It looks like we’re the rebels now

How do we make sense of what, to a morally sane person caught up in a fascist movement, is incomprehensible? As my friend Ken said in a long phone call this morning (he lives in Scotland), “There is something fundamentally sick about America.”

I very much agree. And yet, as morally sane people who try to understand the world rather than fall for propaganda, we’ve got to figure out how to deal with this new situation in which we find ourselves.

Before our phone call, we each had made some notes on our first attempts to grapple with the reality of Trump regaining power through the democratic process. Trump didn’t steal this election. It appears that he even won the popular vote this time, as opposed to regaining power because of the anti-democratic quirks of the Electoral College.

Here are the six points with which I started our conversation:

1. Self care is extremely important right now. In the comments on Heather Cox Richardson’s post last night as votes were being counted, someone said that she couldn’t bear to face the morning and that she had decided to “check out.” It’s unlikely that she’s the only person feeling that level of despair.

2. Mutual support is extremely important right now. We must remind ourselves that we’re all in this together, and that we’re not a tiny minority. As the vote stands at the moment, 66,254,540 people voted against Trump. That’s no small number for organized resistance.

3. Our future is now highly unpredictable. We don’t yet know what Trump and the Republican Party will do with the enormous amount of power that they now have. We know what they have said they will do. The chaos variable is much higher now. Our urge for self-care may tempt us to tune out and give up. That’s just what they want.

4. Why did I not expect this? The explanation that is kindest to myself, and no doubt to millions of others, is that such a fundamental sickness on this scale is incomprehensible to those I don’t hesitate to call decent human beings, as opposed to those who just voted away their right to be called decent human beings.

5. Whom can we trust in a sea of propaganda? I already had written off cable as not to be trusted. I already was increasingly distrustful of the two organizations at the apex of our media — the New York Times and the Washington Post. It appears that the Washington Post, for example (or at least the Post’s billionaire owner), pre-capitulated to Trump by deciding not to endorse anyone. Trump hates “the liberal media.” The media are going to be under extreme pressure, and I don’t think they have the power or even the smarts to put up much resistance, even if their billionaire owners would allow it.

6. Whose are the voices that will help lead us out of this? I am thinking of Winston Churchill’s voice on the radio. For any kind of effective resistance, the 66,254,540 people who voted against Trump now need leadership, coordinated action, and — hope.

Here are some of Ken’s thoughts from our conversation this morning. For the record, he is Ken Ilgunas, author of three beautiful books and someone whose articles and commentaries have been published in many places including the New York Times. He has a Substack newsletter, and he recently started a podcast.

Ken’s thoughts

1. We are the rebels now. It is more fun to be part of the rebel alliance rather than the empire.

2. There is a possibility now for democratic reform. Maybe every democracy, like every alcoholic, needs a rock bottom.

3. I can’t comprehend my own country. I despair of the incomprehensibility. (We both used the word incomprehensible to describe our reactions to the news.)

4. There was no democratic process for the Harris/Walz ticket. Harris chose Walz, and Harris was merely the default replacement after Biden withdrew. Voters did not have the choices they would have had, if, say, Biden had decided much earlier not to run again and if there had been a fresh Democratic primary for choosing who would succeed Biden.

5. I am annoyed with progressive culture; for example, for its inability to have a real conversation about immigration.

6. This opens a new pathway to my Liberal Warrior book proposal.

Liberal Warrior

Ken has been shopping a book proposal with the title Liberal Warrior, a book that will criticize the progressive left for its cultural denigration of men (men, he believes, are not “hegemonic,” but have been “annoyed to the right.”) And it calls for liberals to re-embrace aspects of traditional masculinity (think U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and MLK Jr.). In other words: Democrats and progressives need male voters, values, and activists.

The F-word

Ken and I agree (as, I think, do historians of fascism) that Trump is a fascist and that he used fascist methods and fascist rhetoric to gain political power. But it also remains to be seen whether the United States will become a full-on fascist country under Trump. All we can do is pay close attention to what he does as opposed to what he threatens to do. If Trump actually does follow through on Project 2025, and with Elon Musk’s plutocratic agenda, and with the agendas of depraved MAGA heavyweights such as Stephen Miller, that surely would quality as fascism — making the Department of Justice and the FBI agents of Trump’s agenda, drastically cutting corporate taxes and cutting the federal budget by trillions of dollars, attacking social services such as Medicaid and probably attempting to privatize Social Security and Medicare, gutting if not outright eliminating the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, deporting millions of people, using the law to diminish individual freedoms and impose so-called Christian values, using government power to excuse racism and sexism, and keeping the people enraged, drunk on propaganda, and at each other’s throats. Do the American people even understand what they just voted for?

Will the deplorables get the shaft?

Something like 45 million people now benefit from Obamacare and the expansion of Medicaid. Many millions of those people voted for Trump. If they lose those benefits, how will they react? If Trump does indeed impose huge tariffs on Chinese imports, how will Walmart and Amazon shoppers respond? If people see their Social Security and Medicare benefits reduced or threatened, how will they respond? In a full-on fascist scenario with meaningless elections in 2026 and 2028, how would the deplorables register their surprise at being conned and shafted?

Whom will they blame?

MAGA politics — fascist politics — requires scapegoats. With Trump and Republicans in control of all three branches of government, whom will they blame if things go badly wrong? What would be the consequences for whomever they blame? Not only would they use the law against their scapegoats, we have a country full of brownshirts eager for their orders.

The world

Is it over for Ukraine? Will the United States withdraw from NATO? After Ukraine, what would Putin do next? In the July 2024 issue of The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch wrote about how The World Is Realigning. This is extremely important and potentially extremely dangerous. Under Trump, it would appear that the United States has abandoned democracy, both at home and abroad.

What’s the worst case scenario?

This could all end in firing squads and political prisoners and the Putin-style looting of the American economy. Or it could be a harsh reminder of our democratic American values and a blood transfusion that flushes out the sickness infecting American society as a whole, the very same sickness that once led to an American civil war.

It all depends on what Trump and the Republican Party do with power. It also depends on what the rest of us do.

The Iliad: At least I tried

The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2023. 848 pages.

Sixty pages of the Iliad was all I could handle. Reading Homer is thought to be edifying. I did not find it edifying. I found it boring. The mortals (at least in the first sixty pages) all are idiots, all behaving badly — vain, blind, belligerent, conniving, and mean. The gods are even worse. The mortals are hyperactive and volatile. The gods are lazy. I often have said that dysfunction and foible do not make good stories. If there is a quest in the Iliad, it’s crushing and looting Troy, just for the heck of it. What an edifying goal!

Stories require villains, but there’d better be at least one character per story whom we actually can like. No such character appears in the first sixty pages of the Iliad.

Of course I understand why reading the Iliad is thought to be edifying. To be able to read the ancient Greek would be very edifying. But translations not so much.

I tried to remind myself that the Iliad was 300 or 400 years old in Plato’s time. It’s not surprising that it is so primitive.

I do think, though, that this new translation of the Iliad is a good book to have on the shelf as a reference. There is a long list of characters at the back of the book that would serve as an excellent reference on Greek mythology. There are extensive notes nicely keyed to the verse. The notes explain many of the symbols and allusions, things that only Greek scholars would know. To me, the notes are more edifying and illuminating than the text itself.

There is a fascinating clash between Greek philosophy, with its wisdom, and Greek mythology, with its foolishness. From what little I know about Greek history, it was inspired more by foolishness than by wisdom. Reading about the Peloponnesian War, which was complete folly, will break your heart. Foolish gods, perhaps, drive foolish projects.

Having flung the Iliad, I’ve started on a guaranteed good read — Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I may have read it many years ago, but if I did I don’t remember anything about it. Many of Dickens’ novels were serialized — The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby. These are my favorite Dickenses, though I love David Copperfield and have read it several times.

It’s a shame that nobody serializes novels anymore, because serialization requires that the writer make each installment compelling in itself, so that the reader is eager for more and desperate to know what happens next. A serialized novel probably will be a hot read, and we all love hot reads. The only modern serialized novels that I can’t think of are Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, which were serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle (and briefly in the San Francisco Examiner after Maupin had a spat with the Chronicle’s editors).

Why I’m optimistic about the election


Source: Wikimedia Commons

A couple of friends have told me recently that they wish they had my optimism about which way this election is going. I make no predictions. But I see many reasons for optimism.

Ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee, it is hard to imagine things going better for the Democratic Party. Harris hit the ground running, reversed the sense of doom that we all felt after President Biden’s debate performance, and inspired a huge wave of enthusiasm and political momentum. The polls started moving our way.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been doing pretty much everything wrong. It has been one stupid move after another. For whatever reason, Trump has chosen to throw out red meat to inflame the people who are going to vote for him anyway, instead of reaching out for votes that he might otherwise not have gotten. He keeps infuriating women voters, and in two days’ work he probably has permanently reversed the defection of Latinos from the Democratic to the Republican party. Best of all, the once-forbidden word “fascist” has been rehabilitated and forcefully injected into the national conversation. Even the New York Times was forced to run pieces (quoting experts, of course) acknowledging that, yes, Trump is a fascist. (That the New York times was the last, rather than the first, to tell us that Trump is a fascist says a lot about how completely useless our political media have become.)

I don’t pay much attention to the polls this close to the election. Again this year, as they did in 2022, Republicans have cranked out a bunch of trash polls to convince MAGA voters that Trump is sure to win, even if he loses, and that therefore that the election was stolen.

A few days ago, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Kamala Harris’ campaign chair, put out a YouTube video about the numbers (see below). Yes, of course, someone in her position has to express optimism at this point and stress the importance of voting. But O’Malley also refers to some numbers from the campaign’s internal polling. You can be sure that the campaign’s internal polling is laser-focused and of higher quality that the public polls. The internal polls are essential to campaign decisions about where to concentrate their efforts. If you’ve been stressing out about the election, then maybe you’ll feel better after watching the video.

But I’ve also been thinking some about the worst-case scenario. It’s an ugly scenario, but in the end we win.

If the American people really are so stupid as to vote for a fascist who intends to destroy the American democracy, turn us into Russia (see Fiona Hill in Politico, October 28), make elections obsolete, loot the country, and put billionaires and whack-jobs in charge of everything (thinking that this will save America!) then obviously the American people are going to have to learn things the hard way. If Trump and company get back into power, then no election will ever get them out. He even told people at his rallies that they won’t have to vote anymore, because he’ll “fix” things.

I told a friend at lunch yesterday that, if Trump gets back into power, that I think it would take Americans four to eight years to get our democracy back. After four years of Trump and a non-election in 2028, it should be clear even to MAGA cultists that they’ve been conned, that the economy has been trashed, and that the rights of everyone except for billionaires have been suspended. Non-MAGA Americans, upon seeing that elections no longer work, would clearly see what must be done. The only recourse would be a revolt, with general strikes and millions of people in the streets.

The history of how tyrants are deposed has been well studied. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz have written in How Autocracies Fall that autocrats have become increasingly vulnerable to mass revolts. When Putin and his oligarchs took over Russia, the job was made much easier by the fact that the Russian people have no history of democracy. A tyrant in the Kremlin was just the same-old same-old for Russians. But that is not true of Americans. Democracy is in our bones (most of us, anyway). Anybody who takes democracy from us would have hell to pay. Nor would we Americans be in it alone. We have Canada to the north, and we have our NATO allies, who hate Trump just as much as we do. If the MAGA people ever got the civil war that they seem to want, they would lose. And maybe they’d learn a lesson that they’d remember up to a hundred years or so.

So that’s why I’m not panicking. Even if we wake up to a nightmare on November 6 (or however long it takes to count the votes), we’ll get our democracy back, whatever it takes. For decades, farsighted people have warned us about what fascism would look like if it came to America. And now we can see the whites of fascist eyes. Maybe it’s just denial, but I still find it almost impossible to believe that Americans actually would choose such a thing, especially now that we can call it what it is.

Yes, they have a plan for stealing the election. They will try, through legal maneuvers, to get it before the fascist-majority Supreme Court. Or, through dirty tricks in the states, they will try to throw the election to the House of Representatives. We do need to brace ourselves for that. Unless the election is a landslide for Harris, an attempt to steal the election is inevitable. Trump was even foolish enough to refer to a “secret plan” with the Republican speaker of the House. If they lose the election but succeed with a steal, the revolt will start on Day 1.

WYSIWYG with old daisy wheel printers


A 1985 IBM Wheelwriter 5 with the printer option. Click here for high-resolution version

I apologize to regular readers for this nerd post of limited interest. Many of the hits on this blog come from Google, from people who have run a search on one of the many subjects I’ve written about over the past 17 years. This post is meant as a service to “the typewriter community,” since I am a typewriter collector and my career was in computers and publishing.

Today I am shocked, and ashamed, at how quickly we nerds gave up our typewriters back in the 1980s and quickly adopted the new phenomenon of “word processing.” Now I’m sentimental about what we had back then. We need not only to keep the old machines alive, but also to preserve the knowledge of how to use the old machines.

A few typewriters were made that bridged the world between typewriters and computers. They had a keyboard, of course, and could be used as typewriters. But they also had a computer interface (generally a Centronics parallel port) so that they could be connected to a computer and used as a printer. Most IBM Wheelwriters did not have the printer interface. They are said to be rare. But if you can get your hands on one, they are marvelous machines. Mine is a Wheelwriter 5 made in 1985. The “printer option” for the Wheelwriter 5 consisted of two computer boards that connected to the typewriter’s main board with a ribbon cable. To house the two extra boards, an extension for the case was provided that clipped onto the back of the typewriter. Other versions of the printer option on later models of the Wheelwriter had the printer option more or less built in. Some even came with LCD displays or hardware for connecting the typewriter to an external keyboard and monitor.

The first thing to know about these beasts in that they are (rather obviously) ASCII printers. When Postscript and laser printers came along, ASCII printers including ASCII dot-matrix printers were quickly displaced. These days, printers have drivers that explain the printer’s capabilities to the computers they’re attached to. For ASCII printers, you won’t find any drivers, because: You don’t need a driver! The goal is a simple one — to send ASCII down the wire to the printer. But most computers these days have forgotten how to do that.

I am not a Microsoft Windows person. There are ways to make the old ASCII printers work with Windows, but I’m afraid I can’t help with Windows. However, the job is easy with Linux computers and Macintoshes, because Linux computers and Macintoshes are Unix boxes that still come with all the old text-handling utilities such as “vi,” “nroff,” and “lpr.” Other classic text-handling utilities, such as the Emacs editor, are easily available.

To get an old ASCII printer to work on a Linux computer or Macintosh, you need some basic knowledge that I can’t get into here. You’ll need to do some Googling and learning if the tools and concepts are new to you. For example, to attach an ASCII printer to a Linux computer or Macintosh, you’ll need a USB to Centronics parallel adapter cable. You’ll use Cups, the built-in print spooler, to set up the printer as a “raw” printer. “Raw” means that Cups sends plain ASCII down the wire without using a driver. You need to know your way around in terminal windows.

I’m an old hand at “vi” and “nroff,” because once upon a time that’s what we used for writing, editing, and formatting text. Another popular editor was Emacs. Emacs has a learning curve even steeper than that of “vi.” But to use Emacs with a daisywheel printer, you don’t have to know everything about Emacs. You only need to know enough to use Emacs for writing and editing English text.

Some of the early text utilities with graphical interfaces are still around and no doubt can still provide a WYSIWIG experience with a daisywheel printer. (WYSIWIG means “what you see is what you get.”) For example, George R.R. Martin is notorious for continuing to use WordStar on DOS! But you’ll have a harder time finding WordStar, or a working DOS computer, than you’ll have finding an IBM Wheelwriter with the printer option. So Emacs is the easiest way to go.

I’m sorry that I can’t get into the how-to’s here. It’s all pretty complicated, and Googling will lead you to articles on how to use Emacs, how to use Cups, etc. My purpose is only to show that it can be done and to encourage you to do it if you have a daisywheel printer, an ASCII dot-matrix printer, or a hybrid typewriter-printer such as a Wheelwriter in your collection.

About the IBM Wheelwriters

Typewriter collectors disdain machines such as the IBM Wheelwriters because Wheelwriters are not purely mechanical machines. Rather, there is a computer inside the typewriter that controls the typewriter’s moving parts. So-called electronic typewriters are far simpler — mechanically, anyway — than mechanical typewriters. Just as the IBM Selectric was the ultimate in mechanical typewriters, the IBM Wheelwriter is the ultimate in electronic typewriters. The Wheelwriters are heavy beasts, made for commercial use. The Wheelwriter keyboards are superb. The keyboards are identical to the IBM Model M keyboards, which IBM made for IBM computers starting in 1985. People cherish these keyboards today and pay high prices for them. If you are a good typist, then the best keyboards ever made are the keyboards on the IBM Selectric typewriters, the Model M keyboards for IBM computers, and the keyboards on the Wheelwriter typewriters. Like most of the Selectric typewriters, the Wheelwriters have a correcting function — a sticky tape that lifts letters off the paper if you made a mistake. The Wheelwriters (depending on the model) also have memories (for such things as form letters) and spell check. The daisy wheel itself lifts out, and an assortment of type styles and font sizes were available, as well as support for dozens of languages.

I love my IBM Selectrics, but the Wheelwriters also are lovable machines. They have a kind of robot personality, because, unlike typewriters, they have a brain inside.


⬆︎ This is Emacs running in a terminal window in Mac OS.


⬆︎ A letter from John Steinbeck to Robert Wallsten reproduced on a Wheelwriter using a proportional typeface. Wallsten was a screenwriter for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Fresh leaves, while they last


Carrot top pesto with roasted baby carrots and a quiche bought at Trader Joe’s

I am strongly of the view that what keeps us alive is negative entropy. When I bring this up with people who I think might be interested, their eyes glaze over with boredom, and I drop the subject. Entropy = disorder. Negative entropy = order. Life goes on only because life magically resists the natural tendency toward decay and disorder.

Obviously we eat to obtain energy. And obviously we eat to obtain certain nutrients. If we ate no calcium, for example, we would have no bones. We could eat compost and get calcium and calories. But that’s not enough. We would not be able to thrive on compost. We’d develop all sorts of diseases and then die. Why? Because all the order, all the life, is gone from compost. Once bacteria have squeezed the last bit of order out of compost (the bacteria then die and become part of the compost), only plants can use the compost then. Plants can use the compost because they use photosynthesis to create new order, in the form of complex organic molecules, out of the dead raw material.

I have written in more detail about this here. It boils down to a theory of nutrition based on physics rather than on biology. A theory from physics does not in any way negate a theory from biology. Rather, physics just takes us back one level to a more fundamental science of life.

What does this have to do with fresh leaves? It is photosynthesis, using energy from the sun, that is the basis of life on earth. Life has the ability to take dead elements (such as calcium, nitrogen, iron, magnesium, and water) and build the vast variety of complex molecules that are necessary for life. Those dead elements, as in compost, are simple and lifeless. The order, as in the products of plant life, is exceedingly complex — alive. It is photosynthesis that gave them life and order. Chlorophyll is a rich source of order. And chlorophyll is only one of the countless orderly molecules that plants produce and that we need to thrive and to avoid disease.

This, I think, is why people do not thrive on ultraprocessed foods. Ultraprocessed foods are like compost. The energy is there, some of the simple nutrients are there, but the order has been processed out and is mostly gone. Bodies live on, because they’re getting energy (too much of it, really), but the body breaks down, because it’s starved for order. It’s just a hunch, and I can’t offer any evidence. But I suspect that the reason we sometimes eat too much is that our bodies are starved for order, even though we’re overfed on low-order foods.

So then, carrot tops. If you can get your hands on some living leaves fresh out of the sun, eat them! They are a magnificently rich source of order.

My farmer friends Brittany and Richard grew the carrots and harvested them the morning before I made the pesto.


Carrot leaves — fresh chlorophyll!

A bistro and bar in Trumptown


Grilled salmon with green beans and garlic mashed potatoes

I had been waiting for this place to open for months, following their progress on their Facebook page. It’s the first real bistro in the benighted red county I live in. The place is named “The Dalton” (I’ll explain below why its name also is my surname), and it’s in the mean, racist, theocratic little town of King. I love bistros, but I’m also fascinated by the clash of what I might call bistro culture with white Christian theocracy, in a town that normally feeds on wings, barbecue, burgers, and baloney.

The main thing to know about King, North Carolina, is that it’s a white-flight suburb of the nearby (blue-voting and remarkably civilized) city of Winston-Salem. King is an ugly little town that consists mostly of a one-mile strip development with fast food, grocery stores, a tire store, and a “Christian Supplies” store, whatever that is. The town is politically dominated by a large Baptist church with a crew of nasty little Bible-college preachers. (I’ve seen and heard these preachers at county commissioner meetings when something like putting “In God We Trust” on county buildings and county vehicles is on the agenda.)

Baptists, of course, including those who are secretly sinful, don’t want others to have the freedom to buy alcohol. For years, the power of these Baptists was able to keep “liquor by the drink” and ABC stores out of King. In North Carolina, cities and towns can be either “wet” or “dry,” depending on how the town’s voters vote in a referendum. In 2022, proponents of liquor by the drink were at last able to get a referendum on the ballot. In November 2022, it passed, 63 percent to 37 percent. It has taken almost two years for King’s first bar to open.

The best restaurants make most of their money off of alcohol rather than food. So at last a bistro — with a big bar — had a chance to make a go of it in King. They got the best old building in town. For years, King’s high street had been run down and seedy, with only one strong business, a drug store. Several buildings on the high street are being renovated now. If the Dalton restaurant succeeds, it should lift the entire (very short) high street along with it. The high street is named Dalton Road.

The road is named for the old Dalton plantation that was a few miles north. The plantation is historically significant, not least for the wills and other records of the plantation’s owners, David Dalton Sr. (1740-1820) and David Dalton Jr. (1781-1847). The Dalton family papers are in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. I am not descended from the Daltons who owned the plantation. Rather, that branch of the Dalton family and my branch forked in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the early 1700s and migrated south from the Charlottesville area separately. The Daltons arrived in Virginia very early, during the Williamsburg period. Two names come up again and again in the family trees — Timothy, and David. Where you find Daltons, you will find a David.

I have not yet met the owners of the bistro. I’d love to ask them some questions. They have made a huge investment in renovating and equipping the building. I asked my waitress how many people were working that afternoon. Fourteen, she said. That is a huge staff. Most country eateries operate with two to four people. The place is nicely furnished, though not lavish. They have proper heavy white china and good flatware. The prices are reasonable. My waitress said the place has been packed in the evening. It must be a tough calibration for “upscale” menus in downscale locations, where the food has to be good enough to justify higher prices and to satisfy customers with higher expectations, while not being too expensive or so citified that people don’t understand it.

King is sixteen miles to the south of me, so I won’t be tempted to go there very often.

As though to remind me that I was in Trumptown, as I was enjoying my grilled salmon an older couple came in. The man was “open carrying.” He had a pistol in a holster. This is legal in North Carolina unless a business posts a sign at the door forbidding weapons inside. This irked me at first. But the couple were quiet and polite and not out to make a scene. I’d never seen open carry in a restaurant before, but I’ve heard stories about how people who open carry want to make a show of it, like the people who make a show of holding hands and praying before they eat their barbecue and fries.

I have several reasons for wanting to support this place, but I’d do for only one reason — the fact that that ungodly Baptist church up the road didn’t want it there and lost the battle to keep it out.


⬆︎ The vanilla ice cream was only $2! Other dessert choices were $6 and $8.


⬆︎ King’s high street is on the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this was the old bank building.

Journalism for the few


Dorothy Thompson leaves the White House after a visit with Roosevelt, May 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Today’s substack from Heather Cox Richardson contains a sharp warning about what Trump will do to those who oppose him, if he ever gets power again:

“On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be ‘bloody.’ He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ‘a fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to this country.’

“On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day.”

Our mediocre media soft-pedals Trump’s overt fascism. Most Americans are strangely unconcerned about what Trump intends to do if he ever gets power again, because journalists are afraid that to tell them would sound shrill and unobjective. We even have a new term for how the media normalize Trump’s depravity to avoid sounding shrill — “sanewashing.”

But scholars like Heather Cox Richardson don’t have to care what Republicans or centrists think about what she writes. She writes for a smaller set of people. She has, I believe, 1.3 million subscribers on Substack, as well as 2 million followers on Facebook. That’s a lot of people, but it’s only 1.3 percent of the American population.

Richardson writes today about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who was expelled from Germany in 1934. Thompson was a rare journalist who risked sounding shrill when what she was writing about was gruesomely ugly. She had written in 1931 that Hitler was a man of “startling insignificance.”

In Harper’s Magazine in 1934, she wrote:

“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”

It seems that Dorothy Thompson analyzed everyone she met in the same way she analyzed Hitler. She wrote a fascinating piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Who Goes Nazi? She asks us to imagine a parlor game at a large gathering of people. She describes twelve people in the room, whom she labels A through L, and asks whether they would “go Nazi.” She wants us to see how It Could Happen Here. People today are just the same as people were in 1941. For persons A through L, which types seem familiar? Whom do you like, and dislike, the most? Which one is Elon Musk? Is there a Liz Cheney in the room? For those of us who would never go Nazi, why?

It’s an odd paradox, and only the best of journalists and historians can get at it — how it can be that some of history’s greatest monsters also are pathetic little creeps.

Here’s another paradox. Given any major issue, the higher the stakes and the greater the controversy, the harder it is to find out what is really going on. Sources that depend on large audiences have to water things down so as not be accused of taking sides. But, somewhere in the fog of propaganda, there will be a few who are doing their best to get at the truth. Dorothy Thompson did it then. Heather Cox Richardson is doing it now.

Update: The New York Times seems to have had a fit of conscience:

As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator: John Kelly, the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that he believed that Donald Trump met the definition of a fascist.

The 2024-2025 Covid and flu vaccines


The influenza B virus. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

I had not had a Covid vaccination since 2021, and I had never had a flu shot (though, lucky for me, it has been more than 30 years since I’ve had the flu). Because I’m going to be on two long flights and two long train rides next month, I figured it was time to go get some shots.

At first I thought it was strange when my doctor’s office said that they don’t have the vaccines. They referred me to the dominant pharmacy chain here, CVS. Then I realized that it’s probably not efficient for small rural practices to keep those vaccines when the pharmacies are doing the job with greater efficiency. I’d never had a shot at a pharmacy before; this is new to me. But I understand that, since 2009, all fifty American states have given pharmacists the right to vaccinate. The pharmacist who gave me the shots said I was her 40th flu shot that day.

I went to a CVS in the little town of Walnut Cove at 6 p.m. on a Friday. The sign said that walk-ins are welcome. I had some questions, and I found that the pharmacist was very well informed. She answered all my questions. Though proof of immunization is not required at present for airline passengers, I asked for some documentation just in case. She gave me two printouts. For the Covid vaccine, I got the “MODERNA 2024-2025 COVID 12YR+,” in which the 12YR+ means that it’s the version of the vaccine for people older than 12. For the flu vaccine, I got the “FLUAD TRIVALENT 2024-2025 SYR,” from a company named Sequirus, Inc. This vaccine is optimized for people over 65. It includes something called MF59, an oil-in-water emulsion that, for reasons not fully understood, increases the effectiveness of the vaccine, which may be important for older people whose immune systems aren’t what they used to be.

The shots cost me nothing. My Humana Medicare Advantage coverage paid for it. I can see online in my Humana account that Humana paid CVS $89.71 for the flu shot and $156.13 for the Covid shot.

As expected, the next day I didn’t feel exactly sick; malaise is probably the best word. I had a low-grade fever of 99.7 the day after, but my temperature was back to normal on day 2. My upper arm is a little sore, but only a little. That’s just what we are told to expect. It’s OK to get the Covid vaccine and the flu vaccine at the same time, but you probably want to time it so that you have a couple of days off to deal with the after-effects.

Modern medicine is a miracle. Yes, drug companies want to gouge us where they can. But I also think that vaccine technologies are far more advanced and far safer than lovers of conspiracy theories will ever admit. The flu and Covid vaccines are products of international cooperation. In addition to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is the World Health Organization and the health agencies of other advanced countries, all cooperating on the science and delivery of these vaccines. There is a huge amount of global research on vaccines and their effectiveness.

I have never had Covid. And, by the way, you can still get four free Covid test kits from the U.S. Department of Health & Human services by going here.

The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club

As an amateur scholar of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, I’m very interested in non-amateur Sir Walter Scott scholarship. As far as I can tell, though, not all that many people pursue an academic interest in Sir Walter Scott. Scott has fallen out of fashion. As I’ve argued before, we’re overdue for a Walter Scott revival.

From Googling, many months ago I discovered the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. They are very serious. I’ve watched some of their YouTube lectures. They know who today’s Sir Walter Scott scholars are, and they bring ’em in for lectures. The median age of the group seems to be pretty high. That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t expect younger people to take an interest in Scott until somebody — somebody please! — makes a beautiful movie from, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian.

The club is 130 years old. Princess Anne attended their dinner on their 100th anniversary.

It happens that, when I’m in Scotland next month, there will be a lecture based on a novel about Scott. Ken has secured tickets for us.

The lecture is at the New Club, Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s oldest social club, which I suppose is why there is a dress code for the lecture. Fine. That will be a reason (if I even needed another one) for me to take a couple of my Harris tweed jackets back to their homeland for a wee visit.