One clear, bold phrase defined Risa’s confidence and humor; we can still hear, and feel, her voice, her presence, her humanity, and love for those of us lucky enough to share her life, and laughter.
(Risa Goldberger Gregory, center in red pants; Carol Jacobson Villano, right in yellow top, Risa’s college roommate; and me, in an “Immigrants” tee-shirt, on the Main Academic Podium—the main Quad— at SUNY Albany, where we graduated in 1971, 55 years ago. Risa, a source of life, love and laughter for all of us, died earlier this year. Her 77th birthday would have been this week, as well as her 50th Wedding Anniversary. Photo by Linden Gregory.)
There was so much more to Risa “Bessie” Goldberger Gregory than met the eye.
Gentle eyes of blue, five foot-two, Risa’s diminutive presence, her quick smile and contagious laugh, and her natural cuteness often disarmed people who met her, but didn’t really know her.
Her petite persona belied the steely determination behind each one of those 62 inches, just like they did in such historical figures as Joan of Arc, who was the same height; Golda Meir, two inches shorter than Risa; or, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a towering 4 feet, 10 inches tall.
Risa would have loved the comparisons with women of valor in history, since she loved history. In fact, we became fast and lasting friends when we first met during our Freshman year of college at SUNY Albany, in Dr. Warren Roberts’ Western Civilization honors class, and learned we were both from Long Island, an incubator for much more than buffoons like Joey Buttafuoco, ghouls like the Gilgo Beach killer, or fabulist frauds like Georgie Porgie Santos.
We were mesmerized by the remarkable Dr. Roberts, who masterfully made world history into a Netflix series, some 12 years before any cable networks were invented. Risa Bessie and I hung on his every word, especially when Dr. Roberts explained his well-documented theory of the influence of sex upon history. After all, it was 1968.
I knew next-to-nothing about sex at that time, and chuckled quietly as Professor Roberts regaled us with tales of royal debauchery. Risa, on the other hand, whose sex eduction may not have been any more advanced than mine, laughed hilariously, and the rest of the class laughed with her, because….well, that’s just what you did when Risa laughed, and her smile flashed and her bright eyes twinkled. No one could be left behind.
Risa could talk about Warren Roberts and history in depth, or she could talk about clothing and make-up and music and art and feelings, with the best of us. Not shy, she was unafraid to challenge anything or anyone. If you met Anna Goldberger, her mother, to whom Risa was devoted for decades, you would understand her in-your-face fearlessness. Putting it all together, made Risa one of the first real Renaissance women from Freeport, LI, but she’d be the first one to roll her eyes and say “Oh, please,” if you called her that. Warren Roberts, a master of accomplished modesty, would be proud.
It was Junior Year of college, the Fall of 1969, when Risa and I, and my soon-to-be life-long love & partner Carol Jacobson, all became Resident Assistants or RA’s—24-hour on-call dorm counselors who received free room, board and tuition, for providing a little local, and loco, parental guidance to students in our dorms. Risa took to the job immediately, quickly interpreting RA to mean “Risa’s Authority.”
I got my earliest hint of “Risa’s Authority,” when I first visited the RA Suite which Risa and Carol shared in Eastman Tower, a 22-floor dormitory on State Quad. Carol’s side of the room was orderly and neat, but covered in dust—a condition which has lustily, and dustily, continued through our 54 years of marriage. Risa’s room-side, on the other hand, was a dust-free zone, where everything sparkled, for fear of running into the wrath of Risa, if as much as an errant speck of dust challenged her hegemony over her high-rise heaven.
The ability to make dust jump out of her way (“You’re not the boss of me!”) was a harbinger of Risa’s leadership ability to make college freshman move from where they were not supposed to be. With the end of curfew and limitations on conjugal college student visitations coming to an end on our watch—it was, after all, 1969, the year of Woodstock—a new form of unquestioned authority needed to be found, especially in times of fire drills, emergencies or rowdy crowds that got too loud.
The RA’s met; we explored other options; we searched for solutions; we discussed acceptable alternatives into the early-yawning hours. Suddenly, the sound of pulled fire alarms ricocheted around the Quad. Scantily clad students began pouring out of their dorms into the Quad, heeding the call of the sirens in the night to “PARTY.” Chaos threatened to consume us, until one sharp, clear, no-nonsense voice echoed throughout the Edward Durell Stone designed cement canyons of the State University’s Quad:
“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa Bessie bellowed. “GET OFF THE QUAD!”
Students stopped in their tracks. Where did that command come from? There was no giant stomping over the Quad? No Big Brother loud-speaker. Was it a premonition of the ferocious voice forcing its’ way out of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in the not-yet made sci-fi horror movie “Alien?”
“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa roared again, quickly taking control of what could have been an out-of-control circumstance.
“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa boomed once more into the darkness of the night, searing that life-saving directive into our memories for all of eternity.
Fast forward more than 50 years later, when parts of Risa’s memory began to leave her, that quintessential Risa quote—”GET OFF THE QUAD’“—could still cut through the fog of this night, and evoke her beautiful smile and contagious laugh, bringing us back into the same slice of time, back to our college years, back to our oldest and best friends, when we were sure that what we had would live forever.
(Photo by Steve Villano, at the National Memorial for Peace & Justice; Montgomery, Ala.)
I didn’t blow out any candles to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States.
I spent the day quietly, the way I often like to put big celebrations in perspective: I read; I wrote; I sat outside in my garden and thought; I had breakfast with my best friend; got together for a shared dinner with our neighbors; and relished the joy in my youngest granddaughter’s eyes as she played with our next-door Pugs, declaring that the thing she liked best about the fireworks was the smoke trail they left behind in the night’s sky.
It was the perfect metaphor for what was important and lasting once all the hype, hysteria, flashes in the sky, and in the pan, were gone; that, and who remained, was what mattered.
For hours during the day I lost myself in the words and wisdom of Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin; in the clear, sharp observations of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, who escaped war and oppression at age 4, just before America’s Bicentennial; and, in the brilliant legal analysis of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her powerful concurring opinion in the Birthright Citizenship case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court right before the July 4th holiday weekend began.
I sat and conferred with all of these geniuses to make some sense of the carnival-like cage match between totalitarianism and the truth being played out in Washington, DC, the latest demolition site for the destruction of Democracy by Donald Trump, the architect of anarchy, repression and greed.
Sometimes, the never ending deluge of demoralizing news, challenging our most fundamental rights and beliefs—and all that we’ve worked toward over the past 60 years—makes me want to say “enough,” throw up my hands, and live out my remaining days in peace somewhere else, like Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, England or France. But then, I remember. I could no sooner walk away from my grandchildren than I could from the roiling world we are leaving for them.
We have been here many times before, I think, under far worse life and death circumstances. One such test came 160 years earlier, when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was enacted to enshrine birthright citizenship into law, to erase racial inequality, and to move America closer to the universal equality ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Two years later, and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed overwhelmingly with a Citizenship Clause, that extended US citizenship to any slave born on American soil, and to others. The cost of extending equality to “all men”, as Jefferson originally promised, was severe: up to 750,000 American deaths—slaves and free men— and 470,000 Americans wounded in 4 years of the Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history, fought over the fulfillment of a sacred promise for fundamental human rights and dignity.
Fast forward to today, when masked White Supremacists waving Confederate flags and wearing neatly pressed Khaki slacks marched through the streets of our Nation’s Capitol on the 250 Anniversary of our Declaration of Independence—which declared that “all men were created equal,”— tried again to use terror to erase all of that history and suffering and death, and pretend that “citizenship” was, instead to be found in the “blood” of only certain people, instead of in the universal protections of the common law, or the soil of a special land. It’s the same diabolical web of blood libels the Nazis used against the Jews nearly 100 years ago, inspired in fact, by Jim Crow laws of some of the same Southern States that legalized slavery and flew the Confederate Flag.
Frederick Douglass, in his famous oration on July 5, 1852, entitled, “What, to the American Slave, is your 4th of July?,” forced White Americans nearly a decade before the Civil War began, to face the humanity and dignity of the Black population it ignored while celebrating “freedom & liberty” and pretending that, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence “all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights:”
“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”
Douglass never relented, nor gave up in the face of increasingly violent opposition to his position. Even after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the onset of the Civil War the following year, Frederick Douglass continued to fight for full-citizenship for America’s Black population. He took nothing for granted:
“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man, or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of white people in this country. YOU are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are, at best, only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”
Douglass was not just referring to Lincoln’s longstanding advocacy of Colonization—relocating American Blacks to either the West Indies or to Africa. He was directly referencing the North’s necessity of freeing the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the union. Whether by design or default, freeing the slaves had become an essential military tactic for the North to win the War. Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops, instrumental in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy.
I looked to Douglass and James Baldwin to learn how to channel my fury over the systematic efforts by Trump, his troglodyte followers and their rebranded version of White Supremacy (Patriot Front? MAGA? Christian Nationalists?) and to strengthen my resolve to fight fatigue, or, worse, the temptation to walk away from the battle ahead.
I turned to James Baldwin, in his take-no-prisoners book, The Fire Next Time, first published in 1963, the year four little Black girls were murdered at Sunday School in a Birmingham Church; and Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated. Baldwin’s book was 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:
“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!’
Baldwin, once again, helped me answer the questions I continually asked myself and friends: “Why do we stay? Why after 60 years of struggling for human rights in this century and the one before, do we continue to fight?”
The obvious answer was always: for our children, for my granddaughters, to repair this broken world and make it better, fairer, more just; to fight alongside others who should not face these fights alone. Fleeing to a saner, gun-less, more democratic, more egalitarian, less-hate filled, less cruel country— although we had the means to do it—was never really an option. We were compelled to stand our ground.
An essay published on Zeteo’s Substack by one of my favorite writers, Viet Thanh Nguyen, on July 3, 2026, entitled “250 Years of Cruelty: The American Empire and How to Save the US” riveted my attention with its’ opening sentence:
“The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe a country of such size, power, and diversity.”
The author’s earlier works, particularly his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, had powerfully influenced my thinking and my own writing, as did his personal journey.
Born in South Vietnam in 1971, during the peak of the Vietnam War, Viet’s family fled to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975. During the American Bicentennial, they wer were living in a Fort Indiantown Gap, a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, refugee camp, where more than 32,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian war refugees were re-settled. It was a bitter irony that the same camp was used throughout the previous decade as a large ROTC training camp for US Army soldiers, heading off to fight in the American war in Southeast Asia.
Viet Thanh Nguyen goes on to raise the disconcerting possibility that the “arc of the moral universe,” of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently spoke, might not always turn toward justice, but:
“…the gravity of American history bends that arc towards something far worse than justice.”
He goes on to write that we may be witnessing:
“…the black hole of cruelty that has always been there from the very beginning of the United States, or “America,” or the “New World.”
He quotes the late anti-colonialist poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who described the age of American Imperialism this way:
“The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”
Viet goes on to write that “the persuasiveness of American propaganda about being the greatest country in the world has never worked on everyone, but increasingly that propaganda is failing to work for ever greater numbers of people.”
Linking the present US Government’s war against our own neighbors with the unending war against non-Whites around the globe, Viet Thanh Nguyen warns us that:
“American propaganda has always been about the spectacle of the city upon a hill on whom the world’s eyes are turned, a brightly lit extravaganza marked by Hollywood and lubricated with Coca-Cola. Now the spectacle is about the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults. The bullying of the weak and the desperate inside American borders is matched by the lobbing of missiles outside those borders, the flexing of admittedly enormous muscles that is not matched by intelligence.”
The author dispenses with the notion that this “American cruelty” is something new, or the result of a “declining empire:”
“The cruelty was always there, from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples to the abuse and mockery of Mexicans and Chinese, Latinos and Asians, who were forcibly incorporated into American empire or brought in as cheap labor. American empire was also erected on the labor, subservience, and silencing of women, and the suppression of sexual diversity. If some idea of American exceptionalism is to be saved – this idea that Freedom is the greatest American invention and export – then the liberation of all peoples inside American borders will have to be realized, regardless of race, gender, sex, religion, nationality, or any other feature that is used to single out elements of humanity.”
Too many Americans take delight in cruelty, he observes, since they “cannot take delight in generosity, hospitality and possibility.”
Just a few days before Viet’s message was published of how to mitigate future “American cruelty,” a great-great-great granddaughter of slaves schooled the nation on how the U.S. Constitution commands that we follow “the universal vision of belonging and citizenship,” and not the path of cruelty, exclusion & hate.
Writing what may be one of the most powerful, historically accurate and important concurring Judicial opinions of our time, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first Black women to serve as a Supreme Court Justice—issued a clarion call for clarity and primacy of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, at a time when this core principle of the US Constitution is under its most severe attack since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, 160 years ago.
Born in Washington, D.C, in 1970, and raised in Miami, Florida, by a father who was the Chief Attorney for the Miami Dade County School Board, and a mother who was a principal for an Arts High School in Miami, Justice Jackson brilliantly articulated the majority decision of five other Supreme Court justices of how the 14th Amendment was essential to the “Second Founding” of the United States, in 1868.
Justice Jackson, a champion for equal justice, demolishes the myopic, historically wrong and legally incorrect views of the Trump Administration—and of it’s unintelligible and unthinking mouthpiece on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas:
Justice Jackson writes: “By ignoring that our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation—on all axes and in all manners—they deny the clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to “rebuild a shattered empire . . . to plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.”
Thomas, jettisoning his own long-expressed, tone-deaf “racial blindness” test for the Constitution, makes the tortured claim that the 14th Amendment only applied to freed and enslaved Black men, in response to the dreadful Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied citizenship to Black people because of their “blood,” regardless of their birth on American soil. Justice Jackson easily disposes of Thomas’ historically & legally empty arguments, and she exposes the bald-faced duplicity of Thomas’ overnight flip-flop of his decades-long insistence on “racial blindness.”
“Of course,” Justice Jackson writes, “ the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent (Justice Thomas’) propose a return to its core tenet (of the Dred Scott decision).”
“Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains… I add only that the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim—one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result. Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding—that all human beings are created equal— once more.”
I read and re-read Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s tour-de-force of an opinion over the course of the July 4th weekend, savoring every tightly reasoned phrase, zeroing in on her compelling case that, in fact, the US Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment, was anything but color-blind, since fundamental rights were denied to Blacks on the very basis of their skin color. Despite those racial restrictions written into the original Constitution, Justice Jackson noted that “freed Blacks who advocated for the 14th Amendment “fought for the shared humanity of all people.” It’s a concept of the universal rights of man that Clarence Thomas is incapable of comprehending.
I went back to Justice Jackson’s writing to hear once again, the call to history and memory articulated by Frederick Douglass, especially in the face of the Trump Administration’s jingoistic jihad against history it is hell-bent on hiding, and its’ frantic fanaticism to whitewash the truth:
“Douglass declared that his own aim was to “‘show that nations should have memories.’ In the time since Douglass’s prescient observation, Americans have come to learn that fading memories are not the only danger. The distortion of historical facts—retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims—may be an even greater threat.”
I watched my youngest granddaughter follow the fire works across the night’s sky on the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, marveling that once the lights had burned out, she carefully followed the trails of smoke that reminded us of what we just witnessed, and what we could be part of again.
I watched the wonder on her pure, cherubic face, and knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be for all the nights and days and challenges yet to come.
E. Jean Carroll schools a nation how to beat a bully, sexual predator, liar, fraud, whiner, welcher, cheat & grifter again, and again, and again. Never give in; never give up; outlast the bastard.
(Photo by Steve Villano, of the Statue of Sainte Jeanne D’Arc at the Cathedrale of Notre Dame de Paris, May, 2012, Paris, France.)
It took a tough, tenacious, courageous, intelligent and persistent 80-year old woman to teach this nation how to beat Donald Trump again and again, and how to make him pay for the consequences of his actions, in the only language he understands: costing him money.
Like Sainte Jeanne D’Arc of France, E. Jean Carroll on New York lighted the way to dignity and victory over abject evil, and schooled the bulbous, bellowing bully who has abused and stolen from all of us, is our new national symbol of freedom, independence, and courage, and a true symbol of this nation’s 250 Birthday celebration.
Thrice now, this lightening bolt for justice—E. Jean Carroll—stood up proudly against Donald Trump, an algae-sogged swampbeast of modern times, defying death threats and drubbed the dribbling Donald in courtroom after courtroom, including the highest court in America—the US Supreme Court—which the sputtering, spoiled Fatty Arbuckle of our century—believed he owned. In the end, which came this week, the Supreme Court wouldn’t even listen to the wild-eyed whines of the worst human being in recorded history to ever occupy ANY public office in the United States.
This latest Court decision in favor of E. Jean Carroll, like all of the other legal losses piled up by Trump and his soon-to-be disbarred band of ambulance-chasing lawyers, is yet another clarion call to everyone fighting Trump: never give up, never give in, never capitulate to pressure from a sexual predator, liar, grifter and amoral ghoul.
Saint Jean D’ Carroll showed the con man’s cowardly Christian supporters—who canonized the original Jeanne D’Arc some 500 years after they burned her at the stake— how pure guts, a strong sense of morality, a steel spine, persistence, and an unshakeable determination to never back down in the face of pure evil, will triumph.
This brave woman–sexually assaulted, abused and libeled on a huge scale by Trump–beat the lawless sexual abuser, liar, convicted libeler, and fraud in an arena he has always abused, the way he abuses women: the Courthouse.
Today, she stands astride him once again, sword of justice pointing toward the heavens, our new national shero. Oh, how Trump’s maggot supporters will despise the use of that term, since it represents diversity, and the triumph of right over might & money.
Trump never really saw Jean D’ Carroll’s slaying strikes coming, since she had a few time-tested weapons on her side whose existence Trump has never recognized and cannot comprehend: the law,the truth, and moral courage. In short, she and her kick-ass team of attorneys led by Roberta Kaplan, took no shit, which, in the end, is all Trump really is.
Acting more like Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Trump–who mistook E. Jean Carroll for one of his Epstein girls–also mistook his own lies for the truth.
That approach may work at MAGA cult covens, or or with corporate toadies willing to pay tithes of tributes to be in on the theft of billions of our tax dollars, but not before real, live judges and jurors. When Trump whines that “the courts are out of control,” what he means is that they are out of his control—even the Supreme Court justices he selected, who didn’t want to hear his losers’ voice anymore.
Outraged that he lost a $5 million sexual abuse and libel case to Carroll three years ago, Trump—never a financial nor legal genius with anything he could not steal— decided to double-down, multiplying his initial loss nearly 18 times (to a total of $88 million) by seeking “retribution” against his sex abuse victim in print, at his MAGA mosh pits, and on national television.
The crapulent, spoiled brat, chauffered to private school in his mother’s rose-colored Rolls Royce, just couldn’t stand the fact that years after he physically and emotionally abused her, Carroll–refusing to bow before him–continued to wield her sword of truth, law and moral courage against him, over and over again in Courtroom after courtroom. Each new Trump lie became a new cause of action, costing the financial failure more and more money every time he texted a libel, or opened his mouth—a sure sign that he’s lying.
There are historic implications for this case, which could open the floodgates in the other pending cases against Trump. Courage begets courage. It’s no wonder he’s pilfering billions of dollars of our taxpayer dollars and shaking down corporations down for billions more: he’s stuffing his pockets for the legal battles he knows face him and his family in the years ahead.
With a mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class jury finding that for repeatedly lying about the sexual assault Trump was found guilty of committing— an act, which, the following year was included in a new definition of rape under a new New York State Law—and for incessantly smearing the name and reputation of his victim, Donald Trump was punished over and over again. This week, not even his own appointed conservative Justices could stand to hear his whining words once again.
The jurors from urban and suburban counties in and around NYC, where Trump was born, refused to be intimidated by the threats of violence by Trump’s deranged supporters. Neither was the courageous Carroll—whose name, unlike the jurors’, could not be kept secret.
In Mary L. Trump’s Substack column on the day of the verdict in the Carroll case, Trump’s niece, a clinical psychologist, wrote:
“Donald is someone who has gone through his entire life without facing consequences—and I believe he thinks he can get away with everything. Today, that changed. It was one of the first times Donald has been made to answer for his egregious behavior.”
If only the same standards would be applied to the dozens of other sexual assault charges against Trump, brought by women—and young girls—alleged to be as young as 14 years old—when they were abused and assaulted. .
One of the most ominous statements which puts the Carroll verdict and its validation by the highest court in the United States this week in context for what may lie ahead for Trump, once out of office, came from one of Carroll’s attorneys, Shawn Crowley, to MSNBC, on the day of the jury’s decision:
“I believe very strongly after today, that the lesson is that actually, no one is above the law, and, that your behavior, and your statements, and your threats and your lies are gonna catch up to you someday.”
Even if that someday doesn’t come until after Democratic majorities win both houses of Congress later this year, or when Trump is finally out of office, hope is eternal that Crowley’s prediction will come true. It certainly did at the US Supreme Court on June 29, 2026, when they upheld the core Carroll verdict.
But, it was E. Jean Carroll herself, always bouyant andradiant in victory, head held high in the glow of justice achieved, who perfectly articulated the call to action for women just like her, and millions of others fed up with being abused by well-connected, people in power, and stuffed into the closets, dressing rooms and cages those ghouls construct to try to rob humans of fundamental dignity and rights:
“ This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep women down.”
THIS week, even Trump’s hand-picked Justices on the Supreme Court reaffirmed that message once again, and they did it by silently telling Trump to shut the fuck up.
My love for my father, a working-stiff from Brooklyn who loved his family, his beer and his Yankees, was stronger than all the money & power arrayed against us in New York.
(Our family celebrating our last Christmas holidays together a few months before my father, Alphonse Villano (lower, right, seated) died in May, 1993. Seated next to my father (front, left) is my mother Margaret Julia Villano, and standing behind both of them (from right to left) are Carol Villano, our son Matthew Villano—now a father himself—and me.)
My father died on my 21st wedding anniversary, and my first Fathers’ Day of being a son without a father came three weeks later. His death sent me reeling, spiraling out of control for months.
I watched my father die a painful, drawn-out death from a carnivorous cancer which started in his prostate and spread to his spine, paralyzing him.
I read him the sports section everyday for the last two weeks of his life, quoting every line of each Yankee box score, and telling him the horse-racing results from race-tracks around the country. In addition to his family, baseball and horse-racing were my father’s passions. He had watched Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio & Mantle play ball in the Bronx, and had winning tickets on other thoroughbreds named Affirmed, Secretariat, Native Dancer, and Seattle Slew.
Days after my father’s death, my friend Jim Morgo invited me to join him at Yankee Stadium on Father’s Day. He had prime box seats behind the Yankee dugout for a Yankees/Red Sox game. Jim knew I loved the Yankees as much as he adored his beloved Red Sox, especially watching them play at the Stadium. What better way to feel closer to my father, I thought, than to be in the surroundings where we spent our sweetest hours together.
At least once a year, every August since I was 10 years old, my father was given use of the field box owned by the Pershing Square Building Corporation, his employer. Six days a week, every week, for 35 years, my father labored in the bowels of their office building at 100 East 42nd Street, operating the old steam boilers, to make sure the wealthy lawyers and accountants who worked on the upper floors were always comfortable.
My father knew I loved watching double-headers, and that none of the corporate executives who had first dibs on the tickets, wanted to sit in the sweltering sun on an August Sunday to watch two baseball games. For me, six solid hours of baseball was a double treat. The world consisted of nothing but baseball all day, and I had my father all to myself.
The seats I sat in on my first fatherless Father’s Day were only a few rows behind where my father and I sat, year after year, inning after inning. I looked around the Stadium imagining I saw him everywhere. There he was, getting a beer, or mopping the sweat off his brow with a clean, white handkerchief. Each time I spotted an old guy with a beer belly, I thought of my father hauling his paunch up and down those flattened Stadium steps to “hit the ‘head,” as he said.
Maybe coming to Yankee Stadium so soon after my father’s death was not such a good idea, after all. I was grieving him deeply, but quietly. Being there, so close to where he and I shared so many perfect moments, made me melancholy. I was in the final months of my work in Mario Cuomo’s Administration, and was depressed over conversations I knew were going on between Cuomo, George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch and NYS’ Commissioner of Economic Development Vincent Tese, to move the Stadium out of the Bronx and put it on the site of the West Side Rail Yards—where the Hudson Yards are today—in mid-town Manhattan. How dare they even think about doing that, I thought. My father is here.
I sat there, drinking in the Stadium’s atmosphere, memories swirling around me like one of those tiny dust tornadoes that swept across the infield every so often. I looked at the majestic white facades towering over right field and realized what a place of peace this was for us from an otherwise chaotic life. To remain silent while the old Stadium’s future was being decided would have been to commit a sacrilege against the memory of my father.
I knew how forcefully committed the Governor was to economic development, and how the sinister George Steinbrenner was threatening to move the Yankees to New Jersey if he didn’t get a brand new ballpark in Manhattan, where he could build high-priced skyboxes for corporate oligarchs. I knew that Rupert Murdoch was exploring the possibility of building a sprawling entertainment center, including TV studios, on the site of the new Stadium. And I knew that somehow, I had to find a way to stop this from happening.
That “way” came within days of my 1993 Father’s Day visit to Yankee Stadium. I came across a copy of a scheduled secret meeting between the Governor, Steinbrenner, Murdoch and Tese with a two-word topic: “Yankee Stadium.” I knew I had to act quickly to create a public outcry to save the old Ballpark. With the forces of money and political power in New York aligned against the original House that Ruth Built, I took the only route left open to me, in my low-key position where I had neither money nor power: I leaked the information about the “secret” Yankee Stadium meeting to New York Times Sportswriter, Richard Sandomir.
The following day, June 30, 1993, a front page story by the Times’ Ian Fisher carried a headline announcing: “Fearing Move by Yankees, Cuomo Explores Idea for a NewStadium.” The Governor was livid when the story dropped, and was convinced that Sandy Frucher, a former top official in the Administrations of both Gov. Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, was the source of the leak because Frucher worked for Olympia-York, a company with an interest in the Rail Yards. Sandy insisted it wasn’t him, and he was correct. I was the “source close to the Governor” the New York Times quoted throughout the story.
The uproar caused by the Times story stopped the proposed move of Yankee Stadium to Manhattan, literally, in its tracks. It bought the old Ballpark a reprieve of another 15 years, kept the Bronx Bombers in the Bronx, and enabled the spectacular Hudson Yards—without a new Manhattan Yankee Stadium—to be built.
For me, I wasn’t proud of betraying Mario Cuomo’s trust, nor of his betraying mine in believing he would always do the right thing. More importantly, I wasn’t about to let my pride, or politics, or anything or anyone else for that matter, get in the way of fulfilling a sacred promise I made to my father: to keep the old Ballpark alive, for as long as I could, after he was gone.
Over the next 15 years, I shared dozens of Yankee ballgames at “the old Ballpark” with my son, as we cheered on the historic Yankee teams of 1996 through 2001, with Dan McCourt and Sue Conroy and JoAnne DeCarlo, and firefighters and cops, and all the members of our new extended family in Section 622, who shepherded us through the terrible struggles following 9/11. The “old Ballpark,” helped all of us heal.
And, each time we entered the Stadium before a game, or stayed late to watch the field and the fans empty out, and heard the recording of Sinatra singing “New York, New York”, I could feel my father’s presence, and every once and a while I imagined that I saw him give a wink, to assure us that we’d be all right, and our world would be saved by beauty, and loyalty to each other, and love.
Hillary Clinton’s blaming Joe Biden for Kamala Harris’ loss in 2024 to Donald Trump whitewashes the fact that specific actions by Bill and Hillary in 1999 & 2016, made Trump possible.
(New York Times photo of Hillary Clinton at the 92nd Street Y in NYC this week, being interviewed by the New YorkerEditor David Remnick, where she blamed Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential Campaign as the reason for Trump’s election.”)
I
If Hillary and Bill Clinton only understood the meaning of the word “grace” and slipped into the background, allowing time and perspective to be their just judge. But they are terrified of letting that happen, because what they allege of others, can easily be said of them.
Fearful of what a balanced, long-term evaluation of them would yield, the Clintons continue to blame everyone (the Russians, Bernie Sanders, a ‘vast right wing conspiracy,” and now Joe Biden) but themselves in order to temper history’s harsh decree of how they wrecked the Democratic Party and set the stage for the rise of a deranged White Supremacist, anti-democratic demagogue and soul-less grifter like Donald Trump.
From Bill Clinton’s refusal to step down and pass the torch of leadership to Al Gore in 1999 after Clinton was found to have abused his power and sexually abused Monica Lewinsky, to Hillary’s own refusal to step aside in the summer of 2016, in favor of a Biden/Booker ticket — as Party Chair Donna Brazile was suggesting — after her “abuse of her personal emails” destroyed her own candidacy for President, both Clintons wiped out the hard-fought working class work of the Democratic Party, delivering the Presidency first to George W. Bush, and then, 16-years later, to Trump.
Both Bill & Hillary’s narcissistic blindness to the grave political damage their arrogance directly caused 16 years apart, created the political conditions directly responsible for giving us another horrendous Bush presidency, a War in Iraq based upon false pretenses (which Hillary voted to support as a Senator), Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court, (to join Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush), and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, connected directly to Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking regulation act in 1999.
The consequences of that economic catastrophe were suffered overwhelmingly by millions of working families who lost their homes and modest investments — and were never made financially whole again — while the large banks and financial institutions were bailed out of any losses by the new Democratic Administration of Barack Obama. (NOTE: This week, Barack Obama’s Presidential Library opens to the public, an $850 million fortress which writer David Sirota has tagged “an Oligarch funded shrine” because of the enormous private contributions from “the bankers who cratered the economy” which Obama refused to punish: https://www.levernews.com/the-obama-shrine-brought-to-you-by-wall-street/)
The latest self-serving, Clinton “blame game,” happened this week as reported in the New York Times, on June 16, 2026, in a story headlined: “ Hillary Clinton says Biden’s Re-Election Bid Was a Terrible Mistake.” In the story, Hillary Clinton — who ran an entitled, lackluster and terrible campaign against Donald Trump in 2016 — reportedly told David Remnick of the New Yorker that:
“If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick, “whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten Donald Trump.”
Lost on Hillary Clinton, of course, was the irony that the exact same thing was said by many of us Democratic activists who believed that if her husband stepped aside after his power and sexual abuse of Lewinsky and his impeachment, and opened up the Democratic nominating process in 2000 to either Vice-President Al Gore, or some other Democrat — a governor, or senator or anybody else — the outcome of the 2000 election may have been far different. And, the identical thing was said about Hillary’s own candidacy in 2016, crippled by her own arrogance about her emails, which she finally acknowledged to Remnick this week, undid her campaign and helped hand the Presidency to Trump. Anybody else but Hillary Clinton “would have beaten Donald Trump,” in 2016.
Equally suspect in the role elite establishment connections played in the 2024 election was when Kamala Harris’ first act was to call Hillary & Bill Clinton to discuss running to succeed Biden in 2024. Not surprisingly, establishment corporate Democrats running the 2024 Democratic National Convention gave prominent speaking roles to BOTH Hillary and Bill Clinton while many of us progressive Democratic activists — who didn’t want Joe Biden to serve more than one-term in the first place — screamed about how elevating the Clintons in the 2024 campaign would hand the election to Trump.
After having gone all-in for Kamala Harris’ election, I was so infuriated by the prominent appearance of the Clintons at the 2024 DNC that I complained about it in an August 18, 2024 piece on Substack entitled: “Why Are the Clintons STILL in the Spotlight? which I also circulated to members of the Democratic National Committee:
“If there’s an Achilles Heel in this moment — which should be all about Kamala Harris and our future — it is dregging up the ghosts of Clintons’ past, which, I suppose, was inevitable with the presence of John Podesta and Neera Tandem, lurking among Biden’s team, and the Zelig-like, power-sniffing appearance of Gene Sperling on the new Harris crew.
I’m sure some of the old Clintonistas on the DNC and involved with the convention planning who cannot escape the narrow-box thinking that gave us Donald Trump, argued that Bill “must” be featured as a former President, and Hillary must also speak because she almost broke the glass ceiling 8 years ago — although the visual of Podesta delivering Hillary’s campaign eulogy under the still-intact glass roof of NYC’s Javits Center still gives me night terrors.
I’d rather hear from Liz Cheney instead of Hillary — who ran an abominable campaign for President in 2016, utterly ignoring the Midwest, and enabling Trump to get elected — and from Laura or George W. Bush on the night when Bill Clinton is slated to bring his wax-museum presence to the podium. A double-dose of the Clintons is hardly the way to appeal to undecided voters in 2024 who only voted for Trump eight years earlier because they found the alternative not “like-able enough” as Barack Obama hoped Hillary would be.”
But they wouldn’t be the oligarch-loving, self-aggrandizing Clintons — whose minions are STILL trying to resist change and reject new leadership into the Democratic Party — if they didn’t maneuver for protecting the status quo, and the institutions which have supported them, and become ossified, like their supporters.
Ten years ago, after spending $3,000 of my own money to travel to North Carolina for a month and do Voter Protection in an open-carry, swing state for Hillary’s 2016 campaign, I saw the hollowness of Hillary’s own campaign for President from the inside and wrote about it 2-weeks following her loss to the most corrupt individual in the history of the United States to seek the Presidency:
Writing on Medium.com, my piece on November 23, 2016, was entitled “Can a Campaign that Lacked Courage Find it Now?” (https://medium.com/@stevevillano/can-a-presidential-campaign-that-lacked-courage-find-it-now-49be468881d5):
“I was going to wait longer than two weeks after the Presidential Election of 2016 to tell this insider’s story about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President.
The looming deadline of this Friday, November 25, (2016) for Clinton supporters to step-up and challenge questionable vote tallies and voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania has compelled me to come forward now. Bold, legal actions on the part of the Clinton campaign — unlike the tepid response of Al Gore 16 years ago — hold the possibility of setting aside this year’s election results on the basis of constitutional and voting rights violations.
Whether or not the Clinton campaign has the courage to do it is another question entirely. What’s at stake is nothing less than American democracy, and the rights of free citizens to vote.
I experienced the campaign’s lack of courage first hand when I traveled to North Carolina to do Voter Protection for Hillary Clinton for the last four weeks before the election. As a Californian, with friends and former labor union colleagues in Raleigh, I chose to work in North Carolina — at my own expense — for two reasons: 1. The state’s history of voter suppression in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby; 2) the critical importance of North Carolina as a swing or “checkmate” state for the Clinton campaign.
The North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign knew I was an activist writer when they agreed to take me on as a full-time, unpaid volunteer at their Raleigh, NC, headquarters. I was assigned to do Voter Protection, because of my law degree and my expressed interest in the area.
During my first week of working with the campaign, I studied the State’s Election Law, the Federal Judge’s July decision overturning North Carolina’s Voter “suppression” law of 2013 as “surgical discrimination,” and sat in on two training sessions for citizens volunteering to participate in voter protection activities at the polls. I was impressed by the volunteers: law-abiding, fellow Baby Boomers, passionately devoted to protecting people’s right to vote, as their civic duty.
On Sunday, October 16, 2016, following a terrific Voter Protection training session in Wilmington, NC — a city with a history of White Supremacist violence against local Black leadership (not unlike the murder of hundreds of Black people on “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma) I awoke to the news that a GOP campaign office in Hillsborough, Orange County, was firebombed during the night. The office was rarely used by GOP campaign workers, a local Republican operative told me, and the message and technique of the single Molotov cocktail bombing was suspicious. Within hours of the bombing, Donald Trump took to Twitter to pin the illegal act on “Hillary Clinton supporters” and “Democrats” with no evidence. Having worked with both of those groups, I knew those charges were patently false, and smacked of a too-quickly issued cover for a crime, still unsolved five weeks later.
So, I did what I do. I wrote about the incident as someone with first-hand knowledge of the decent people accused of a crime they did not commit. To me it smelled like the “Reichstag Fire,” of 1933, when the Nazi’s blamed the communists and Jews for starting a blaze in the German Parliament — a fire started by the Nazis themselves.
The National Memo, published my piece, and I circulated it on my blog and on medium.com. The piece was a powerful defense of the North Carolina Democrats and their respect for the rule of law and The National Memo’s headline reflected that: “Why North Carolina Democrats Would Never Bomb Orange County GOP Office.” Among the reasons I gave was that Orange County, NC — which contains the University of North Carolina — was one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the nation, giving Barack Obama over 70% of its vote each time he ran.
Monday morning, October 17, when the article was read by The National Memo’s 300,000 subscribers, the Clinton’s Campaign, was so upset by my article (particularly the paragraph where I wrote of the role the Reichstag Fire played in German political history) that they told me to either “take the piece down” or leave the campaign by the end of the day. The young, campaign operative who directed me to to “take down the piece” had no idea what the Reichstag Fire was.
I refused to “take down” the piece, citing my First Amendment Rights to write what I pleased, both as a professional writer and as a private citizen. I was an unpaid volunteer doing Voter Protection, who traveled from California to North Carolina on my own dime and the campaign could not censor me. The Clinton Campaign’s 20-something-year-old- paid staffer was officious and inflexible, fearing any fallout that could come from my article. He insisted that I “take it down”, or leave the campaign office immediately. Again, I refused to “take my article down” — a preposterous request, since the piece had already been circulated nationwide around the internet. I was physically escorted out of the campaign’s Raleigh office by mid-afternoon for being “too radical.”
I spent the rest of my four weeks in North Carolina extensively covering the elections across the state, interviewing Trump and Clinton voters, attending events from the State Fair to rallies with both Obamas, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, closely examining the history of voter suppression of African American voters in the state, and writing a half-dozen stories for various media outlets. I came away with an in-depth view of the kind of cautious, take-no-chances campaign waged by the Clinton team in North Carolina and across the nation, that made it possible for the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners Trump campaign to prevail.”
Now, 10 years later, the attention-starved Clintons — knowing full well that an even more malleable and insatiable media STILL can’t resist anything they say — have focused on a new and easy target — Joe Biden — for their endless circle of blame that goes back at least two decades, and never, ever, ever includes themselves.
Who will be Hillary — or Bill’s — next target for blame? Bernie Sanders? Oh right, they attacked Bernie already. Graham Platner? The Maine Senatorial candidate that establishment Dems love to hate? AOC, when she primaries Chuck Schumer in New York State in 2028? Candidates rejecting AIPAC money, and calling Israel’s actions Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon? Candidates campaigning for a Wealth Tax on oligarchs in California and around the country?
Just go away, Hillary and Bill. No one wants to participate in your blame game anymore. It’s not now, nor has it ever been, productive. Stop wasting precious air, and internet (and print) time attacking us — the enemy is already within the gates, destroying the White House, and the nation, and taking a wrecking ball to every single human and constitutional right. Why are you still searching for others to blame? Accept your own responsibility and move on.
Fold up your large shadows, and let a thousand new flowers bloom. Your season under the kleig lights is over. Get out there and raise a ton of money for Voting Rights in local communities around the country or for Jamie Raskin’s Freedom Summer Initiative.
But, please: have the good sense to be anonymous about it, which according to Maimonides is the highest form of giving. Your day in the sun is done. Have the grace to know when it’s time to go.
The political piling on of Graham Platner of Maine is an insult to all people, with many attacks being orchestrated by Right Wing/Christian Nationalist operatives weakening Women Rights for decades.
(Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifying under oath, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, concerning her sexual assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Despite Dr. Blasey-Ford’s compelling, credible, non-partison and under oath testimony, Maine Senator Susan Collins cast the deciding vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court. Four years later, on June 24, 2022, Justice Kavanaugh—who told Senator Collins he believed Roe v. Wade was settled law, voted with the Court’s right-wing majority to overturn the 50-year old decision which gave women autonomy over their own health care decisions. It was the single most damaging blow to Women’s Rights in half-a-century in the United States. Contrast the sworn Congressional testimony—under penality of perjury—of Dr. Blasey-Ford, with the unfounded accusations made by GOP operative Lyndsey Fifield, a long-time employee of the Extreme Right Wing Heritage Foundation—the authors of Project 2025, a religious screed against Women’s Rights and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,—which crusaded for decades for the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Fifield alsoled a group of pro-Trump Republicans to support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court in 2018, and campaigned for Susan Collins, Graham Platner’s opponent, for Senator from Maine. Fifield’s statements were politically motivated, extremely biased, and made on social media and to the press,, where she was not under oath, nor under penalty of perjury for false ore misleading statements.)
((In a column released on June 12 across multiple media platforms, the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Melinda Henneberger, who has written for the Kansas City Star and the Sacremento Bee , presents her perspective of “The Platner Problem: When Principles Meet Power.”
The column, which is easily accessible on Substack or via Google, could just as well have been headlined: “The Platner Problem: When People of Principle Who Care Deeply About Women and Women’s Rights are Manipulated by Malevolent Forces Dedicated to Destroying What They Care About.”
Melinda Henneberger’s writing and perspectives on life and humanity are often superb, but in the case of her writing concerning Graham Platner—in the context of decades of blatant destruction of human rights, and women’s health care equity which have been central goals of the Heritage Foundation, the GOP, Christian Nationalists and the Trump Administration—Henneberger’s writing is woefully short of facts, and long on comparisons that are not based in the lived reality of what’s going on in this country regarding economic injustice and civil & human rights—the biggest victims of which are women, the poor, people of color and the LGBTQ community.
I posted a streamlined version of this rebuttal to Henneberger’s column on her Substack page, and offer my fuller response here for my own readers. Henneberger is an important voice for all to hear, and because of her great credibility in the past, it is imperative that those of us who respect her abilities & insights, but disagree with her conclusions, speak out loudly and clearly, while freedom of expression still exists in the United States.
Here is my response, expanded for my own social media:
**
“Melinda: This column is so unscrupulously foul on so many levels. First, let’s examine some fundamental elements of fairness I expect from a Pulitzer Prize winning writer/journalist:
1. Did you go to Maine? 2. Have you interviewed Platner? His wife? 3. Did you interview Hannah Pingree, the young, progressive Democrat running for Governor? 4. Did you interview Representative Chellie Pingree, the long time women’s right advocate whose family has deep roots in the State, and she has long been a leader of Progressives nationwide? 5) Did you interview in person the ethically challenged Lyndsey Fifield, long-time political operative for the Heritage Foundation and opponent of Women’s Rights?
I expect nothing less from a writer of your stature and ability, yet you tell us you divined this perspective from a retreat, not from speaking with Maine citizens. That’s like Trump saying he knows “cheating in elections,” just because he knows it. Where’s your testing of the credibility of your sources, and your information?
Secondly, your Nader comparison is not even close to reality and ripped apart from any historical context. Yes Nader, and Susan Sarandon, were wrong in 2000, especially because the public records of Gore and Bush on all fundamental questions of human rights , and the composition of the Judiciary, were miles apart. Even those of us activists who detested Bill Clinton, and his sexual abuse of Monica Lewinsky and sense of arrogant entitlement, saw the clear difference between the political and personal philosophies of Clinton (Bill) and Gore.
Many of us ripped into Nader for being so narrowly focused on corporate influence in both parties, and being blind to the difference between the two Presidential Candidates on social justice issues, human rights, environmental justice, and the composition of the nation’s Federal Courts. Your brief plane ride of epiphany next to Nader, ignores all nuance and the depth of those differences, as Nader did. And, to make matters worse, you are doing the same kind of shallow, out-of-context reasoning that Nader did, which gave us George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, Justice John Roberts Justice Samuel Alito, and the cratering of the US economy costing millions of people their homes and livelihoods..
Before we even get to Susan Collins sell out of women by enabling Brett Kavanaugh, an accused sex offender, to become a Supreme Court Justice, it’s important to note that It was George W. Bush, guided by Karl Rove, Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt, who gave us John Roberts and Sam Alito, two of the most destructive voices on Voting , Civil and Human rights since Justice Roger Taney and his decision on Dred Scott. Nicole Wallace, who now Podcasts on “The Best People,” along with Schmidt, a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing scold, led the campaign out of the White House to put both Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. I’m not even mentioning their cheerleading for Sarah Palin. They were merely doing what they were told by their boss—indefensible from a moral standpoint, especially when two decades later the extraordinary damage done by Roberts and Alito, has ripped apart the US Constitution and this country’s desultory attempt to civilize itself on Civil Rights.
Even such a civil rights advocate like Joe Biden bears responsibilty for enabling the Supreme Court to be poisoned by not giving Anita Hill’s testimoney enough credibility, nor giving her Congressional protection, and running away fron the false and performative “racism” claims pushed by Clarence Thomas—himself an enemy of civil rights for others— and the deeply cynical forces of racism in this country—not unlike what’s being done by the Heritage Foundation and Christian Nationalists on the matter of misogyny right now, in Maine.Those groups of trolls and troglodytes wrote the book on mistreating women, winked at rape and sexual harassment laws, undermined women’s economic equality, and are actively working to turn the clock back in this country to before the time women were granted the right to vote.
Some of us, going back 30 years, excoriated Biden for his abject failure as the then- Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mario Cuomo, with whom I worked at the time, was furious over Biden’s failure to use his position to defend Anita Hill and her testimony, and his outrage of such terrible timidity on Biden’s part came close to pushing Cuomo to overcome his personal misgivings, and run for President.
You ignore all of this history going back some 30 years, which made Susan Collins support of Kavanaugh—even more egregious—despite her constant blathering of giving nothing but lip service to the urgency of maintaining the health care and human rights protections of Roe v. Wade.
Some of us who crusaded for a Women’s Right to choose going back over 50 years, to when New York State passed it’s liberalized abortion law in 1970—3 years before Roe. v. Wade—find Collins caving in to 50 years of women’s health care, and civil rights progress, unconscionable—not to mention her 90% voting record in concert with the most misogynistic federal administration in US history.
NONE of that forgives Platner’s stupid , offensive decisions about insensitive,, tough-guy tattoos, unacceptable sexting, and misognyistic comments. Yet, you repeatedly glide over the clear political motivation of his primary accuser, a GOP right wing operative, out of the Roger Stone school, who worked for the most anti-women GOP organization of the past 40 years, the Heritage Foundation.
I suggest you re-readProject 2025, it’s attacks on DEI, on women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. To write as much about Platner’s past—without examining precisely where his primary accuser is coming from, is not “victim blaming”—since her public support for Heritage, Kavanaugh and Collins make her far from an innocent victim. Fifield is a perpetrator of pernicious policies against women’s rights. She is no Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and Platner is no Jeffey Epstein, Donald Trump or any other of the malevolent misogynists and pedophile protectors who have changed laws and bastardized institutions—like the military—to flagrantly discriminate against women. How can you ignore those actual, practical, catastrophic consequences of Lyndsey Fifield’s well-funded political activity over the past decade?
NONE of this occurs in a vacuum, nor without historical and personal context, yet you continually bulldoze all of that concering Collins, and her political and financial cronies campaigning against Platner, under the guise of “misogyny” when their own actual enacted policies have caused grave harm and been violent to women’s rights These duiplicitous, cynical, abusers of fairness and justice gave us Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court; covered up the Epstein files and Trump’s involvement in them, ripped apart Roe. v. Wade protections at the federal level and in state after state, and are working hard bury women’s rights back to the Dark Ages, How can you ignore all this?
Finally, your writing fails to mention the other major source of opposition to Platner coming from AIPAC, because of his outspoken opposition to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, his strong statements about cutting off all US military aid to Israel, and his determination to lead the Democrats into taking a powerful anti-war position. With Susan Collins unblemished record of supporting the past four wars, and of unquestioningly doing AIPAC’s bidding on Israel, how can you not examine this as a motivation to bring Platner down, and disenfranchise the voters of Maine?
As a superb journalist, I am suprised you have not questioned the integrity of the New York Times assigning reporter Katie Glueck, a past “AIPAC Activist of the Year” to cover BOTH the NYC Mayoral Campaign of Zoran Mamdani—where support for Israel was a key issue—AND the campaign of Graham Platner for Senator from Maine, when his criticism of AIPAC and Israel—and Susan Collins slavish support— is very well known. How did that egregiouis violation of journalistic integrity escape your notice? Does it matter to you that the Times reporter has a political axe to grind against Platner, as does the Heritage Foundation operative whose unverified statements Glueck relies upon? How can the working women and men of Maine not feel that cultural elites outside of their own communities and billionaire-backed financial interests are working overtime to keep them down?
I challenge you to layout, side-by-side, what Platner has done and said about women, next to what Brett Kavanagugh (and Justices Thomas, Roberts & Alito) have done.
I challenge you to research and write about the extraordinary destruction of human and civil rights, of women’s health care, and economic justice, being implemented right before our eyes every single day by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, Christian Nationalists, and the Trump Administration, and their enablers, like Senator Susan Collins.
