#libraryofcongress — Public Fediverse posts

What To Watch On YouTube Right Now – Part 138

Welcome back my readers, YouTube viewers and all others who followed this series of articles focused on YouTube videos worth watching.

Have you been searching for something fun or interesting to watch on YouTube? Do you feel bored right now and you crave for something to see on the world’s most popular online video destination?

I recommend you check out the following videos I found.

#1 How To Get The Strongest And Most Optimized Spaceship Crew In Starfield – This year, Bethesda launched several important updates to make their 2023 science fiction role-playing game Starfield better and they also offered new DLC for those who crave for new content. One of the more defining aspects of the game is space travel and this includes setting up your own crew for your spaceship and there is impact on its functions and capabilities. If you want to learn how to get the stronger and most optimized crew for your ship, I encourage you watch the video below.

https://youtu.be/vy8iOx7eqVU?si=gn7W1mZxTOQ4SSrd

#2 Mari Iijima And The Defining Song of Macross: Do You Remember Love? – I really love watching the 1984 anime feature film Macross: Do You Remember Love? Apart from the great animation, the spectacle, the memorable characters and the solid storytelling, the movie also has a great soundtrack made to delight the long-time Macross fans. Still, the movie has its very own song performed by none other than Mari Iijima (Minmay) and it is a classic among Macross fans. In the videos below, you will see Mari Iijima perform the song live in a 1980s TV broadcast and the song playing with selected footage of Macross: Do You Remember Love? Enjoy these!

https://youtu.be/OfuW_Wbt73c?si=Q1DE8eJxo4Zk90pc

https://youtu.be/uJBMYV9e1Nc?si=veDGYU4r7s0flQ_H

#3 The Tuna City In Japan Is Changing With Tourism In Mind – If you plan to visit Japan at all, you might want to discover Miura City located in Kanagawa Prefecture. Miura City is famous for its fresh tuna and in recent times there has been a series of changes as several room-only hotels and new trends have sprouted as the locality is finding new ways to turn visitors into overnight guests. This is a place I would like to visit someday if ever I get the opportunity to return to Japan. Watch and learn from the Nippon TV video below.

https://youtu.be/fUPP30fYH78?si=MrC6Dml3IRVe7fcV

#4 Women’s Rights Activist Marries Islamist And Things Went Wrong – Did you notice that there is a gradual rising number of feminists and women’s rights activists who not embrace Islam (wicked and ugly) but also marry Islamists believing that things will be alright and they can just continue their activism. Of course, many of them activists and feminists do not fully understand Islam nor the full content of the Quran. As such, when things go very wrong, they are get into deep trouble. Watch and learn from the video below.

https://youtu.be/bx3YvoyP6cw?si=omxqhyR8CQfpfhYK

#5 Islamists Violate Hindu Women In India And Get Arrested – Let’s be very clear here. Islamists are oriented to conquer others even though they may not be numerous within a locality. Believe it or not, a group of such people who wielded power inside a business violated the Hindu women (plus at least one male employee) with regards to cultural norms and doing things that go against their faith. Even forced religious conversion happened. Watch and learn from the video below.

https://youtu.be/9xjFS-3Vuws?si=xuDIivIonrp9tQux

#6 Meatballs Reaction And Retrospective – When it comes to cinematic comedy, Bill Murray is iconic and his early work in 1979’s Meatballs already involved the late Harold Ramis and the late director Ivan Reitman. That said, there is something about Meatballs – produced for less than $2 million – that helped it achieve tremendous commercial success with ticket sales of $70 million. Remember, three of the creative minds behind the classic Ghostbusters are involved in this old movie and you will see how You, Me and The Movies react to it in the video below. Be aware that as of this writing, there are not too many movie reaction videos about Meatballs on YouTube. Also posted below is an in-depth retrospective about Meatballs by GoodBadFlicks.

https://youtu.be/nhR9xUCvpAI?si=Zh6gjAX0SdIrtSfT

https://youtu.be/D0BS-K3K_vE?si=HtyR_VThLUKv0Wj6

#7 Ashleigh Burton Reacts To The Thin Man – Have you ever heard of The Thin Man? It’s not a UFO reference. It’s the 1934 American pre-Code comedy-mystery movie that was eventually named to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress having been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 1997. Apart from its reputation in American film history, The Thin Man also resulted in five sequels. If you want to discover the 1934 movie but you don’t have the time nor resources to watch the movie, watch Ashleigh Burton’s reaction video and see how it impacts her.

https://youtu.be/IJRQXuw–20?si=mSYY7_Eb4EK6reBY

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Historic Photos Show the Once Ubiquitous American Diner https://petapixel.com/2026/05/01/historic-photos-show-the-once-ubiquitous-american-diner/ #libraryofcongress #historicalfriday #Editorial #americana #Features #diner #food

Her groundbreaking sea floor discovery was dismissed as 'girl talk.' But science proved her right.

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/marie-tharp-tectonic-discovery

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

• “About this Reading Room,” Library of Congress, 2025.
• “About Us,” British Library, 2025.
• “About us,” House of Commons Library, 2025.
• “About us,” Royal Asiatic Society, 2025.
• “About us,” Wellcome Collection, 2025.
• “Archives,” London Library, 2025.
• Barker, Sam. “The British Museum’s Secretive Round Reading Room Has Reopened To The Public,” Secret London, 4 Jul. 2024.
• “Bickley,” Wikishire, 13 Jul. 2025.
• “D. Leonard Corgan Library,” Kings College, 2025.
• “Dana Research Centre and Library,” Science Museum, 2025.
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rosetta Stone,” British Museum, 2025.
• Fox, Caroline. “Every Enola Holmes Filming Location (And What Every Place Looks Like Now),” ScreenRant, 26 Oct. 2020.
• Funk, Alex. “The British Museum’s mysterious domed Reading Room has officially reopened to the public,” TimeOut, 3 Jul. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Librarians and libraries in anime,” Pop Culture Library Review, 2025 (orig. 25 Jul. 2020).
• Hermann, Burkely. “More than a coming-of-age drama: The value of libraries and librarians in “I Want To Eat Your Pancreas”,” Pop Culture Library Review, 8 Jan. 2024.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Recently added titles (March 2025),” Pop Culture Library Review, 2 Apr. 2025.
• Hermann, Burkely. “The fictional library and the value of studying redux,” Pop Culture Library Review, 30 Jul. 2024.
• Hickley, Catherine. “British Museum’s historic Reading Room opens to the public after 11 years,” The Art Newspaper, 3 Jul. 2024.
• “History of The London Library,” London Library, 2025.
• “Library,” Linnean Society of London, 2025.
• “Library & Collections,” Society of Antiquities of London, 2024.
• Mathur, Rhea. “The British Museum’s Reading Room: Past and Present,” gowithyamo, 2 Sept. 2024.
• Moran, Sarah. “The British Museum’s Stunning Domed Reading Room Reopens to Public,” Home Journal, 27 Sept. 2024.
• “National Art Library,” Victor and Albert Museum, 2025.
• “Philatelic Collections: Introduction,” British Library, 29 Mar. 2010.
• Hermann, Burkely. “Remembering “Bibliophile Princess” and its significant fictional depiction of libraries,” Pop Culture Library Review, 14 May 2024.
• “Spaces at the Bodleian Old Library,” Bodleian Library, 2025.
• “Spotlight: the Reading Room,” British Museum, 2025.
• Steves, Rick and Openshaw, Gene. London (24th Edition, US: Avalon Travel, Sept. 2022): 212, 214-215, 236, 238, 240, 244-247, 249.
• “Strand Campus: Self-guided tour,” King’s College, 5 Oct. 2014, p. 8.
•  “The British Library Philatelic Collection,” The Royal Philatelic Society London, Nov. 2005.
• “The Present Buildings,” Inner Temple Library, 2025.
• “Treasures of the British Library,” British Library, 2025.
• “Update on progress with the Masterplan,” British Museum, 19 Dec. 2024.

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Trump’s sweeping 2020 election pardon raises alarms ahead of the midterms – Politico

Trump’s sweeping 2020 election pardon raises alarms ahead of the midterms

The language in the pardon also underscores that Trump’s clemency is not limited to people named in the document.

By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, 11/10/2025 07:21 PM EST

President Donald Trump’s adversaries say his sweeping pardon for dozens of alleged co-conspirators in the plot to subvert the 2020 election sent an unmistakable signal: If you do it again, I’ll protect you.

The extraordinarily broad pardon, signed Friday but revealed Sunday night, has little substantive effect for its recipients. Trump can pardon only federal crimes, and his administration had already pulled the plug on any lingering investigations stemming from the 2020 election. Some of the clemency recipients are still facing state-level criminal charges in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin — though some Trump allies argue the pardons could derail those cases.

The mass pardon — the first in history to cover people accused of criminally conspiring with the president who issued it — comes as Trump continues to stoke false claims about rampant cheating by Democrats and sow doubts about the integrity of future elections. And his opponents see the pardon as a permission slip for similar efforts in 2026 and 2028.

“Trump is sending a message to his supporters that if you commit a crime in the name of Donald Trump, I’ve got your back,” said Liz Oyer, the former U.S. pardon attorney, whose successor Ed Martin announced the sweeping clemency on X and released a 15-page statement explaining the move.

Oyer said the pardon was written so broadly that it could apply to countless people who aided Trump’s effort to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election — and the vaguely worded document permits Martin and other Justice Department officials to decide for themselves who receives a pardon certificate.

“That’s just not how pardon paperwork is written,” Oyer said.

The move also appeared to be a way for Trump to test the well-settled boundaries of the pardon power itself, with allies like Martin and election attorney Cleta Mitchell suggesting it should cause the pending state cases to crumble. The pair argue that the presidential pardon could cover state-law crimes because the purported electors were engaged in activity related to a federal election, though legal scholars say that rationale is a stretch. A spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said Trump’s pardon would not influence her handling of the case there, which has remained in limbo as she fights a judge’s ruling that the grand jury process was flawed.

Mayes’ office charged 18 of Trump’s allies last spring for their efforts to subvert the 2020 election and labeled Trump an unindicted co-conspirator. Mayes brought her case last year, several months after Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia charged Trump himself with orchestrating a conspiracy to corrupt the state’s election results. State prosecutors in Nevada and Wisconsin have charged people connected to Trump’s alleged conspiracy. All of the cases remain pending, though they’ve been mired in varying degrees of dysfunction and protracted litigation.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s sweeping 2020 election pardon raises alarms ahead of the midterms – POLITICO

#2020ElectionPardons #2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #January6AttackOnUSCapitol #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Pardons #Politico #Politics #Resistance #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpPardons #UnitedStates

The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell – Axios New Orleans

 Oct 31, 2025 – Culture

The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell

• By Carlie Kollath Wells

New Orleans pays homage this weekend to author Anne Rice in two grand events for fans of the vampire novelist and the fantastical world she created.

Why it matters: It’s a delayed celebration of life for Rice, who died in 2021 when pandemic protocols prevented large gatherings.

The big picture: The fan club for her character Lestat gets the party started Friday at a formal ball.

• The 37th annual vampire ball sold out in seven minutes, says co-host and French Quarter resident Alys Arden.
• Arden, who also writes about vampires and witches in New Orleans, has attended for years with several hundred other revelers. They often dress as Rice’s characters.
• “We’re really trying to make it feel like you walked into her world and that there’s an element of her words throughout the night,” Arden tells Axios in an exclusive interview.

The next day: Anne Rice’s son, Christopher, and her longtime friend, Eric Shaw Quinn, host the main fan event Saturday at The Orpheum.

• It will be an immersive stage spectacle with musical performances, a recreation of her gardens and interviews with her family and colleagues.
• It explores how she turned the worst thing that ever happened to her — the death of her daughter — into the best thing, Christopher Rice tells Axios in an exclusive interview.
• “The genesis of her entire success was this terrible loss that she transformed into this world and invited all of these people in,” he says.

What he’s saying: “I want them to feel inspired,” he says of Saturday’s event, while also having moments to feel their grief about the loss of the author.

State of play: Anne Rice grew up in New Orleans and lived in the Garden District for years.

• The New York Times “trashed” “Interview with the Vampire” when it came out in 1976, Christopher Rice says, but his mom kept at it.
• “The idea of taking dark fantasy seriously as a serious literary genre in which you could talk about the human condition — that was not popular when she was doing it,” he says.
• She pioneered the technique of writing about vampires — the so-called villains — from their point of view, Quinn says. She published more than 35 books and sold more than 150 million copies.

Zoom in: A new generation of fans is being introduced to her work through AMC’s “Anne Rice Immortal Universe” television series.

• “Talamasca” premiered this week and tells the story of the secret society mentioned in her books.
• “Interview with the Vampire” and “Mayfair Witches” both have two seasons available for streaming. They were filmed in New Orleans.
• Anne Rice and Christopher Rice are executive producers on the shows, the network confirmed.

The intrigue: Rice and Quinn teased new projects, including the possibility of new books. Christopher Rice wrote several books with his mother and says she left behind unfinished material.

Plus, they say they “salivate” over the idea of “Ramses the Damned” projects.

Fans often ask for more “Wolf Gift” books as well, the two business partners say.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The queen of vampire fiction gets her New Orleans farewell – Axios New Orleans

#2025 #America #AnneRice #Axios #AxiosNewOrleans #Books #Education #Films #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Movies #NewOrleans #NewOrleansFarewell #Opinion #Queen #Reading #UnitedStates #VampireFiction #Writing

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition – A Special Report – October 24, 2025

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition

DrWeb Editorial:

I was afraid this might be long. So I’ll be brief.
Like the flickering TV and ads and social media posts and messages that fly by like so much dust in the wind (we used to call it a firehose). And in these times, (I have take to calling it Trump2.XKNGS) –some Americans accept the shutdown, some look away, some wait, some hesitate, some ignore. But, I go off on a tangent.
The sudden, complete destruction of American history, the complete East Wing –shows us much is wrong with American Democracy –our protections for it; our legal system for it; our states’ rights to their protections, in a federal system. We are weaker than I thought, less capable of fighting authoritarianism, corrupt and cruel leaders starting with Trump. We need to fix Democracy, too, after his failed administration fails, and he is gone.
Most Americans know that if One Man can do this, and worse, and kill “suspected” drug dealers in the Caribbean –he can do whatever he wants. That is not Democracy.
Oh, he and his broken circle will try to corrupt and disturb the 2025 November elections –trial run for Presidential election in 2028– so they will be monitored by the states and Democratic coverage.
This is an example of our failures –to modernize our government; to ensure protections exist for Trump-like attacks, balance the Supreme Court and enlarge it for balance, reduce Presidential authority over Congress 100%. We have a system with flaws, and GOP and Trump and ghost figures like Musk, Bannon, and Miller and the dark ones in the shadows, and we failed clearly to see Project 2025’s actions were not imaginary after all.
The East Wing Destruction (EWD) is a metaphor for all that’s wrong. In real time. We saw what HE seems to be allowed to do. Today (October 25), I see lawsuit is filed, perhaps more to follow. These are the darkest days of our nation and Democracy since the Nazis. We all allowed some of this darkness to descend. Let’s learn, pull on our asbestos suits, and fight like Hell for the nation WWII and since showed America’s strength. We need that strength now. –DrWeb

Top Ten Major Media Stories – The East Wing

1. BBC – “Satellite images show extent of demolition at the White House” (October 24, 2025)1
2. CBS News – “Where is debris from the White House East Wing demolition being taken?” (October 24, 2025)2
3. PBS NewsHour – “The East Wing of the White House has been demolished. Here’s a look at its history” (October 24, 2025)3
4. ABC News – “White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show” (October 23, 2025)4
5. CNN – “See the White House’s East Wing demolition from satellite images” (October 23, 2025)5
6. NBC News – “White House’s East Wing demolition finished as Trump makes way for new ballroom” (October 23, 2025)6
7. CNN – “Why Trump’s sudden East Wing demolition is extraordinary” (October 22, 2025)7
8. Reuters – “White House East Wing will be torn down fully to make way for Trump ballroom” (October 22, 2025)8
9. The New York Times – “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions” (October 22, 2025)9
10. USA Today – “Trump exposed a ‘loophole’ to demolish the White House East Wing” (October 23, 2025)10

Best Five Images – Major Media

1. CNN Photo Gallery – “In pictures: Trump’s East Wing demolition” – Complete visual documentation of the demolition process11
2. Getty Images – “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing” collection – 23 professional images12
3. ABC News Australia – Satellite imagery showing complete demolition13
4. PBS NewsHour – “PHOTOS: White House starts East Wing demolition”14
5. Yahoo News Canada – “Photos reveal shocking destruction of East Wing” – Ground-level destruction images15

What in World is Trump Doing Now?
Why Would He Do This?

The Trump administration’s stated rationale centers on a complaint –that no one made–about inadequate space for large-scale diplomatic functions16. Trump also argues –though again, no one said this anywhere–the federal government has lacked adequate space for large gatherings at the White House for 150 years16.
It’s a home, a house, a symbol, a residence, a meeting space for small gatherings, the First Lady’s staff and space. The new 90,000-square-foot ballroom will accommodate nearly 1,000 guests, compared to the East Room’s 200-person capacity14.

However, critics question the timing and priorities. The project costs an estimated $300 million during a government shutdown that has lasted nearly three weeks [as of 10/24/2025], halting most government expenditures16, including damaging Americans health care and food support.

Christina Hurt, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University, questioned whether it’s “justifiable for an administration to embark on costly, primarily aesthetic projects while ordinary Americans are experiencing financial hardships and federal employees are going unpaid”16.

–Christiana Hurt’s view

The funding comes from private donations and corporations, including major defense contractor Lockheed Martin and tech giants like Amazon and Google16. Ethics experts warn this fundraising approach could foster corruption, with companies “clearly doing so to curry favor with the government,” according to Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer during George W. Bush’s administration16.

Best Editorial Quotes – Suggested by Perplexity and approved

“This encapsulates Trump’s presidency in a single image. Illegal, destructive, and not beneficial to you.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)17

“Oh you’re trying to say the cost of living is skyrocketing? Donald Trump can’t hear you over the sound of bulldozers demolishing a wing of the White House to build a new grand ballroom.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren18

“I didn’t know draining the swamp meant Donald Trump building a $200 million ballroom for billionaires to bend the knee for special favors.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren19

“The people’s house is basically being sold to the highest bidder. It is corruption at its core.”
— Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre20

“The companies providing funds are clearly doing so to curry favor with the government and enhance their visibility among federal officials.”
— Richard Painter, Corporate Law Professor and Former Ethics Lawyer16

MLA Bibliography – Thanks Perplexity!

1. BBC News. “Satellite Images Show Extent of Demolition at the White House.” BBC, 24 Oct. 2025, www.bbc.com/news/videos/c4gkrnn4892o.

2. CBS News. “Where Is Debris from the White House East Wing Demolition Being Taken?” CBS News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-east-wing-demolition-debris/.

3. PBS NewsHour. “The East Wing of the White House Has Been Demolished. Here’s a Look at Its History.” PBS, 24 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-east-wing-of-the-white-house-has-been-demolished-heres-a-look-at-its-history.

4. Hutzler, Alexandra, and Isabella Murray. “White House East Wing Demolished, New Images Appear to Show.” ABC News, 23 Oct. 2025, abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684.

5. CNN. “See the White House’s East Wing Demolition from Satellite Images.” CNN, 23 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/us/east-wing-white-house-satellite-photos-invs.

6. NBC News. “White House’s East Wing Demolition Finished as Trump Makes Way for New Ballroom.” NBC News, 23 Oct. 2025, www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-east-wing-demolished-new-ballroom-rcna239399.

7. CNN. “Why Trump’s Sudden East Wing Demolition Is Extraordinary.” CNN, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/white-house-east-wing-demolition-trump.

8. Reuters. “White House East Wing Will Be Torn Down Fully to Make Way for Trump Ballroom.” Reuters, 22 Oct. 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-east-wing-will-be-torn-down-fully-make-way-trump-ballroom-official-2025-10-22/.

9. The New York Times. “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/us/politics/east-wing-trump-ballroom.html.

10. USA Today. “Trump Exposed a ‘Loophole’ to Demolish the White House East Wing. Here’s What We Know.” USA Today, 23 Oct. 2025, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/23/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-explained/86837471007/.

11. CNN. “In Pictures: Trump’s East Wing Demolition.” CNN Politics, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/gallery/east-wing-white-house-demolition.

12. Getty Images. “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing To Build White House Ballroom.” Getty Images, 2025, www.gettyimages.com/editorial-images/news/event/trump-to-demolish-entire-east-wing-to-build-white-house-ballroom/776405723.

13. Allison, Charmayne. “Satellite Images Show the White House’s East Wing Has Been Demolished.” ABC News Australia, 24 Oct. 2025, www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/white-house-east-wing-demolished-trump-ballroom/105930582.

14. Associated Press. “PHOTOS: White House Starts East Wing Demolition to Build Trump’s Ballroom.” PBS NewsHour, 21 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/photos-white-house-starts-east-wing-demolition-to-build-trumps-ballroom.

15. Yahoo News Canada. “Photos Reveal Shocking Destruction of East Wing as Crews Work to Build Trump’s $300M Ballroom.” Yahoo News, 22 Oct. 2025, ca.news.yahoo.com/photos-reveal-shocking-destruction-east-193833511.html.

16. Deutsche Welle. “Trump’s White House Ballroom Sparks Criticism Amid Shutdown.” DW, 23 Oct. 2025, www.dw.com/en/trump-ballroom-project-white-house-renovations-shutdown/a-74478671.

17. The New York Times. “The White House Wrecking Ball.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-white-house-demolition.html.

18. Benzinga. “Elizabeth Warren Says Trump Is Deaf To Cost Of Living ‘Over The Sound of Bulldozers.'” Benzinga, 21 Oct. 2025, www.benzinga.com/news/politics/25/10/48320523/elizabeth-warren-says-trump-is-deaf-to-cost-of-living-over-the-sound-of-bulldozers-knocking-down-white-house-wing-for-new-grand-ballroom.

19. QuiverQuant. “Press Release: Senator Elizabeth Warren Critiques Donald Trump’s $200 Million Ballroom for Billionaires.” QuiverQuant, 15 Oct. 2025, www.quiverquant.com/news/Press+Release:+Senator+Elizabeth+Warren+Critiques+Donald+Trump’s+$200+Million+Ballroom+for+Billionaires.

20. Fox News. “Trump White House Ballroom Sparks Liberal Outrage Over Demolition.” Fox News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.foxnews.com/media/democrats-liberal-media-figures-fume-over-trump-demolishing-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.

Additional Citations – Added October 25, 2025

What’s Been Lost In Donald Trump’s Teardown Of The East Wing To Build A White House Ballroom – Analysis- https://deadline.com/2025/10/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-1236595980, October 23, 2025

White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show – https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684 October 23, 2025

The Daily, New York Times’ podcast, “The Trump administration completed its demolition of the East Wing of the White House on Thursday to make way for a new presidential ballroom” – https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/podcasts/the-daily/demolition-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.html October 24, 2025

Google News – Lawsuit(s) East Wing – https://news.google.com/search?q=lawsuits%20east%20wing&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen October 25, 2025

#2025 #America #Demolished #Demolition #Destroyed #DonaldTrump #DrWebEditorial #EastWing #Education #Health #History #Images #LawSuits #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #PerplexityAI #Politics #Resistance #Science #SpecialReport #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition – A Special Report – October 24, 2025

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition

DrWeb Editorial:

I was afraid this might be long. So I’ll be brief.
Like the flickering TV and ads and social media posts and messages that fly by like so much dust in the wind (we used to call it a firehose). And in these times, (I have take to calling it Trump2.XKNGS) –some Americans accept the shutdown, some look away, some wait, some hesitate, some ignore. But, I go off on a tangent.
The sudden, complete destruction of American history, the complete East Wing –shows us much is wrong with American Democracy –our protections for it; our legal system for it; our states’ rights to their protections, in a federal system. We are weaker than I thought, less capable of fighting authoritarianism, corrupt and cruel leaders starting with Trump. We need to fix Democracy, too, after his failed administration fails, and he is gone.
Most Americans know that if One Man can do this, and worse, and kill “suspected” drug dealers in the Caribbean –he can do whatever he wants. That is not Democracy.
Oh, he and his broken circle will try to corrupt and disturb the 2025 November elections –trial run for Presidential election in 2028– so they will be monitored by the states and Democratic coverage.
This is an example of our failures –to modernize our government; to ensure protections exist for Trump-like attacks, balance the Supreme Court and enlarge it for balance, reduce Presidential authority over Congress 100%. We have a system with flaws, and GOP and Trump and ghost figures like Musk, Bannon, and Miller and the dark ones in the shadows, and we failed clearly to see Project 2025’s actions were not imaginary after all.
The East Wing Destruction (EWD) is a metaphor for all that’s wrong. In real time. We saw what HE seems to be allowed to do. Today (October 25), I see lawsuit is filed, perhaps more to follow. These are the darkest days of our nation and Democracy since the Nazis. We all allowed some of this darkness to descend. Let’s learn, pull on our asbestos suits, and fight like Hell for the nation WWII and since showed America’s strength. We need that strength now. –DrWeb

Top Ten Major Media Stories – The East Wing

1. BBC – “Satellite images show extent of demolition at the White House” (October 24, 2025)1
2. CBS News – “Where is debris from the White House East Wing demolition being taken?” (October 24, 2025)2
3. PBS NewsHour – “The East Wing of the White House has been demolished. Here’s a look at its history” (October 24, 2025)3
4. ABC News – “White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show” (October 23, 2025)4
5. CNN – “See the White House’s East Wing demolition from satellite images” (October 23, 2025)5
6. NBC News – “White House’s East Wing demolition finished as Trump makes way for new ballroom” (October 23, 2025)6
7. CNN – “Why Trump’s sudden East Wing demolition is extraordinary” (October 22, 2025)7
8. Reuters – “White House East Wing will be torn down fully to make way for Trump ballroom” (October 22, 2025)8
9. The New York Times – “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions” (October 22, 2025)9
10. USA Today – “Trump exposed a ‘loophole’ to demolish the White House East Wing” (October 23, 2025)10

Best Five Images – Major Media

1. CNN Photo Gallery – “In pictures: Trump’s East Wing demolition” – Complete visual documentation of the demolition process11
2. Getty Images – “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing” collection – 23 professional images12
3. ABC News Australia – Satellite imagery showing complete demolition13
4. PBS NewsHour – “PHOTOS: White House starts East Wing demolition”14
5. Yahoo News Canada – “Photos reveal shocking destruction of East Wing” – Ground-level destruction images15

What in World is Trump Doing Now?
Why Would He Do This?

The Trump administration’s stated rationale centers on a complaint –that no one made–about inadequate space for large-scale diplomatic functions16. Trump also argues –though again, no one said this anywhere–the federal government has lacked adequate space for large gatherings at the White House for 150 years16.
It’s a home, a house, a symbol, a residence, a meeting space for small gatherings, the First Lady’s staff and space. The new 90,000-square-foot ballroom will accommodate nearly 1,000 guests, compared to the East Room’s 200-person capacity14.

However, critics question the timing and priorities. The project costs an estimated $300 million during a government shutdown that has lasted nearly three weeks [as of 10/24/2025], halting most government expenditures16, including damaging Americans health care and food support.

Christina Hurt, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University, questioned whether it’s “justifiable for an administration to embark on costly, primarily aesthetic projects while ordinary Americans are experiencing financial hardships and federal employees are going unpaid”16.

–Christiana Hurt’s view

The funding comes from private donations and corporations, including major defense contractor Lockheed Martin and tech giants like Amazon and Google16. Ethics experts warn this fundraising approach could foster corruption, with companies “clearly doing so to curry favor with the government,” according to Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer during George W. Bush’s administration16.

Best Editorial Quotes – Suggested by Perplexity and approved

“This encapsulates Trump’s presidency in a single image. Illegal, destructive, and not beneficial to you.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)17

“Oh you’re trying to say the cost of living is skyrocketing? Donald Trump can’t hear you over the sound of bulldozers demolishing a wing of the White House to build a new grand ballroom.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren18

“I didn’t know draining the swamp meant Donald Trump building a $200 million ballroom for billionaires to bend the knee for special favors.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren19

“The people’s house is basically being sold to the highest bidder. It is corruption at its core.”
— Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre20

“The companies providing funds are clearly doing so to curry favor with the government and enhance their visibility among federal officials.”
— Richard Painter, Corporate Law Professor and Former Ethics Lawyer16

MLA Bibliography – Thanks Perplexity!

1. BBC News. “Satellite Images Show Extent of Demolition at the White House.” BBC, 24 Oct. 2025, www.bbc.com/news/videos/c4gkrnn4892o.

2. CBS News. “Where Is Debris from the White House East Wing Demolition Being Taken?” CBS News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-east-wing-demolition-debris/.

3. PBS NewsHour. “The East Wing of the White House Has Been Demolished. Here’s a Look at Its History.” PBS, 24 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-east-wing-of-the-white-house-has-been-demolished-heres-a-look-at-its-history.

4. Hutzler, Alexandra, and Isabella Murray. “White House East Wing Demolished, New Images Appear to Show.” ABC News, 23 Oct. 2025, abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684.

5. CNN. “See the White House’s East Wing Demolition from Satellite Images.” CNN, 23 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/us/east-wing-white-house-satellite-photos-invs.

6. NBC News. “White House’s East Wing Demolition Finished as Trump Makes Way for New Ballroom.” NBC News, 23 Oct. 2025, www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-east-wing-demolished-new-ballroom-rcna239399.

7. CNN. “Why Trump’s Sudden East Wing Demolition Is Extraordinary.” CNN, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/white-house-east-wing-demolition-trump.

8. Reuters. “White House East Wing Will Be Torn Down Fully to Make Way for Trump Ballroom.” Reuters, 22 Oct. 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-east-wing-will-be-torn-down-fully-make-way-trump-ballroom-official-2025-10-22/.

9. The New York Times. “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/us/politics/east-wing-trump-ballroom.html.

10. USA Today. “Trump Exposed a ‘Loophole’ to Demolish the White House East Wing. Here’s What We Know.” USA Today, 23 Oct. 2025, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/23/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-explained/86837471007/.

11. CNN. “In Pictures: Trump’s East Wing Demolition.” CNN Politics, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/gallery/east-wing-white-house-demolition.

12. Getty Images. “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing To Build White House Ballroom.” Getty Images, 2025, www.gettyimages.com/editorial-images/news/event/trump-to-demolish-entire-east-wing-to-build-white-house-ballroom/776405723.

13. Allison, Charmayne. “Satellite Images Show the White House’s East Wing Has Been Demolished.” ABC News Australia, 24 Oct. 2025, www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/white-house-east-wing-demolished-trump-ballroom/105930582.

14. Associated Press. “PHOTOS: White House Starts East Wing Demolition to Build Trump’s Ballroom.” PBS NewsHour, 21 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/photos-white-house-starts-east-wing-demolition-to-build-trumps-ballroom.

15. Yahoo News Canada. “Photos Reveal Shocking Destruction of East Wing as Crews Work to Build Trump’s $300M Ballroom.” Yahoo News, 22 Oct. 2025, ca.news.yahoo.com/photos-reveal-shocking-destruction-east-193833511.html.

16. Deutsche Welle. “Trump’s White House Ballroom Sparks Criticism Amid Shutdown.” DW, 23 Oct. 2025, www.dw.com/en/trump-ballroom-project-white-house-renovations-shutdown/a-74478671.

17. The New York Times. “The White House Wrecking Ball.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-white-house-demolition.html.

18. Benzinga. “Elizabeth Warren Says Trump Is Deaf To Cost Of Living ‘Over The Sound of Bulldozers.'” Benzinga, 21 Oct. 2025, www.benzinga.com/news/politics/25/10/48320523/elizabeth-warren-says-trump-is-deaf-to-cost-of-living-over-the-sound-of-bulldozers-knocking-down-white-house-wing-for-new-grand-ballroom.

19. QuiverQuant. “Press Release: Senator Elizabeth Warren Critiques Donald Trump’s $200 Million Ballroom for Billionaires.” QuiverQuant, 15 Oct. 2025, www.quiverquant.com/news/Press+Release:+Senator+Elizabeth+Warren+Critiques+Donald+Trump’s+$200+Million+Ballroom+for+Billionaires.

20. Fox News. “Trump White House Ballroom Sparks Liberal Outrage Over Demolition.” Fox News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.foxnews.com/media/democrats-liberal-media-figures-fume-over-trump-demolishing-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.

Additional Citations – Added October 25, 2025

What’s Been Lost In Donald Trump’s Teardown Of The East Wing To Build A White House Ballroom – Analysis- https://deadline.com/2025/10/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-1236595980, October 23, 2025

White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show – https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684 October 23, 2025

The Daily, New York Times’ podcast, “The Trump administration completed its demolition of the East Wing of the White House on Thursday to make way for a new presidential ballroom” – https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/podcasts/the-daily/demolition-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.html October 24, 2025

Google News – Lawsuit(s) East Wing – https://news.google.com/search?q=lawsuits%20east%20wing&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen October 25, 2025

#2025 #America #Demolished #Demolition #Destroyed #DonaldTrump #DrWebEditorial #EastWing #Education #Health #History #Images #LawSuits #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #PerplexityAI #Politics #Resistance #Science #SpecialReport #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition – A Special Report – October 24, 2025

Trump’s Unauthorized East Wing Demolition

DrWeb Editorial:

I was afraid this might be long. So I’ll be brief.
Like the flickering TV and ads and social media posts and messages that fly by like so much dust in the wind (we used to call it a firehose). And in these times, (I have take to calling it Trump2.XKNGS) –some Americans accept the shutdown, some look away, some wait, some hesitate, some ignore. But, I go off on a tangent.
The sudden, complete destruction of American history, the complete East Wing –shows us much is wrong with American Democracy –our protections for it; our legal system for it; our states’ rights to their protections, in a federal system. We are weaker than I thought, less capable of fighting authoritarianism, corrupt and cruel leaders starting with Trump. We need to fix Democracy, too, after his failed administration fails, and he is gone.
Most Americans know that if One Man can do this, and worse, and kill “suspected” drug dealers in the Caribbean –he can do whatever he wants. That is not Democracy.
Oh, he and his broken circle will try to corrupt and disturb the 2025 November elections –trial run for Presidential election in 2028– so they will be monitored by the states and Democratic coverage.
This is an example of our failures –to modernize our government; to ensure protections exist for Trump-like attacks, balance the Supreme Court and enlarge it for balance, reduce Presidential authority over Congress 100%. We have a system with flaws, and GOP and Trump and ghost figures like Musk, Bannon, and Miller and the dark ones in the shadows, and we failed clearly to see Project 2025’s actions were not imaginary after all.
The East Wing Destruction (EWD) is a metaphor for all that’s wrong. In real time. We saw what HE seems to be allowed to do. Today (October 25), I see lawsuit is filed, perhaps more to follow. These are the darkest days of our nation and Democracy since the Nazis. We all allowed some of this darkness to descend. Let’s learn, pull on our asbestos suits, and fight like Hell for the nation WWII and since showed America’s strength. We need that strength now. –DrWeb

Top Ten Major Media Stories – The East Wing

1. BBC – “Satellite images show extent of demolition at the White House” (October 24, 2025)1
2. CBS News – “Where is debris from the White House East Wing demolition being taken?” (October 24, 2025)2
3. PBS NewsHour – “The East Wing of the White House has been demolished. Here’s a look at its history” (October 24, 2025)3
4. ABC News – “White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show” (October 23, 2025)4
5. CNN – “See the White House’s East Wing demolition from satellite images” (October 23, 2025)5
6. NBC News – “White House’s East Wing demolition finished as Trump makes way for new ballroom” (October 23, 2025)6
7. CNN – “Why Trump’s sudden East Wing demolition is extraordinary” (October 22, 2025)7
8. Reuters – “White House East Wing will be torn down fully to make way for Trump ballroom” (October 22, 2025)8
9. The New York Times – “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions” (October 22, 2025)9
10. USA Today – “Trump exposed a ‘loophole’ to demolish the White House East Wing” (October 23, 2025)10

Best Five Images – Major Media

1. CNN Photo Gallery – “In pictures: Trump’s East Wing demolition” – Complete visual documentation of the demolition process11
2. Getty Images – “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing” collection – 23 professional images12
3. ABC News Australia – Satellite imagery showing complete demolition13
4. PBS NewsHour – “PHOTOS: White House starts East Wing demolition”14
5. Yahoo News Canada – “Photos reveal shocking destruction of East Wing” – Ground-level destruction images15

What in World is Trump Doing Now?
Why Would He Do This?

The Trump administration’s stated rationale centers on a complaint –that no one made–about inadequate space for large-scale diplomatic functions16. Trump also argues –though again, no one said this anywhere–the federal government has lacked adequate space for large gatherings at the White House for 150 years16.
It’s a home, a house, a symbol, a residence, a meeting space for small gatherings, the First Lady’s staff and space. The new 90,000-square-foot ballroom will accommodate nearly 1,000 guests, compared to the East Room’s 200-person capacity14.

However, critics question the timing and priorities. The project costs an estimated $300 million during a government shutdown that has lasted nearly three weeks [as of 10/24/2025], halting most government expenditures16, including damaging Americans health care and food support.

Christina Hurt, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University, questioned whether it’s “justifiable for an administration to embark on costly, primarily aesthetic projects while ordinary Americans are experiencing financial hardships and federal employees are going unpaid”16.

–Christiana Hurt’s view

The funding comes from private donations and corporations, including major defense contractor Lockheed Martin and tech giants like Amazon and Google16. Ethics experts warn this fundraising approach could foster corruption, with companies “clearly doing so to curry favor with the government,” according to Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer during George W. Bush’s administration16.

Best Editorial Quotes – Suggested by Perplexity and approved

“This encapsulates Trump’s presidency in a single image. Illegal, destructive, and not beneficial to you.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)17

“Oh you’re trying to say the cost of living is skyrocketing? Donald Trump can’t hear you over the sound of bulldozers demolishing a wing of the White House to build a new grand ballroom.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren18

“I didn’t know draining the swamp meant Donald Trump building a $200 million ballroom for billionaires to bend the knee for special favors.”
— Senator Elizabeth Warren19

“The people’s house is basically being sold to the highest bidder. It is corruption at its core.”
— Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre20

“The companies providing funds are clearly doing so to curry favor with the government and enhance their visibility among federal officials.”
— Richard Painter, Corporate Law Professor and Former Ethics Lawyer16

MLA Bibliography – Thanks Perplexity!

1. BBC News. “Satellite Images Show Extent of Demolition at the White House.” BBC, 24 Oct. 2025, www.bbc.com/news/videos/c4gkrnn4892o.

2. CBS News. “Where Is Debris from the White House East Wing Demolition Being Taken?” CBS News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-east-wing-demolition-debris/.

3. PBS NewsHour. “The East Wing of the White House Has Been Demolished. Here’s a Look at Its History.” PBS, 24 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-east-wing-of-the-white-house-has-been-demolished-heres-a-look-at-its-history.

4. Hutzler, Alexandra, and Isabella Murray. “White House East Wing Demolished, New Images Appear to Show.” ABC News, 23 Oct. 2025, abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684.

5. CNN. “See the White House’s East Wing Demolition from Satellite Images.” CNN, 23 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/us/east-wing-white-house-satellite-photos-invs.

6. NBC News. “White House’s East Wing Demolition Finished as Trump Makes Way for New Ballroom.” NBC News, 23 Oct. 2025, www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-east-wing-demolished-new-ballroom-rcna239399.

7. CNN. “Why Trump’s Sudden East Wing Demolition Is Extraordinary.” CNN, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/white-house-east-wing-demolition-trump.

8. Reuters. “White House East Wing Will Be Torn Down Fully to Make Way for Trump Ballroom.” Reuters, 22 Oct. 2025, www.reuters.com/world/us/white-house-east-wing-will-be-torn-down-fully-make-way-trump-ballroom-official-2025-10-22/.

9. The New York Times. “See the White House as It Stood and What Trump Envisions.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/us/politics/east-wing-trump-ballroom.html.

10. USA Today. “Trump Exposed a ‘Loophole’ to Demolish the White House East Wing. Here’s What We Know.” USA Today, 23 Oct. 2025, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/23/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-explained/86837471007/.

11. CNN. “In Pictures: Trump’s East Wing Demolition.” CNN Politics, 22 Oct. 2025, www.cnn.com/2025/10/22/politics/gallery/east-wing-white-house-demolition.

12. Getty Images. “Trump To Demolish Entire East Wing To Build White House Ballroom.” Getty Images, 2025, www.gettyimages.com/editorial-images/news/event/trump-to-demolish-entire-east-wing-to-build-white-house-ballroom/776405723.

13. Allison, Charmayne. “Satellite Images Show the White House’s East Wing Has Been Demolished.” ABC News Australia, 24 Oct. 2025, www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-24/white-house-east-wing-demolished-trump-ballroom/105930582.

14. Associated Press. “PHOTOS: White House Starts East Wing Demolition to Build Trump’s Ballroom.” PBS NewsHour, 21 Oct. 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/photos-white-house-starts-east-wing-demolition-to-build-trumps-ballroom.

15. Yahoo News Canada. “Photos Reveal Shocking Destruction of East Wing as Crews Work to Build Trump’s $300M Ballroom.” Yahoo News, 22 Oct. 2025, ca.news.yahoo.com/photos-reveal-shocking-destruction-east-193833511.html.

16. Deutsche Welle. “Trump’s White House Ballroom Sparks Criticism Amid Shutdown.” DW, 23 Oct. 2025, www.dw.com/en/trump-ballroom-project-white-house-renovations-shutdown/a-74478671.

17. The New York Times. “The White House Wrecking Ball.” The New York Times, 22 Oct. 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-white-house-demolition.html.

18. Benzinga. “Elizabeth Warren Says Trump Is Deaf To Cost Of Living ‘Over The Sound of Bulldozers.'” Benzinga, 21 Oct. 2025, www.benzinga.com/news/politics/25/10/48320523/elizabeth-warren-says-trump-is-deaf-to-cost-of-living-over-the-sound-of-bulldozers-knocking-down-white-house-wing-for-new-grand-ballroom.

19. QuiverQuant. “Press Release: Senator Elizabeth Warren Critiques Donald Trump’s $200 Million Ballroom for Billionaires.” QuiverQuant, 15 Oct. 2025, www.quiverquant.com/news/Press+Release:+Senator+Elizabeth+Warren+Critiques+Donald+Trump’s+$200+Million+Ballroom+for+Billionaires.

20. Fox News. “Trump White House Ballroom Sparks Liberal Outrage Over Demolition.” Fox News, 24 Oct. 2025, www.foxnews.com/media/democrats-liberal-media-figures-fume-over-trump-demolishing-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.

Additional Citations – Added October 25, 2025

What’s Been Lost In Donald Trump’s Teardown Of The East Wing To Build A White House Ballroom – Analysis- https://deadline.com/2025/10/trump-white-house-east-wing-demolition-1236595980, October 23, 2025

White House East Wing demolished, new images appear to show – https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/new-images-show-entire-white-house-east-wing/story?id=126800684 October 23, 2025

The Daily, New York Times’ podcast, “The Trump administration completed its demolition of the East Wing of the White House on Thursday to make way for a new presidential ballroom” – https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/podcasts/the-daily/demolition-white-house-east-wing-ballroom.html October 24, 2025

Google News – Lawsuit(s) East Wing – https://news.google.com/search?q=lawsuits%20east%20wing&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen October 25, 2025

#2025 #America #Demolished #Demolition #Destroyed #DonaldTrump #DrWebEditorial #EastWing #Education #Health #History #Images #LawSuits #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #PerplexityAI #Politics #Resistance #Science #SpecialReport #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

No Kings protests: What to know as millions rally against Trump – Axios

Axios, Updated Oct 15, 2025 – Politics & Policy

What to know about Oct. 18 “No Kings” protests

• By April Rubin

 “No Kings” protest events planned for Oct. 18

Places with planned rallies, meetings or visibility events; As of Oct. 14, 2025

A map of the U.S. showing the locations of “No Kings” protest events planned for Oct. 18, 2025. There were more than 2,000 events planned in 1,700 cities as of Oct. 14, 2025.

No Kings protest organizers expect millions to gather across the nation on Saturday, Oct. 18 in an event Republicanlawmakers decry as “a hate America rally.”

Why it matters: The latest round of protests comes amid growing frustration about the ongoing government shutdown and widespread opposition to President Trump’s military crackdown on Democratic-led cities across America.

State of play: More than 2,500 events are planned across all 50 states as of Monday, organizers said.

• “Together, millions will send a clear and unmistakable message: we are a nation of equals, and our country will not be ruled by fear or force,” their statement said.
• Participating groups include the American Civil Liberties Union, American Federation of Teachers, 50501, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible and MoveOn.

The other side: The recurring movement against the Trump administration has garnered sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers who say Democrats are protesting as a ploy during the government shutdown.

• “The Trump Administration is focused on stopping the scourge of left-wing violence plaguing American communities,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “Left-wing protestors can beclown themselves by lawfully protesting the alternate reality they live in, but violence or breaking the law will not be tolerated.”

What they’re saying: Republican leadership, including House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), called the protest “a hate America rally.”

• Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said the National Guard will need to respond to protesters. “Hopefully it will be peaceful — I doubt it,” he said. The White House did not answer whether Trump plans to deploy National Guard troops to any protest sites Saturday.

Friction point: Johnson, in a Fox News appearance, said the protests were being put on by “the pro-Hamas wing and the Antifa people.”

• “It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally because they can’t face their rabid base,” he said after criticizing House Democrats.

Reality check: Johnson canceled a third week of House votes amid the ongoing shutdown.

• “The fact that they’re trying to smear millions and millions of Americans who are fed up with the dictatorial actions of the Trump administration as the reason why they themselves are unable to govern is just another demonstration of their own panic, their own desperation, and the fact that they know that they are on the losing end of this fight,” Leah Greenberg, co-founder of organizing group Indivisible, told Axios.

Zoom in: “Speaker Johnson is running out of excuses for keeping the government shut down,” No Kings organizers said.

He wrote that Republicans “spend their days sucking up to King Trump & demonizing peaceful protest just as some in America sought to appease King George III.”

“Instead of reopening the government, preserving affordable healthcare, or lowering costs for working families, he’s attacking millions of Americans who are peacefully coming together to say that America belongs to its people, not to kings.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said on Bluesky he looked forward to No Kings Day, saying the GOP was “the same kind of weasels who would’ve called George Washington & America’s revolutionaries ‘terrorists.'”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: No Kings protests: What to know as millions rally against Trump

#2025 #AgainstTrump #America #Axios #Cities #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NoDictators #NoKings #NoNazis #Opinion #Peaceful #Politics #Protests #Rally #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USConstitution #UnitedStates

US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’ – US news – The Guardian

US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’

Second round of protests at more than 2,500 sites are set for Saturday, including in cities where Trump has sent troops

By Rachel Leingang, Fri 17 Oct 2025 06.00 EDT

Donald Trump has promised to crack down on dissent and sent troops into US cities. His allies are claiming antifa, the decentralized antifascist movement, is behind plans to protest. He is looking for any pretext to go after his opponents.

Still, this Saturday, even in cities with troops on the ground, millions of people are expected to march against the president as part of a second “No Kings” protest. The last No Kings protest in June drew several million people across more than 2,000 locations. This time, more than 2,500 cities and towns nationwide are hosting protests.

Organizers expect this Saturday’s protests to draw more people than the June events as the American public sees the excesses of the Trump administration more clearly.

“Their goal is to dissuade you from participating,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the progressive movement organization with chapters around the US that is a main organizer of No Kings. “That doesn’t mean that everybody has the same threat level. It doesn’t mean that people should ignore what the threats are, but it does mean we’re going to need to see a lot of courage out there on Saturday.”

More than 200 organizations are signed on as partners for the 18 October protests; none have dropped off for fear of a Trump backlash, Levin said. The American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights group, is a partner, as is the advocacy group Public Citizen. Unions including the American Federation of Teachers and SEIU are in the coalition. The new protest movement 50501, which began earlier this year as a call for protests in all 50 states on a single day, is also a partner. Other partners include the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn, United We Dream, the League of Conservation Voters, Common Defense and more.

Resistance to Trump continues to grow. The Harvard Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks political crowds, noted that 2025 had seen “far more protests” than during the same time period in 2017. The June No Kings protests were “probably the second-largest single day demonstration since Donald Trump first took office in January 2017”, second to the Women’s March in 2017, the consortium said.

In June, on the same day a man shot and killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, tens of thousands of people still turned out for No Kings in St Paul while the shooter was on the loose, with attenders saying they didn’t want to back down in the face of political violence.

The messages behind the No Kings protests are simple: Trump is acting like a king, and the US rejects kings. The No Kings coalition has cited Trump’s “increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption” as motivation for the protests, including ramping up of deportations, gutting healthcare, gerrymandering maps and selling out families for billionaires.

In the months since the first No Kings protests, Trump’s menace against the opposition has only grown, particularly after the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered. Trump declared antifa to be a terrorist organization and has promised to investigate and take action against any leftwing groups he deems support terrorism.

Amid this backdrop, tens of thousands of people have joined calls in recent weeks to prepare safety plans, train on how to serve as marshals for the protests and learn de-escalation tactics.

Still, some people may decide to stay home because the threats against them are too great, including the fear of deportation for participating in peaceful protest.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: US cities to resist Trump’s crackdown on dissent with No Kings protests: ‘We will not be bullied’ | US news | The Guardian

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NoFacists #NoKings #NoNazis #Opinion #Politics #Protests #Resistance #Science #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Jack Smith Speaks – Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Jack Smith Speaks

By Joyce Vance, Oct 14, 2025

You have choices about where you get your news and analysis. I’m grateful you’ve chosen to read Civil Discourse. If you value clear, independent insight into the law and our democracy, I hope you’ll consider a paid subscription. Your support makes the newsletter possible. Thank you for being here with me.

ABC reported today that the House Judiciary Committee wants to have former special counsel Jack Smith testify—behind closed doors—about investigating the Mar-a-Lago, January 6, and Donald Trump. Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who chairs the Committee, wants an interview by October 28. He is calling for Smith to turn over documents and communications too.

Why now? Last week, there was reporting (very unsurprising to anyone who has ever investigated a federal case) that Smith’s probe obtained phone records regarding a number of Republican lawmakers as part of the January 6 case investigation. Jordan wrote to Smith, “As the Committee continues its oversight, your testimony is necessary to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement.”

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri complained that “The F.B.I. tapped my phone.” He said he’d been wiretapped.

Not so fast, though. Obtaining phone records means getting call information—that can mean which phone number called which other phone number, when, and possibly, how long the call lasted. It’s easy to understand why prosecutors would want that information in virtually any case they’re investigating.

Here, given reports that Trump had numerous calls leading up to and on January 6 (for instance, one with brand new Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville), it would be surprising if they hadn’t done so. The New York Times reported that “The calls were scrutinized because at the time, prosecutors were trying to identify relevant communications between the president and his inner circle with members of Congress on the key days surrounding the violence.”

Call information, which frequently produces investigative leads, is acquired routinely by investigators. But it is not the same thing as a wiretap, which lets law enforcement listen in on a target’s phone calls. To get a wiretap, prosecutors and agents have to get an order from a federal judge in compliance with the strict requirements of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. They have to establish probable cause and show that less intrusive investigative methods were tried and failed. A wiretap only lasts for 30 days, and prosecutors must go back to the judge, with fresh proof, in order to reup the wiretap for an additional 30 days.

Jordan’s allegation that this is the weaponization of the DOJ should fall on deaf ears. Jack Smith was investigating one of the most serious situations our country has ever faced—an effort to interfere with the smooth transfer of power between two American administrations, with involvement by the outgoing president who had lost the election—using routine investigative techniques. Jordan and other Republicans should be able to differentiate between that and wiretaps, since these are statutory creatures and Congress sets the requirements for when they can be used.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Jack Smith Speaks – Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

#2025 #America #CivilDiscourse #DonaldTrump #Education #GOP #Health #History #JackSmith #January6AttackOnUSCapitol #JoyceVance #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #RuleOfLaw #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpPoliticalEnemy #UnitedStates

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian Is Creating a Digital Archive of Exhibits – School Library Journal

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian Is Creating a Digital Archive of Exhibits

by Kara Yorio, Oct 03, 2025 | Filed in News & Features

The all-volunteer initiative is documenting exhibits at the more than 20 Smithsonian Institution museums and the National Zoo in response to the Trump administration’s announcement that museums’ contents would be subject to review and revision to align with the president’s directive.

When retired Virginia school librarian Mary Anne O’Rourke learned about a project to digitally archive the Smithsonian Institution museums, she immediately wanted to volunteer.

“I spent my career teaching children how to research and look up facts, how to know facts from distortions, and what were good sources? The Smithsonian has been our greatest source,” says O’Rourke, who was a preK–8 librarian for 11 years after being a classroom teacher and working at the Smithsonian Visitor Information Center.

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian is an all-volunteer effort to document everything on display at the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, the National Zoo, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Volunteers take photos and videos of exhibits in this crowdsourced archiving endeavor. Organizers call it “Crowd to Cloud” and plan to make the information accessible to the media and public.

The initiative is a response to an August letter sent by the Trump administration to the Smithsonian Institution secretary stating that exhibits were subject to review and revision in an effort to “reflect the unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story.” The letter went on to say it was an effort to “ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

After learning of the administration’s intentions, Georgetown University history professors Chandra Manning and James A. Millward wanted to take action. Inspired by Save Our Signs—which seeks to document signs and information at National Parks that may be removed by the administration—Manning and Millward sent an email to the university’s history department saying they wanted to find a way to document the Smithsonian exhibits. Upon receiving the email, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, a graduate research assistant at the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, immediately proposed possible ways of achieving the goal and offered to help coordinate. Not only is the dual master’s student pursuing a degree in Global, International, and Comparative History, the Smithsonian also holds a special place in her personal history.

“When I was in college, my partner and I were long distance, and we would meet up every other weekend in D.C. and go to the Smithsonian,” Dickinson Goodman says. “They are very personal to me. They’re a big part of my sense of my country, and my sense of my field, and my sense of pride in what it means to be an American—that we can produce these amazing free institutions to the public and to the world. And these institutions hold within them a huge amount of human wisdom and American and world experience that deserve to be accessible.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

https://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/story/Citizen-Historians-Smithsonian-creating-digital-Archive-Exhibits

#2025 #America #CitizenHistorians #DigitalArchive #DonaldTrump #Education #Exhibits #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #SchoolLibraryJournal #Science #SLJ #Smithsonian #SmithsonianInstitution #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Inside the Battle for The Smithsonian – Vanity Fair

CULTURE WAR

Inside the Battle for The Smithsonian

Donald Trump’s unprecedented measures to take control of The Smithsonian Institution have rattled staffers, enraged artists, and even put the future of its vast collection in doubt.

By Manuel Roig-Franzia, September 29, 2025

The look on the curator’s face said it all, and the intensity of the conversation was escalating by the moment. Confusion to worry. Worry to dread.

“I want to do this,” the curator said. “But I don’t think I can do this. I’m worried that I might get in trouble.”

On any other day, the curator’s sit-down with a high-ranking Smithsonian official about an exhibition plan would have been routine—the idea wasn’t particularly controversial. But not on this day in late March. President Donald Trump’s White House had just issued an executive order, a mere 1,100 words or so but plenty enough to shake the world’s largest museum and research institution to its core, a document titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The order lambasted The Smithsonian, saying it had “in recent years come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” It went on to order Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to seek out and “remove improper ideology” and to take a hand in reshaping content at the popular 21-museum complex as well as its research centers and the National Zoo. The Trump administration, the order said, would work to ensure The Smithsonian would transmit an “uplifting” message to remind “Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

The order felt almost Orwellian to some.

“It taps into people’s basest fears,” a high-ranking official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about retribution, told me.

Across the breadth of the vast Smithsonian network, similar reactions were taking place. Officials were beginning to doubt their decisions. Might they be self-editing to appease a vengeful president? Might self-editing morph into self-sabotage? Might The Smithsonian, which gets a large percentage of its budget from the federal government but prides itself on independence, become a political propaganda tool?

“The whole thing is fucked up,” said artist Mika Rottenberg, whose work will be featured at The Smithsonian in November. “So many things are fucked up.”

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/inside-the-battle-for-the-smithsonian

#2025 #America #Battle #Censorship #DonaldTrump #Education #EraseHistory #Health #History #InsideSmithsonian #KennedyCenter #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #RemoveHistory #Resistance #Science #Smithsonian #SmithsonianInstitution #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #VanityFair

America in Facts 2025 – USAFacts.com

America in Facts 2025

To find solutions to issues affecting the United States, everyone, from regular citizens to top policymakers, needs data to understand how the government is serving the people.

About the report

In this report, America in Facts 2025: A Data-Driven Report for Congress, we leverage nonpartisan government data to inform critical policy debates of particular interest to the 119th Congress, including taxes, federal finances, and immigration and border security, among others.

Explore what we shared with Congress below or download the report.

Read the PDF report

Report chapters

01 Federal finances 02Taxes 03Standard of living 04Economy 05Immigration 06Population

Federal finances

Questions about how the federal government raises and spends money are front and center in 2025. With debates intensifying over the future of major programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest payments consuming a growing share of the budget, this chapter offers a factual baseline to understand how the federal government raises and allocates money. It highlights recent trends in taxes, spending, deficits, and debt and provides essential context for evaluating fiscal policy choices.

Read the chapter

Federal individual income taxes

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was passed in 2017 and was first effective during the 2018 tax season. It made sweeping changes to the individual provisions of the federal tax code, particularly the standard deduction and itemized deductions. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of 2025 made some of those changes permanent, tweaked others, and introduced new tax code provisions.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://usafacts.org/research-and-initiatives/reports/america-in-facts/

#2025 #America #AmericaInFacts2025 #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #USAFacts #USAFactsOrg

Democratic senators urge Smithsonian to resist White House attempts to ‘bully the institution’ : NPR

Culture

Four Democratic senators urge Smithsonian to resist White House attempts to ‘bully the institution’

Updated September 5, 2025, 3:32 PM ET

By Anastasia Tsioulcas

In a letter sent Friday to the Smithsonian Institution’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and three other Democratic senators urged Bunch to resist any attempts by the White House to “bully the institution to go against its mission and values.”

The letter from the four Senate Democrats comes weeks after President Trump called the Smithsonian and museums “all over the Country essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” On Truth Social, he said that the Smithsonian presents a narrative of the country’s history that is about “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

The White House also released an unsigned memo last month specifically criticizing 22 exhibitions, live programs and other materials at the Smithsonian, titled, “President Trump Is Right About The Smithsonian.” NPR has reported that some of the exhibitions were temporary and are no longer on view.

The coauthors of Friday’s letter are three senators with ties to the institution: Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., both current members of the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents; and Sen. Jeffrey A. Merkley, D-Ore., the ranking member of an appropriations subcommittee which holds jurisdiction over the Smithsonian’s federal funding. The letter was provided to NPR by Padilla’s office.

Within the letter, the senators asserted that oversight of the Smithsonian rests with Congress from its founding, not the White House.

“As you know,” the senators wrote in part, “the Smithsonian Institution is a national treasure, and it is also a public-private partnership managed as an independent federal trust. It is not an executive agency over which the President can exert unilateral control over its historical, scientific or artistic content. The Institution was created by Congress to care for the bequest of James Smithson and to found ‘an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.’ In recent years, it has been funded with a relatively even split of private donations to support its programming, and federal appropriations provided by Congress to support its core operations including the maintenance of the facilities, further underscoring its unique status.”

The letter continued: “Congress assigned the trust responsibility for this gift of private property to the United States and its ongoing mission to the Smithsonian Board of Regents, not to the executive branch.”

In a written statement sent to NPR on Friday afternoon, Lindsey Halligan, a White House official tasked with reviewing the Smithsonian, said: “The Smithsonian is not an autonomous institution, as 70% of its funding comes from taxpayers. While we acknowledge the Smithsonian’s recognition of its own programmatic failures and is moving toward critical introspection, it cannot credibly audit itself. By definition, an ‘audit’ must be neutral and objective. The American taxpayers deserve nothing less, which is why the White House will ensure the audit is conducted impartially. This is non-negotiable.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Democratic senators urge Smithsonian to resist White House attempts to ‘bully the institution’ : NPR

#2025 #America #bullying #Democrats #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #NationalPublicRadio #NPR #Opinion #Politics #Resist #Resistance #Science #Senators #SmithsonianInstitution #SmithsonianMuseums #SupportSmithsonian #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WhiteHouse

Smithsonian secretary reaffirms institution’s ‘independence’ in response to White House’s demand for review – ABC News

Smithsonian secretary reaffirms institution’s ‘independence’ in response to White House’s demand for review

Sec. Lonnie Bunch said that the institution’s “independence is paramount.”

By Elizabeth Thomas and Deena Zaru, September 5, 2025, 12:31 PM

White House wants Smithsonian exhibits to fit Trump’s view of history: Official
The White House plans to conduct a wide-ranging review of the Smithsonian Institution’s museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III asserted the Smithsonian Institution’s control over its programming and content this week in a letter addressed to the White House after the Trump administration demanded a review of the institution’s exhibits, a Smithsonian official confirmed to ABC News.

The White House announced last month that it plans to conduct a wide-ranging review of the Smithsonian’s museum exhibitions, materials and operations to ensure they align with President Donald Trump’s view of American history.

In the Sept. 3 letter, Bunch responded to Trump’s demand that his administration review the Smithsonian’s exhibitions, materials and operations. It also said that the Smithsonian, which is the world’s largest museum complex, will remain control over programming and content and that it will do its own review of exhibits, material and operations, the official told ABC News.

Following its internal review, Bunch said he will brief the White House on its findings, but the Smithsonian will not be sending a formal report to the White House, the Smithsonian official added. The museum’s review of exhibits is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

Asked about the Smithsonian’s internal review and whether the White House will insist on being involved, a White House official told ABC News that the Smithsonian “cannot credibly audit itself.”

“The Smithsonian is not an autonomous institution, as 70% of its funding comes from taxpayers. While we acknowledge the Smithsonian’s recognition of its own programmatic failures and is moving toward critical introspection, it cannot credibly audit itself,” White House official Lindsey Halligan said. “By definition, an ‘audit’ must be neutral and objective. The American taxpayers deserve nothing less, which is why the White House will ensure the audit is conducted impartially. This is non-negotiable.”

ABC News reached out to the Smithsonian but a request for comment was not immediately returned.

Bunch, who met with Trump at the White House on Aug. 28 over lunch, referenced the Smithsonian’s response to the White House and his conversations with Trump during the lunch in a Sept. 3 letter to the institution’s employees, which was obtained by ABC News.

In the letter, Bunch told Smithsonian employees that he communicated to the president during their Aug. 28 meeting that the Smithsonian’s “independence is paramount.” He also told employees that the Institution remains committed to telling the “American story” and “will always be, a place that welcomes all Americans and the world.”

Asked about the Smithsonian’s internal review and whether the White House will insist on being involved, a White House official told ABC News that the Smithsonian “cannot credibly audit itself.”

“The Smithsonian is not an autonomous institution, as 70% of its funding comes from taxpayers. While we acknowledge the Smithsonian’s recognition of its own programmatic failures and is moving toward critical introspection, it cannot credibly audit itself,” White House official Lindsey Halligan said. “By definition, an ‘audit’ must be neutral and objective. The American taxpayers deserve nothing less, which is why the White House will ensure the audit is conducted impartially. This is non-negotiable.”

ABC News reached out to the Smithsonian but a request for comment was not immediately returned.

Bunch, who met with Trump at the White House on Aug. 28 over lunch, referenced the Smithsonian’s response to the White House and his conversations with Trump during the lunch in a Sept. 3 letter to the institution’s employees, which was obtained by ABC News.

In the letter, Bunch told Smithsonian employees that he communicated to the president during their Aug. 28 meeting that the Smithsonian’s “independence is paramount.” He also told employees that the Institution remains committed to telling the “American story” and “will always be, a place that welcomes all Americans and the world.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Smithsonian secretary reaffirms institution’s ‘independence’ in response to White House’s demand for review – ABC News

#2025 #ABCNews #America #Books #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #SecretaryLonnieBunch #SmithsonianInstitution #SmithsonianMuseums #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #WashingtonDC #WhiteHouse

Influential Sister Photographers Were Hidden in Geronimo’s Eye for a Century https://petapixel.com/2025/09/05/influential-sister-photographers-were-hidden-in-geronimos-eye-for-a-century/ #womeninphotography #libraryofcongress #historicalfriday #gerhardsisters #20thcentury #geronimo #portrait #Culture #history #News

Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth | The Guardian

Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth

By Saida Grundy

The United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to make slavery respectable again by promoting ‘the lost cause’

Sat 23 Aug 2025 07.00 EDT

It should surprise no one that former cast members from reality shows that ran for more than 15 seasons are running out of new material.

Days ago, Donald Trump, former star of NBC’s The Apprentice and current US president, posted a lengthy Truth Social rant in which he (again) threatened the country’s leading cultural institutions to adhere to his political ideology. The target was one he has had in his crosshairs before – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – which Trump called “OUT OF CONTROL” in his post. “Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” Trump unloaded. “WOKE IS BROKE,” he continued through his customary use of all caps and misplaced capitalization of common nouns. “We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”

The tirade left many wondering what exactly Trump saw as the upsides of slavery, but also where they had previously heard this recycled talking point. The comment seemed to echo comments made just days prior by his fellow reality show bully Jillian Michaels, a former trainer on NBC’s The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss competition show that launched alongside The Apprentice in 2004. Michaels had been making her rounds in media and public appearances, rebranding from verbally abusive fat shamer to Maga influencer.

On CNN’s NewsNight, the host Abby Phillips moderated a roundtable discussion on Trump’s months-long overreach into cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the NMAAHC. Michaels hijacked the conversation into a lament about slavery’s prominence in the massively popular museum’s displays on US history. “[Trump] is not whitewashing slavery, he’s not,” Michaels said. “You cannot tie slavery to just one race, which is what every single exhibit [at NMAAHC] does.” Turning towards the representative Ritchie Torres, who was seated beside her, Michaels unloaded popular far-right talking points. “Do you realize that only less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves?” she continued. “Do you realize slavery is thousands of years old? Do you know who was the first race who tried to end slavery?”

Torres’s interjections that slavery was a system of white supremacy, not a set of individual white acts, went unaddressed by the TV star. (From 20% to 50% of the white population in southern US states owned enslaved people, and all white people nationwide benefited from slavery’s racial order. Michael’s false claims prompted Phillips to later post a public correction.)

The tirade was an escalation of Trump’s previous open declarations to “restore truth and sanity to American history”, an effort to overhaul exhibits and installations across federally operated museums and galleries and politicize their content, with the NMAAHC locked squarely in the administration’s sights for what it called “corrosive ideology”. Previous edicts about the museum, lovingly nicknamed “The Blacksonian” by many of its patrons, had not specifically identified slavery as the White House’s gripe. But Trump’s Truth Social post more directly reflected a return to a century-old tactic to minimize chattel slavery as “not that bad”.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth | Saida Grundy | The Guardian

#2025 #America #AmericanMuseums #Blacksonian #Books #CivilWar #DonaldTrump #Education #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #OldMyths #Opinion #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Slavery #SmithsonianInstitution #TheGuardian #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedDaughtersOfTheConfederacy #UnitedStates

Changing the Smithsonian doesn’t erase slavery and the racial wealth gap – The Washington Post

Changing the Smithsonian doesn’t erase slavery and the racial wealth gap

There isn’t enough museum space to represent the full extent of the brutality that millions had to endure.

August 22, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT, Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDT, 5 min

Column by Michelle Singletary

The legacy of slavery — and the decades of theft associated with it both before and after it ended — cannot be erased from American history.

Nor should it be minimized.

One might assume this didn’t need to be said. But comments made by President Donald Trump suggest otherwise.

Trump this week accused the Smithsonian Institution of being “WOKE” and too focused on slavery, using his platform to diminish itsimpact and criticize exhibits, including those at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

I am a descendant of enslaved people, and there isn’t enough museum space to represent the full extent of the brutalitythat millions had to endure.

In a 10-part award-winning series that I wrote five years ago, I aimed to dispel common misconceptions about race and inequality.

Sincerely, Michelle

Yes, Black Americans are entitled to reparations. We’ve earned them.

In one part, I recounted how my grandmother, Big Mama, told me about her enslaved great-grandmother, Leah Drumwright.

While caring for her own infant, Leah was forced to nurse the baby of the White woman who owned her. The woman made another demand, one that still fills me with grief and anger.

Leah was told she could nurse her own baby only on her right breast. Theleft was strictly reserved for the White baby. The woman’s rationale: The left breast, being closer to the heart, produced healthier milk, and therefore, the best milk had to be given to the White child.

One evening, exhausted from cleaning and cooking for the plantation owners, Leah was caught in the kitchen feeding her child on her left breast.

Fueled by rage, the White mother struck Leah across the face. A beating followed the slap.

I want to revisit part of the “Sincerely, Michelle” series because understanding our history with slavery is crucial to addressing economic disparities that still exist for Black Americans.

The institution that stripped Leah of basic human rights also seeded the discriminatory policies that systematically denied Blacks opportunity.

After the Civil War, many newlyfreed people purchased land, only to see it stolen. Prosperous Black towns were looted and burned. Blacks were denied the right to vote and were prohibited from living in certain neighborhoods.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Changing the Smithsonian doesn’t erase slavery and the racial wealth gap. – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Opinion #Politics #RacialWeathGap #Racism #Resistance #Science #Slavery #SmithsonianInstitution #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets Smithsonian museums | Trump administration | The Guardian

Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets Smithsonian museums

Exclusive: White House flags seven institutions including those for Latino, African and Asian art for review, document shows…

Joseph Gedeon in Washington, Wed 20 Aug 2025 20.36 EDT

Amid the Donald Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that details examples of how the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history.

The document, based on public submissions shared with the administration, points to what it says are problematic exhibits at seven different museums, including a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people and a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.

“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable,” a White House official said. “Until we get info from the Smithsonian in response to our letter, we can’t verify the numbers of artifacts that have been removed because the Smithsonian has removed them on their own.”

Trump announced the initiative on Truth Social earlier this week, writing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

The seven museums that have so far been flagged for review include the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Latino, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art.

The administration argues exhibits at these museums focus excessively on oppression rather than American achievements. At the National Museum of American History, the document flagged the ¡Presente! Latino history exhibition for allegedly promoting an “anti-American agenda” by examining colonization effects and depicting the US as stealing territory from Mexico in 1848.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets Smithsonian museums | Trump administration | The Guardian

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #SmithsonianInstitution #TheGuardian #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Trump administration threatening funds approved by Congress – The Washington Post

Trump budget officials claim sweeping spending power from Congress, records show

Russell Vought, the White House budget director and architect of Project 2025, would have vast authority to approve or block billions in federal spending, the records show.

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks with reporters outside the White House on June 3. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The Trump administration is asserting new power to withhold billions of dollars from low-income housing services, education assistance, medical research grants and other programs approved by Congress, centralizing sweeping authority in the executive branch and potentially inflaming tensions between the two branches.

The new practices revealed Monday — which increase the leverage and power of budget chief Russell Vought — are likely to reignite a clash over the administration’s power to freeze dollars approved by Congress, usurping authority that the legislative branch has under the Constitution. The power struggle dates to President Donald Trump’s first term, when his refusal to release congressionally approved money for Ukraine helped spark a House impeachment, from which he was acquitted in the Senate.

Trump during his second term has been more emboldened to ignore Congress’s approved spending plans, and the two Republican-controlled chambers have largely acquiesced. But the issue has simmered in the courts, which recently determined the White House Office of Management and Budget must make its spending decisions public.

The agency’s newly released documents, made public under the court order, show Trump’s budget office is imposing litmus tests on releasing money — demanding plans from agencies to show they are following guidance Trump has laid out in executive actions, such as avoiding spending on diversity programs. While Trump has authority to issue those directives, experts say they do not, under law, carry the same weight as congressional actions.

The documents show OMB has in some cases blocked the release of funding until agencies provide a White House-approved spending plan and in other cases prevented funds from being spent that conflict with Trump’s executive orders.

The restrictions effectively give Vought, the director of the White House budget office and an architect of the controversial conservative governing plan Project 2025, the power to approve or deny virtually all spending decisions. The records do not provide a full accounting of government funding that has been withheld.

The administration’s spending requirements are coming in the form of footnotes attached to “apportionments,” which are records that provide permission for agencies to spend federal money.

Federal budget offices under previous presidents have generally asked agencies to provide spending plans before doling out money, according to experts. But withholding that money constitutes an impoundment, which is illegal under the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, those experts said.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump administration threatening funds approved by Congress – The Washington Post

Original article: View source

#2025 #America #BudgetOffice #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Project2025 #Resistance #RussellVought #Science #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Opinion | American history can be painful. The Smithsonian should embrace it. – The Washington Post

Good foreign policy depends on good information

Readers also discuss a new way to address Confederate memorials, socialism in New York City and the Smithsonian.

Regarding the Aug. 13 news article “Rubio recasts beliefs with cuts to human rights reports”:

I oversaw the production of the State Department’s annual human rights reports from 2009 to 2012. For almost 50 years, thousands of career diplomats have participated in the compilation of these reports, which have become the most comprehensive and reliable public assessment of human rights conditions in almost 200 countries.

Mandated by Congress in the 1970s to inform decision-making about foreign aid and trade policies, the reports have become an indispensable resource. Global leaders use them to assess risks where they conduct business. Immigration judges in the United States and elsewhere rely on them when evaluating asylum claims. Civil society activists turn to them for credible information when they operate in places where publishing criticism of government actions leads to official reprisals. Journalists and representatives of humanitarian organizations use them to orient themselves as they begin working in complex environments.

All of these benefits are now being jeopardized by the Trump administration’s decision to slash the comprehensive nature of these reports and to dramatically politicize their content. Good foreign policy depends on good information. That begins with thorough, independent accounting of the state of human rights everywhere.

Weakening this foundation risks blinding us to them. Once the credibility of our reporting is lost, it will be extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | American history can be painful. The Smithsonian should embrace it. – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #AmericanHistory #DonaldTrump #Health #History #HumanRightsReport #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #MandatedByCongress #Opinion #Politics #Resistance #Rubio #Science #SmithsonianInstitution #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #USStateDepartment #UnitedStates

Letters from an American – August 5, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 5, 2025 (Tuesday)

By Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 05, 2025

Sixty years ago tomorrow, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The need for the law was explained in its full title: “An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, and for other purposes.”

In the wake of the Civil War, Americans tried to create a new nation in which the law treated Black men and white men as equals. In 1865 they ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing enslavement except as punishment for crimes. In 1868 they adjusted the Constitution again, guaranteeing that anyone born or naturalized in the United States—except certain Indigenous Americans—was a citizen, opening up suffrage to Black men. In 1870, after Georgia legislators expelled their newly seated Black colleagues, Americans defended the right of Black men to vote by adding that right to the Constitution.

All three of those amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—gave Congress the power to enforce them. In 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to do just that. Reactionary white southerners had been using state laws, and the unwillingness of state judges and juries to protect Black Americans from white gangs and cheating employers, to keep Black people subservient. White men organized as the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize Black men and to keep them and their white allies from voting to change that system. In 1870 the federal government stepped in to protect Black rights and prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan.

With federal power now behind the Constitutional protection of equality, threatening jail for those who violated the law, white opponents of Black voting changed their argument against it.

In 1871 they began to say that they had no problem with Black men voting on racial grounds; their objection to Black voting was that Black men, just out of enslavement, were poor and uneducated. They were voting for lawmakers who promised them public services like roads and schools, and which could only be paid for with tax levies.

The idea that Black voters were socialists—they actually used that term in 1871—meant that white northerners who had fought to replace the hierarchical society of the Old South with a society based on equality began to change their tune. They looked the other way as white men kept Black men from voting, first with terrorism and then with grandfather clauses that cut out Black men without mentioning race by permitting a man to vote if his grandfather had, literacy tests in which white registrars got to decide who passed, poll taxes, and so on. States also cut up districts unevenly to favor the Democrats, who ran an all-white, segregationist party. By 1880 the South was solidly Democratic, and it would remain so until 1964.

Southern states always held elections: it was just foreordained that Democrats would win them.

Black Americans never accepted this state of affairs, but their opposition did not gain powerful national traction until after World War II.

During that war, Americans from all walks of life had turned out to defeat fascism, a government system based on the idea that some people are better than others. Americans defended democracy and, for all that Black Americans fought in segregated units, and that race riots broke out in cities across the country during the war years, and that the government interned Japanese Americans, lawmakers began to recognize that the nation could not effectively define itself as a democracy if Black and Brown people lived in substandard housing, received substandard educations, could not advance from menial jobs, and could not vote to change any of those circumstances.

Meanwhile, Black Americans and people of color who had fought for the nation overseas brought home their determination to be treated equally, especially as the financial collapse of European nations loosened their grip on their former African and Asian colonies and launched new nations.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-5-2025-tuesday

August 5, 2025 (Tuesday) by Heather Cox Richardson

Read on Substack

#2025 #America #CivilWar #DonaldTrump #Education #HeatherCoxRichardson #History #LettersFromAnAmerican #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #LyndonBJohnson #Politics #PresidentJohnson #Resistance #Science #Substack #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #VotingRightsAct

Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Listen to this article · 7:12 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Listen to this article · 7:12 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Listen to this article · 7:12 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Listen to this article · 7:12 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

Opinion | The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away – The New York Times

Opinion, By Thomas L. Friedman

The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away

Aug. 4, 2025

Listen to this article · 7:12 min Learn more

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/opinion/columnists/friedman-trump-labor-firing.html

#2025 #America #DonaldTrump #EditedTruth #FederalGovernment #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Lies #Opinion #PoliticalBias #Politics #Resistance #Science #TheNewYorkTimes #Trump #TrumpAdministration #TrumpCorrupts #UnitedStates

Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid – SFGate

CANNABIS

Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid

By Lester Black, Cannabis editor, Aug 4, 2025

Glass House Brands released its first public comment Monday since the California company faced a violent raid from federal authorities last month that left one man dead and hundreds arrested. 

On July 10, federal agents searched two of the company’s Southern California cultivation facilities — one in Ventura County and one in Santa Barbara County — in an operation that quickly descended into chaos. Officers fired tear gas inside the facilities and searched for immigrants as hundreds of protesters gathered outside to protest the Donald Trump administration’s action. One worker fell from a green house and later died, marking the first known death in Trump’s immigration crackdown. 

Following the raid, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had arrested at least 361 people suspected of being in the country illegally, as well as 14 “migrant children,” although the agency hasn’t shared any court documentation behind those figures. 

Glass House, one of California’s largest legal cannabis companies, had not issued any public comment in the weeks following the raid other than a post to X on July 11 confirming it was being raided. 

On Monday, the company broke its silence with a news release that outlined details of the operation, including that nine company employees were detained or arrested. The company said any other people arrested would have been employed by farm labor companies that provide employees for the farm, which is a common practice at agricultural facilities.

Glass House said that it has not been able to determine the identities of the alleged minors but said that if minors were at the facility “none of them were Glass House employees.”

There has been widespread fear in the cannabis industry that federal agents could have been conducting a much broader operation investigating the cultivation of marijuana itself, which is still federally illegal and could lead to federal criminal charges against the company and its staff. Video apparently taken during the raid and posted to social media showed a federal agent saying, “This is not an immigration raid.”

Monday’s news release countered that narrative, saying the raid was led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that the search warrant was authorized specifically for “evidence of possible immigration violations.” Glass House said that “very few documents were seized pursuant to the search warrant.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Calif. cannabis farm breaks silence weeks after deadly ICE raid

#2025 #America #California #CannabisFarm #DonaldTrump #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #SFGate #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

Opinion

Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

July 14, 2025, 5 mins

By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

Opinion

Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

July 14, 2025, 5 mins

By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

Opinion

Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

July 14, 2025, 5 mins

By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

Opinion

Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

July 14, 2025, 5 mins

By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

Opinion

Texas just gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next?

New laws in the Lone Star State will silence dissent and undermine faculty authority.

July 14, 2025, 5 mins

By Laura Benitez and Jonathan Friedman

Laura Benitez is state policy manager and Jonathan Friedman is Sy Syms managing director for PEN America’s U.S. free expression programs.

As thousands of students return to college campuses this fall, they will find themselves stepping into an environment reshaped by political and ideological mandates. Across the country, state legislators have been racing to exert new influence over free expression in higher education. Now, Texas has surged to the forefront, closing its 2025 legislative session by passing two alarming laws that take effect Sept. 1.

Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing

Signed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in June, the new laws amount to a stunningly aggressive legislative crackdown on campus protest (S.B. 2972) and academic shared governance (S.B. 37) at public colleges and universities. The laws will not just silence dissent and undermine faculty authority in Texas; they provide a blueprint for how to dismantle academic freedom and chill speech on campus state by state.

Only a few years ago, conservative lawmakers railed against college “free-speech zones,” arguing that liberal administrators were muzzling students on the rest of campus. In 2019, Texas legislators joined other states in taking action by declaring all outdoor spaces on public campuses open for protest and speech by students, employees and the general public.

Now, some ofthe same legislators have done an about-face. The campus protest law actually directs public colleges and universities to implement a version of free-speech zones and adopt sweeping limitations on protests. Encampments? Banned. Megaphones or speakers during “class hours”? Forbidden — if anyone claims your “expressive activity” is one that “intimidates others” or “interferes” with an employee’s duties. Even wearing a mask during a protest — something many do for safety — could land a student or employee a disciplinary hearing resulting in “sanctions.” And any expressive activity between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is off-limits altogether.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | Texas gutted free speech on college campuses. Is your state next? – The Washington Post

#2025 #America #Books #CollegeCampuses #Colleges #DonaldTrump #FreeSpeech #Health #History #Libraries #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Resistance #Science #Texas #TheWashingtonPost #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates #Universities

Who was Alan Lomax? 🎵 Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) spent almost 70 years as a folklorist and ethnographer, collecting, archiving, and analyzing folksongs and music in America. www.loc.gov/item/n500394... #AlanLomax #FolkMusic #LibraryOfCongress #music

Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002)

Library of Congress Acquires 17,500 Images by Pioneering Photographer Raúl Ruiz https://petapixel.com/2025/05/15/library-of-congress-acquires-17500-images-by-pioneering-photographer-raul-ruiz/ #libraryofcongress #mexicanamerican #raulruiz #Culture #chicano #News

Library of Congress Blog: Raúl Ruiz, La Raza Collection Lands at the Library. “Passion, grief and change come with protests, riots and strikes. That is exactly what journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz captured when he joined La Raza, a newspaper and magazine in East Los Angeles started by Chicano activists and creatives in the last half of the ’60s…. The Library will […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/05/12/library-of-congress-blog-raul-ruiz-la-raza-collection-lands-at-the-library/