When the meaning of Independence Day has been obliterated, and the Constitution and Human Rights are trampled and torched by the Totalitarians within.

(In times of great stress, and when the darkness begins to crowd out the light, or when despair threatens to drown out hope, I turn to thinkers and writers and activists who never gave up, no matter how terrible the times. Viktor Frankl‘s “Mans Search for Meaning,” written by a concentration camp survivor is one such source of strength. So is the writing of James Baldwin, who sees “hope” as a moral imperative, despite the heinous cruelty and racism of our own country. I wrote this piece two years ago for July 4th, a jingoistic holiday I deplore for its’ self-congratulatory smugness and nationalized delusion. The conditions I described then, are multiple times worse now, and assault us everyday in the image of masked ICE brownshirts, and the grinning, greedy faces of Trump and his supporters who take glee in destroying some 60 years of gains in Civil Rights, crushing working families, and making Apartheid Great Again. As a Jew, outraged by the Israel’s abandonment of every fundamental principle of Judaism, and angry at America’s destruction of democracy and any shred of fairness, James Baldwin speaks for me more now than ever before. Holding onto hope is more difficult for me today, than at anytime in my 76 years of civic engagement, public service, political activism, and as an advocate for humanity. Baldwin and Frankl and my granddaughters compel me to continue to do so.)

July 4^th in the USA is jammed with jingoist junk; stuffed with solipsistic slop of self-congratulation and “exceptionalism;” inebriated on the insanity of illuminating the night sky for mere minutes with a fortune in feel-good fireworks, while the people gawking at them below, get ground into the dirt on which they stand.

Nothing illustrates that sharp contrast of Red, White and Black and Blue this July 4^th holiday, than the three-pronged missiles of mass destruction aimed at every person of color, and every person of modest means in this country, by the US Supreme Court of High Executioners.

The High Court’s poison-dipped darts came “in bunches, not as single spies,” as Shakespeare wrote, but their targets were all the same: people of modest means, and people of color, left out of this country’s original contract; shackled, whipped, beaten, robbed and robbed again and again and again. Reparations? Don’t be ridiculous—this rich man’s country and its’ institutions are hell-bent on Decimation of any poor, or Black or brown human different from it’s wealthy, White overlords.

First, the repeal of Roe, and the termination of a woman’s right to have freedom over her own body, comes down like a hammer on the heads of predominantly poor women of color, in the States of the Old Confederacy—which once had laws protecting the rights of Slave owners to rape Black women, and now, in 2023, has laws forcing poor, Black women to give birth to the child of their rapists. How far have we come? In the good ole’ boy days of the Confederacy, that’s just the way Slave owners increased their workforce, with the approval of their Christian churches & governments.

Secondly, the assault and dismemberment of Affirmative Action was an arrow aimed directly at a noble, 60 year movement toward fairness, to level the playing field for many whose ancestors’ labor and the very fields they worked were ripped out from under them, without compensation, or remorse. Affirmative Action—an affirmative, constructive step to approach equality—was a measured, modest, long-term attempt to rebuild some of that stolen wealth over generations, and to overcome the onerous obstacles continually constructed to block Black people—like Black Veterans being denied the right to go to college, or use the GI Bill’s benefits they risked their lives to earn. Affirmative Action was intended to make a minor correction to those crimes against Black humanity; a very mild attempt, not unlike Germany’s, to recompense the families of the six million Jews that German Nationalists slaughtered.

Finally, and much like an assault weapon obliterates the flesh of its victims, the Supreme Court’s malicious destruction of a Student Loan forgiveness program, decapitated one concrete hope millions of striving, working-class Americans of all colors had of building wealth for their families and their communities, by dramatically reducing their college debt. But in this rich man’s corporate playground known as the United States, only big banks, oil & gas companies, and Justices Thomas, Alito, & Roberts are permitted to get bailed out –-by government or billionaires, and multi-million dollar law firms with business before their kept Court.

My anger over these these intentional, pre-meditated acts of murder of poor women, Black people and generations of working families, has unlocked some of my darkest demons. I want revenge; I want to even the score; I want to understand how generations of Black Americans have never lost hope in this goddamned, amoral country.

So, not for comfort, but to learn how to better channel my fury, I turned to James Baldwin, in his brilliant book, The Fire Next Time. The tight, tough book, was first published in 1963, the year Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated; and, republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his powerful and prescient closing pages, Baldwin wrote in 1963:

“ A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the 20^th Century, ‘ wrote W.E.B. Dubois around 60 years ago, is the problem of the color line.”

Baldwin continued:

“A tearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world—here, there or anywhere. It is for this reason that everything White Americans think they believe in, must now be reexamined. “

“What one would not like to see again is the consolidation of peoples on the basis of their color. But as long as we in the West place on color the value that we do, we make it impossible to consolidate, according to any other principle. Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality. . .

“And, at the center of this dreadful storm, stand the Black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk—eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.

“For the sake of one’s children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion… I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand…

“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”

“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’

Justice Sonia Sotomayor schools the lesser lawyers on the Supreme Court on the meaning of the Constitution, and the essence of humanity.

(United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, photo from the New York Times).

One hundred years ago, the State of Tennessee was the site of perhaps the first big legal battle of the culture wars in the United States following the Civil War. Accordingly, it was no surprise that it was Tennessee again earlier this month, a century later, where religious fundamentalism flared up to set fire to individual rights once again, in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Skrmetti.

In March,1925, the Tennessee State Legislature, dominated by religious fundamentalists, passed the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach scientific evolution in the State’s public schools, or any theory of evolution that denied “the Biblical account of creation.” Tennessee’s became the first law in the nation’s history to ban the teaching of science-based evolution.

Then, it was a 24-year old High School football coach, John Scopes, who also taught Math, General Science and Biology in the Rhea County High School, who ran smack into the law’s prohibitions on what he could teach, by introducing the concepts of scientific evolution in his high school biology class. Scopes was immediately fired, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up the case of what became known as “The Scopes Monkey Trial,” in the small Tennessee town of Dayton.

The trial ran for 11-days, from July 10, 1925, with the legendary defense attorney Clarence Darrow, representing John Scopes, and three-time Presidential Candidate William Jennings Bryan prosecuting for the State of Tennessee. The first trial to be broadcast nationwide on the new medium of radio, the Scopes trial riveted the country’s attention, becoming a symbol of cultural conflict between contemporary scientific teachings, and religious fundamentalism. The ACLU’s position on the case was that the Butler Act violated both Academic Freedom and the First Amendment’s prohibition against the Establishment of Religion.

Despite Darrow’s brilliant dismantling of Bryan’s strictly religious arguments (depicted some 35 years later by the actor Spencer Tracy in the film version of the play Inherit the Wind), Scopes was found guilty of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act and fined $100. Two years later, that verdict was overturned on a technicality involving the fine, but the statute’s prohibition against teaching evolution remained. It would not be declared unconstitutional—along with other laws like it across the country—for another 40 years, when, in 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar law in Epperson V. Arkansas, on First Amendment grounds—the same basis on which the Tennessee law was challenged in 1925.

Fast forward to the State of Tennessee in 2025, when despite remarkable gains in medical science, scientific knowledge and human and civil rights, religious fundamentalists—now in control of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Executive Branch of the federal government– have seized on a new, human target to tar and feather: children, who have questions about sex and gender, and are seeking either medical or mental healthcare.

Astonishingly, despite the passage of nearly 100 years of time, Tennessee passed a new law in 2023, entitled: “Prohibition on Medical Procedures Performed on Minors Related to Sexual Identity,” or Tennessee Senate Bill SB1. The law explicitly “prohibits healthcare providers from prescribing, administering or dispensing puberty blockers or hormones to any minor for the purpose of (1) enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex, or (2) treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s biological sex and asserted identity.” United States v. Skrmetti.

At the same time, and by the US Supreme Court’s own statement of the case in Skrmetti, Tennessee’s SB 1 “permits a healthcare provider to administer puberty blockers or hormones to treat a minor’s congenital defect, precocious puberty, disease or physical injury.” That explicit permission to other children of the same or different sexes presenting other reasons for such healthcare procedures is a flashing red-light of discrimination meriting “intermediate scrutiny” to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Sotomayor points out in her brilliant, blistering dissent from the Court’s 6-3 decision upholding the Tennessee statute, that :

“Sex and diagnosis may both be in play. As long as sex is one of the law’s distinguishing features, however, the law classifies on the basis of sex, and the Equal Protection Clause requires application of intermediate scrutiny.” (P. 20, Sotomayor dissent).

The Tennessee anti-transgender children’s law did not materialize overnight. In fact it’s language—and that of similar laws in more than two dozen other states—was virtually ripped out of the pages of Project 2025, a 920-page religious fundamentalist blueprint being followed by the Trump Administration to deny legal and human rights to LGBTQ+ individuals.

In the opening pages of Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, subheaded “Promise#1: Restore the Family as the Centerpiece of American Life and Protect Our Children” the key author of the Project, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, lays out the underpinnings of the anti-individual rights agenda advanced by the Tennessee statute ( pages 4 & 5, Forward, Project 2025):

“This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion(“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used
to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule,
agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender
ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot
inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual
liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its
purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women.”

Justice Sotomayor’s 31-page dissent, is free from knee-jerk ideology and trope-laden language which permeates the Majority’s decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and the egregiously biased concurring opinions of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett. Unlike her far more conservative colleagues on the Court, Sotomayor sticks to the law, and the facts of the case.

Her clear, concise legal arguments fall into two categories:

• A compelling case made for elevating the scrutiny of the claims in the case to the intermediate or heightened level of scrutiny, an important jurisprudential notch above the “rational basis review”, the lowest level of legal scrutiny which the Majority on the Court applied do the case;
• The existence of an unconstitutional sex classification in the law.

Without wasting anytime, Justice Sotomayor immediately reminds the Court that it “has long subjected to heightened scrutiny any law that treats people differently based on sex.” (p. 1, Sotomayor dissent):

“Today, the Court considers a Tennessee Law that categorically prohibits doctors from prescribing certain medications to adolescents if (and only if) they will help a patient ‘identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex. In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who, by definition ‘identify with” an identity ‘inconsistent with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.”

Justice Sotomayor is relentless in reminding the Court of the failure to perform even their most basic duties of scrutinizing such a clearly discriminatory sex-status case at a higher level:

“Tennessee’s law expressly classifies on the basis of sex and transgender status, so the Constitution and settled precedent require the Court to subject it to intermediate scrutiny. The majority contorts logic and precedent to say otherwise…Thus, the majority subjects a law that plainly discriminates on the basis of sex to a mere rational-basis review. By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims.”

Justice Sotomayor’s torrid dissent is a tour-de-force of jurisprudence, the facts, the law, and constitutional precedence, including a decision Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote five years ago in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020) which prohibited Title VII employment discrimination on the basis of sex or transgender disrcrimination:

From Bostock: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

Sotomayor noted that Bostock confirmed the classification of “sex” in the Tennessee statute and made it clear that discrimination based on incongruence between sex and gender identity was discrimination “because of sex.” It astounded her that a majority of her colleagues on the Court could so blatantly overturn their own, precisely-on-point legal precedent of only five years earlier, with Gorsuch joining the majority.

Not only did Justice Sotomayor school her fellow Supreme Court justices on the content and meaning of their most recent anti-discrimination decision pertaining to sex and transgender status, but she skillfully used her dissent to educate them about the extraordinarily serious mental health issues that the Court’s Skrmetti decision, ignored, and would make worse:

“Suicide, in particular, is a major concern for parents of transgender teenagers, as the lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts among transgender individuals may be as high as 40%. Tragically, studies suggest that as many as one-third of transgender high school students attempt suicide in any given year.” (Sotomayor dissent, p. 5)

As if to punctuate the callous cruelty of the Supreme Court’s majority decision in Skrmetti, on the very same day the Majority’s Skrmetti screed was released, the Trump Administration announced it was eliminating funding for specialized suicide prevention services on the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for LGBTQ+ youth.

The National LBGTQ+ Bar Association stripped bare the meaning of those dual, destructive decisions (Skrmetti, and the end of the Suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth) the day after they came down, on June 20, 2025: “The message is chillingly clear: our government is willing to let LGBTQ+ people suffer, to let us die, and to harm our community’s children.”

Sonoma County Bar Association’s LGBTQ+ Legal Section Chair and Board of Directors Member Tate Birnie (Birnie Law Office, Sebastopol, California) underscores that warning:

“The ruling sets a dangerous precedent for future actions targeting trans and LGBTQ+ individuals. Skrmetti has intensified the risks faced by transgender, nonbinary, and intersex youth, and anyone who defies societal or state-imposed gender definitions. I see this ruling as both a denial of care, and a fundamental affront to the humanity, autonomy and dignity of trans, nonbinary and intersex people.”

Birnie, a Stanford University Law School graduate, went on to warn that even states like California are not immune from the ban:

“Just this week, Stanford Medicine announced that it had stopped providing gender-affirming surgeries for patients under 19 years old. Similarly, Children’s Hospital in LA—another major provider of medical care for transgender youth in California—has decided to close its’ trans youth program. As a graduate of Stanford Law School, I am dismayed that Stanford has decided to capitulate on this issue, rather than continue to provide safe access to affirming care and recognize the right to bodily autonomy.”

That’s the same powerful message delivered by Justice Sotomayor in her 31-page masterpiece of a factual, jurisprudential and humane dissent in Skrmetti, required reading for every law student in the country and for practicing lawyers in all areas of law:

“…it is difficult to ignore that Tennessee professes concern with protecting the health of minors while categorically banning gender affirming care for even those minors exhibiting the most severe mental health conditions, including suicidality.”

Like the Tennessee Scopes trial 100 years earlier, when the lower court in Tennessee and the local community of religious fundamentalists tried to pretend that the facts in front of their face did not exist, the majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is also opting for an alternative reality, which much higher, more urgent life and death stakes. Justice Sotomayor refuses to permit them to look the other way, as the closing paragraph in her dissent to Skrmetti declares:

“This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s (Tennessee’s) ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with…sex,” contains a sex classification. Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet, the Majority refuses to call a spade a spade. Instead, it obfuscates a sex classification that is plain on the face of this statute…The Court’s willingness to do so here does irrevocable damage to the Equal Protection Clause and invites legislatures to engage in discrimination by hiding blatant sex classifications in plain sight.

“It also authorizes, without second thought, untold harm to transgender children and the parents and families who love them. Because there is no constitutional justification for that result, I dissent.”

***

By Steve Villano, Executive Director, Sonoma County Bar Association (the opinions expressed in this article are the author’s; the facts, are all verifiable, by citation.)

###

Today is Donald Trump’s 79 Birthday and “NO KINGS DAY,” across the US, with massive protests vs. Trump’s Dictatorship. The Rosenbergs only wish that Trump, a Russian Asset, be treated like they were.

For Donald Trump’s 77^th birthday 2 years ago, he was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling Nuclear secrets.

Next week, June 19, marks the 72^th anniversary of the execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act. It’s seems so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are so intertwined.

Three years ago, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”

Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory.

As we’ve witnessed Trump incessant Smash & Grab 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to put EVERYTHING in the U.S. up for sale, the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–is entirely plausible. It adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information.

Like Trump’s friend, mentor, lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents. After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My faith in the US Justice system has been shaken because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say. And, since the foreign asset Trump was not treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic.

After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain.

Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.

ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.

ROY: But am I dead?

ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.

(Pause)

ETHEL:

I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.

I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”

Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will he die defeated again, in his own shit, and stripped of everything he ever knew?

The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached, twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, and flagrant disregard for any and all laws, have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe. Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, the UAE, Qatar, or the highest bidder?

Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, 50-year temper tantrum and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed: “Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”

Charlottesville and Trump’s defense of Anti-Semites and White Supremacists as “fine people,” were only a preview of his new virulent war against anyone non-White, nor Christian.

(In working on a documentary about Harry Chapin, singer/songwriter Billy Joel was generous with his fond recollections of Chapin, and recounted the inhumane treatment and cruelty the Joel Family faced at the hands of the Nazis in Germany during the 1930’s. “There are NO good Nazis,” Joel told me during the course of our interview, held in his Motorcycle Shop/Museum in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York.)

Legendary Singer/songwriter Billy Joel has been in the news a lot these past few weeks: first, concerning a brain disorder—normal pressure hydrocephalus—-that will greatly restrict his ability to perform over the next two years; secondly, in a People Magazine story where he discussed his two suicide attempts in his early 20’s; and, currently, as the subject of a new documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in NYC last week.

Yet, for those of us who have been big Billy fans for decades, he has never really been out of the news, especially when his friend and fellow musician Bruce Springsteen tore into Donald Trump at concert after concert around the world calling Trump a “demogogue” who has “sold out our country and our allies.”

Springsteen’s powerful pro-democracy statements in the face of Trump’s growing totalitarianism, reminded me of a night eight years ago in late August, 2017, when Billy Joel walked out on stage at Madison Square Garden. Joel was the Artist-in-Residence at the Garden, and he performed monthly to standing room only crowds.

On the left side of Joel’s dark suit jacket, a yellow Star of David was pinned prominently over his heart. For the singer/songwriter who has performed more than 100 times at one of the world’s premiere concert arenas, sold more than 150 million records and won virtually every music award, it was a bold and dramatic action, surprising some of his fans, since Joel was not known for being overtly political.

Joel’s jolt came less than ten days after the White Supremacist/Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young women walking to peacefully protest the anti-Semitic and racial hatred spewed by the “Unite the Right” mob, was deliberately run down and killed by a White Supremacist driving a car into the group of counter-protestors.

Charlottesville was where many Americans were introduced, for the first time, to the pernicious and hateful “Great Replacement Theory,” a Far Right extremist concoction— which called for violent White Domestic Terrorist actions against Blacks, Jews and immigrants. The chant “Jews Will Not Replace Us” was screamed throughout Charlottesville by mostly male, White Supremacists, aiming to drive Jews, and our fellow travelers, out of American society.

The Charlottesville tiki-torch carrying thugs were some of the same violence-loving, anti-Semitic and racist Right Wing fanatics who elected Trump twice, assaulted police officers and committed acts of domestic terrorism on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and are fueling the present xenophobic jihad against Brown and Black immigrants. They represented the same maniacal, inhumane cruelty being currently carried out against thousands of immigrant families—many legal residents or citizens—by masked Federal Agents under direct orders from Trump, and his Taliban-like team of Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan.

To compound the terrible and deadly, hate-fueled events in Charlottesville that day in 2017, Donald Trump went on television and refused to place responsibility on the Nazis and White Supremacists, but instead, stated there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Trump’s despicable statement “enraged”, Joel, as he told The Times of Israel.

“No, Nazis aren’t good people, “ Joel said. “My old man, his family got wiped out. They were slaughtered at Auschwitz. Him and his parents were able to get out.”

Joel’s comments about his family’s treatment by the Nazis was an understatement.

In Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography, by Fred Schruers (Crown Archetype Books, NY, NY, 2014), the author details the systematic campaign by the Nazi’s against Joel’s ancestors, simply because they were successful Jews living in Nuremberg, Germany, where Billy Joel’s father (Helmut, later Americanized to Howard) was born.

Joel’s paternal grandfather, Karl Amson Joel, started a business in household linens in 1927, which he called the Karl Joel Linen Goods Company. His business was so profitable that he, his wife and their young son — Billy Joel’s father — were able to move into a wealthy section of Nuremberg.

As Karl Joel’s business rose in prominence and the Nazis rose in power, the Nazis fixed their sights on eliminating the Joel’s business and the family operating it.

The Billy Joel biography reports that “in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum database titled ‘Index of Jews whose German Nationality was Annulled by Nazi Regime, 1935–1944,” Billy’s grandfather is falsely accused of “monetary and currency offenses” in the records of two separate files.

“After taking part in the making of the documentary The Joel Files ,I realized what the film’s director, Beate Thalberg had discovered,” Billy told the book’s writer, Fred Schruers. “ My relatives were hounded out of Germany at an absurd price — a paradigm of the economic casualties during the Nazi takeover.”

But Karl Joel was not simply an “economic casualty”: he and his family were specific targets of the Nazis and were used as examples by Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher in the virulently anti-Semitic publication Der Sturmer.

Streicher ran front page articles calling Billy’s grandfather a “Yid,” and falsely accused him of underpaying and sexually harassing his workers. The Nazis made up thousands of lies against Germany’s Jews to dehumanize them and turn their political base against them.

Billy Joel’s father was one of four Jews in his Nuremberg classroom, forced to sit apart from their classmates, and forbidden from using the public swimming pool. As circumstances for Jews in Germany became more dire, and Karl Joel was arrested three times while being called the “Jew Joel,” a “bloodsucker,” and “oppressor,” young Helmut (Billy’s father) was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the Nazi equivalent of Fox News, Der Sturmer continued its relentless Twitter-like name calling attacks on Karl Joel, labeling him the “Nuremberg Linen-Jew Joel.”

Karl Joel was ordered by the Nazis to stamp all of his outgoing packages with a “J”, a German plant manager was installed at his company, and suppliers began to boycott him. In June, 1938, a new law was passed requiring all Jewish businesses to be forfeited to Aryan ownership. Karl Joel’s linen business was taken from him at one-fifth its’ actual value.

“My grandparents fled in the night,” Billy Joel told author Schruers, “using fake passports, and escaped across the Swiss border to Zurich. They got in touch with my father at his school and told him they had left Germany for good.”

To escape Europe, Billy Joel’s grandparents and his father “secured places aboard a cruise ship called the Andora Star, for a 1939 passage across the Atlantic to Cuba, where they resided for two years before the United States — strictly limiting the immigration of Jews to protect “the ideal of American homogeneity” — allowed them entry.

Karl Joel’s brother Leon and his family were not so fortunate. They boarded the SS St.Louis, and after the Voyage of the Damned was refused entry in Havana and at every US Port, Billy Joel’s aunt, uncle and family were send back to Europe, and executed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Billy’s father, fluent in German and trained as a concert pianist, was drafted into the US Army in 1943, fighting in General George Patton’s Third Army. When Howard Joel’s battalion liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp near Munich in April, 1945, he didn’t know that his relatives had been slaughtered at Auschwitz.

I interviewed Billy Joel at his Oyster Bay, Long Island, motorcycle shop/museum in five years ago last month.

I wanted to thank him for wearing the Star of David as a powerful statement of protest to what happened in Charlottesville, and as a strong rebuke to White Supremacy, of Trump’s depiction of “fine people on both sides,” and of the “Great Replacement Theory” lie. His bold action was particularly poignant for me, having converted to Judaism 45 years ago. I married a Jewish girl from Joel’s hometown of Hicksville, Long Island, who was in the Hicksville High School Choir with him, so we shared a few things in common.

“There are no good Nazis, “ Joel said. “They killed my family members.”

Then he told me how the Nazis, once they confiscated his grandfather’s linen factory, used the machines in the factory to make the black and white striped prison uniforms which they forced Jews to wear, including his family members who were executed at Auschwitz. It was too macabre and twisted to imagine.

“I’ll continue to fight them as long as I can, and to use my voice to speak out against that kind of hate, “ Billy Joel said.

I thought back to his simple, straight-forward, quietly powerful and courageous act of pinning a yellow Star of David above his heart on his dark suit, and thought of the decades of family and global history behind it, and the millions of Jews and non-Jews for whom Billy Joel’s voice rang out clear and true, without having to sing one note on that night in New York City.

Billy Joel’s voice may be quieted as he returns to full health over the next two years, but his courage and his calls to civic activism may yet be his best public act.

What I learned by listening carefully to what my granddaughter says, and to what the music she is listening to is saying to her, and to all of us.

(Our granddaughter Sage (front row, right, wearing bracelets and braids) and friends at the barricades of the 2025 Bottlerock Music Festival in Napa, California.)

TO LISTEN TO my 16-year old granddaughter Sage’s ever-evolving taste in music is to understand her, and to see the full arc of her personal and character development.

Three years ago, when Sage was 13, she and I did ukulele duets to a painfully revealing little song called “NUMB LITTLE BUG,” by Em Behold. She was going through a particularly rough patch at the time, and the lyrics of that gentle song, calmed her, much as her beautiful, searching voice did for me:

“DID YOU EVER GET A LITTLE BIT TIRED OF LIFE?

LIKE YOU’RE NOT REALLY HAPPY, BUT YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE?

LIKE YOU’RE HANGING BY A THREAD, BUT YOU GOTTA SURVIVE…

‘CAUSE YOU GOTTA SURVIVE…”

Her intuitiveness about those powerful lyrics stunned me. How could this 13-year old know this? How could she possibly know what I was feeling when I was a teenager and made a lame-ass attempt—fortunately—at taking my own life? How could she know that, like her, I was “Hanging by a Thread” but somehow knew, that “I had to survive?”

How could she possibly know that, unless she, too, at age 13, was experiencing the same thing? The last stanza of the song always made my throat catch, hearing those profound and plaintive words, being sung by Sage’s pure, clear voice—my precious little bug with the big, soulful eyes:

“DO YOU EVER GET A LITTLE BIT TIRED OF LIFE?

LIKE YOU’RE NOT REALLY HAPPY BUT YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE?

LIKE A NUMB LITTLE BUG THAT’S GOTTA SURVIVE, THAT’S GOTTA

SURVIVE…”

Astonishing.

But, that was only one small step along a winding, and often painful path. Struggling with some mental health issues, my Sageroo, as I called her, needed a special place to help her discover herself and her talents, and how to better integrate both into her own life, and society. Her “Golden Retriever” (relentlessly loving) father found a music and arts school in Salt Lake City, Utah, which would best fit Sage’s needs and talents.

It wasn’t an easy adjustment at first, for our “numb little bug.” On her second day in a beautiful place, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, she tried to run away, going off campus and into a surrounding neighborhood, wearing only Crocs on her freezing feet, as she trudged through the snow covering the ground in that mile-high City in late November.

She came back to the school, a former Bed & Breakfast in which she lived with about 20 other teenaged girls for the next 18-months. It took her some time to accept exactly the kind of guidance, help and education she needed, and once she did, Sage grew stronger and gained more confidence each day. And, like the “numb little bug,” she once was, she survivee, and never gave up on herself.

Sage’s musical tastes blossomed, and she discovered many more artistic muses, including a proud, all Queer, female group known as “Boy Genius”—-Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dakus and Julien Baker. She taught herself, and me, the lacerating lyrics of a song written by Phoebe entitled, “Graceland, Too.”

Listening to their music was another way of learning how Sage was growing and of listening to my eloquent granddaughter, who was teaching herself to play the guitar:

“NO LONGER A DANGER TO HERSELF OR OTHERS,

SHE MADE UP HER MIND TO LACE UP HER SHOES…”

Those opening lyrics stopped me cold.

“No longer a danger to herself or others.” Sage KNEW this was true, and had come extraordinarily far to get to this point.

“She made up her mind to lace up her shoes.”

THAT was the line that slapped me: “She made up her mind to lace up her shoes.”

There it was. My Sageroo was not only ready to survive, but to trust in herself, and embrace life—“to lace up her shoes,” —the way you do when you’re ready to go out and play, or get back in the game.

She performed that song at one of her school’s Music & Arts Festivals, her lilting voice echoing how all of us who loved her felt:

“I WOULD DO ANYTHING YOU WANT ME TO,

I WOULD ANYTHING FOR YOU…

I WOULD DO ANYTHING , I WOULD DO ANYTHING…

WHATEVER YOU WANT ME TO DO, I WILL DO.”

She was singing to us, and for us, and most importantly for herself. Not only had she found her path, but she paved some new ones—fearlessly, passionately—expressing clearly who she is as a human being, and what she believes and values most in life.

Sage, whose birth pulled her grandmother and I across country from NYC to San Francisco 16 years ago, always had her own unique voice, just like her father did as a child, and still does. Here and now, she learned how to use that gift, tutoring her friends in Math, and, by example, how to speak up for themselves, and take pride in who they are. She learned how to use that gift—her voice, her vision—to make her world better, and, in turn, to improve all of our lives.

Sage’s friends came out in waves on the day of her graduation from the program and the 10th grade this month, to movingly speak extemporaneously on her behalf, about how Sage transformed her experiences into tools to help other survive, and grow. As one of her classmates said, “She went from being the Crash Out Queen to Buddha.”

Even the great Temple Grandin saw it, when Sage’s Grammy and I serendipitously ran into her earlier this year at a hotel’s breakfast buffet just outside of Stanford University, where both of us were attending conferences. An impromptu chat about how much Dr. Grandin’s brilliant books and work in the field of Neurodiversity meant to us, turned into a full-blown breakfast for the three of us, where the conversation turned to the remarkable accomplishments of our oldest granddaughter.

“Well, what does she want to do?” Temple Grandin asked us.

We filled her in on what Sage had achieved over the last 18 months, and shared with the great Dr. Grandin Sage’s love for music, and how she was talking more about becoming a therapist, to help other people.

“Well, she can do that!” Temple Grandin insisted to us.

And, at that moment, as the great Dr. Grandin was reinforcing Sage’s ability to do just that, the lyrics to “Graceland, Too,” popped back into my head:

“SHE COULD DO ANYTHING SHE WANTS TO..

SHE COULD DO WHATEVER SHE WANTS TO DO..”

Right then and there, Carol Villano and I told Temple Grandin on that sunny morning in Palo Alto, California, that we’d always be there, standing right behind Sage, supporting her in “whatever she wants to do.”

Now, ordinarily, an endorsement from Temple Grandin would be the last thing anyone needs to say. After all, for those of us who know and love her path-breaking writings, teachings and inventions, that’s like getting an endorsement from God…

Yet, even after getting Temple’s blessing, Sage astonished us again. She discovered the music of Noah Kahan, a 28-year old singer/songwriter from the Northeast, whose first album “BUSYHEAD” came out only 6 years ago. Kahan, had experienced mental health issues, and was unafraid to write about those experiences in his songs.

He understood—much as our Sageroo has done—that by writing and communicating about his first-hand experiences, he could benefit other people—to help them through some dark days and night—to help them survive.

As his fame grew, Kahan founded “The Busyhead Project,” named after his first album, a national non-profit aimed at reducing the stigma surrounding mental health and making mental healthcare more affordable and accessible to others. In the short time of “The Busyhead Project’s” existence, it has raised $4 million and helped more than 160 community-based Mental Health Organizations.

Sage’s sweet voice sung the lyrics of Noah Kahan’s music at another Music & Arts festival, in a song explaining how Kahan helped save a friend from committing suicide. The song, entitled “Call Your Mom,” reflects the full-circle our Sageroo traveled over the past 18-months: from first refusing help; to accepting how good, caring people could make her life better; to using her own first-hand experience to help others navigate troubled waters.

But, it was another Noah Kahan song which grabbed hold of me, once I started constantly listening to his music on Spotify:

“YOUR GONNA GO FAR.”

In that song, Kahan records his bittersweet feelings for a friend leaving home, knowing that as painful as it was for him, it was the best thing for his friend. It reminded me of exactly how we felt when our Sageroo went away to school, some 600 miles away:

“SO PACK UP YOUR CAR, PUT A HAND ON YOUR HEART,

SAY WHATEVER YOU FEEL, BE WHERE EVER YOU ARE…

WE AIN’T ANGRY AT YOU LOVE…

WE’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU LOVE…

AND WE’LL ALL BE HERE FOREVER…

AND WE’LL ALL BE HERE FOREVER..

YOU’RE GONNA GOOOOOOO FAR…

YOU’RE GONNA GOOOOOOO FAR…

YES , YOU ARE (OOOOOOOH, OOOOOH).”

This past weekend at the Bottlerock Music Festival in Napa, California, Sage, along with her dad, Matt Villano, their next door neighbors The Chavez’—who are among our granddaughters’ biggest boosters—and thousands of others, sang and swayed to Noah Kahan performing his own original music which articulates so much of our lives.

A music festival pro—thanks to her father’s love of such venues—Sage seized a prime spot at “the barricades” of Bottlerock, close enough to make eye-contact with all of her favorite musicians, and to make new friends. Her instagram account is full of photos of Noah Kahan, in a glittering white suit, singing the songs SHE made famous to me.

I cannot listen to Kahan’s “You’re Gonna Go Far”, without thinking of our Sage—who has already come so far. . . and continues to astonish us, and to improve her world, as well as the lives of others.

And, just as Temple Grandin confirmed: “She can do that!”

Like all other sideshows in the Trump Administration, the Press Secretary dances with veils, so wealthy white boys can steal and commit crimes.

(Top to bottom : Eva Karoline Braun; Tom Homan, of the Anti-Humans; Hans Schultz, of “Hogan’s Heroes;”)

Eva, Eva, Karoline Braun,

Clicks her heels to Hans Homan!

Her cross of Gold;

His stare of Cold;

Cut from Goebbels/Miller’s Mold.

Eva, Eva, Karoline Braun,

Monstrous men know she’s their pawn;

Trot her out, show her abs;

And, her gift of Gaslighting Gab.

“The Constitution is Unconstitutional,” Eva declared,

And, even Aryan AG Blondie was shocked & scared.

Then, the Fuhrer waved his own fine hair,

And Eva Karoline Braun was there!

Each time his thin, little lips spew lies,

Eva certifies them with her wide eyes.

“Ridiculous,” she sniffs when anyone calls out his Grifts;

Qatar’s $400 million jet? The Smash & Grab hasn’t started yet!

Bob Martinez got his Mercedes Benz—

What can Trump steal? World without end. . .

Crypto? Gold coins? Media stock?

Eva’s good felon can sell any old schlock.

“If the President sells it, it’s fair trade,”

Says Eva Karoline, milk-skinned handmaid.

No DOJ to get in the way;

No S.E.C. to oversee.

Attack the Judges!

Attack the Courts!

Eva, Goebbels/Miller & Hans

Do it with Loud, Angry snorts.

For White Collar Criminals: AMNESTY!

Since everything White, must be free.

Erase Black History, and Gay People, too;

Eva’s got a prayer, and Stepford Smile for you.

Habeas Corpus? Rigor Mortis! Process Due? Not for you!

NOT, if you’re Black, Brown, foreign born, LGBT, or a liberal Jew.

Eva, Eva Karoline Braun,

Distraction is her siren song;

Look at Greenland! Rage at Musk!

Nothing nailed down is gone by dusk.

Eva, Eva Karoline Braun,

Slithering on what-used-to-be the Rose Garden Lawn.

Hail to Trump! To Hans and Goebbels/Miller!

Hail to the true Democracy Killers!