Only yesterday, I posted a notice about the planned lecture by Dr. Azar Nafisi at Wellesley College on April 15.
Overnight, we agreed that the lecture would be postponed because of a non-tenure track faculty strike on campus. I fervently hoped the strike would be finished before the lecture, but the two sides are currently not close to a settlement.
Non-tenure track faculty voted to unionize as the Wellesley Organized Academic Workers, or WOAW with the United Auto Workers. The strike began March 27.
Dr. Nafisi will not cross a picket line, and neither will I.
Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of the mega-bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, will speak at Wellesley College on April 15 at Wellesley College at 4 p.m. in the Jewett Arts Center. Admission is free.
Please mark the date on your calendar. She is speaking in a lecture series that I endowed several years ago. The lecture will be available eventually on the archive website of the College.
The book, which was a sensation upon its publication for its depiction of life under the mullahs, has recently been made into a film.
This review of the film was published by The Atlantic and written by Arash Azizi. At present, the film can be seen only at film festivals.
He wrote:
The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.
Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.
Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.
Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.
When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.
More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”
The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.
In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.
The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.
The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.
In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.
The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.
In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.
Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)
The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”
This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.
The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.
Trump signed an executive order declaring all state laws that address climate change to be null and void. He claims that efforts to protect the environment are a hindrance to energy production. So ignoring climate change is important to national security because we need oil and gas more than we need clean air and water.
Remember when Trump said he was eliminating the Departnent of Education because states should manage their own schools and the federal government should get out of the way? Why can’t states make decisions about clean air, clean water, and auto efficiency?
Trump’s tariffs are getting blowback from some of his rightwing allies. Elon Musk called tariff-lover Peter Navarro “a moron.” Several Republican Senators expressed their opposition to tariffs at a Senate hearing. The National Review tore into Trump’s tariffs and his imperial behavior:
It wrote:
If it seems preposterous that a single person could enjoy this much power over the American economy — and, with it, the global economy — rest assured that it is. In Article I, the Constitution vests the “power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” in Congress, not in the president. As a result, the president has no power to impose tariffs that he has not been accorded by an act of the legislature. If it desires, Congress can choose to take back as much of that power as it sees fit. It ought to do so — and do so now.
That the Founders placed the power to tax, tariff, and legislate in the hands of the legislature, instead of the executive, was not an accident. On the contrary: This allocation sat at the very core of the system that they designed. Because legislatures play host to a diverse cast of characters — characters who have different views, are elected by different groups, and come from different regions — they are less prone to dogmatism, caprice, and flightiness than are monarchs, presidents, or emperors. Especially within the United States, where the Senate often checks the passions of the House, the procedural challenges that result from this tend to ensure that only those proposals that enjoy broad purchase among the citizenry’s representatives are able to become law. This arrangement has two chief benefits. First, it guarantees that the ideas under consideration will be subject to serious criticism and debate. Second, it makes it difficult to alter the status quo on a whim — which, in turn, makes it easier for the people to understand the laws under which they live.
This predictability is useful in all areas of civic life. But it is especially beneficial in the financial realm, where stability is imperative. Businesses, investors, workers, and families are all aided enormously by a reliable comprehension of what their tax rates, operating rules, regulatory liabilities, and tariff exposures are likely to be for the foreseeable future. When those variables are determined by Congress, the debates that inform them are transparent and the laws that result are built to endure. When those variables are determined by the president, the debates that inform them are opaque and the law is liable to change radically from day to day. In essence, the case for Congress fulfilling its responsibilities is the same as the case for written law per se: No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king.
In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…
It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.
With markets reeling and the odds of a recession shooting up, Trump made a Wednesday afternoon announcement that he would pause or lower the previously announced BIG, STRONG, NECESSARY reciprocal tariffs he had placed on all countries. China was the only nation that didn’t get the pause/lowering treatment.
It was an about-face of biblical proportions, given that a mere five days had passed since Trump posted on social media: “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
Trump decided to HANG TOUGH on tariffs for a few minutes, then fold
I guess Trump had enough medicine. I guess he decided not to HANG TOUGH.
Trump’s tariff reversal was head-spinning in its swiftness
But don’t you dare say that Trump panicked and took his tariff ball and ran home. Don’t you dare say that!
Trump is the toughest and most no-nonsense president in American history, and there’s no way world leaders will now look at him as a paper tiger who appears to have no clue what he’s doing.
Granted, The New York Times recently reported: “President Trump said on Sunday that he would not reverse tariffs on other nations unless the trade deficits that the United States runs with China, the European Union and other nations disappeared.
“His comments indicated that the steep import taxes that have panicked global businesses and investors would be in place for the long run.”
Turns out “the long run” was not particularly long.
He also said trade negotiations would not happen quickly: “They’ve been bad actors for a long time. And it’s not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.”
Gotcha. It appears Trump negotiated things away in approximately three days without getting anything except a nation with an economy plagued by uncertainty and a world that knows America’s president will fold in an instant.
A week ago, the White House made it sound like Trump would not bend
“These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated.”
“President Trump refuses to let the United States be taken advantage of and believes that tariffs are necessary to ensure fair trade, protect American workers, and reduce the trade deficit ‒ this is an emergency.”
“Reciprocal tariffs are a big part of why Americans voted for President Trump ‒ it was a cornerstone of his campaign from the start. Everyone knew he’d push for them once he got back in office; it’s exactly what he promised, and it’s a key reason he won the election.”
The world now knows, for sure, that President Trump is a chicken
So, to sum it up: Trump’s tariff policies are what voters wanted and they will NEVER CHANGE and this is “an emergency” and the “tariffs will remain in effect” until the threat is resolved and America is in it for “the long run” and we need to “HANG TOUGH” and, oh, by the way, we’re putting a pause on all the harebrained tariffs we announced because we almost cratered the economy with this incalculably ignorant idea.
Don’t you dare say President Trump panicked. Don’t you dare say he chickened out.
That would be too kind, frankly. Because it would assume he had a clue about what he was doing in the first place.
What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with theagency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology divisionresponsible for the website and other electronic access.
Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example,many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.
“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit thatadvocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.
“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.
“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances,managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outageshave occurred during “high volume use of the network.”
“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..
What readers are saying
The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.
Rex Huppke writes opinion columns for USA Today. In his latest column, he muses about Trump’s on balance as most Americans watch their retirement savings melt away.
He has a way of finding the humor in gut-wrenching events. Recently he has been writing about Trump’s demolition of the global economy. Don’t worry if your life savings is shrinking. Trump isn’t worried. Trump promises a future of plenty, someday. Trust him at your own risk.
It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He filed for bankruptcy six times. American banks would not lend him money because he was not credit-worthy. His “Trump University” was required by the courts to pay former students $25 million for defrauding them. People forget that he played a businessman on TV. If they knew that, they might be reluctant to support his decision to impose tariffs on every nation (except Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus.) He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He thinks we should not have any deficits. I heard a law professor explain how crazy that idea is. He said, “I shop at my local grocery store and have spent thousands of dollars there. They don’t buy anything from me. I have a large trade deficit with that store.” Nuts.
Thanks, buddy. As we await whatever fresh hell Monday’s stock market brings and brace for the global response to the ludicrous tariffs you slapped on pretty much everyone, including some random penguins, we’ll do our best to hang tough, comforted by the fact that you and your assorted weirdo billionaires had a lovely weekend.
And I’d almost be able to swallow the maddening absurdity of it all if Trump and his Republican barnacles would just straight up admit their galactic-level hypocrisy.
What if a Democratic president had done this?
None of what Trump is doing with tariffs is a surprise. He told us over and over that he was going to do this. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.
But imagine an America where a Democratic president got fixated on tariffs while clearly not understanding how tariffs work. An America where that Democratic president needlessly triggered a trade war, watched the stock market plummet for two days, then trotted off for a golf weekend during which he profited off people partying at his resort.
Would Fox News preach patience if a Democrat tanked the economy?
In this scenario, Republicans would have already impeached the Democratic president – twice. Pitchfork sales among right-leaning Americans would have skyrocketed, and the Treasury secretary would have had to flee the country. Fox News would have wall-to-wall coverage painting this hypothetical president as a literal demon and demanding he step down because he’s insane or a communist or both.
That would bring a third impeachment from Republicans, and Fox News itself, along with the entire right-wing media ecosystem, would explode with enough ferocity to open a portal to another dimension.
Imagine if Biden did even a fraction of the damage Trump has done.
That hypothetical is 1,000% accurate. You know it. I know it. Republicans know it, and Fox News sure as hell knows it.
If Joe Biden, as president, intentionally murdered the stock market, it would have ended his presidency. Period. Biden, instead, made our economy the envy of the world and Republicans still wanted to end his presidency. So don’t tell me any of what Trump is doing would be even momentarily tolerated if Trump were a Democrat.
This point is not debatable.
I’m sick of people shrugging off GOP hypocrisy – they need to own it
So all I ask, as my 401(k) shrivels like a raisin and rich jerks keep telling me to suck it up, is that Trump and his Republican bootlickers and all the little goobers on Fox News and Newsmax and the Illustrious King Trump Mighty Genius Appreciation Network (I might’ve made that last one up) muster the decency to admit they’re giant freakin’ hypocrites.
I’m talking about apex hypocrites. These are unrivaled practitioners of the dark art of hypocrisy.
And they need to own it.
Better to be poor and honest than poor and a liar, right?
C’mon, tough guys. Show a modicum of courage and tell us what we already know.
What do you have to lose? Your guy is in charge. He’s taking a wrecking ball to America, and there’s little people like me can do other than come up with clever opposition slogans for protest signs.
As the markets crash and the imaginary factories Trump keeps babbling about never come and regular Americans start Googling recipes that can stretch a pack of bologna out for a full week, Republicans need to say it loud and say it proud: “We are total hypocrites and we’re only OK with this mess because a Republican created it!”
You may end up as broke as the rest of us, but at least you’ll be able to tell your pauper children that, in the end, you were honest.
This important article appeared on the blog called “Inside Medicine,” which appears on Substack. It describes the terrible consequences of Elon Musk’s decision to eliminate USAID. Many of us are still wondering how he got the authority to dismantle an agency authorized and funded by Congress. Many of us wonder why the Republicans in Congress ceded their Constitutional powers to this one man.
Musk said merrily that he was “feeding it to the woodchipper.” He strutted onstage at a Trump rally, waving a bejeweled chainsaw to flaunt his power. What a cruel and callous man he is. How little he cares about human life. He tells us we must procreate (I think he means whites), yet he is completely uncaring about the people who will die because he cut off medical services, medicine, and food to those in need.
Inside Medicine is written by Dr. Jeremy Faust, MD, MS, a practicing emergency physician, a public health researcher, writer, spouse, and girl Dad. He blends his frontline clinical experience with original and incisive analyses of emerging data to help readers make sense of complicated and important issues. Thanks for supporting it!
This past week, Dr. Atul Gawande briefed US Senators on the effects that the destruction of USAID is already having. Here are the facts we need to know.
Over the last couple of months, the Inside Medicine community has been fortunate to hear and learn about USAID directly from Dr. Atul Gawande.
Today, I’m sharing the first public release of Dr. Gawande’s latest update provided to members of the United States Senate, remarks that were delivered in person in Washington, D.C. last week.
This is essential and up-to-date information that we all need to know. When people ask what the human costs of this administration’s brazen actions have been, we must respond with facts. Well, here they are…
First, a quick reminder: Inside Medicine is 100% supported by reader upgrades.
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Do you have any idea where things stand with USAID? With everything else going on, I realized that even I needed an update. So, I again reached out to our friend Dr. Atul Gawande, who, until noon on January 20, 2025, ran global health for USAID.
Here’s where things stand: While the Supreme Court ruled last month that the Trump administration still has to pay its bills for work already completed by USAID contractors, that was not exactly a high bar to clear—and even that decision was a narrow 5-4 ruling. Meanwhile, all of the contract terminations and personnel purges have been permitted to go through while the overall issues are litigated. Therefore, the reality is that even if the courts eventually determine that the complete gutting of USAID was not lawful, it will already be a fait accompli—that is, practically impossible to reverse.
So, what of USAID’s crucial work remains, and what has—in Elon Musk’s own words—already been ‘fed to the wood chipper’? In testimony to members of the US Senate this past week, Dr. Gawande summarized what has already been destroyed by callous and brutal DOGE-directed terminations since January. We are only just beginning to be able to estimate the number of deaths these cuts will cause in the coming months and years, but unless something changes, it will surely amount tomillionsof human lives lost. A particularly depressing aspect is that these are senseless deaths (not to mention other suffering from disease and poverty), without reasonable or accurate justifications, as Dr. Gawande explicitly delineated in his presentation.
I’m grateful that Atul has provided his remarks for publication here in Inside Medicine. Please read his words and share them.
Senate Roundtable on The Dangerous Consequences of Funding Cuts to U.S. Global Health Programs.
Tuesday, April 1 from 2:30-3:30PM. U.S. Senate Visitors’ Center, Room 200/201.
Testimony of Atul Gawande, MD, MPH:
I was the Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID during the last administration. It was the best job in medicine most people haven’t heard of. I led 800 health staff in headquarters working alongside more than 1600 staff in 65-plus countries. With less than half the budget of my Boston hospital system – about $9 per U.S. household – they saved lives by the millions and contained disease threats everywhere.
Before my departure on January 20, I briefed this committee about several major opportunities ahead for the next few years. Among them were three breakthroughs. The journal Science had just declared one of them the scientific breakthrough of 2024. American scientists had developed a drug called Lenacapavir that could prevent or treat HIV with a single injection that lasted six months and perhaps even a year. Deploying this game-changer in high-risk communities through PEPFAR could finally bring an end to HIV as a devastating public health threat.
Similarly, USAID launched a trial of a four-dose pill that could prevent tuberculosis in exposed individuals and dramatically reduce cases – while three TB vaccines complete testing.
And USAID was just about to scale up a novel, inexpensive package of existing drugs and treatments that was found to reduce severe hemorrhage after childbirth – the leading cause of maternal death – by 60%.
American companies, nonprofits, and scientists played key roles in these breakthroughs, and they were poised to transform global health over the next five to ten years. The next administration had no reason not to pursue these objectives. Congress had already funded them. There was nothing partisan about them at all.
But instead of saving millions of lives, we got surgery with a chainsaw. The new administration not only shuttered this work, they fired the staff of the entire agency, terminated 86% of its programs, and kneecapped the rest – all against Congressional directives. They dismantled the US’s largest civilian force advancing global stability, peace, economic growth, and survival. And they have done it in a way maximized loss of life and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.
Here are few specific examples of the global health damage:
● Our 50-country network for stronger surveillance to deadly diseases from bird flu to swine fever – gone.
● Our emergency response system that cut response times to global outbreaks from >2 weeks to <48 hours – gone.
● AIDS programs to prevent new cases of HIV in high-risk populations – gone.
● Programs for preventing child and maternal deaths that reached 93 million women and children under 5 in 2023 and added 6 years of life on average – cut 92%.
● Lifesaving tuberculosis programs – cut 56%.
● Lifesaving water and sanitation programs – cut 86%.
● Funding for Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, which was set to vaccinate half a billion children — terminated and, if not restored, will cost 500,000 lives a year and drive higher exposure to measles in the US.
The damage is already devastating. And it is all part of a larger dismantling of America’s world-leading capacity for scientific discovery, health care delivery, and public health that goes well beyond USAID. They are using the same playbook to purge staff and destroy programs in across our entire domestic infrastructure in government, universities, and medical center. And they are inserting political controls on NIH science research, FDA approvals, and CDC guidance.
For the sake of power, they are destroying an enterprise that added more than 30 years to US life expectancy and made America the world leader in medical technology and innovation. We need you in Congress to stop this process. USAID cannot be restored to what it was. But we must salvage what we can of our health, science, and development infrastructure and stop the destruction.
Not so very long ago, when North Carolina had forward-looking governors like Terry Sanford and James Hunt, North Carolina was considered the best state in the South for its public schools and universities.
Since the Tea Party takeover in 2010, the Republican-dominated legislature has done its worst to shed that reputation. Now it strives to be a state that ignores and underfunds public schools while pouring money into substandard charter schools and segregated voucher schools.
Where once North Carolina boasted of having more National Board Certified teachers than any other state, it now treats teachers disrespectfully, underpaying them and driving out some of its best teachers.
North Carolina is in a race to the bottom, hoping to fall behind Mississippi, Alabama, even Florida, in its maltreatment of the teaching profession. The state Republicans don’t want its children to be well-educated.
Just recently, the Republican leaders in the State Senate decided to increase class sizes and to lower the percentage of licensed and certified teachers in its classroom.
Legislation filed Monday by state House Republican education leaders would eliminate class-size requirements in schools and allow school districts to hire unlicensed teachers. The “Public School Operational Relief” bill would change class-size requirements in elementary schools to class-size “recommendations.” House Bill 806 also would only require 50% of the teachers in a public school to have a license — down from the 100% requirement for traditional public schools.
The bill comes at a time when schools are struggling to find enough teachers. A state report released last week showed the teacher turnover rate was 9.88%, meaning nearly one out of every 10 teachers left the profession between March 2023 and March 2024.
If adopted, the bill would have major ramifications for how North Carolina public schools educate their students. Three of the legislation’s primary sponsors are the Republican co-chairs of the House K-12 Education Committee: Rep. David Willis of Union County, Rep. Brian Biggs of Randolph County and Rep. Tricia Cotham of Mecklenburg County. The bill’s fourth primary sponsor is Rep. Heather Rhyne, a Lincoln County Republican and House Majority Freshman Leader.
Eliminating school class-size requirements Under state law, class sizes are capped in K-3 class sizes with no limits for other grade levels. Charter schools are exempt from the class-size limits. State GOP lawmakers lowered K-3 class size limits in 2017, saying it would help improve instruction.
But school districts, such as Wake County, have complained it’s led to them reassigning students and putting enrollment caps at some elementary schools.
Currently, the state funds one teacher for every 18 students in kindergarten, 16 students in first grade and 17 students in second and third grades. Individual classrooms are allowed to go three students above that number. The bill would make K-3 the same as grades 4-12, with class size limits being recommendations only.
Lowering the number of licensed teachers under current law, school districts are required to have all their teachers be licensed. This includes people who have received temporary licenses allowing them to teach while they meet their training requirements.
Nearly half of all the new teachers in North Carolina enter classrooms under alternative licensure routes, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. Charter schools are only required under state law to have 50% of their teachers be licensed. The new bill would have all public schools — charter schools and traditional public schools — use the 50% teacher licensure requirement in each school.
While the bill says school districts can hire unlicensed teachers, it says you’d need to be a college graduate to teach the core subject areas of mathematics, science, social studies, and language arts.…
The legislation could run afoul of a 2022 N.C. Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to transfer funds to public schools to help provide every student with a sound, basic education and access to highly qualified teachers. But a pending ruling by the Supreme Court could throw out the 2022 ruling in the Leandro case.
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