Jonathan P. Baird

Last fall, when I was traveling in South Carolina, my friend Robin, who is a civil rights attorney, told me about Robert Smalls and showed me a plaque in his honor in Charleston. I have to admit I had barely heard of him. In all my years of education and in my own independent reading, his name was never mentioned.

Smalls grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was born a slave in 1839. His situation was unusual. His owners, the McKee family, made him what was called a ‘quasi-slave’. He was raised as if he was a rich white boy even though he could be beaten or sold off at any time. The McKee family treated Robert almost like a son.

As a young man, Robert asked to buy his freedom but the McKees did not respond well. They tried to break Robert’s spirit by exposing him to slavery’s dark side but that backfired. Robert’s mother and Henry McKee, the son of the patriarch, decided on a different plan to address Robert’s rebellious tendencies. McKee rented him out for work in Charleston, a plan that profited McKee who kept nine-tenths of the money earned.

That led to Robert working a variety of jobs as a laborer. One job was as a dockworker and then a sailor for the Confederate Navy. The Civil War was already underway. Robert was hired for the lowest position on a ship as a deckhand but he was a quick study and soon rose to become one of the top ranked black sailors on his ship, the C.S.S. Planter. He got trained as a helmsman.

In that role, he became an expert on the ins and outs of Charleston harbor. The Captain of the Planter taught Robert everything he needed to know about running a boat. Robert also knew the location of all the mines placed in the harbor that were meant to blow up Union ships as he was one of those responsible for placing the mines.

Charleston had played a critical role as the most active North American port in the slave trade. Nearly half the captives forced from Africa to the mainland United States arrived through Charleston. By 1860, an estimated 4 million people were being held in bondage.

During those years around the start of the Civil War, Smalls got married and he went to his wife’s owner to see if he could purchase her freedom. The price was $800, which was an almost impossible sum for someone in Smalls’ position. The financial impossibility of buying his wife’s freedom (along with the possibility that his wife could conceivably be sold along with his two small children) led Smalls to think more seriously about escape.

Smalls hatched a plan. Over a period of months he waited for the right time. He needed the Captain and the other white members of the crew to be off the ship (which was not supposed to happen). The opportunity arose on May 13, 1862. Smalls and a small crew of black sailors slipped their cotton steamer off the dock in the middle of the night. They picked up family members at a rendez-vous spot and then they carefully navigated through Charleston harbor.

Smalls even got the Captain’s broad-rimmed hat to wear which would be recognized by those defending the harbor. He counted on the dark to aid his ruse. If the Confederates realized it was a ship commandeered by slaves, all on board would have very likely been tortured and executed. It was no easy feat to get through the heavily fortified harbor. Smalls had to ring a secret bell code and navigate through five check points. The Union Navy had blockaded Confederate ports including Charleston and Smalls hoped to reach the Union ships that were outside the harbor.

When the Union officers saw the Planter, they almost fired on it. If hit, the ship would have been a powder keg since it was heavily armed. There was 200 rounds of ammunition, four cannons, a 32 pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer and 4 other guns on board. However, Smalls displayed a white flag and that saved the day. The Confederates realized what was happening too late. They fired on the Planter but the ship was out of range. Smalls’ escape meant an unexpected weapons bonanza for the Union. It was the largest seizure of weapons in the entire war.

The news of the escape to freedom went viral nationally. Smalls became an instant hero. The U.S. Congress passed a private bill authorizing the Navy to appraise the value of the Planter and they awarded Smalls and his crew a monetary award. Smalls received $1500, a significant sum in those days. It was enough to allow him to purchase his former owner’s house after the war. The Confederacy was so freaked out by Smalls’ audacity, they put a $4000 bounty on his head.

President Lincoln was extremely impressed by Smalls’ actions. He invited him to meet at the White House. Smalls had been lobbying Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, to begin enlisting Black soldiers. Lincoln subsequently made that hugely consequential decision which dramatically advanced the Union’s cause. It is likely that Smalls’ exemplary action persuaded Lincoln to make that decision.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the introduction of Black troops to the Union side. The effect was tide-changing. Nearly 200,000 Black men, many previously enslaved, served in the Union Army and Navy. The new troop addition gave the Union a crucial manpower advantage while depleting the Confederate labor force. It also transformed the entire goal of the civil war. The war became not just about preserving the Union. It became a war of liberation from slavery. The introduction of Black troops was a devastating psychological blow to the already battered Confederacy.

Smalls fought on the Union side in 17 military actions and became the first African American Captain in the United States Navy. He personally shattered any notion of Black inferiority and inspired millions. He had immense popularity after the war and he served in the South Carolina assembly and then served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was a founding member of the South Carolina Republican Party. In 1895 he fought tooth and nail against Jim Crow in the South Carolina Constitutional Convention that stripped Black people of their voting rights again.

In Smalls’ lifetime, Black people had already been excluded from democracy for 200 years. He said:

“My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”

Smalls’ story has never reached a large mass audience even though his actions sent a huge shock wave across the country during the Civil War. He may be the least well-known individual whose actions had the most consequential effect on the entire Civil War.

For the U.S. Supreme Court majority, poor quality decisions are the new normal. They draft edicts on major issues – not opinions. Such is the case with their new shadow docket decision on racial profiling. They give the okay to racial profiling, a practice previously considered unconstitutional and they don’t bother to explain their reasons. It is not clear how such an edict can, in any way, be precedential.

In the case of Noem v Vasquez Perdomo, the Court ruled to halt a lower court order that had found certain criteria used by federal immigration agents conducting raids violated the Fourth Amendment. That foundational amendment protects all persons (not just citizens) against search and seizures without reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion has typically required specific individualized articulable facts.

The lower court had prohibited ICE agents in California from stopping or arresting based on four factors: apparent ethnicity; whether they spoke Spanish or had an accent; whether they were in a certain location where immigrants may gather; or if they worked a job considered common to undocumented immigrants.

Now the Supreme Court majority offers a free pass on racially profiling Latinos. They are allowing unidentified men in masks with guns to stop Latinos based on the fact they are Latino. Nothing could be more antithetical to the Fourth Amendment requirement that there be some individualized basis for a stop beyond how you look or talk.

This is the same court that explicitly said race could never be considered in college admissions but, in this circumstance, it is fine. They failed to comment on the fact they just said race can’t be considered across-the-board in voting rights and education. As noted, the Court majority didn’t explain their reasoning. The Supreme Court has demonstrated an increasing tendency to make important rulings with no reasoning or explanation. They appear to have forgotten that their legitimacy depends on the quality of the explanation they offer when deciding.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had unanimously affirmed the District Court decision in Vasquez Perdomo with detailed reasoning. The Supreme Court gave no deference to those opinions. While their order is not a final decision on the merits it doesn’t bode well for any final decision. It is hard to imagine they would have issued their order if there were not six votes supporting racial profiling.

The only thing offered by the Court majority is a concurrence signed only by Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe he wrote it because the Court has received so much flak about the shadow docket. Justice Kavanaugh wrote:

“The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs, who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants, and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”

Reading that, I did wonder about the out-of -touch world Kavanaugh inhabits. His wealthy, preppy, country club roots were showing. Some of the plaintiffs in this case were U.S. citizens. Some of their stops have been violent and they have not been promptly let go. People have been detained for extended periods. Kavanaugh is in an ivory tower, divorced from reality.

There was an extensive record from the lower federal court showing both the violence of ICE and the fact that Latino-looking U.S. citizens have been wrongly held and detained for far more than “brief” stops but Kavanaugh overlooked the fact-finding. The truth is that people who have attempted to show ICE agents proof of citizenship have been getting harassed and detained. Only in Kavanaugh’s mind are they promptly let go. The reality is an authoritarian goon squad manhandling and brutalizing people and flying them to faraway places.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, along with Justices Kagan and Jackson, disagreed vehemently with the Vasquez Perdomo majority. Justice Sotomayor wrote:

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

What has become common is large roving patrols of unidentified, masked federal agents dressed in SWAT clothing, heavily armed with weapons displayed, swarming people of color and taking them to places unknown and not easily traceable. I would submit this is not the practice of a democratic society. Being stopped for looking Latino or speaking Spanish doesn’t square with the Fourth Amendment requirement that a police stop requires specific articulable facts.

This is too reminiscent of the practice of authoritarian societies. In 1930’s Germany, Jews were required to carry papers and wear a yellow star that identified them as Jewish. Now, in America, many Latinos are afraid to go outside unless they carry their immigration papers. Being able to move freely without government interference is part of what separates a free society from a police state.

The Trump regime is engaged in an unprecedented power grab. The Supreme Court majority is failing the American public by facilitating that power grab. They almost always give Trump his way no matter how outrageous the case. Instead of putting life into our Fourth Amendment, they are bleeding it while green lighting a racist practice.

This is another shameful moment for the Supreme Court. The Noem v Vasquez Perdomo decision hasn’t gotten the publicity it deserves. It is in the disgraceful tradition of worst Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scott, Korematsu and the Trump immunity decision.

The nasty underside of the Trump immigration agenda keeps gaining visibility. Deporting as many as possible as quickly as possible while disappearing due process is the name of the game. Smearing and demonizing those who are caught in the ICE machinery is also part of the game plan. The Trump regime always say they are deporting “the worst of the worst” but that is a big lie. The deported could be your co-workers, a graduate student or some unlucky person with a brown skin.

While Americans have been told these mass deportations will make America great, I would submit the erosion of due process is a grave danger for all of our rights. Taking away rights from a disfavored group creates precedent for taking away rights from everyone else.

With so many court decisions playing out, it can be difficult to sort out which ones are most consequential. Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court decided one case on its unexplained shadow docket that deserves attention. In the case of D.V.D. v Department of Homeland Security, the Supreme Court ruled the government can deport non-citizens to third countries without prior notice or an opportunity to challenge that deportation.

A lower court had required 15 day notice before deporting non-citizens to countries other than their country of origin but, without rationale, the Supreme Court overturned the order. The Court majority didn’t appear to have a problem with deporting non-citizens to places they have never lived and to places where the deported person doesn’t speak the language or have any ties.

No-notice deportations raise the risk of sending non-citizens to countries where they are likely to be tortured or killed. The reason the 15 day notice matters is that it allows the opportunity to seek counsel and to have a hearing where evidence can be presented about the dangerous situation they may face if deported.

At first glance, I could not believe the Supreme Court was going along with allowing deportations to a third country. It didn’t seem right. You might think otherwise but the due process requirement applies to all persons regardless of immigration status. It is a constitutional right.

There is also the matter of international law. The principle of non-refoulement prohibits deporting people to unsafe third countries where they could face persecution or torture. The principle especially comes into play when migrants are sent to countries known for violence, instability and human rights abuses..

These issues have been raised in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. The government recently threatened Abrego Garcia with deportation to Uganda, a country with which he has no association. Now they say it will be Eswatini, a tiny African nation formerly known as Swaziland. Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. in 2011. He is the husband of a U.S. citizen and father of a U.S.-born child and he was the guy who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in disregard of an immigration judge’s order that he not be removed.

The Supreme Court ruled he was deported illegally and said the federal government had to facilitate his return. Although they said they could not do it, the feds did bring him back but they immediately re-arrested him on human smuggling charges related to a 2022 traffic stop.

Because Abrego Garcia stood up and exercised his constitutional rights, he became the monster poster boy of the Trump regime. With no evidence, Trump, Vance, Miller, Bondi and Noem have all relentlessly tagged him as a “violent terrorist”. They have poisoned the water around Abrego Garcia’s case by slandering him so much. What we have witnessed is a prototype in creating a demon in the public mind.

The threat to deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda (and now Eswatini) came in the context of a plea deal the government offered. They said he could be ultimately deported to Costa Rica if he pled guilty and served jail time on the human smuggling charge.

That charge appears to be a fraud manufactured by prosecutors. No case was ever brought up in 2022. Now, to make their human smuggling case, the government uses informants who they offer deals on their own criminal or immigration charges in exchange for desired testimony. The case could not smell more.

Abrego Garcia has not accepted the plea deal and a federal court judge has ruled that he cannot be deported from the U.S. before his trial in October. He also has filed an asylum claim. You would never know that Abrego Garcia originally left El Salvador to escape gangs.

No one outside the Department of Justice knows why the Trump regime picked Uganda or Eswatini for Abrego Garcia. It is a calculated act of cruelty meant to harm. Sending someone to an unknown place where they don’t even speak the language is bad. Whether that place is dangerous is at least an open question but the Trump regime acts like concern about torture or persecution is a joke.

During the Great Depression and in the years after World War 2, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the U.S. because they were suspected of being Mexican. In that period, Mexicans were blamed for taking American jobs and public resources. It turned out that over one million were American citizens who were wrongly deported.

With deportations, we are seeing a very similar thing happen again.

The human rights crimes of the Israeli state keep accumulating. As an independent American Jewish observer, I have watched with horror. What is the worst? Is it the murder of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians who happened to live in Gaza? Is it the calculated starvation of a generation of Palestinian children? Is it the laying waste to the entire civilizational infrastructure of that region to make it uninhabitable?

Then there is the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists who are trying to get the story out. Is it that? Or is it the fanatical actions of West Bank settlers who use violence and thievery to murder and steal land that doesn’t belong to them while the Israeli authorities look the other way? It is hard to keep up.

Even so mainstream a writer as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has written that Israel is making itself a pariah state. He writes that Israel is committing suicide, homicide, and fratricide. By the depraved actions of the Netanyahu government, Israel has entirely squandered the sympathy it received (and deserved) after the October 7 attacks.

But today I am not interested in categorizing whether Israel’s actions should be classified as genocide or ethnic cleansing. More interesting is how and why Israel transformed from a country in the 1960’s and 1970’s with a mildly left, Labor Party-led government to a country ruled by a coalition of far right extremists and ultra-nationalists.

The leaders of major American Jewish organizations want to uncritically defend Israel and pretend everything is the same as it was 50 years ago but it clearly is not. They indulge in willful blindness.

While no one person can entirely explain this massive shift, I believe that one key actor in this change was Meir Kahane. He was assassinated in 1990 but I think his influence has been highly consequential.

The veteran Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, has described what has ensued since the October 7 attacks as the country’s first Kahanist war. Levy wrote:

“Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist population-transferist far right. The spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.”

The ideology of Netanyahu’s governing coalition is an amalgam of ultra-nationalism, hyper-Orthodox fundamentalism and religious Zionist messianism. It is a Jewish supremacist vision rooted in the dehumanization of Palestinians, mirroring Kahane’s views. Kahane believed that Jewish lives were more valuable than all others.

Kahane was born in the United States in 1932. From early on, he claimed violence was a Jewish value. He was a founder of the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and the JDL carried out many acts of vandalism, shootings and bombings. In that era, Kahane was focused on the struggles of Soviet Jewry.

He was arrested and charged with a number of violent offenses but managed to evade jail time. Like his father, Kahane became a rabbi. While he had a sanctimonious exterior, he had a secret double life as a swindler and a womanizer. He maintained the image of a family man with a wife living in Queens but he had another side. He abandoned Estelle Evans, a non-Jewish girl friend, two days before they were supposed to get married. She jumped to her death from the Queensboro Bridge because he fooled and dumped her.

Kahane left the United States in the early 1970’s because things were getting too hot for him with the JDL crime spree. When he arrived in Israel he realized that anti-Arab racism would be the path he could use to shock, gain attention and mobilize followers. He told Israelis “I say what you think”. He led his cadre of followers on hate marches through East Jerusalem and other Palestinian-majority towns chanting “Death to Arabs”.

He founded a political party, Kach, which made ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza its central demand. For Kahane, ethnic cleansing was a religious imperative. For a long time Kach was irrelevant but in 1984 Kach won a seat in the Knesset. The party was actually banned in the 1988 election and the political establishment tried to cordon them.

It remained on the political fringe for almost 25 years but Kahane’s use of vulgar anti-Arab racism grabbed Israeli media attention. He wanted a totalist Jewish ethnostate. He called for banning marriages between Jews and Arabs and he favored criminalizing sex between Jews and gentiles. He was a sensationalist in all the worst ways.

As mentioned, Kahane was shot and murdered in 1990 in New York but his persistence had created a band of fanatical loyalists. Among them was Baruch Goldstein who in 1994 ruthlessly shot and murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in Hebron. Yigal Amir, the 1995 assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was also inspired by Kahane and Goldstein.

Subsequent events, particularly the second intifada, which lasted from 2000-2005, changed the fortunes of the Israeli far right movement. Unlike the first intifada which was largely about mass protest, in the second intifada, suicide bombings and violence were far more prominent. The bloody tactics both repulsed Israelis and opened far more to a Kahanist perspective. Kahanism has been like an infectious disease spreading through the population.

Kahane’s disciples made it their business to oppose any peace deal or two state solution. They remain dedicated to the goals of annexing the West Bank and Gaza and expelling all Palestinians from there. Kahanists want to replace the secular state with a theocracy.

Meir Ettinger, one of Kahane’s 37 grandchildren, is a leader of the Hilltop Youth, a group of young West Bank settlers who have terrorized Palestinians, carrying out violent physical assaults, establishing illegal outposts and torching crops.

When Bibi Netanyahu formed his coalition with the far right in 2022, he boosted leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir is a graduate of the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, a seminary Kahane established. He has hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer, in his living room.

Kahane exemplifies the danger of a charismatic demagogue. When conditions changed, his message resonated widely. No doubt there are many, many Israels who were and are disgusted by Kahane and his acolytes but they are now in the background. Kahane’s legacy is relentless bellicosity, disregard for Palestinian life, and widespread acceptance of anti-Arab racism among Israelis.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, demonstrators, with ropes and chains, pulled down the statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike. It had been the only outdoor statue of a Confederate military leader in Washington D.C. For decades the statue had been controversial with many calling for its removal. The D.C. Council sought its removal in 1992 and Mayor Muriel Bowser had reached an agreement with congressional leaders in 2017 for that result. No date had been agreed to when the statue was dragged down.

It is revealing that the Trump regime wanted Gen. Pike’s statue re-installed. Pike had a checkered, less than honorable career. He was born in Boston in 1809 but left Massachusetts in 1831 to move to Arkansas. Pike was a lawyer and he played a role for the Confederacy in negotiating treaties with some Native American tribes. The Confederacy commissioned Pike a brigadier general in their army in August 1861. He was assigned to the Department of Indian Territory but his soldiers were accused of atrocities and he was accused of military incompetence. He had to resign from the Confederate Army in disgrace.

It is disputed whether Pike was a member of the Ku Klux Klan but his Klan sympathies are not historically disputed. In his writings Pike held racist views and advocated against Black suffrage. He believed white people should solely govern the country.

Pike thought slavery was a necessary evil and claimed slaves wouldn’t be able to hold any other job. He thought slaves were well treated by their masters. He admitted to owning his own slave. In 1858, he had joined with eleven others in signing a circular that encouraged people of Arkansas to expel free Blacks from the state.

This is the person the Trump regime wants to honor with a statue re-installation in Washington D.C. They are, apparently, not big on vetting. I was going to note that at least he wasn’t Grand Dragon of the Klan but there are historians who believe he was the Arkansas Grand Dragon.

Who a nation chooses to commemorate signifies who it deems essential to remember. The National Park Service is planning the Gen. Pike re-installation but this enterprise provides psychological sustenance and succor to white supremacists only. Not only does Gen. Pike not deserve any honor but it must never be forgotten that Confederates like Pike were traitors, not freedom fighters. They had sworn loyalty to the United States but then betrayed that loyalty.

The re-installation of the Gen. Pike statue is part of a propaganda campaign to launder slavery. Donald Trump just said the Smithsonian focused too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America.

I would submit that America has never come to grips with how evil slavery was and white supremacists have spent enormous energy constructing a false narrative in which they present themselves as victims fighting to preserve state’s rights.

The history of slavery remains poorly understood. Under the slave system, the South was a white supremacist stronghold with a deeply entrenched racial hierarchy which was designed to perpetuate racial inequality. That system was based on violence and control by any means necessary.

After a brief respite during Reconstruction, violence, lynchings and massacres were used to maintain white dominance. The South defended what it saw as its way of life. That way of life systematically excluded, disenfranchised, disempowered and marginalized black people.

Trump’s ambition is to rewrite America’s official history to reflect a glorified narrative. That means scrubbing out slavery. The Trump ideal picture of America is white wealthy men being financially successful. His DEI campaign is about censoring and disappearing minorities and women. He wants a narrative of progress with a happy ending.

In contrast to our American failure to confront slavery and racism is the German denazification effort. There are no monuments celebrating Nazis left in Germany. You will not find any Hitler statues there.

In her book, Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman describes the multi-pronged German effort to acknowledge its crimes. In addition to a Holocaust Memorial, there are decentralized stumbling stones (small brass plaques recording the names and dates of birth and deportation of Jews, gays, Sinti and Roma who lived in the houses before which they stand). Over 107,000 stumbling stones have been laid across Europe in more than 30 European countries. They commemorate victims of Nazi terror and they constitute the largest decentralized monument in the world.

Bryan Stevenson has suggested that Southern buildings be renamed after white abolitionists and anti-lynching activists. That is far preferable to honoring slavery defenders like Gen. Pike. Taking down Pike’s statue was the right thing to do. His statue could be placed in an obscure museum. That is not erasing him. It is placing him in a well-earned location. He doesn’t deserve the honor of being remembered with a public monument.

What is most shocking about the Gen. Pike statue re-installation is the absence of shame. The project is not an innocent remembering of a benign past. Slavery is not something to recall with pride. Pike is at best an embarrassment and at worst an utter humiliation.

The Trump regime is attempting nothing less than the burial of actual history. They stand in the long historical tradition of white supremacists who have ruthlessly opposed the black vote by gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Just as happened after Reconstruction, the new redistricting is a form of racial engineering to dilute Black and Latino voting strength. Republicans are cracking and packing Black and Latino neighborhoods to reduce minority voting power. With a greatly weakened Voting Rights Act, they may well be able to get away with it.

This is what the lack of shame will get you.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
And their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

In the last seven months, conventional thinking about American politics has been tested and it has proven inadequate to describe what is going on. All the cliches about three co-equal branches of government and checks and balances have not come close to describing and naming the Trump power drive. He has hollowed out federal agencies and largely gotten the okay from the U.S. Supreme Court while turning law enforcement into his private army.

Most alarming has been his calling out the National Guard first in Los Angeles and now in Washington DC. Trump said Washington DC has been overtaken by “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people”. Stephen Miller, his aide, said “DC was more violent than Baghdad”.

These allegations are entirely false, even ridiculous. According to the Justice Department’s own data from the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington DC recorded its lowest crime rates in over 30 years with a 20% decrease in total violent crimes compared to the previous year.

In both Los Angeles and Washington DC we have seen military troops meandering around cities with no mission. In his first term we saw him do something similar in Portland Oregon. Masked agents in unidentified vehicles pulled people off the street. Trump’s calling the troops out is a stunt, an attention-grabber and an obvious effort to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal but he is threatening to repeat this in other cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.

The point is partly about intimidation but it is also about laying the groundwork for more and worse. Trump is testing the American public to see if we will accept authoritarian rule. How the public reacts may well influence his next moves. If reaction is weak in his eyes, ratcheting up both the authoritarianism and his gangsterism is likely. He is using a manufactured crisis to justify a crackdown, the erosion of civil liberties and increased power for the Executive branch.

Trump is following a well-established authoritarian playbook of power consolidation. Becoming a dictator requires neutralization and submission of competing power centers. Trump had tried unsuccessfully to overturn an election and violently halt the counting of electoral votes. Now he is seeking to chip away at all institutional, legal and political constraints on his power. Too many universities, law firms, media companies and legislators have voluntarily capitulated with minimal fight back. As was clear at his inauguration, the billionaires are on board.

Neither the creation of a network of concentration camps nor the fact that thousands of immigrants are being wrongfully detained in horrible conditions without due process have roused enough Americans. It is summer and people prefer distraction and vacation (if they can get one) before fall reality hits.

What has to be a major concern is Trump using the bogus excuse of an invasion, a rebellion or a crime wave to institute martial law. He has raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That law could allow the use of active-duty military personnel to perform law enforcement duties inside the U.S.. Of course, there is no rebellion or invasion so the justification is entirely lacking.

Still we are talking about someone who spins webs of disinformation and facts that aren’t happening. Whatever he says, most of his followers will believe him.

The law is not on Trump’s side. The Posse Comitatus Act criminalizes the use of federal armed forces to conduct civilian law enforcement. The military mission of officers and soldiers is to defend the country against foreign enemies, not be a cop on the beat. There is a trial in California going on now where the state of California is raising the Posse Comitatus Act as grounds for why Trump’s actions are illegal.

California is also correctly arguing that Trump is violating the Tenth Amendment which reserves to the states all powers not expressly given to the federal government. Policing is typically a use of state and local power. Trump has shown no regard for state sovereignty.

This case will land at the U.S. Supreme Court like so many other Trump initiatives and it is impossible to have confidence in the majority of that entity. If Trump does declare a national emergency and martial law, I would expect him to suspend the Constitution.

At that point, all bets are off. Authoritarian leaders do not typically want to give up power. In so many countries like Russia and Turkey, they have proven difficult to dislodge. They often ignore legal limits on terms of office and find a way around that. Trump has joked about staying on. Just the profitability and his monetizing the presidency are factors that might lead him to want to stay on. He has plenty of other reasons too like possible prosecution for his own corruption. If he has suspended the Constitution, the 22nd Amendment which forbids more than two terms would carry no weight.

Among things Trump does care about, retribution would appear to matter and questions abound about how aggressively he would pursue vengeance. Would he jail Obama or Hillary Clinton or others like Jack Smith? Would he go after a much wider swath of opponents like fascists in other regimes have done? It is hard to know what goes on in that mind. We know he cares about winning the Nobel Peace Prize and getting his head on Mt Rushmore but what else is not clear.

In his first term, he famously wanted the military to shoot protesters in the leg after the George Floyd protests but he was stopped by sensible advisors like Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. With advisors like Pete Hegseth, Trump in 2025 might take a far more aggressive approach.

I fear that Trump is looking for his Reichstag fire moment where a protest or event he can dress up will give him a green light to demolish the democracy that remains. With such an excuse, he would cancel mid-term elections and possibly any future elections. He would say there is a national emergency of some kind no matter how incongruous that was.

The MAGA movement has multiple components including far right extremists, evangelical Christians and tech billionaires. All would stand behind an authoritarian takeover that marginalizes people of color, subjugates women and forces gay people back in the closet. Some evangelical Christians are currently advocating repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment which gave women the right to vote.

Sugarcoating and pretending there is no authoritarian threat could not be more dangerous. There has never been a greater need for American patriots who will stand up to fascism and fight back.

As a student of American history, I believe there are some very important heroes who have never received the acknowledgement and acclaim they deserve. Charles Sumner from Massachusetts is one of those heroes. If I was guessing I would estimate 95 out of 100 Americans have never heard of Sumner. It appears to be the fate of many 19th century protagonists, no matter how outstanding. They were famous long ago.

Along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Charles Sumner led the struggle for abolition of slavery in the United States. Both as a lawyer and as a U.S. Senator from 1852 to his death in 1874, Sumner steadfastly fought the Slave Power. His story is beautifully told in The Great Abolitionist, a 2024 biography by the historian Stephen Puleo.

Sumner was an unlikely hero. At the same time as he was ferociously principled, he was painfully shy, almost geeky. He was wealthy, intellectual and pretentious but his oratorical skills and his bravery were undeniable. He hung out with a high-powered literary crowd that included his best friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He experienced some awful tragedies in his life. At age 33, his sister, Mary, who was 22, died. They were very close and that death rocked him to his core. He married at age 55 to a much younger, beautiful woman. It didn’t end well. To call it disastrous would be entirely accurate.

Most historically well-known, Sumner was the victim of a vicious assault on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 22, 1856 by a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks. With a cane of gutta-percha, he repeatedly beat Sumner over the head, nearly killing him.

Sumner survived but it took him over three years to recover. The effects of the traumatic brain injury were life long. It’s likely as Puleo surmises that Sumner also had PTSD. For years he suffered severe headaches when he would re-enter the Senate. His condition improved whenever he left the Senate floor.

Brooks attacked Sumner because of an anti-slavery speech he made called “The Crime Against Kansas”. Brooks considered the speech a libel. In his speech, Sumner had singled out Brooks’ cousin Senator Andrew Butler for vicious criticism. Sumner was the most outspoken anti-slavery advocate in the Senate and that was true for Sumner’s entire tenure as a senator.

As Puleo wrote, from the Brooks perspective, “Sumner represented a dangerous group of Radical Republicans who threatened the South, its sense of order and its cherished institutions”.

Even before he became a U.S. Senator, Sumner had distinguished himself. 105 years before the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education which was decided in 1954, Sumner and an African American lawyer Robert Morris litigated Roberts v City of Boston. In that case, the plaintiffs argued against segregated schools.

It is not an exaggeration to say that in Brown, Thurgood Marshall made the same argument Sumner made in Roberts. Sumner lost then but the argument that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal did eventually win both in Brown and in the state of Massachusetts. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature forbade racial discrimination in schools, something that proved extremely difficult to prevent in practice.

To appreciate the greatness of Sumner, you have to recognize the minority status of abolitionism in the 1840’s. Abolitionists were not just hated – they were an absolutely despised fringe. Abolitionists were subject to physical assault, mob attacks and social ostracism. It was not until the mid-1850’s that the tide turned. The assault on Sumner elicited much sympathy and propelled the abolitionist movement. He became a revered figure in the North while becoming a pariah in the South.

Sumner had made his first major anti-slavery speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1845. He spoke against the admission of Texas into the nation as a slave-holding state. He turned on the ruling class of his time, including his own world of Boston high society, and he excoriated their accommodation with slavery. He spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Puleo wrote that Sumner was relentless in his view that American slavery was a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the laws of God.

When Abraham Lincoln became President, Sumner remained a close friend but he always pushed Lincoln toward the goals of equality and total emancipation for black people. Before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner consistently pressured Lincoln to free the slaves and to allow them to serve in the Union army. He did not want to re-admit the Confederate states to the Union after the Civil War unless they agreed to universal suffrage.

Sumner was way ahead of his time. Very ambitiously, he had wanted to re-make the South. He anticipated the voting rights problems which have bedeviled the Southern states since Reconstruction. Before he died, he worked on the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which President Ulysses Grant signed. The law forbade discrimination in public accommodations. In 1883, the Supreme Court largely reversed it but Sumner was correct in seeing the problem.

Sumner was integrally involved in passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery. He wanted it to be stronger than the version that passed. Congress repealed all fugitive slave acts, allowed “colored ” persons admission into railroad carriages and allowed “colored ” testimony in United States courts. Sumner had introduced all those measures. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Freedmens’ Bureau.

When Sumner died in 1874, his coffin was placed in the center of the Capitol rotunda and many thousands came to pay their respects. It was the first time in American history a senator was so honored. What was unique about Sumner was that he more resembled a revolutionary intellectual than a party politician.

With voting rights so threatened now and with an inert Congress, we could so use more brave and principled legislators like Charles Sumner.