do you feel you can work at all with what’s left of the white feminist movement or the white women’s movement? Is there any kind of working relationship or do you just say they don’t have a revolutionary program and so you can’t work with them?
It depends. I think in the beginning of the feminist movement in this country it was fairly progressive. Now the feminist movement in this country has just as many right-wing elements as you have revolutionary elements. As a matter of fact, I would say the right-wing elements outnumber the revolutionary elements in the feminist movement in the U.S.
And not just in the white feminist movement, but in the Black/Third World feminist movement also. Sometimes I think that they equate their individual issues with revolutionary struggle, which is not one and the same.
And even with the lesbian and gay community’s struggle in this country – a lot of them are just as conservative as their counterparts in the heterosexual community. And they don’t understand that the issue of sexuality itself is not a revolutionary issue. A lot of people don’t see the difference. They don’t see that that is not a revolutionary issue and that it is not an issue that you can impose and make it an issue of the Black Liberation movement.
When I address the issue of oppression based on sexuality, I make clear that oppression in and of itself, regardless of what reason you oppress people, is wrong. So, to oppress a person because of their sexuality, that in itself is something that we can’t contend to deal with.
Now, once you get past that, then it’s your personal choices. And I think that it doesn’t fall on the level of racism and it doesn’t on class oppression.
And then dealing with the feminist movement they have the question of reproductive rights or pro-choice, choice, and no choice. That is a movement by itself. On the Left, we take the position that a person’s body is their own; that there is a choice that they should make about themselves.
But when you get to the big question, you got just as many cops, female cops, and female judges, and female prosecuting attorneys and oppressive forces who are pro-choice and anything else. So, being pro-choice is not a revolutionary position. And so you can’t continue to equate and allow ourselves to be put in a position that we get dictated to by people who are in one-issue forces.
Q: Thank you for the interview.
Text taken from ATS-L Archives; e-mail Wed, 8 Mar 1995 17:22:29 -0500 (EST) from [email protected], Subject: IWD: Interview With Safiya Bukhari-Alston
More:
- Safiya: Lioness for Liberation, by Mumia Abu-Jamal
- Tribute to Safiya on her passing, from the NYC Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition
- Reminiscence of Safiya Bukhari from the Provisional Government, Republic of New Afrika
- Tributes from Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, Sally O’Brien, and Yuri Kochiyama
- Defending Kamau Sadiki, Safiya’s last project
- Safiya Bukhari, “Coming of Age: A Black Revolutionary,” Notes from a New Afrikan P.O.W. Journal, Book 7 (Spear & Shield Publications, 1979). Reprinted with updates in Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Page maintained by Jericho Amnesty Movement, SF Bay Area. Updated October 12, 2003
source: Jericho Movement
Attached is a zine for printing.
Letter
A4https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=12747
#blackLiberationArmy #blackPantherParty #feminism #newAfrikna #northAmerica #safiyaBukhari #us
-
An Elephant called Murdoch: the thread about the travails of Edinburgh’s first Zoo
This thread was originally written and published in February 2024.
It’s almost exactly a year since I tweeted about the intriguing map labels on the 1849 Ordnance Survey Town Plan of Edinburgh, and I’ve been meaning to write up more about them ever since. And so here we are, this is a thread about the (first) Edinburgh Zoological Gardens, the city’s (and Scotland’s) first zoo, which existed from 1840 to 1861. It’s a story about which almost nothing has been written (except in scraps of Victorian newspaper)… Until now that is! So read on and find out more about this pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful venture.
Intriguing labels on the 1849 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandJames IV of Scotland had built a menagerie at Holyrood in 1512 where lions, tigers are lynx reputed to have been kept. James V had an ape and James VI a camel. But it was not until the London Zoo began in 1828 that desire for a public collection in the city began to grow. The two driving figures behind a Zoo for the city were Dr Patrick Neill of Canonmills, a naturalist and botanist with a huge personal botanic garden, and Mr John Douglas, a wire-worker at 61 Princes Street and “experienced collector of foreign and British birds and quadripeds“. Travelling menageries were nothing new, they were big entertainment business in Victorian Britain – we see one here on the Mound around 1840 (we can date it from what’s on at the Panorama, a display of Jerusalem to be followed by the Battle of Waterloo in coming weeks), which is Wombwell’s Menagerie. The elephants were always a big draw and we can see one here, serving as a mobile advertising board.
Princes Street from the Mound, Edinburgh. Charles Halkerston, 1843. Museums & Galleries Edinburgh via ArtUKBut the city saw itself as having a status above that of a mere travelling circus and so something more highbrow than a menagerie was desired. Something like London had at Regents Park, with lofty, scientific ideals. So rather than form a private company to pursue the scheme, a committee of learned and interested men in the city was formed under “the control and superintendence of gentlemen in whom the public could safely confide“. The committee appointed the Duke of Buccleuch as its president and the Marquis of Lothian and Earl of Roseberry as his deputies; three of the wealthiest and most influential noblemen in the county if not the country. With this backing, John Douglas got to work.
A View in the (London) Zoological Gardens about the year 1838. Tate Gallery, S.270-199In September 1838, he began soliciting donations of animals to form the core of the new zoological collection. James Boswell bt. sent a red deer; Mr Scales of Swanston Cottage sent a buffalo; Dr Gardner in Lothian Street gave a green monkey; others supplied a Grivet and a Ring-tailed Lemur. Six Spanish partridges were sent from Ipswich by a Mr Cobbold (more on him later); J. S. Lyon esq. of Kirkmichael provided a Golden Eagle; the Misses Gibson-Craig a Macaw; a “tortoise from the plains of Troy” came from J. B. Knight esq. of Brabdon Street and Captain Turner of the Leith Smack sent a “curious variety” of gannet (perhaps this was the closely related booby, as the 3 species of gannet all look fairly similar).
The Edinburgh Zoological Garden green monkey, a plate from “The Naturalist’s Library ” by Sir William Jardine Bt.Douglas appears to have accommodated this varied and growing collection at his premises at 61 Princes Street. On October 13th 1838 he issued a prospectus for the Edinburgh Zoological Gardens, placing himself as manager of it, and began soliciting financial donors and subscribers to the scheme. The Scotsman said of the scheme that “the higher classes would hail it as a fertile and most interesting source of amusement and recreation… Every citizen who has the good of the city at heart ought cordially to help forward the establishment of so beneficial an institution.“
Advert for prospectus issued by Douglas. Caledonian Mercury, October 1838For the rest of the year, more animals continued to arrive. In December, a pair of Egyptian geese from R. J. Pringle esq. of Clifton, a raccoon from Dr Munro of the famous Leith steamship Sirius, a “Prehensile-tail” (i.e. Spider) monkey from Mr Murray at the Observer Office; Russian rabbits, a deer…
The Edinburgh Zoological Garden spider monkey. A plate from “The Naturalist’s Library ” by Sir William Jardine Bt.But money was also needed; in January 1839, the Duke of Buccleuch as President of the Committee made it publicly known he had contributed 50 Guineas, in an effort to try and solicit further donations. To keep interest in the scheme up, and pay for its upkeep, the collection of some 200 animals was put on display by the Panorama on the Mound. At a general meeting held on May 6th at the Royal Hotel, chaired by the Lord Provost, it was noted that £924 1s had been donated so far, £83 3/3d taken on the gate at the Mound and running costs were £1 a day. There was as yet no site agreed and Dr Neill of Canonmills was one of the many ordinary directors elected.
30th March 1839, Scotsman, advert for the MenagerieThe Committee had a problem however over where to locate the collection and agreed to petition the Council to extend its stay on the Mound while they tried to find a permanent home; all the temporary structures on its western edge were due to be cleared in an agreement with the “Board of Trustees for Encouraging Manufactures and Arts“, proprietors of the Royal Institution (now the Royal Scottish Academy building of the National Galleries of Scotland). But the Board of Trustees was having none of it; they were having the Mound back and the Panorama and the animals had to go. You see, there’s nothing new under the sun in Edinburgh and the age-old argument between use of the city centre for highbrow vs. lowbrow culture and temporary vs. permanent city centre structures was going on even 185 years ago.
“Royal Institution, or School of Arts, Edinburgh”, engraving of Thomas Hosmer Shepherd illustration of 1829 © Edinburgh City LibrariesMessrs. Cleghorn, the proprietors of East Princes Street gardens (whose planting had been carried out by Dr Neill of Canonmills) tried to entice the Zoo to settle there, but there was no rights to erect any structures there apart from a Church, monument or public building. Cleghorn was chancing his arm; he was in trouble. His erection of a dwelling house and greenhouses in the gardens, on which he had a lease, was contrary to the Act of Parliament but had been overlooked. But he had now begun erecting a warehouse and the proprietors of Princes Street, from whom he leased the ground, finally took action. He was facing financial ruin. It was as well the Zoo ignored his overtures as just a few years later the railway cutting through the Gardens would have obliged it to move anyway.
On January 18th 1840, the Scotsman announced that the Zoo had found a permanent home; it had taken out the lease on the grounds of Broughton Park, home of the late Sir James Donaldson (he of Donaldson Hospital). Its location, between Edinburgh and Leith, was perfect. It was located between what is now East Claremont Street, Bellevue Road and West Annandale Street.
Broughton Park on Kirkwood’s Town Plan of 1817. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandIn February 1840 the Edinburgh Journal of Natural History published an inventory of the principal animals in the collection then:
“The Edinburgh journal of natural history, and of the physical sciences” February 1840Work now proceeded quickly at Broughton Park. By March, the Caledonian Mercury described it was substantially complete. It described a park, entered by a gateway with refreshment rooms, a bear pit 18ft deep and 26ft across, with a pole in the middle where the bears were enticed to climb for food and the amusement of the crowds.
Detail of the Regent’s Park print, showing the bear pit and pole with a top-hatted man offering it food from a stickThere was a large aviary in the centre, a house for “rare and more delicate class of birds”, one for the carnivores and one for bears. These are the labels we can see these on that 1849 town plan. There were also stalls and paddocks for animals like deer, a pond for waterfowl and various other cages around the walls.
OS 1849 Town plan of the Edinburgh Zoological Gardens. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandMore animals arrived – Bengal tigers, a polar bear, a spotted hyena – as did more money from the Duke of Buccleuch. In April a prized exhibit arrived; the skeleton of a Blue Whale which had been found floating in the Forth and brought ashore by North Berwick fishermen back in October 1831. It had been dissected in situ by Dr. Knox (he of Burke & Hare infamy) who had presented its cleaned skeleton to the city.
The Edinburgh blue whale, engraving in “The Natural History of the Ordinary Cetacea Or Whales” by Robert Hamilton, 1837By June 1840, things were almost ready and so Mr Douglas headed to London to spend the last of his funds on acquiring more animals; a lioness; a dromedary; a llama (the only one in the country); two Norwegian wolves; a brown bear; three peccaries from South America, a jaguar from Surinam; two spotted deer from the banks of the Ganges; a civet, a raccoon etc. These were sent back to Edinburgh on the steamship Royal Adelaide. With this final expense, the project had now run out of money and was finished only on loans and the goodwill of its directors. But it had made it! On July 7th 1840 there was a “Grand Opening Parade” with the band of the 78th (Ross-shire Buffs) Highlanders providing the music.
Newspaper Advert from July 1840 announcing the opening of the Gardens.The 78th brought their mascot, a young elephant they had acquired on campaign in Ceylon on account of their regimental badge featuring an elephant. This was Murdoch and he had been living in Edinburgh Castle with the soldiers. It had rained all morning and the previous day, but the sun came out at 1PM for opening and “the [Zoo] entrance was literally besieged with an eager and fashionable assemblage“. Just arrived for the occasion was a Nile crocodile, a pair of swans from the Provost of Linlithgow and a king vulture (a type of condor). The day (and the Zoo) was a smash-hit success, with 6,000 people attending the opening. The below image is the only one I know of that shows it; looking across the waterfowl pond towards the animal houses and aviary. We see Murdoch the elephant and Broughton Park house in the left distance.
The only known illustration of the Edinburgh Zoological Garden, an engraving reproduced in “The Story of Edinburgh Zoo” by T. H. GillespieThroughout the summer, there were weekly promenade concerts with the bands of the 78th, or the 2nd Dragoon Guards or the 29th (Worcestershire) Regiment providing the accompaniment. This mixture of popular entertainment and zoology was a common feature of Zoos at that time, despite their ambitions to be more than just menageries. The last prom of the season was 3rd October. At a delayed AGM on March 25th 1841, the outgoings to date were recorded as £3,358 and the total income was £3,309, meaning a slight running loss. But as this had included the entire startup costs, the Directors were encouraged. To Mr Douglas, to whom “not only this city but the whole of Scotland were so deeply indebted” a £400 award was made to cover his costs to date. He was voted an £80 salary, plus 4% of gross gate takings plus one “free day” a year to organise an event and keep the whole profits.
“Popular Gardens – Tom, Jerry and Logic laughing at the bustle and alarm occasioned amongst the Visitors by the escape of a Kangaroo. “, print satirising London Zoo by Robert Cruickshank, 1830. V&A S.1677-2014In May the next year, the Directors announced the first prom of the season and the rates for next years subscriptions. These ranged from £21 to give the subscriber and seven family members perpetual admission to a donation of £10 10/- and subscription of £1 1/- to give them and six members access so long as they subscribed down to a £1 1/- subscription for the year for them and two family members. John Douglas chose to hold his annual “free day” benefit on July 3rd and arranged for a spectacular fireworks concert, however the weather was terrible and it was rained off; he had to refund disgruntled customers and it’s not clear whether he was allowed to hold another. I suspect he wasn’t, on 6th December 1841, he was sacked by the Directors, accused of mismanagement. He had tried to get them to let him take the Zoo over in its entirety and so perhaps this had triggered the fall out. The secretary, Mr Cobbold, was made honourary manager in his place. Douglas didn’t go quietly – he would turn up at the next AGM with his supporters to try and get it minuted in the annual report that he was not let go for mismanagement. He took out newspaper adverts to this effect and put on “evening entertainments” to explain how much personal effort and money he had put into the project and put his case to the public. When a rival Zoo was started in Glasgow two years later, who should they hire as General Manager but John Douglas!
In April 1842 we get an example of the difficulty early zoos had in caring for their charges, particularly big predators. One of the tigers got an ingrown claw which got infected and she was going lame. They tried, and failed, to cut the claw, so ended up devising an iron hook to pull it out from a very safe distance, using the enraged animal’s own strength to wrench it free. Dr Knox, who had provided the whale skeleton, recalled he had treated one of the lions that had an abscess in its paw by having a very long, sharp prod made and lancing it through the bars at the opportune moment. The AGM that year noted a surplus for the year of £152, but requested more public support. At this time the 78th Highlanders, late of the Castle garrison, were leaving from service in Ireland for India and they offered their mascot to the Zoo. He was readily accepted and arrived by train from Glasgow on March 24th, the directors of the railway waiving the transport costs. And so it was that Murdoch the elephant came to call the Zoo home. He would occasionally be used to carry advertising posters and leaflets into town to drum up business.
Murdoch the elephant, from a Will’s cigarette card.New acquisitions that year included a sun bear sent from Dr. Montgomery of Singapore; a pair of Egyptian geese from Lord Lurgan; three Indian monkeys from D. J. Grant esq. of Eastfield; six puffins by Miss Dalyell of Binns; a tortoise from Mr Ball of Falkirk and another from Mr Goodsir. The directors purchased a 6-banded Armadillo. But not all was well; at a public dinner of thanks for the honorary manager, Mr Cobbold, it was noted in the speeches that £1,000 of debts were outstanding and that the directors would have to cover these.
German engraving of a 6-banded armadilloThe AGM the following year, 1843, was reported in great detail in the papers. £21 8/6d had been subscribed for an elephant house; £12 10/6d had been made selling manure; £267 13/1d went on wages and £80 8/5d was spent on hiring the bands. The annual surplus was now a healthy £618 17/2½d. In September, the Leopard had three cubs (it was noted she had two cubs 2 years previously) but in October the Illustrated London News reported that a pair of Napu musk deer from Java had died during the passage of the tea clipper Monarch from Hong Kong to Leith. New Years Day events were always big business for the Zoo, when it offered half price admission. In 1844, 15,000 people passed through the gates that day. At the 1844 AGM a £100 operating surplus was declared and the collection now extended to 500 animals and as many birds. But subscriptions were falling off, it was found people were sharing season tickets and by now a total of £1,600 in loans had been taken out to cover various running costs. This growing debt would be an unshakeable millstone around the neck of the institution. But the year ended on a high with Lord Aberdeen letting the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Adam Black, know that Queen Victoria had agreed to extend royal patronage; thus the institution became the Royal Edinburgh Zoological Garden.
In March 1845, at a sale of animals from the circus of American showman Isaac A. Van Amburgh in Manchester, Mr Cobbold purchased a male lion cub for £10 10/- for the Zoo. It would be named Wallace.
Isaac van Amburgh (1808–1865) by T. C. Wilson 1838 in National Portrait Gallery, London.In 1847 one of the oddest exhibits arrived; several swarms of Egyptian locusts had blown over from the Sahara and were found in Perthsire. One was captured, kept alive, and put on exhibit at the Zoo. The German travel writer Johann Georg Kohl visited the Zoo in 1849. He wrote it had the “largest, strongest and finest American bison” anywhere in Great Britain, and that it was kept with a “courageous but comparatively powerless” goat that butted it fearlessly and relentlessly. In 1852 the Russian brown bear gave birth to three cubs. In 1854 the directors complained of “the indifference of their fellow-citizens and the small number of shillings and sixpences that find their way into the park“.
But donations still came in; the Marquis of Dalhousie, who had been Governor-General in India, sent it two more Bengal tigers. One wonders if these repeated donations of big cats were just to cover those that had died in the Zoo’s primitive and restrictive veterinary conditions. In August 1855 a second elephant arrived, a gift from the 25th Light Dragoons, whose regimental colours had the animal at their centre. Sadly in January the following year, Murdoch died after a very short illness. But once again, all was not well at the Zoo. In July that year an advert in the Scottish Press paper had noted new management; this I think was a man called Mr Carroll, a showman and fireworks organiser. Increasingly the Zoo was used as a leisure and concert ground to try and find a way, any way, to make it profitable. The newspapers are now stuffed with adverts for fireworks concerts at the Gardens. The animals do not ever seem to be mentioned. These changes culminated in December 1857 with the opening of a very large wooden concert hall in the grounds, the “Victoria Hall“, where all kinds of entertainment, exhibitions and variety were put on.
Advert for the Victoria Hall, 28th December 1857The Victoria Hall was a financial disaster; its construction costs of £2,200 were more than 10 years of the Gardens profits; profits already required to service the existing debt. In December 1858 the park was sold to John Jennison Junior of the Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester. But Jennison couldn’t make the place pay either. In October 1861, the Town Council found out that he had put the whale skeleton – their whale skeleton – up for sale and resolved to recover it. It was sent to the Museum in Chambers Street, where it hung until 2011, a childhood favourite of myself and countless others.
Official guidebook for the Manchester Belle Vue GardensEven though military music concerts were still running at the Zoo on October 12th 1861, just a week later it was announced all the movable property had been auctioned off. The £2,200, four year old Victoria Hall fetched only £500 and was broken down on site. On November 1st, the Governors of Donaldson’s Hospital (who still owned the superiority to Broughton Park) let it be known that the lease would not be renewed when it came to expire that year and advertised the ground for feuing (breaking up into plots for development). Bits of the collection were found new homes. The eagles went to Canaan Lodge in Morningside, where John Gregory, an advocate, had a large aviary in his garden. I believe the toe bones of the late Murdoch the elephant can still be found in one of the museums in Edinburgh Castle.
1849 OS Town Plan showing Canaan Lodge, and the aviary and eagle cage in the garden. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut most of the animals wound end their days in the travelling menagerie of Mr Edmond, who had inherited Wombwell’s Menagerie that had toured Edinburgh back in the 1840s. Edmond bought them in Edinburgh in June 1862 when his tour left the city, taking them with him. Ultimately the Zoo could not be made to pay either its way or its debts. As it got ever more commercialised it descended into a “meager menagerie“, with the animals a backdrop to ever more desperate and cynical attempts to make money. The relentless fireworks concerts must have been awful for the inmates. It wouldn’t be until 1913 that the City would get a proper Zoo, one run on a scientific basis.
The gates to Edinburgh Zoo in 1914, Francis Caird Inglis photograph. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Setup reveal of my lil hobbit hole 🐻
@[email protected] #setup #desksetup #workspace #deskspace #pcsetup #artistsworkspace
-
Setup reveal of my lil hobbit hole 🐻
@Suzie97 #setup #desksetup #workspace #deskspace #pcsetup #artistsworkspace
-
Setup reveal of my lil hobbit hole 🐻
@[email protected] #setup #desksetup #workspace #deskspace #pcsetup #artistsworkspace
-
Setup reveal of my lil hobbit hole 🐻
@Suzie97 #setup #desksetup #workspace #deskspace #pcsetup #artistsworkspace
-
Setup reveal of my lil hobbit hole 🐻
@Suzie97 #setup #desksetup #workspace #deskspace #pcsetup #artistsworkspace
-
Help~ ive been trying to upload my animated gif banner since last night but to no avail.. Even though
it's within file size limit and aspect ratio 🙃 #fedinewbie