Tag: Voice of America

Blog topics keep dropping in my lap

One of these days I hope to be able to enjoy reading fiction again. I miss the days when I wanted to read every historical novel that was published. I can’t remember the last one I read. I’m pretty sure it was before Inauguration Day 2025.

I miss not having books I’ve read to blog about the first Monday of each month. I read parts of several books in August, but I didn’t finish reading any of them.

I settled down at the computer on Friday evening after supper to look for that afternoon’s weekly update on the status of road repairs in western North Carolina since Hurricane Helene a full eleven months ago. I can’t imagine the stress the people who live or work along some of those roads must be under at this point.

For eleven months, I have tried to give an update on Mondays of the progress being made in repairing western North Carolina since the hurricane. Roads are not the most important things being repaired or needing to be repaired. People lost family members, their homes, their businesses, their friends, their communities, and their sense of security. But I don’t know how to report on how those losses are being coped with or healed. I report the progress being made in rebuilding roads and highways because that is something tangible that I can find statistics about. I hope in some way it reminds people in other parts of the United States that just because Hurricane Helene is no longer in the headlines, it doesn’t mean it is over.

On Friday evening, I didn’t know what I was going to blog about today, but I knew I needed to include my weekly update about the roads. I sat down at the computer to get that part of today’s blog written.

But before I could put anything in the search engine, a disturbing piece of breaking news popped up. Although the announcement was put online shortly before 6:30 p.m., the national news channel I watched at 6:30 did not mention it. I guess it was more important to talk about this being Labor Day weekend and how that would specifically bring in lots of business for a particular convenience store chain on steroids.

The free publicity the network gave that convenience store chain was bizarre. It was the kind of story one would expect on “a slow day for news.” But we have not had “a slow day for news” in this country in eight months.

Instead of reporting on how busy the franchises in that convenience store chain would be over the long holiday weekend, I wish that network had reported on what the U.S. Supreme Court did on Friday.

National Institutes of Health

Photo of a woman in a white lab coat looking into a microscope.

The piece of news that was not reported is devastating to a lot of people. In a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump Administration can indeed cut $783 million in National Institutes of Health grants connected to diversity programs. Thus, the injunction that a federal judge had put on the action has been lifted.

Too bad that 90,000-square foot ballroom that’s going to dwarf the White House isn’t in place. I’m sure lots of people in The White House would love to go dancing to celebrate this victory over medical research and diversity.

Voice of America

Photo of a silver microphone.
Photo by Jono Hirst on Unsplash

Another thing Trump could celebrate over the Labor Day weekend was the firing of more than 500 employees of Voice of America and its parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, on Friday night. It comes across as, “Happy Labor Day! You’re fired!”

Voice of America was founded by the United States in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda. Every week for 83 years, it has delivered news to 420 million people in 63 languages in more than 100 countries.

But the Trump Administration does not see the need for it and has been working for eight months to destroy it. One of his Executive Orders in March placed more than 1,000 journalists on indefinite administrative leave.

Kari Lake, an Arizona politician, is tasked by Trump to dismantle Voice of America. She fired 500 contractors in May and tried to fire 600 federal employees in June.

Trump says the Voice of America is speaking for our adversaries and not for the American people. He has produced no evidence. By “our adversaries” does he mean North Korea, China, and Russia? Or does he mean his Democratic political adversaries? I tend to think he means the Democrats. He cannot tolerate people speaking the truth.

Some tariffs ruled illegal

Photo of letters on wooden blocks spelling out: USA Tarriffs.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

A Federal Appeals Court has ruled that some of the tariffs ordered by the Trump Administration are illegal. We haven’t heard the last of this. Like a dog with a bone, Trump won’t let go without a fight.

Chicago prepares for Trump

Photo of a huge dome-like reflective sculpture in Chicago reflecting the sky and buildings
Photo by Sawyer Bengtson on Unsplash

The City of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois prepare for an invasion by Trump’s military this week. The mayor of Chicago vows to not roll over and play dead.

Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an order on Saturday stating that the Chicago police will not “collaborate with federal agents on joint law enforcement patrols, arrest operations, or other law enforcement duties including civil immigration enforcement.”

The mayor’s order “urges” federal officers in Chicago “to refrain from wearing masks, to wear and use body cameras and to identify themselves to members of the public with names and badge numbers.”

That is what local law enforcement officers do, so why shouldn’t federal officers be required to do the same? The argument that Trump’s thugs must wear masks because their lives are in danger doesn’t hold water. Every law enforcement officer’s life is in danger when they are on the job, but they don’t get to hide behind masks like Trump’s people or the Ku Klux Klan.

Hurricane Helene Update

As of Friday, of the 1,469 roads and highways that had to be closed in western North Carolina due to Hurricane Helene, 33 were still closed and 38 have partial access.

A temporary US-64/US-74 between Chimney Rock and Bat Cave opened last week.

Another section of the Blue Ridge Parkway reopened on Friday, meaning that the 85 miles from Asheville to the parkway’s southern terminus near Cherokee are now open! Work continues on various sections of the road north of Asheville.

It was announced last Thursday that the rebuilding of I-40 in the Pigeon River Gorge North Carolina at the Tennessee line is expected to be completed by the end of 2028. That’s not a typo. 2028.

The NC Department of Transportation is constructing a retaining wall along the Pigeon River below the highway, which will be 30 feet thick and 100 feet tall in some places.

A temporary wall now allows two lanes (one in each direction) to be open with a 35 mile-per-hour speed limit. Monitoring devices are in place to alert drivers to possible landslides.

The reconstruction of five miles of the interstate in the gorge is expected to cost $1.3 billion.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park Alert Update

US-441/Newfound Gap Road in the Tennessee side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park is expected to be repaired and reopened by September 30. Earlier estimates were in October. Heavy rainfall caused the undercutting a section of the road between Mile Marker 12 and Mile Mark 13 during flooding on August 2.

Hurricane Erin Update

NC-12 on the north end of Ocracoke Island, NC reopened last Monday and ferry service to Hatteras Island resumed. By the end of last week, what was left of Hurricane Erin was lashing the Butt of Lewis on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Erin did not give up easily.

Too much news

In less than 24 hours from Friday night until midday on Saturday, I went from not knowing what I could blog about today to having an abundance of topics vying for my attention. I miss the good old days of 2024 when there wasn’t much news on weekends.

Janet

The New American Dream?

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on “Make America Wealthy Again.”

Republicans tell us to be patient. They say it’s coming. We must suffer through short-term pain while we focus on long-term gain.

The “American Dream” has always been that if you work hard enough, you can accomplish anything you want. Another part of the American Dream is that each generation will be better off than the previous one.

That’s not the new message now from the Trump Administration.

Trump said he isn’t worried about empty store shelves.

US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who has a permanent smile on his face, has said that with all the manufacturing facilities supposedly returning to the US, multiple generations in a family can look forward to working in the same factory.

That’s definitely a new twist on the American Dream of each generation being better off than the one before.

The Huffington Post quoted Lutnick as saying, “This is the new model, where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.”

That sounds bleak to me. It sounds more like a nightmare than a dream.

Trump Administration considers suspending habeas corpus

According to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Friday, the Trump Administration is considering suspending habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus is a legal procedure by which a report can be made to a court alleging the unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual, and requesting that the court order the individual’s custodian to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether their detention is lawful.

We were a nation of laws until January 20, 2025. For any member of the Trump Administration to lecture us about the US Constitution is rich!

Mr. Miller, the United States of America has not been invaded. Illegal border crossings by people fleeing corrupt governments is not what the US Constitution means when it invokes the word “invasion,” and anyone with an ounce of common sense knows it.

Yes, we have a border problem, but we have not been “invaded” in the truest sense of the word.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been nabbing people and whisking them away in unmarked black vehicles for weeks now. The ICE officers are reportedly not usually in uniform. They present no identification. They rough up any bystanders who dare to ask them to show identification.

I have seen videos of some of the arrests. They look like the Gestapo, and they look a lot like the Proud Boys who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. We’ve never had law enforcement look like this in the United States, and it is unsettling to say the least. People, including young women as young as 16 are slammed face down on the ground or asphalt, handcuffed, and shoved into black military-style heavy vehicles.

People are being arrested and detained in undisclosed locations, usually hundreds of miles from home. The Trump Administration has ignored habeas corpus since he took office on January 20. The difference, if he decides to suspend it, will mean that his thugs can then legally arrest and detain people without a chance of a court hearing.

What has America become?

A Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk of Turkey, was ordered to be released by a Vermont judge on Friday. She had spent six weeks in a detention facility in Louisiana after being arrested on the street by ICE. It was all caught on video. ICE accused her of supporting Hamas. Judge William K. Sessions III ruled that the government did not have enough evidence to hold her. Their only “evidence” was that she co-wrote an op-ed in the Tufts Daily newspaper last year. The op-ed encouraged the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.”

Rumeysa Ozturk’s case is proof that the Trump Administration is ignoring habeas corpus. If it can be ignored in cases against international students, it can be ignored for anyone.

Miscellaneous news from the Trump Administration

Via email last Thursday night, President Trump fired Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The Library of Congress is our national library. It houses the world’s largest collection of books, films, photographs, and manuscripts. It is the home of the US Copyright Office.

Dr. Hayden is a professional librarian and had been the Librarian of Congress since 2016. I cringe to think who from Fox News Trump will replace her. Fox News is functioning as Trump’s human resources department.

Apparently, Trump got wind of the fact that Dr. Hayden had worked to add more works from minorities into the library’s collections. He’ll have none of that!

But on Monday, when Trump tried to put his former personal lawyer and current Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, in as acting Librarian of Congress, the library staff would have nothing of it! Yea! Staff said Congress has a say in who holds that position, and they refused to let two top Department of Justice officials picked by Blanche to even enter the building! Way to go, librarians!

On Friday, US Copyright Register Shira Perlmutter had denied Elon Musk access to “troves” of copyrighted materials for the purpose of training Artificial Intelligence. It is no coincidence that she was fired by President Trump less than 24 hours later.

Perlmutter had been Register of Copyrights since October 2020. She had concerns about releasing copyright material for use by AI technology. As a holder of seven copyrights, I appreciate her efforts.

When I tried to look her up on the US Copyright Office website at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, all her information was already gone.

Looking elsewhere online, I found that Ms. Perlmutter is no slouch. She hold a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and has been a law professor. She has stated that copyright laws need to keep pace with technology. She was the chief policy officer and director for international affairs at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

She has been executive vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and vice president and general counsel for intellectual property policy at Time Warner.

No doubt, the guardrails protecting copyrighted material from AI will be off when Trump puts his choice in Perlmutter’s place. He is all in favor of AI. He has no concept of intellectual property and how copyrights work.

Seeing live video at 2:00 pm Eastern Time yesterday of the US President being whisked away at 9:00 at night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in a souped-up shiny black golf cart driven by a Saudi with two perhaps US Secret Service agents anxiously hanging on in the back seat was more than a little unsettling. I guess the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Iranians are Trump’s new besties. I enjoy writing fiction, but I don’t have enough imagination to make this stuff up.

The day after stating in sworn testimony before a Congressional committee, Acting Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cameron Hamilton, was fired by Trump. In the hearing, said, “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” The Trump appointee and former US Navy SEAL was fired on Thursday.

The newest Trump hire from Fox News is Jeanine Ferris Pirro. Although she had a career in the court system in New York more than 20 years ago, her real claim to fame has been serving as a TV host on the Fox News network. On Thursday, May 8, Trump appointed her as interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

It is beside the point that Jeanine Pirro was one of the defendants in Smartmatic’s February 2021 defamation lawsuit against For News (Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network) because she made false accusations on the air about the voting machines being rigged against Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Fox News paid Smartmatic $787.5 million to settle out of court and was required to acknowledge that the statements made on air were false.

It is also apparently beside the point that she was charged with driving 119 miles per hour in the 65 mile-per-hour zone.

Now the attorneys working under Ms. Pirro will be expected to respect and abide by her directions and leadership.

Part of Trump’s “big, beautiful budget” is slowly working its way through Congressional committees and small snippets of it are coming to light. I’m angered that the budget proposal calls for four oil and gas lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge over the next ten years.

This Administration’s wholesale disregard for wildlife and the beauty and global importance of pristine areas is stunning in its greed, ignorance, and short-sightedness.

The leasing of 6,250 square miles of public land is mandated in his budget proposal to apparently help the coal industry. The world adopts solar and wind power as the US reverts to the filthy air of the 1950s and 1960s.

Coincidentally, Trump has cut off federal funding to support coal miners who suffer from Black Lung even as he pushes for more coal mining jobs and a resurgence of coal-burning power plants.

Voice of America Update

On a brighter note, CNN reported on Saturday that the US is bringing back Voice of America. That’s good news. Too bad the Trump Administration shut it down completely on a whim just two or three weeks ago. They had no appreciation of its 83-year history. We were supposed to get “tired of winning,” but so far we’re just tired of “losing” and being jerked around.

Trump takes a sledgehammer to an agency one day and then tries to resurrect it later. That’s no way to run a country. It is no way to run a business either, but I wish he’d give up his day job and go back to his businesses.

Another glimmer of hope

On Monday some two dozen clergy linked arms and stood outside the gate of the Delaney Hall ICE Detention Center in New Jersey where the Mayor of Newark was arrested on Friday and there was a confrontation between three Congress members and ICE security officers. The clergy spoke against what is going on at the detention center. One of them was quoted as saying that “what’s going on inside the center violates the tenets that God has laid down on this Earth.”

Until my next blog post

With librarians, park rangers, and clergy standing up to Trump, I have some hope that our current nightmare might eventually be stopped.

I hope you have a good book to read.

Don’t forget the people of Ukraine and western North Carolina. Eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina were rattled by an unusually strong (4.1 magnitude) earthquake on Saturday morning. They must be wondering what’s next!

Janet

These 13 things bring me hope

You will see from today’s list that it doesn’t take much to make me happy these days. I will take little victories for democracy any time I can find them.

Writing blog post after blog post about bad and unjust things going on in America lately, I was determined to blog about things that bring me hope.

Today’s post is, unfortunately, not as long as any of my posts about the things that worry and frighten me, but today is dedicated to things that bring me hope.

It serves as a reminder that, just like the seven recipients of the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize that I blogged about yesterday, Environmental Justice, sometimes it just takes one person to take a stand and make a difference.

Photo of a stack of books
Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash
  • Twelve children of active-duty US military personnel in the US, Japan, and Italy are suing US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for removing books about race and gender from Pentagon schools.
  • At 1:00 a.m. (ET) on Saturday, April 19, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that blocks the Trump Administration from sending any more migrants to El Salvador under further notice. Not that a US Supreme Court ruling will stop him.
  • On April 18, Judge Amy Berman Jackson held an emergency hearing about the impending firings of 1,483 employees of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. She halted the employees’ access to their computers until an evidentiary hearing can be held on April 28 with witness testimony.
  • Under the lame guise of fighting antisemitism, the Trump Administration continues to attack universities every day. BUT… the faculty senates of the universities in the “Big 10 Conference” are creating a Mutual Academic Defense Compact (MADC). It’s sort of a mini-NATO. Under the agreement, if the Trump Administration attacks one of the member universities, it will be considered an attack on all member universities. The resolution is in response to the Trump Administration’s “legal, financial and political” attacks on academic freedom and universities’ missions. Yes, folks, it has come to this! This give me hope that other conferences throughout the US will create Mutual Academic Defense Compacts.
  • Millions of Americans held peaceful protests across the country on Saturday.
  • CBS News reports that District of Columbia US District Judge Royce Lamberth has ordered the Trump Administration to rehire all Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Network staff at least for the time being. He also ordered all Congressional funding must resume to those outlets. A Voice of America journalist and her colleagues filled a suit against Kari Lake, the acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media – a supposedly independent federal agency that oversees public service media networks. With Kari Lake in charge, thought, there’s no chance for it to act independently of Trump. The judge granted a preliminary injunction. A preliminary injunction was not granted to Radio Free Europe because it filed a separate lawsuit. 
  • The April 20 deadline for US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and US Secretary of Homeland Security to give President Trump a joint report about border security was extended. In that report, they are supposed to state whether or not they think the President should invoke the Insurrection Act. That Act would give him the authority to declare martial law. The extended deadline for the report gave us a breather! We just don’t know what the new deadline is… or if Pete Hegseth will still be Secretary of Defense long enough to participate.
  • Three students in the Rutherford County, Tennessee School District and PEN America (a writers’ organization) are suing the school board for removing more than 150 books from school libraries. The lawsuit was filed with the US District Court Middle District of Tennessee at Nashville. The removals were based on a list circulated by Moms for Liberty instead of school board members or apparently anyone connected with the school district reading the books themselves. Moms for Liberty is known for pushing book bans based on their belief that reading a book will contaminate a child’s mind. They believe they have the right to dictate what all children should not read. Bizarrely, one of its chapters in Indiana quoted Hitler’s “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future” statement from a 1935 Nazi rally.
  • On April 17, four members (sadly, but predictably all Democrats) of the US House of Representatives Committee on House Administration signed a letter addressed to Vice President J.D. Vance asking him to reject possible changes made in the 21 museums, 14 libraries and research centers, and the National Zoo – all part of the Smithsonian Institution. As Vice President, Vance is a member of the Smithsonian’s board of regents. In a March 27, 2025, Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and prompted by Lindsey Halligan, Esq. of Colorado beauty pageant fame, Trump wants to eliminate “divisive” and “anti-American” content from the Smithsonian and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, and markers” that have been removed from public spaces since 2020. The Executive Order gives Vance the authority to determine what content is “improper.”
  • An indigenous woman has been named the new president of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Dr. Heather Shotton is Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and a Kiowa and Cheyenne descendant. What makes this especially notable is the fact that Fort Lewis College started out as a military fort from 1878 until 1891. Ironically, the fort was built to protect white settlers from Indian raids. In 1892, it was turned into a federal Indian boarding school and served in that capacity until 1909. Approximately 1,100 children attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, and at least 31 of them died there. Here’s a link to an article that gives more information about the dark days of the boarding school: https://www.cpr.org/2023/10/03/state-investigation-report-released-indian-boarding-schools/.
  • CBS and other news outlets reported that an article documenting the career of Nicole Malachowski, the first female US Air Force Thunderbird pilot, is back online. That gives me a fraction of an ounce of hope, but it should never have been removed! Women and ethnic minorities who have served with honor in the US military should not have to go through the humiliation and disappointment of seeing records of their accomplishments removed from government website. They or others on their behalf should not have to raise cane and make such a stink that the government finally caves in and puts the information back online. What we have here is much larger than one person’s military record being trashed. What we have is an attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion because apparently some white men are so insecure they just cannot tolerate a woman or a person of color being recognized for accomplishments that they themselves did not attain. It especially stinks coming from a US President who did not serve in the military. One person’s record being put back on a website is not sufficient. Some of the pages still cannot be opened. And what about all the people whose records were taken down and have not been restored to a place of honor?
  • This one might surprise you, but I found hope on Wednesday when Ukrainian President Zelensky rejected the peace agreement that Trump thought he could force on Ukraine. Trump thought Zelensky would roll over and play dead and agree to giving Russia everything. Trump has no understanding of Zelensky’s love of country. He cannot identify with that concept. Trump’s claim that Russia’s “concession” is not taking all of Ukraine is reprehensible.
  • And last, but not least, there are rumblings that Pete Hegseth might be on his way out as Defense Secretary! He must have one of those “Friends & Family” Plans so he can share real-time bombing details with his wife, brother, and his personal lawyer on his cell phone. Even a child knows when to keep a secret.

Until my next blog post… tomorrow

I hope you are reading a good book that you don’t want to put down long enough to read my blog.

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet

“First they came for the…”

Every week I think I’ll write a shorter blog post, but every week there’s something in the news about which I’m compelled to comment. Every week I think I’ll get back to work on the novel I’m writing.

The original blog post I wrote for today came in at more than 3,000 words. No one wants to read a 3,000-word blog post, so I’ve divided it into three posts.

Tomorrow I will blog about a couple of US Supreme Court rulings made in 1898 and 2025 that I initially was going to blog about today.

Wednesday’s post will include a breakdown of the $524 million bill passed by the NC General Assembly and signed by Governor Josh Stein las week as well as highlights from the National Hurricane Center’s final report about Hurricane Helene.

And you know me… if something else happens before I post tomorrow and Wednesday, I’m liable to go off on another tangent. While we still have a modicum of free speech in America, I will take advantage of every opportunity to speak out about injustice and actions that run counter to the US Constitution.

A blog post update

Last week I reblogged Tangie T. Woods’ post from her “Mrs. T’s Corner” blog about Lt. Col. Charles Calvin Rogers’ information being taken down from the Department of Defense (DoD) website.

The DoD seemed to get confused about exactly what on its website qualified as the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) that the Trump Administration wants eradicated from all federal government departments and resources.

Under the Trump Administration, the online record of the Medal of Honor that Lt. Col. Rogers received on May 14, 1970 was changed to read, “dei-medal-of-honor.” There is no such medal and there was no such thing as DEI in 1970.

Of course, the teenagers working for Elon Musk would not know that. They wouldn’t care that Lt. Col. Rogers served in the war in Vietnam. They probably could not find Vietnam on a map if their lives depended on it.

And, since Elon Musk is from South Africa, he probably doesn’t know anything about the war in Vietnam either.

The last I heard, Lt. Col. Rogers’ information has been corrected, but the bigger problem still exists as every single day something else is erased from history by the computer geeks working for Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.

According to the Associated Press on Saturday, March 22, 2025: “The restoration process has been so hit or miss that even groups that the administration has said are protected, like the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots who served in a segregated World War II unit, still have deleted pages that as of Saturday had not been restored.”

Would someone please explain to me what the online removal of the records of the Tuskegee Airmen and military Medal of Honor recipients has to do with “Efficiency” because I’m having trouble understanding it?  

Last week, Principal Chief Mitchell Hicks of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians issued a statement about how indigenous peoples on the North American continent have been marginalized by the government since European settlers arrived here.

Chief Hicks pointed out in his statement that even though the US Government tried to wipe out the Cherokee language, during World War I it was the Cherokee who developed a secret code based on their language for the US military to use. He said in his statement that the Cherokee people will make sure their military history is not erased.

Thank goodness the Cherokee people are doing this, because we cannot depend on the United States Government to preserve it.

We are not stupid. We all know exactly what is behind all these anti-DEI actions. White men have dominated politics and business in the US since the country’s formation, and many of them cannot accept the fact even in the 21st century that women and people whose skin is all shades of brown and black have brains.

Many of them claim to be Christians, but they reject the essence of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Their words and actions fly in the face of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

As a Presbyterian, I believe that in the eyes of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, all people – women and men – of every shade of skin hold equal value. It is offensive when someone claims to be a Christian but they endorse political leaders who demean women and disrespect people of color.

If some of those old white men in the White House, the US Congress, and the US Supreme Court are not getting that message at their churches, maybe they need to find another church.

If you think I’m being disrespectful to the US President and other old white men, my words don’t hold a candle to the disrespect they are showing me and my fellow citizens every day through their words, their actions, and their inactions.

DEI was about making sure everyone had an opportunity to get into the college they were academically-qualified to attend. It did not guarantee that they would pass the courses and graduate. It was about everyone having the opportunity to apply for a job. It did not guarantee them the job. It was about making sure everyone had a chance to sit at the proverbial table.

When I was a little girl in the 1950s, it wasn’t like that. In fact, when I was a teenager in the late 1960s, things were just beginning to change. I pray our country never goes back to the dark days of racial segregation and gender discrimination.

The Republican Party (i.e., Donald Trump, for he is the Republican Party now) has twisted the opportunities that DEI offered into something ominous, vile, and discriminatory. Through Project 2025 that his friends wrote, he is attempting to erase opportunity and history.

But some of us were entering the workforce in the 1970s and we know from personal experience how it was. It makes me sick to my stomach to know that my four great-nieces who are in their early twenties will not have the same opportunities their mothers had in the 1990s.

You see, the problem wasn’t solved when Lt. Col. Rogers’ military record was restored to a website. That was accomplished only after a public outcry. But the evil, hate, ignorance, small-mindedness, and fear (yes, fear!) that resulted in his record being mislabeled and removed is very much still with us.

If you think I’m reckless in my use of the word “evil,” according to Merriam-Webster, evil is defined as “morally reprehensible,” “arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct,” “causing harm,” and “something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity.”

The Trump Administration and his Department of Government Efficiency is all about evil, hate, ignorance, small-mindedness, and fear (yes, fear!). They work from a place of evil. They set out to hurt everyone they hate, don’t understand, and fear. They fear that white people will soon be in the minority in the United States. They fear that since women are going to colleges and universities in greater number than men, that eventually more women will attain positions of leadership in government and business.

Elon Musk has been quoted as saying that the biggest weakness of “the West” is empathy. I beg to differ. I think empathy has been one of our strengths. We showed empathy through the work of the USAID. Through the Voice of America radio broadcasts we showed empathy toward people who were trapped in authoritarian governments.

Trump and Musk have ended USAID and stopped the Voice of America. Being from South Africa, though, Mr. Musk has little experience with empathy. The word “empathy” is not in Trump’s vocabulary.

That takes us to “ignorance.” The people who took down the photograph of the Enola Gay airplane took it down because it had the word “Gay” in it. Well, duh! “Gay” just happens to be a woman’s name.

If you don’t believe me, look it up. And if you don’t know what the Enola Gay was, by all means, look it up if you still can.

While we’re on the topic of Government Efficiency…

US Department of Agriculture has halted $500 million in deliveries to food banks nationwide that the Biden administration announced last year. Even The Washington Post has reported this. One more slam at farmers and people who need a little help putting food on the table.

And even though under 26 U.S. Code 7213 it is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison, a $5,000 fine, and mandatory termination of employment for a federal employee to give anyone access to a taxpayer’s tax return information, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is working on an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to gain access to private tax records.

ICE claims to only be going after the tax records of undocumented immigrants, but this is a slippery slope.

If you aren’t careful, Mr. Trump, someone outside the IRS could someday gain access to your tax records! We all know how much you don’t want that to happen, even though every US President for decades before your first term made their tax records public. You promised to follow suit as soon as your 2015 tax audit was completed. We’re still waiting….

Until my next blog post

I hope you have a good book to read.

Hold your family close.

Remember the people of Ukraine.

And remember the people of western North Carolina where a half-dozen wildfires were still burning out-of-control yesterday afternoon. Three of them are in Polk County, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene last September.

Look for my next blog post tomorrow!

Janet