One year to the day after his finest hour in the U.S. Senate, Chuck Schumer shows that time, and courage, have passed him by.

(Photo by Haiyun Jiang for the New York Times, 3/14/25)

Last year on March 14, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, was a profile in courage.

He stood in the well of the U.S. Senate and directly challenged Israel’s recklessly disproportionate slaughter of tens of thousand of Palestinian children and women in Gaza, and the lawless reign of terror of Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, beholden to Israel’s xenophobic Extreme Right Wing.

Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish public official in American history, knew what he was risking. His hold on Senate leadership was tenuous, if AIPAC—the Right Wing political action committee doing Bibi’s bidding in US Elections—shifted their considerable financial support behind Republican Senate candidates instead of Democrats. Yet, he fearlessly confronted the bully Bibi, and the Extremist cabal controlling Israel.

Schumer, never a spellbinding speaker, was eloquent:

“I speak for myself, but I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish Americans — a silent majority — whose nuanced views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s discussions about the war in Gaza….

“I speak as a member of a community of Jewish Americans that I know very well. They are my family, my friends. Many of them are my constituents, many of them are Democrats and many are deeply concerned about the pursuit of justice, both in New York and around the globe. From the Talmud — Tikkun Olam, the call to “repair the world” — has driven Jews around the globe to do what is right….

Schumer detailed the horrific crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, when 1200 Israelis and other were murdered, the forcible kidnapping of over 200 hostages, and the disportionate response of the Israeli Government—in direct contravention of the IDF’s own Ethical Code of Conduct in War—resulting in the indiscriminate bombing and slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian children and women.

“The only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution — a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel in equal measures of peace, security, prosperity, dignity and mutual recognition,” Schumer said from the Senate floor… I also believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.

Schumer was surgical in his slicing up of Netanyahu’s assault on the highly regarded Israeli Judiciary, calling it a “weakening of Israel’s political and moral fabric, “ pointing out Bibi’s contemptuous disregard for the Rule of Law, and his embracing a lawless, extremist fringe of Israeli society—some of whom had been convicted of acts of terror, and tied to groups responsible for the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin– which did not recognize the legitimacy of the Judiciary, or any limits to the use of violence.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu has put himself in coalition with far-right extremists like Ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and as a result, he has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza…As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me:

The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel… The world has changed — radically — and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past”

Schumer’s courageous comments stunned the Biden White House, itself caught up in playing a duplicitous game with Israel, condemning its slaughter of innocent civilians and deprivation of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents, and continuing to supply Israel with the huge, 2,000 pound American bombs that were causing massive destruction and loss of human life in Gaza.

American Jews, like myself and my own Rabbi, were proud that at last a major Jewish leader in this country was finally willing to confront the anti-democratic, anti-Jewish, Netanyahu government, which had wiped out Israel’s original governing laws, and the fundamental tenets of Judaism which emphasized a reverence for humanity.

A New York Times story of March 19, 2024, entitled “Part of my Core: How Schumer Decided to Speak Out Against Netanyahu,” noted that Schumer too, was influenced by what his Rabbi was saying.

Rabbi Rachel Timoner, from Schumer’s Reform Synagogue in Brooklyn, who had spoken movingly about the excruciating moral questions raised by this war in Gaza, told Schumer that the Far Right Extremists in Netanyahu’s government were: “endangering all of us because their agenda is about dehumanizing Palestinians, and it’s undermining Israel’s democracy and dearest values.”

Timoner told the New York Times, that she and Senator Schumer:

“share the belief that Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas but talked about the desperate need to bring the hostages home and end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza through an agreement… even if we would only care about Israel’s safety and security, this war was actually harming Israel on the world stage and its relationship with the United States.”

Rabbi Timoner went on to tell The Times, what she thought of Schumer’s speech calling for new elections in Israel:

“This was him trying to discern the moral path and trying to step up in a way he knew was risky for him, to do something that he felt deeply was right.”

That delicate balancing act blew up in Schumer’s face when, three months later, Netanyahu came to address a Joint Session of Congress, with Schumer’s blessing, despite Bibi’s blustering, predictably, being full of calls to blatant Israeli nationalism, and accolades to Donald Trump, who was locked in a close Presidential campaign with Joe Biden.

Fast forward to exactly one year later, to March 14, 2025, and the stirring memory of Schumer’s courageous speech, dissolved into the shadow of his own cowardice, and his own failure to recognize that time and circumstances had made his old style of politics obsolete. Schumer had become, as he accused Bibi of being one year earlier, “stuck in the past.”

In what may well have been the worst and most damaging speech of his long public career in the Senate, Schumer failed to seize the moment and articulate the extraordinary damage being done to ordinary Americans every single day by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Russell Voight and the anti-human rights, anti-Semitic screeds contained in Pogrom 2025, the call for a Christian, non-Jewish nation written by Voight and other Christian Nationalists, conducting a jihad against anyone “different” from their definition of who belonged in “Christian America.”

A year earlier, to the day, Schumer fearlessly confronted Bibi and his phalanx of fascist Right Wing extremists, threatening Israel’s very existence as a Democracy. Yet, when it came time to muster the same kind of courage at a crucial moment in the fight for democracy in his own country—and beat back the forces of extremism, nihilism and techno-terror tearing fundamental US government services away from veterans, the elderly, children and those most in need, Schumer flinched, slipping behind a shadow of cowardice.

Fearing a “far worse” outcome for the country if he stood strong against the Republican’s Continuing Resolution (CR) designed to cripple social programs for most Americans, Schumer gave away the only power card he held, whimpering away into the night, without as much as a flicker of a fight. It was hard to imagine how much worse things could get than the Trump/Musk/Voight troika had already made them for millions of middle-class families.

Instead of caving, Schumer could have held the Senate Floor for many hours, allowing Democratic leaders and veterans like Senator Mark Kelly, Tammy Duckworth and Ruben Gallego to filibuster against the life-threatening impact the Trump/Musk/Voight attack upon the VA, for example, has had on Veterans Services, and how it was Veterans and people of color who were suffering the greatest personal damage and loss of income from the wholesale elimination of tens of thousands of their jobs.

Holding the Senate floor open for hours could have enabled Senators to express the outrage of their constituents from across the country, dominated media coverage for as long as they kept the debate burning, inundated social media, TV and all media with scorched earth attacks on how the GOP was fire-bombing all public human services, the way White Supremacists set Black Wall Street ablaze in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

A vote delayed by Schumer, would have allowed time for citizen advocacy groups like Indivisible, Vote Vets, the ACLU, Democracy FORWARD, the SCLC, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and others to challenge and condemn Elon Musk’s illegal mass firings and his theft of the private, proprietary data of hundreds of millions of Americans.

And, if Schumer signaled he was ready to fight into the night, instead of hiding in his own shadow, public employee unions whose members are reeling from a frontal attack on the US Government by a band of felons, would have had the time to organize by the tens of thousands in DC and in communities and states across the country, where most public employees labor to improve the lives of their neighbors.

Chuck Schumer, who has relinquished his leadership position in the US Senate by failing to galvanize the forces of common sense and humanity against the CR—or Catastrophic Resolution—needed then, more than ever, to remember what his Rabbi said about him during his finest hour, one year earlier, when he stood up to Bibi Netanyahu and extreme Right Wing forces in Israel:

“This was him trying to discern the moral path and trying to step up in a way he knew was risky for him, to do something that he felt deeply was right.”

We needed that kind of courage from Schumer last week in the face of Trump and the extreme Right Wing forces in our own country, not the cautious cowardice that caused him to slip behind the shadows of the night.

It’s still all about racial hatred, ignoring the Rule of Law, and dragging the U.S. Constitution back to the era of Apartheid America & burning crosses.

(The site of the once beautiful Oak Park, Montgomery, Alabama, Public swimming pool, filled in with cement and planted over by the all-white Montgomery City Council rather than allow Black children to swim in it with White children, despite a court-order to do so.)

There’s a new “N” word being spit out of the mouths of hate-filled fanatics, and it’s “DEI.”

Most of the people using the term—which is shorthand for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion”—slime it in a derogatory fashion, the way beer-bellied Southern Sheriffs in Mississippi and Alabama used to shout out the “N” word, every time they brought down a billy club on the head of John Lewis, or Fannie Lou Hamer, or some other black or white person peacefully marching for freedom.

Using it as a harpoon of hate, the Stephen Millers, Elon Musks, Pete Hegseths, Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s—all smug, inhumane White men of privilege peddling poison like the Sacklers selling Oxycontin—smirk when they spread the slur, knowing it will color a dark face over the concept of “favoritism,” crowding out the real life images of Trump & Musk’s Apartheid-loving wealthy fathers, and of Vance’s owner, the anti-democratic, tyrannical techy immigrant Peter Thiel, just enough to boil the bile of their vile followers, conditioned to believe that it’s poor Black folks and women who are stepping on their throats, when it’s the billionaires and bigots skillfully slitting them.

“IDEA”—for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Acceptance—would have been a far better term for the fair offering of opportunity, started by LBJ 60 years ago to expand the possibility of getting a government contract to people who were not part of rigged rich men’s network-–the kind that produced $40 billion in federal contracts for a wealthy South African white man named Musk—whose family made its money on the backs of an Apartheid-driven economic system, one small step above slavery.

No matter. Whether it’s the N-word, the C-word, “DEI” or any good IDEA, Trump’s troglodytes would have gleefully trashed it to ramp up racial-hatred and keep all but the very wealthy down-trodden and dumb. It’s just like the maniacal, methodical weaponization of the word “woke”, the opposite of which is to be asleep, blissfully ignorant, of what’s being done by racist Right-Wing ideologues.

We’ve heard and felt this kind of blind hatred many times before in this country, nationally and in the smallest of communities.

In her brilliant book The Sum of US: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGee documents how public swimming pools became spiteful graveyards of racial equality:

“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time. . . By World War II, the country’s 2,000 pools were glittering symbols of a new commitment by local officials to the quality of life of their residents, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to socialize together for free.”

Except, of course, if your skin was darker than Barbie’s

McGee writes:

“ By the 1950’s the fight to integrate America’s prized swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public good”.

In Baltimore, in 1956, after a 3-year court fight and the drowning death of a 13-year-old Black child in a public river, the NAACP won the right for “all Baltimore children to have the chance to swim with other children, regardless of skin color.”

However, what ended up happening, as McGee writes is that “instead of sharing the pool, white children stopped going to the pools that Black children could easily access, and white adults policed (through intimidation and violence) the public pools in white neighborhoods.”

There was no need for “No Blacks Allowed,” signs; Black kids were just kicked out, in violation of the law, which no one enforced.

A few years later at the old Oak Park pool in Montgomery, Alabama, attempts at offering Black children the chance to escape Alabama’s oppressive summer heat—as the local Parks Department envisioned after a federal court ordered it—was shamefully drowned in the shallow end. The Montgomery City Council swiftly voted to eliminate the Parks Department.

McGee writes, astonishingly that:

“The Council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their Black neighbors. Of course that decision meant that White families (non-wealthy white families) lost a public resource as well…Uncomprehending white children cried as the City contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time the summer came along again.”

The spite-filled insanity of the all-white Montgomery City Council’s decision to fill the glorious Oak Park public swimming pool with cement, rather than allow Black children (or white kids, for that matter) to swim in it, was, of course, blamed on the Federal court and the Black community, by the KKK and other local White Supremacists, just as the racists running the Trump Administration are doing today toward DEI.

The “N” word of that time, however, was not “DEI,” but the actual “N” word. Now it comes in the form of vicious, vituperative attacks on diversity programs in the public and private sectors, made at screeching Stephen Miller decibel levels, and are the burning crosses of our time.

Judge Dan Brenner’s keen intellect, boundless compassion, great heart, and sharp sense of humor keep instructing us how to live a full, meaningful life of great dignity and delight.

It’s been 9 years since my friend and former colleague, Judge Dan Brenner, was struck and killed by a car while crossing a street in LA.

I was stunned when I heard the news. It was inconceivable to me: Dan Brenner, the picture of life, a brain of sheer wizardry and wonder was dead. Gone, at 64 years old.

Yet there he was, one night, very much alive in my dream. I jumped ahead of a group of people I was walking with and called out to him.

“Dan! Dan!,” I shouted to him down the hall. “Dan Brenner.”

I quickly turned around to the people with me.

“It’s Dan Brenner!” I screamed at them.

They looked at me like I had lost my mind. They didn’t see anything or anyone at the end of the hallway.

I called out again.

“Dan! Dan Brenner!”

No answer. Odd, pitying looks from everyone around me.

I woke up with a start, wondering why I saw Dan Brenner so alive in my dream. He was a constant source of joy and genius for me, when he served as General Counsel to the national HIV/AIDS non-profit I ran, Cable Positive.

Why had I seen him so clearly now? It could be because I was again, becoming immersed in the law, taking on a new challenge as Executive Director of the Sonoma County Bar Association, during a time of heightened disregard for the rule of law in the United States. After years of working at the highest levels of communications law in Washington, DC, Dan, a Stanford University Law School graduate, returned to his native LA, to care for his aging mother, and became a local judge.

I hadn’t seen him for some 16 years, seven years before he was killed, but he came to life for me again, the moment I stepped inside a building at Stanford Law School last week, a place where Dan excelled.

I was there for a symposium on how the State of California would continue to respond in court to every single illegal action of the Trump Administration. Before the session on Immigration Rights began, I went up to the front of the room to talk with former Law School Dean, and Stanford Law Professor Robert Weisberg.

“Professor Weisberg,” I said outstretching my hand to shake his.

“Did you remember having Dan Brenner as a student?”

Weisberg’s kind eyes twinkled.

“Sure,” he said. “ I remember Dan. He was an outstanding student.”

We chatted about the terrible way Dan’s life ended, and I mentioned to the Professor that I knew coming to Stanford Law School for a day long series of seminars on how California will continue to fight for the rights of individuals, would unlock torrents of memories about Dan Brenner.

Brenner and I first met when I was a student at Hofstra University School of Law, and Dan—then the General Counsel at the FCC—was a guest lecturer in Professor Stuart Shorenstein’s Communications Law class. When Dan Brenner taught, there was no time for boredom; his mind raced so fast, his humor was so relentlessly quick, that if you snoozed, you’d lose.

Fifteen years later, when I was hired to head Cable Positive, I saw Dan again at the National Cable Show in New Orleans. I went up to him at the Cable Positive Board of Directors meeting where I would be introduced, and whispered in his ear.

“I’m the only person in the entire Cable Television industry who’s ever been your student in law school,” I said, catching him off guard for a nano-second, watching his gentle eyes smile before his warp-speed wit went into action.

“And, I must have done a good job,” he said, “because you’ve chosen not to practice Communications Law.”

In fact, Dan did a very good job, which is no surprise to all of us who knew, admired and loved him. Whether working as Counsel to former FCC Commissioner Mark Fowler, as General Counsel for NCTA, or as a leading voice on Cable Positive’s Board for a decade, Dan Brenner’s brilliance in his work was only equaled by his boundless compassion, and his razor-sharp wit.

A proud, Gay man, Dan once did stand-up comedy for a time, performing at such legendary venues like The Duplex in NYC’s Greenwich Village. In a room full of a diverse group of people, Dan’s laser-like eyes & mind would scan the crowd, and declare that he was holding a black-tee-shirt contest, to see who owned the most.

In venues outside of Cable Positive, it was easy to be distracted by Dan’s intelligence and how devastatingly funny he could be, with a few carefully chosen words and nuances. Cable Positive benefited by both of those gifts of his, but they took a back seat to his passion for the organization’s mission and his deep feeling for individuals—around the world—living with HIV, and those being discriminated against because they were different.

Dan Brenner represented the heart-and-soul of Cable Positive and why the industry’s commitment to fighting AIDS was so unique. He understood intuitively—long before he worked meticulously with staff developing our “One-for-One Program” of domestic and international anti-retroviral drug assistance, that presaged the PEPFAR program–how a rich and powerful industry had a responsibility to direct its vast resources to help people in dire need.

I always respected and admired how he challenged me constantly at Cable Positive, and loved the fact that, through our work with him in fighting HIV/AIDS, he was always fearless in acting on his deep feelings for others, inspiring all of us along the way. His humor was his shield against despair.

Maybe Dan Brenner burst into my subconscious the other night because the Trump Administration tried to instantly delete the PEPFAR program abroad, which saved 25 million lives since it’s inception, and has illegally dismantled the USAID program, damaging the health and safety of tens of millions more. Such inhumane actions would have depressed Dan Brenner for days on end, until he figured out a way to use his genius, his sharp legal mind, and his humor to fight back.

Maybe I saw him down the hallway of an unidentified office building, or in the classrooms of Stanford Law School, because I was starting a new challenge to strengthen my respect for the law, and how it could help people, which is how Dan spent the final days of his brilliant, bright, full life.

Maybe he was signaling to me that this was a higher calling, or that he would use his sub-conscious cameo to tease me that he wouldn’t tell anyone that he had become the man of my dreams. That quip would be quintessential Dan Brenner.

I’m not sure what it was, but seeing Dan Brenner, alive and smiling again, told me that whatever I was doing at this very moment in my life, was precisely the right thing.

The Trump/Vance Administration abandoned 80 years of protecting the world from totalitarian brutality in Munich earlier this month, just as Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler and Mussolini in 1938.

( Top Photo 1 (far left), Chamberlain signing the peace treaty of Munich with Hitler & Mussolini, in Munich, 1938; (middle photo), Trump capitulating to Putin on matters of US national security in Helsinki; (Photo 3, , Vice-President abandoning his own Christian values and the Democracies of Europe, at Munich, 2025.)

For years, I asked a question of my students in an Ethics Class I taught in Cornell University’s Labor Studies Program: “If you had the hard evidence that Hitler was slaughtering Jews, and had the opportunity to kill him, would you?

Shortly after the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine began three years ago, in an interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky updated and broadened the moral question for us, and provided the world with an answer:

“All the (Ukrainian) people who die, will die because of you (NATO), your weakness. I remember, books about the Second World War, and about the devil in uniform, Adolf Hitler; Does the world carry responsibility for the Genocide? When you have the ability to close the sky — but whether the world is responsible for this — Yes, I believe so, I believe so. Stand in front of the mirror and ask yourself , “are you able to do something?” And ask, who are you?”

Zelensky, a lawyer by training, and the Ukrainian-born Jewish son of a computer scientist and an engineer, has been fearless — not only in standing up to the calculated, criminal and murderous methods of the world’s latest mass-murderer, Russian President Vladimir Putin — but in confronting Western leaders with uncomfortable moral & ethical questions.

“If you are the UN Security Council,” Zelensky asked the members of the UN, “where is the Security? Do you think that the time of International Law is gone?”

Now, as the Trump Administration is poised to abandon the 40+ million people of Ukraine, and throw open the borders of Europe by appeasing Putin for Trump’s personal purposes, and boosting Fascism over our Allies of 80 years, the liberal democracies of Europe & NATO, even more serious and seering questions need to be raised.

Does International Law exist any longer in the world, with a convicted felon serving as the American President, pardoning other violent convicted felons, and a War Criminal excused for the biggest land war in Europe since the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews, Russians, Europeans and American soldiers?

Similarly, Zelensky, who has offered to sacrifice his own democratically elected Presidency—and perhaps his life—to guarantee Ukraine the security and protection of NATO—has refused to sell-out the people of his own country, or to participate in Trump’s twisted rewriting of history which would transform Putin into a mass-murderer on the scale of Josef Stalin, who intentionally starved three million Ukrainians to death.

Zelensky has expressed skepticism about whether well-documented War Crimes charges against Putin for the intentional bombing of hospitals and schools—once lodged by the US and NATO members against the Russians, will ever be enforced, or adjudicated. Does any tribunal exist anymore to try such crimes, or are those monstrous crimes against humanity subject to “pardon” by the convicted felon, heading the world’s most powerful nation?

After all, the United States, Russia, China, India & Israel ( in the ultimate historic irony) — some of the world’s leading nuclear powers — have rejected the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the primary international body for prosecuting War Crimes. The irony for Israel, of course, is that it was the Nuremberg Trials which laid the foundation for the establishment of International Law, and the ICC, as an essential component of a just world order under law. Has that standard been suffocated by the Trump Administration, in it’s perverse push to appease Putin, and other totalitarians?

Zelensky knew from the beginning of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that the “War Crimes” war cry against Putin and Russia, was an empty threat, to take attention away from the early failure of the US & NATO to commit their own forces in direct military punishment of Putin, and to make the West feel better about not stopping the crimes while they are happening in real time, in full view of the entire world.

In a detailed New York Times analysis done the week the war in Ukraine began, entitled “War Crimes Often Avoid A Reckoning,” by Max Fisher, the Times reported that: “In 2016, the ICC opened an investigation into possible war crimes committed during Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia…Prosecutors requested the first arrest warrants only last month,” some 14 years after the alleged War Crimes occurred.

During World War II, the United States waited for two years to confront Hitler with direct military force, ignoring clear evidence of the madman’s widespread massacre of Jews across Europe & the Ukraine, and the Nazi’s brutal takeover of nations like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Despite, or maybe because of, the History Channel’s endless reruns of World War II, we appear to believe that the lessons of the past — of mass murder, genocide and the utter destruction of civilizations — are only made-for-television events. But, we are shown by the hour, as Zelensky emphasized in his first interview for CBS’ Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes: “This is not a movie; This is real life.”

Yale Professor Timothy Snyder has worked mightily to teach us that sobering lesson as well. Most well-known for his best-selling, small but powerful book, “On Tyranny — published during the first year of the Trump Administration, as a warning against the weakening of democracy in America — Snyder has authored 13 other books, and is one of the world’s foremost experts on authoritarianism. Snyder has repeatedly warned us that the Holocaust could happen again if we are not assiduous in defending democracy and the rights of individuals. Or, as Zelensky has said recently, “Never again, is happening again,” underscoring the emptiness of words without immediate and direct military intervention to stop another Holocaust in progress.

Professor Snyder’s book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books/Division of Penguin Random House, NY., 2015) is both a detailed and riveting examination of how the Nazi Holocaust happened, and an alarm for spotting the scorched-earth, inhumane tactics Vladimir Putin and Russia practiced in Ukraine. Eerily, the term “Black Earth,” defines Ukraine — a land always known for its fertile, rich soil and as the “breadbasket of Europe”, and now seen as a wasteland of charred hospitals and apartment buildings, bombed out train stations and community centers, and half-buried bodies with frozen limbs emerging from unmarked graves.

The conquest of Ukraine (then part of Russia), was a central element of Hitler’s plan for Lebensraum, or land on which the Third Reich could grow and become a global empire. “I need the Ukraine, “ Hitler said, “in order that no one is able to starve us out again, like in the last war.” In Putin’s case, the conquest of Ukraine was essential to restore Russia to its glory days of Soviet Empire, his own version of Lebensraum.

Now, in a further maccabre murdering of history, the Trump Administration is, once again, trying to blackmail Ukraine for the treasures that lie beneath it’s “Black Earth,”—the billions of dollars in rare minerals needed to power the American high tech industry. Again this time, like Hitler aligning himself with wealthy German industrialists, Trump is doing the bidding of US billionaires like Elon Musk, who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, in order to secure hundreds of billions of dollars of business for themselves.

Brutal authoritarians like Putin, Hitler and Stalin borrow tactics of mass slaughter from each other, especially when they are not forcibly prevented from doing so by the world’s democracies. It was the USSR’s own Joseph Stalin, another one of Putin’s heroes, who inspired Hitler to use mass starvation — much as Putin used it in Mariupol — as an illegal tool of war, by using it against his own people, the Ukrainians, whether they were Russian-speakers or not. In Black Earth, Professor Snyder writes:

“Stalin wished to apply to his own subjects (Ukrainians) the policies that he believed imperialists applied to native peoples…Soviet policy brought massive resistance and massive starvation…in the second half of 1933, Stalin treated the starvation region in Ukraine as a political problem, blamed the Ukrainians themselves, and claimed the whole crisis was the result of Polish intelligence work….About 3.3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died horrible and unnecessary deaths of starvation and disease in 1932 and 1933….thousands of peasants fled Soviet Ukraine across the Polish border, entire villages at a time, begging for a war of liberation. The summary report of the Polish border guards assigned to interview the Ukrainian refugees read as follows: “The population longs for armed intervention from Europe.”

Zelensky and millions Ukrainian refugees have been pleading for “armed intervention from Europe,” and the US, since the very outset of the Russian invasion. Forgetting history, we immediately ruled out a direct military confrontation with Russia, citing a fear of triggering “Nuclear War,” — precisely the talking point which Putin wanted the West to parrot. Our reluctance to immediately confront Putin’s immoral and illegitimate use of force in Ukraine with the defensive, legitimate and superior force of NATO nations, sent the message to Russia — as the British and French sellout of Czechoslovakia at Munich did to Hitler in 1938 — that 40+ million Ukrainians were expendable, as long as Western soil was left untouched.

When Putin ordered the attack on the refugee-full train station in Kramatorsk, turning Kramatorsk into a crematoria for all the world to see, Zelensky — fresh from witnessing the barbarism by the Russian soldiers in Bucha — frankly framed what faced us: “This is an evil that has no limits.” Unspoken was the phrase, “unless the overwhelming power of NATO and the U.S. are immediately and equally engaged to limit such evil.” Now, with the installation of a Putin appeaser in the White House, and Fascist fan-boys running the Trump Administration, even the significant, yet limited, American support for Ukraine’s freedom and right to life, appears to be gone.

US & NATO officials patted ourselves on the back for agreeing to more tough economic sanctions against Russia, and continuing the steady flow of weapons to Ukraine — as long as the Ukrainians, not Americans nor Europeans, faced Putin directly — even when a NATO aerial attack on clearly visible, miles-long Russian supply caravans — outside of Kyiv and now in Eastern Ukraine — could have stopped the slaughter. Elon Musk, who controls Starlink Satellite Services, LLC—a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX—admitted to shutting down Ukraine’s Starlink service when the Ukrainians had a credible change to destroy Russian ships stationed off Crimea in the Black Sea. Now, Musk’s paid-for mouthpiece, Trump, is proposing to extort Ukraine, by suspending Starlink Satellite again if Ukraine doesn’t agree to unilaterally turn over 50% of its rare minerals to the United States.

Ukrainian lives, once again, are not being valued as much as American or European lives, or the profits of American billionaires, It was not lost on Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians that a similar catastrophic conclusion — for far more twisted, sinister and evil purposes — was made by both Hitler and Stalin decades earlier. It’s a dehumanizing distinction which is being dangerously repeated around the world.

CBS’ 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley asked Ukrainian President Zelensky what he wanted the world to understand:

“We are defending the ability of a person to live in the modern world. We are defending the right to live,” Zelensky said. “I never thought this right was so costly. These are human values. So that Russia doesn’t choose what we should do and how I’m exercising my rights. That right was given to me by God and my parents.”

Frighteningly, it’s no longer Russia choosing “what we should do and how I’m exercising my rights.” It’s a new American government, in love with the appeasement and the tactics of authoritarians, and abandoning any pretense to advancing human and democratic rights, in exchange for cash, or any other currency, at the expense of the law, fundamental decency and morality.

It will stand strong–long after Trump is sentenced to a legacy of infamy– and teach future generations where the fight for LGBTQ+ Equality began.

(The next, proud generation of the Villano Family at the site of the Stonewall Rebellion for LGBTQ+ equality.)

When we took our three granddaughters to visit New York City three years ago, our oldest granddaughter, now almost 16 years old, wanted to see the Stonewall National Monument.

She is a remarkable human being, incredibly intelligent and compassionate, and acutely aware of what’s going on in the world around her. An out and very proud Lesbian, our oldest granddaughter is already a strong, clear voice for equality, human rights, and personal honesty. She has taken her father’s mantra, “putting humanity first,” to heart, and it guides every single thing she does.

I thought I already knew a lot about the LGBTQ+ community, having been part of it for many years, and having raised tens of millions of dollars for HIV/AIDS education, treatment and care, and secured a few billion dollars of pro-bono TV time to fight anti-HIV stigma and discrimination and violence against the entire community. My decade as CEO of Cable Positive —theAIDS action organization of the Cable Television industry—introduced me to every sexuality and gender under our big, welcoming umbrella of love.

Then, my granddaughter began educating me.

She meticulously drew every multi-colored flag representing each segment of the Queer community. Her father, who welcomes diversity with a Pride Progress flag proudly flapping in the breeze in front of his house, was delighted to hang her hand-done flags as a valance over the patio doors in his kitchen. My granddaughter never tired of explaining the difference to me between each flag, and each community.

Patiently she told me about some of the definitions describing the newer nuances of gender, and she never once tired of her “boomer” Grampy asking question after question. If only every family could have a caring, nurturing teacher like my sweet Sage I thought; the world would be a far, far better place.

I sent my granddaughter an Instagram photo of this weekend’s demonstration at the Stonewall Monument, protesting the mean-spirited Trump Administration’s removal of the “T” from the National Parks Monument to Stonewall, on Christopher Street in NYC. Driven by the shrivel-souled Fundamentalist religious fanatics behind Project 2025, on a jihad against “Transgender ideology,” Trump signed an Executive Order demanding that any reference to “trans” or “gender” be scrubbed from all national sites, websites, and documents.

The National Women’s Law Center has been sounding the alarm about these totalitarian actions, which, are ripped right from the playbook of Nazi Party in 1930’s Germany:

“For the architects of Project 2025, few things are more terrifying than LGBTQI+ people.. . . on page after page, they weaponize that fear to try to demonize, dehumanize, and destroy LGBTQI+ people.

Right out of the gate, Project 2025 bemoans “transgender ideology”—a phrase that suggests that trans people are not actual humans as much as embodiments of malignant propaganda. For Project 2025’s authors, the “ideology” of trans existence and LGBTQI+ equality has seeped into every crevice of the federal government, and it’s their mission to eradicate it.

For starters, Project 2025 calls for removing the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.” This erasure isn’t symbolic—it’s part of a systematic effort to strip LGBTQI+ people of all legal protection from persecution, discrimination, and violence.”

The fact that it was Barack Obama in 2016 who designated that a National Monument be built at the site of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion—the first LGBTQIA+ visitors center within the National Parks System—must have given Trump a sick sense of joy when he signed his flagrantly prejudiced fatwa into effect.

I went to the National Parks Website, for the Stonewall Monument, and discovered that the “T” had indeed been torn down by the troglodytes, with the National Park site identified as an historic site for the “LGB” community. How lame.

Fortunately, on the website of the Stonewall National Visitor Center—a NYC visitor’s center on the location of the original Christopher Street uprising—the full LGBTQIA+ designation waves proudly in almost each paragraph. And, nothing prevents the City or State of New York from building a massive monument honoring the Transgender community on City property smack in front of the National Park sign.

I thought of the small, gnarly and gnome-like worldview of the people who wrote Project 2025, and of Trump, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller and the sewer full of red-fanged rat-faced functionaries who take delight in cruelty to one individual or to a group of people.

Then, I thought of my beautiful, loving granddaughter, and her full, bright smile and wonderful, unbridled laugh, and knew that no amount of smallness or meanness or narrow-minded fear, could ever hold back the world that she and her contemporaries are demanding for themselves, with all of us who love them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them fighting for equality and a better life.

Abe Lincoln initially wanted to ship the Black population to another country, until he saw how they sacrificed their lives to save the American union from Apartheid. THIS is no time to whine.

(From the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Steve Villano)

Yes, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves.

But, as un-whitewashed history teaches us, not without giving far more progressive abolitionists, and Black folks, lots of aggravation and agita. Lincoln spent much of his life advocating an even more extreme White Supremacist view of the United States than present day dunces of the Confederacy, Donald Trump and Elon Musk—two wealthy, spoiled white boys who made their careers spewing racist and exclusionary bile—are pedaling right now.

If you’re tired of Lincoln’s legend being sanitized, or the story of Black Americans being bleached by a coordinated campaign to ban Black History in schools, pull down references to Black History Month on Google, or rip down “End Racism” signs at the NFL’s Superbowl, than it’s time to turn to the brilliant 1619 Project: A New Origin Story created by Nikole Hannah Jones for the New York Times & Random House (copyright 2021, New York Times Publishing Company).

In her watershed work, the truth-telling journalist Jones points us toward the insightful writings of Frederick Douglass, a powerful voice for equality who knew Lincoln well, and understood what crumbs of freedom White American public officials would risk offering to millions of Black Americans, who were enslaved. Lincoln, much as we would like to believe otherwise, was no exception.

Douglass, a former slave, ardent abolitionist, great orator, and one of the most consequential writers, thinkers and leaders in American History — wrote three separate autobiographies from 1845 through 1892. He is the Douglass whose name should be immediately paired with Lincoln’s, rather than that of US Senator Stephen Douglas, who debated Lincoln about slavery, beat him for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, and tried to broker a wishy-washy State sovereignty deal on slavery to avert Civil War.

In the 1619 Project, the Lincoln/Frederick Douglass story is meticulously told. I have excerpted some key portions of that story here:

“In our national story, we crown Lincoln the Great Emancipator, the president who ended slavery, demolished the racist South, and ushered in the free nation our founders set forth.

But this narrative, like so many others, requires more nuance. Frederick Douglass would never forget that the president initially suggested that the only solution, after abolishing enslavement that had lasted for centuries, was for Black Americans to leave the country they helped to build.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Abe Lincoln, considered by many to be the greatest of all American presidents, first favored the deportation of all Black Americans. It was a position he had favored for years.

More than a decade after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Douglass was asked to eulogize the assassinated President.

“ The abolitionist (Frederick Douglass), whose mother had been sold away from him when he was a young child, had met Lincoln a few times during his presidency and had repeatedly prodded Lincoln in his writings and speeches to emancipate the enslaved.”

“At first, Douglass praised Lincoln as “a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity.”

But, as Jones writes in 1619 Project, Douglass was determined to make clear that he hadn’t simply come to praise Lincoln and “promote the narrative of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator who set his people free.”

Frederick Douglass: “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, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops.

Historian Bruce Levine, in his book The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Random House, NY, 2013), drove home the crucial role newly freed slaves had in the Union’s victory over the South:

“By early 1864, the steady erosion of slavery throughout the loyal border states was as difficult to miss as it was in Union-occupied portions of the confederacy…By mid-September 1864, the Union had enlisted 14,000 Black soldiers (from border states, with another six thousand expected by the end of October…General Lorenzo Thomas praised the new Black regiments as filling up with “the very best class of men.”

What became clearer each succeeding day, was that while Lincoln “freed the slaves,” the newly freed Black men, fighting alongside Union Troops, were critically important in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War. Once freed, former enslaved people fought fiercely to preserve — and extend — their liberty. There was no going back.

In his eulogy, “Douglass launched into a breathtaking litany of Lincoln’s shortcomings, referring in part to their White House meeting with Black leaders in August 1862, just a little over four months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued:

“Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost…when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born.”

However, as Jones writes in The 1619 Project, “though the Union was worth more to Lincoln than enslaved people’s freedoms, Douglass said: ‘under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”

“Douglass understood that Lincoln’s ideas about Black people changed during the course of the War. The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d help save the Union, and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem. Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated Colonization (resettlements of the Black population), by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In his final speech before his assassination, Lincoln expressed an openness to enfranchising a limited number of Black men — particularly educated men and those who’d fought in the War.”

Historian Christopher James Bonner, author of Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, offered his perspective to The 1619 Project:

“ That last speech calling for partial inclusion of Black Americans, that’s an evolution, and among the many tragedies of Lincoln’s death is that he did change so much in such a short period of time,” Bonner said. “Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for certain Black people on certain terms. It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.”

Formerly enslaved Black Americans were not interested in any half-way solutions. Jones writes in The 1619 Project, that when the Civil War ended “suddenly freeing four million Black Americans, few were interested in leaving the country.

“Instead, most would have fervently supported the sentiment of a resolution against Black colonization put forward at a convention of Black leaders in New York, some decades before:

“This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers…Here we were born, and here we will die.”