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36 Nations Create Special Tribunal to Try Putin for War Crimes

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2026 //
19

Europe knows aggression when they see it. They are sick of Putin’s crimes of aggression against Ukraine. Some know they could be next. Now that Trump has cut off aid to Ukraine, now that Trump has shown his slavish devotion to Putin, Europe is stepping up to make Putin accountable for war crimes.

Euronews reports:

The tribunal on the crime of aggression against Ukraine marks “the point of no return” in the search for justice, the country’s foreign minister said on Friday. But the court will face limitations in bringing Putin to justice.

Thirty-six countries, mainly from Europe, have signed up to a special tribunal to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, which will be headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague.

The joint pledge was formalised on Friday during the annual meeting of foreign affairs ministers of the Council of Europe, a human rights organisation that has taken the lead in addressing the jurisdictional gap left by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Ministers endorsed a resolution laying down the structure and functions of the management committee that will oversee the tribunal. Among its tasks, the committee will approve the annual budget, adopt internal rules and elect judges and prosecutors. The countries commit to respecting the independence of the judicial proceedings.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, who took part in the ceremony, hailed the moment as “the point of no return” in the years-long search for accountability.

Very few believed this day would come. But it did,” Sybiha said on social media, evoking the spirit of the precedent-setting Nuremberg trials that brought to trial the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany.

“Putin always wanted to go down in history. And this tribunal will help him achieve this. He will go down in history. As a criminal,” he added.

Friday’s resolution was signed by Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Republic of Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.Australia and Costa Rica were the only non-European signatories. The European Union also endorsed the initiative, even if four of its member states, Bulgaria, Hungary, Malta and Slovakia, did not add their names to Friday’s resolution

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, International

ABC: Trump Wants Treasury to Set Up $1.7 Billion Fund for Allies and Insurrectionists

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
11

Trump is apparently willing to drop his demand for $10 billion from the IRS, which wouldn’t pass the smell test in a court of law (unless the judge was Aileen Cannon), if the Treasury sets up a $1.7 Billion fund to compensate anyone who was “wrongfully” prosecuted during Biden’s term.

That means that all of the MAGA crowd that attacked and defaced the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, will get not only a pardon but a payoff for their efforts to overthrow the Constitution. Also, the friends and allies of Trump who collaborated to nullify the 2020 election will be rewarded.

ABC reports:

President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.  

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself. 

While the settlement is expected to be agreed upon in the coming days, sources caution that the final terms will not be set until they are officially announced. Judge orders Trump, DOJ to justify why president’s $10B IRS lawsuit should proceed

In addition to a public apology from the IRS, the compensation fund is believed to be the main condition for Trump to drop a series of legal actions he filed against the federal government, including the $10 billion lawsuit related to the 2019 leak of his tax returns as well as $230 million in legal claims related to the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office, sources familiar with the ongoing deliberations said. 

The settlement terms are expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims, sources said. 

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team told ABC News, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment when contacted by ABC News. Representatives for the IRS and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Why Is the Department of Justice Prosecuting a Leading Civil Rights Group?

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2026 //
6

The Department of Justice indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center by paying informants to infiltrate extremist groups.

CNN wrote:

The Justice Department alleges in the criminal case brought last month that the Southern Poverty Law Center — which has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump and other Republicans for labeling right-wing organizations as hate groups — defrauded donors by not informing them of secret payments to hate group members to act as informants.

The Justice Department alleges that SPLC has funneled $3 million to hate groups like the KKK, Unite the Right, and the Aryan Nations. SPLC also listed Moms for Liberty as a hate group, and M4L said that SPLC should be shut down.

One of the specialties of SPLC is compiling a list of hate groups and individuals who spread hate.

As an organization that was created to oppose racial injustice in the South, SPLC became a natural target for the GOP vengeance campaign.

The odd thing about the suit is that SPLC paid infiltrators, not the groups themselves.

This is a brazen assault on a significant civil rights group that has tangled with hate-groups for more than 50 years.

It is also a demonstration of the Trump administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department, turning it into a partisan cudgel.

Some large corporations have paused their charitable gifts to SPLC, including a division of Schwab that manages charitable gifts, Fidelity, and vanguard.

It was noted on Twitter that Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy advisor, is in the SPLC list of extremists.

Categories Civil Rights, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

The Court Decision Requiring U of Penn to Compile a List of Jews on Campus Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2026 //
21

Erwin Chemerinsky writes on the legal site Cafe that a judge’s ruling upholding the Trump administration’s demand for a list of Jews at U of Penn is “egregiously wrong.”

Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at UC Berkeley and a constitutional scholar.

He wrote:

A federal judge in Philadelphia was egregiously wrong in upholding an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission subpoena to the University of Pennsylvania that effectively requires it to provide a list of its Jewish faculty and staff. At a time of increasing antisemitic acts, and at a moment when the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are expressing vile anti-Jewish hate to massive audiences, it should be unthinkable to ask a university to compile and turn over a list of Jewish people on campus, including their home addresses and phone numbers. The University has appealed and the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit should quickly reverse federal district court Judge Gerald Pappert’s truly insensitive opinion…

The EEOC’s goal is to force the University to create a list, with contact information, of as many Jewish faculty and staff on campus as possible so that the agency can reach out to interview them.  It is a fishing expedition by the EEOC with the hope that if it contacts enough Jewish faculty and staff, it might find evidence of antisemitism on campus.

For many reasons, this is unconstitutional; it also is deeply frightening. The Supreme Court has held for almost 70 years, since NAACP v. Alabama in 1958, that requiring organizations to disclose their members violates freedom of association. In that case, the Court held that Alabama violated the First Amendment in requiring that groups like the NAACP disclose their membership lists. Many cases since have reaffirmed this principle. For example, in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021), the Court declared unconstitutional a California requirement that non-profit groups turn over their list of donors that they already were required to provide to the federal government….

There are also serious privacy concerns in requiring that the University compile and turn over contact information. The district court said the information here—personal home addresses and phone numbers, task-force participation, survey receipt—is not “highly personal.” This is just wrong as a matter of law. In U.S. Department of Defense v. FLRA (1994), the Supreme Court recognized substantial federal employee privacy interests in home addresses. Moreover, a list of home addresses and phone numbers is one thing; a list of home addresses paired with religious identity is another. Similarly, in Kallstrom v. City of Columbus (1998), the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recognized that disclosure of home addresses can threaten personal security when linked to a category that a hostile actor has targeted. Hostile attacks on Jewish victims are at their highest number in decades….

This egregious decision should be reversed on appeal.

Categories Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Pennsylvania, Privacy, Religion, Trump

Iran Mocks U.S. in Searing Short Videos

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2026 //
11

While the U.S. has eliminated its agencies that speak to the world, like Voice of America, Iran has been producing videos mocking the United States, portraying its history as a long series of atrocities, and linking the current war to Jeffrey Epstein.Virginia Heffernan tells the story in The New Republic.

She writes:

There’s a new way to teach American history. It’s not woke. But it’s not patriotic, either. It’s not the 1619 Project or the 1776 project.

It’s the Iranian History of the United States, as seen in “One Vengeance for All,” the most cosmological of the recent pieces of pro-Iran Lego-style agitprop. This is the series you’ve probably caught a glimpse of—the obscene, masterful, and viral AI videos that have hammered the internet since the start of Donald Trump’s ruinous war in Iran. The series, which has been labeled “slopaganda,” is sometimes called “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The strongest entries in the series are producedby an anonymous student activist group called Explosive News (Akhbar Enfejari). Shorter videos in the same style, which look less polished, are reportedly fan-made. All of the videos treat the war with max cartoonery and max ideological torque. Russian and Iraniangovernment accounts regularly boost them. (China has also made its own anti-American propaganda pegged to the war.) 

Scare up the extremely violent videos at your own risk, but here’s a plot summary. In an early one, Trump, panicked about his culpability in the Epstein affair, smashes a red button to strike Iran as a distraction. After Iran strikes back and slams shut the Strait of Hormuz, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu run scared from Iran’s strategic genius and godlike military might. In the next few videos, the U.S. Army loses personnel, planes, helicopters, and popular support; capital markets spiral. Coffins draped in American flags pile up. 

“One Vengeance for All” stands out from the rest because it contains more American history than breaking news. And what a way to see our once-promising nation. The Iranian History of the United States features no pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Civil War, or wars in Europe. Also absent: slavery, civil rights, feminism, and unions. 

Instead, you get 53 seconds of 600 years of American jingoism and genocide. The video opens on an AI caricature of an Indigenous man in a headdress looking to the heavens from the Western plains. Cut to a little boy carrying a dead infant amid smoldering rubble in Hiroshima. These are ghosts.

From there to Vietnam. A middle-aged woman carries a scythe, in a rice field, and again looks skyward. Then come slain Iranian leaders: Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February. All ghosts. Now there’s a girl at a refugee camp in Gaza. We’re given to understand from her hopeful expression that help is coming, and that the help is the Iranian army, though it has no intention of “liberating” or “saving” the ghosts. Instead, with centuries of pent-up resentment in its arsenal, Iran will avenge their suffering with fire and fury.

About two-thirds of the way in, the narrative rounds on the American people, and finds Trump’s victims among us. A blond girl in a pink dress, no older than 6, is pictured in a tropical landscape. It’s Epstein Island. The island’s enigmatic blue-striped building, which some speculate is a reference to the Israeli flag, stands behind her. This girl is also a victim of American imperialism, courtesy of the Trump-Epstein class that merged capital and executive power; private-sector monopolies with political world domination. 

This girl’s Iranian counterpart appears in the next image, a young schoolgirl in a blue coat and white hijab, and she seals the connection. She’s abandoned in the deserted courtyard of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, Hormozgan Province. This is the schoolyard where around 170 people were murdered, elementary school students, when the school was bombed by U.S. forces back in February on the war’s first day. 

At once, a sisterhood of ghosts coalesces. From Epstein Island to southern Iran, schoolgirls pair with schoolgirls, the specters of abused children whose lives or spirits have been extinguished by sadistic American tyrants.

Trump is globally known for sex crimes and, like Hegseth, charges of sex crimes—and the Iranian videos depict the two men explicitly as rapists. In one video, the Lego Trump has doll-like girl figures on his bed and lap, and Hegseth is shown in military garb, repeatedly committing rape. Assaults on girls are the modus vivendi of these videos’ versions of Trump and Hegseth.

These sequences are not idle trolling. Rape is, of course, a crime against humanity. But rape is implicated more immediately in the brief for this war, which centers not on strategic goals but on the relentless use of violence against innocents to humiliate an entire people. 

As Jamelle Bouie put it recently, “Forcing others to submit through the indiscriminate use of force does not really sound like war. That does sound like something else. It sounds like rape.” He concluded that the ideology of Trump and Hegseth is “the ideology of the rapist.” 

After 9/11, President Bush used to tell Americans that our enemies resented “our way of life.” In his memorable “Why Do They Hate Us?” speech of September 20, 2001, Bush answered his own question, “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” 

This may or may not have been true of the terrorists a quarter century ago. But it’s not at all true now of Iran, which the U.S. attacked without permission from the people or provocation from Iran. Iran hates the American government for its cruelty toward hundreds of millions of people across six centuries. It’s hard not to see the logic in it. 

In Trump, the ideology of the rapist was unmistakable a decade ago, when he crowed about the joy he takes in humiliating human beings by mauling their crotches. With this war, he’s trying, as usual, for highly aestheticized spectacles of humiliation, and he’s getting them—but not for Iran. For himself, and for the United States.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, History, Trump

Should White House Press Invite Enemies of a Free Press to Their Dinner?

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2026 //
10

Natalie Korach of Status questions whether the press should invite enemies of a free press to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. Status is an unusually perspicacious source of insider talk about the communications industry.

Korach writes:

As the Trump administration wages war on the press, news outlets hosting White House Correspondents’ Dinner events are dodging questions about who’s on their guest lists. 

When Donald Trump revealed last month that he would attend this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner for the first time as president, the announcement prompted immediate blowback. After years of vilifying the press, the decision by the White House Correspondents’ Association to welcome Trump as a guest of honor struck many as an extraordinary act of appeasement. 

Yet little attention has been paid to the nation’s biggest news organizations who play host to the weekend’s marquee gatherings. But as invitations for the weekend’s festivities started to circulate this week, it raised the question of whether newsrooms plan to welcome members of an administration that has spent more than a year publicly waging war against them. 

Status reached out to the handful of major outlets hosting WHCD-adjacent events to ask whether they planned to invite members of the administration to sip cocktails and snack on hors d’oeuvres at their respective events. Will officials like Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller—who regularly launch vicious assaults on the press—be welcomed with open arms at gatherings ostensibly aimed at celebrating the First Amendment and standing up to those who would chip away at it? 

Representatives for ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW, NBC News, and POLITICO all declined to comment when asked whether they will play host to members of the administration—perhaps tellingly so. 

That reticence is hardly surprising. When Status reported earlier this week that many attendees plan to don First Amendment-supporting accessories to this year’s dinner, some derided the symbolic action as a weak response to the near-daily assaults unleashed by Trump against reporters and news organizations. 

“It’s entirely hypocritical to invite administration officials who consistently attack the media,” one former network executive told Status, calling it “absurd.” 

The situation is no doubt an uncomfortable one for news organizations, which have not had to seriously grapple with the issue before. During Trump’s first term, the White House largely stayed away from the correspondents’ dinner and surrounding festivities, sparing outlets from their events becoming defined by officials who were simultaneously attacking them. That followed conservative blowback in 2018 when the night’s entertainment, comic Michelle Wolf, roasted then-Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, comparing her to Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and quipping, “She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye.” 

With Trump planning to attend this year, it is far more likely that administration officials will make the rounds. Executives are now tasked with deciding whether inviting Trump officials is simply an extension of long-standing bipartisan tradition or an act that risks normalizing an administration that has repeatedly sought to undermine the press and stepped far outside the bounds of accepted behavior. 

Still, there are early indications of how at least some networks are approaching the weekend. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for instance, could make an appearance at the CBS News–POLITICO pre-dinner reception, Status has learned. That’s because Hegseth has been invited by the network to attend the dinner itself, according to a person familiar with the plans, as first reported by Breaker. New CBS News Editor in-Chief Bari Weiss also plans to attend, the person said, who noted that the network has historically invited the full cabinet and administration officials to the dinner. This year’s invitations, the person said, were extended to elected leaders from both parties, with an expectation that Democrats would attend as well. 

Even so, the Hegseth invitation didn’t sit well with some. “What a slap in the face to the journalists at CBS News to invite the man leading the fight to unilaterally shut down press freedoms in this country,” an executive from a rival network told Status. “Nothing says celebrating press freedoms like the man who won’t even let photographers in the room for fear they’d miss his good side!” 

The decision to invite Hegseth is particularly stark after the former Fox News weekend host booted journalists from the Pentagon and used press briefings to discuss the U.S. war on Iran to deride reporters. One CBS News staffer called it “deeply disappointing” that the Weiss-led outlet would invite Hegseth as a guest, while another told Status it felt like an “access play,” at the expense of the network’s journalists. 

Other networks seem to be approaching the weekend in a similar manner. A person familiar with CNN’s planning said that the network doesn’t take “different approaches” to its guest list “based on who is in office,” adding that extending bipartisan invites is standard practice. “If they choose to accept this year when they’ve boycotted before, that’s their decision, but it’s not a new approach,” the person said. 

Likewise, a person familiar with NBCUniversal’splans for the weekend said that, as in years past, NBC News has extended invitations broadly to both Democrats and Republicans, including members of the current administration.  

It goes without saying, however, that the Trump administration is not just another Republican administration. It’s not politics as usual in Washington, though it seems clear some news executives prefer it were. Trump and the top officials in his government have shattered norms and taken unprecedented measures to chill speech and demonize the press. While news executives might conveniently position their decisions as simply following decades-long norms, Trump has had no problem shredding them. It raises the question: If Trump is willing to trash longstanding traditions, why are news executives so beholden to them? 

In any event, some newsrooms are signaling a more pointed posture. 

While a spokesperson for MS NOW declined to detail the guest list, invitations to the network’s first standalone correspondents’ dinner event since its split from NBCUniversal have adopted a distinctly values-driven tone, emphasizing that “a free press and the journalists who power it are essential to the future of democracy,” as MS NOW’s afterparty invitation reads. (Full disclosure: Status is also hosting an event and has chosen not to invite or grant admission to administration officials, given their ongoing attacks on the press.) 

HuffPost has also outright said that it is taking a principled stand against mingling over champagne and canapés with Trump administration officials who have derided, mocked, and insulted the press corps, choosing not to attend the dinner this year, a departure for the BuzzFeed-owned digital outlet. 

“HuffPost refuses to celebrate journalism and laugh alongside an administration and president that regularly attacks the free press, weaponized the FCC, and threatened to jail journalists,” a person familiar with the decision told Status. Instead of having a presence at the dinner, the progressive outlet will focus on “rigorously covering the White House and holding power to account and covering any developments on April 25th,” the person added. 

During his second term, Trump has taken his threats against the media to a new level, barring outlets from events and stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of its traditional authority over the press pool. Trump has stripped funding for public media and moved to shut down Voice of America under Kari Lake’s leadership. Meanwhile, the White House has sued numerous news organizations, including ABC News, the BBC, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. 

The dinner, and what comedians like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Minhaj, and Larry Wilmore have joked about from the stage, has long been a source of friction and occasional controversy. Until Trump, though, presidents and officials dutifully attended, weathering the jabs and jokes that went with it. This year, however, the association has invited mentalist Oz Pearlman to headline the evening, signaling a less politically-tinged monologue with Trump in the room. 

But Hegseth and other administration officials making the cut for events celebrating the First Amendment underscores a larger issue. News organizations have long prided themselves on maintaining neutrality. But that posture is being tested in an environment where one side of the political equation has made hostility toward the press a central feature of its governing approach.

Categories Accountability, Evil, Extremism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Judge J. Michael Luttig: The Beginning of the End of Trump’s Presidency?

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2026 //
21

Judge J. Michael Luttig has always been considered a conservative Republican. He worked in the Reagan administration and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice Warren Burger. In 1991, he was appointed to the Fourth District Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush. Luttig resigned his judgeship in 2006 to work as general counsel for Boeing.

Although a stalwart conservative, Luttig was appalled by Trump’s attempt to overturn the election he lost in 2020. He testified to the House January 6 committee that Trump and his allies were “a clear and present danger to American democracy.” In 2023, he co-wrote an article with liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe arguing that Trump should be barred from running for the Presidency because of his role in the 2021 insurrection (Section 3 of the 14th Amendment).

When Trump was leading the field in 2024, Luttig predicted that Trump’s election would be “catastrophic” for the United States, and he subsequently endorsed Kamala Harris.

Luttig has continued to put the Constitution and the rule of law over partisan politics.

Judge Luttig wrote this article on his Substack blog. I reposted about half of it. To read it in full, open the link or subscribe.

Judge Luttig wrote:

On January 11, 2026, with America and the world anxiously watching — and hoping — Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell fearlessly stood up to the President of the United States, and his truth put the lie to Donald Trump.

For their honorable and courageous stands against the President of the United States, Chairman Powell and Judge Boasberg may have earned Donald Trump’s eternal enmity, but they have earned the nation’s and the world’s eternal gratitude.

On that day, Chairman Powell became the first elected or appointed public official to stand in the breach in America’s time of testing and confront the President of the United States, man to man. The first public figure in over five years who Donald Trump has been unable to insult, harass, threaten, or persecute into silence, bludgeon into submission, or politically destroy, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board became the first man to stand up to the wannabe king of the United States.

History will record that Chairman Powell’s courageous televised statement in defiance of the President of the United States marked the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, and history will richly reward Jerome Powell with its favor.

It could just well be that this honorable humble public servant single-handedly saved America’s Democracy, Constitution, and Rule of Law, if only the others of America’s institutions of government, democracy, and law will finally summon the same courage and follow Jay Powell’s noble and courageous lead before it’s too late.

Jay Powell was always the one man in the world who could stand up to Donald Trump, and Trump knew it, which is why, despite his false bravado, he feared the Reserve Board Chairman. Trump forced the latest confrontation with Jay Powell in one last desperate attempt to force Powell from office so that he could finally seize control over the independent Federal Reserve Bank in the eleventh hour and manipulate the interest rates to disguise the crippling economic impact of his sweeping, unconstitutional global tariffs and his unconstitutional war in Iran.
It turned out to be the worst miscalculation of his life.

Donald Trump considered his years-long effort to fire Powell or force his resignation and to gain control over the independent Federal Reserve Bank to be the decisive showdown of his presidency. His face-off with the Federal Reserve was always to be Donald Trump’s Armageddon in which he victoriously vanquished his archnemesis Jay Powell and took the victor’s spoil of control over the Federal Reserve Bank.

When, not if, he succeeded, his conquest was to be the crowning achievement of his presidency — the conquest that assured the success of his entire presidency, because he would control the monetary policy of the United States and, along with it, interest rates, and thereby the economies of the world, to do with them whatever he pleased.

But Donald Trump’s gloriously imagined victory over Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Bank was never to be and, like the Greek tragedy that it was, everyone in the world knew it, except Donald Trump.

When the day of the world heavy-weight championship finally arrived, the favored heavy-weight Reserve Board Chairman knocked out the reigning light-weight President of the United States in the opening round. The President was TKO’d in the championship fight of his life by the man he had insulted, tormented, and belittled for years.

Donald Trump had finally crossed the wrong man. It was the demure, universally respected Jay Powell who finally called Trump’s bluff, revealing that the humiliated emperor embarrassingly has no clothes.

Both America and the world had longed for a David to slay America’s Goliath and save the nation and the world from the giant’s tyrannical rampage. On January 11, As he spoke clearly, plainly, and truthfully about his ludicrously corrupt pretextual prosecution by the bully president, the entire world cheered on their new David-hero.

America and the world at last had their longed-for hero in the pitched battle for the heart and soul of America, The Honorable Jerome Powell, the courageous Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

History is written by the victor, Winston Churchill is (mis)reported to have said. On January 11, 2026, Jay Powell wrote the victor’s history of the 47th President of the United States before the would-be victor even got the chance.

It poetically fell to The Honorable James Boasberg to mop up after Donald Trump’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Fed Chairman. Judge Boasberg’s swift and withering judicial confirmation of the president’s utter contempt for the Constitution and Rule of Law officially ratified the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s presidency that Jay Powell had wrought. For his distinguished service to the country and to the Constitution, The Honorable James Boasberg is America’s other Profile in Courage and Hero in the battle for America and its future.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Economy, Evil, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Timothy Snyder: Trump Threatens Genocide

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2026 //
8

Timothy Snyder, scholar of European history, of tyranny and genocide, warns about the consequences of Trump threatening to wipe Iran and its ancient Persian civilization, off the earth. That’s genocide. Trump is an immoral monster.

Snyder writes:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States, today.

Do not be distracted by circumstances. Of course there are emotions, personalities, politics, a war. None of this excuses that sentence. The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide, is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.

Are these “only words”? No, they cannot be “only words.” As any historian of mass atrocity knows, there is no such thing as “only words.” The notion of killing a whole civilization, once spoken, remains. It enables others to say similar things, as when another elected representative compared the entire country of Iran to a cancer that had to be removed.

Whatever happens tonight, the president, by saying such things, has already changed the world for the worse, and made acts of mass violence more likely. If we are Americans, he has also changed our country. He has changed us, because he represents us; we voted for him, or we didn’t vote and allowed him to come to power, or we didn’t do enough to stop him. These words are America’s words, until and unless Americans reject them.

Yes, there have been other genocides, and there are other politicians who endorse genocide. That makes the words of the president worse, not better. Yes, the United States has undertaken atrocities before. That makes it all the more important, all the more urgent, that we catch ourselves now. Neither the evil nor the good in our history determines who we are. It is what we do now.

If we do not say something ourselves about this horror, we allow ourselves to be changed. 

Around the president there will be people, sadly, who work deliberately to normalize the language of genocide. There will be other politicians who find the right words to reject it. One can hope that there will be politicians who find the courage to remove the man who speaks genocide from office. And these words should lead to resignations by everyone who works closely with the president.

But we cannot count on politicians. This is ultimately up to us, the citizens: for our own sake, for the sake of the future of the country, for the sake of a possibility of new beginnings, we need to say something, to someone else, to ourselves: this is simply wrong.

Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by the president’s statement. In the practical application of the law of genocide, the Genocide Convention of 1948, the difficulty is usually in proving “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Henceforth the intent is on the record, in the published words of the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces about the death of “a whole civilization.”

We all have good ethical and political reasons to reject the president’s words. But those who serve in government, and in the armed forces, have been placed under the legal shadow of genocide by what Trump wrote. To bomb a bridge or a dam or a power plant or a desalinization facility, very likely a war crime in any event, could very well have a different legal significance, a genocidal one, if it takes place after the expression of genocidal intent by the commander and head of state.

The concept of genocide was created by a survivor and an observer of atrocities, Rafał Lemkin, so that we could see ourselves, judge ourselves, stop ourselves. But genocide is not only a concept. It is also a crime under international law, signed by the United States in 1948 as a convention, ratified by the United States as a treaty in 1988. That makes the words I have quoted here the law of the land.

The president speaks genocide. And so we too must speak. Not only about crimes, but about their legal punishment.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, History, Trump, Tyranny

The 25th Amendment Won’t Save Us from the Mad King

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2026 //
6

Appalled by Trump’s erratic behavior and his threats to commit war crimes in Iran–as he said in a news conference, to destroy every bridge and every power plant in Iran–many political commentators are calling for the implementation of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

Last night, Laurence O’Donnell devoted most of his news program on MS NOW to the claim that Trump is insane, and it is time to activate the 25th Amendment.

Trump’s vulgar message to Iranian leaders, posted on Easter Sunday morning, set off a new round of demands to get this unhinged man out of the Oval Office, far away from the power to start a nuclear war on a whim.

After reading Trump’s message, even former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once close to Trump, wrote in a tweet:

Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness.
I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.

Certainly Democrats and most independents would like to see this menace to world peace, the global economy, democratic institutions, and national security removed from office. No doubt JD Vance, despite his sycophancy, quietly would love to be catapulted into the presidency.

BUT…..it’s not going to happen.

To remove a President from office, the Vice President and a majority of his Cabinet must agree that the President is incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office.

Trump’s Cabinet would never agree to remove him from office unless he did something unthinkable. They were chosen not for their competence, but for their personal loyalty to him. Can you imagine Pete Hegseth or wrestling queen Linda McMahon voting to remove Trump? The unthinkable that might change even their minds might be…Trump running around the White House grounds stark naked; Trump ordering the military to drop a nuclear bomb on some country, friend or foe, because they disrespected him; Trump ordering ICE or the FBI to murder his political enemies; Trump engaging contractors to demolish the entire White House so he can erect a high-rise replacement, with his name at the bottom and the top in flashing lights ….The possibilities are limited.

But let’s imagine that Trump does something beyond my poor imagination, something so awful that a majority of his lackeys and sycophants vote to remove him.

That’s not enough. Their recommendation goes to the Congress, where two-thirds of both Houses must approve his removal.

How likely is that?

I say zilch, unless a black swan happens to build a nest on his bleached blonde tresses. A black swan, you may recall, is a metaphor for a totally unprecedented event, one that almost no one anticipates.

The 25th Amendment is not going to remove Trump, because those around him and Republicans in Congress are afraid of him or idolize him. There is only one way to curb Trump’s rage, incompetence, and boundless narcissism: Turn out the vote in November 2026. Sweep every Trump enabler out of office. Restore checks and balances. Elect a Congress that will investigate corruption, grifting, and profiteering. Elect a Congress that will stop his demolition of federal agencies and departments. Elect a Congress prepared to fight his attacks on enforcement of civil rights laws. Elect a Congress that will encourage and protect the votes of every citizen, not seek to suppress them.

The 25th Amendment will not save us. But a Congress devoted to the Constitution and to democracy can limit the damage that Trump has imposed on our government and on our relations with the rest of the world.

A historical note:

The National Constitution Center summarized the 25th Amendment, passed by Congress after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

AMENDMENT XXV. Passed by Congress July 6, 1965. Ratified February 10, 1967. Note: Article II, section 1, of the Constitution was affected by the 25th amendment.

The relevant content–removing a President who is unfit but unwilling to resign–is Section Four.

Section 4 addresses the dramatic case of a President who may be unable to fulfill his constitutional role but who cannot or will not step aside. It provides both a decision-maker and a procedure. The initial deciding group is the Vice President and a majority of either the Cabinet or some other body that Congress may designate (though Congress has never done so). If this group declares a President “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the Vice President immediately becomes Acting President. If and when the President pronounces himself able, the deciding group has four days to disagree. If it does not, the President retakes his powers. But if it does, the Vice President keeps control while Congress quickly meets and makes a decision. The voting rule in these contested cases favors the President; the Vice President continues acting as President only if two-thirds majorities of both chambers agree that the President is unable to serve.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

A Must-Watch Interview: Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2026 //
2

This is a very important interview, a thoughtful discussion between two remarkable people.

Two historians talk about Trump tyranny, the rule of oligarchs, and the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Snyder reminds us of the importance of the November elections. It’s our chance to put limits on the oligarchs and authoritarians.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Censorship, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Trump
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