In Pennsylvania and Arizona, Big Lie supporters have won GOP nominations for governor and other key races
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Caesarism
If Donald Trump committed crimes on his way out of the White House, he should be subject to the same treatment as any other alleged criminal. The reason for this is simple: Ours is a government of laws, not of men, as John Adams once observed. Nobody, not even a president, is above those laws.
So why did I feel nauseous yesterday, watching coverage of the FBI executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate?
Because this country is tracking toward a scale of political violence not seen since the Civil War. It’s evident to anyone who spends significant time dwelling in the physical or virtual spaces of the American right. Go to a gun show. Visit a right-wing church. Check out a Trump rally. No matter the venue, the doomsday prophesying is ubiquitous—and scary. Whenever and wherever I’ve heard hypothetical scenarios of imminent conflict articulated, the premise rests on an egregious abuse of power, typically Democrats weaponizing agencies of the state to target their political opponents. I’ve always walked away from these experiences thinking to myself: If America is a powder keg, then one overreach by the government, real or perceived, could light the fuse.
Think I’m being hysterical? I’ve been accused of that before. But we’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans abandon their faith in the nation’s core institutions. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans become convinced that their leaders are illegitimate. We’ve seen what happens when millions of Americans are manipulated into believing that Trump is suffering righteously for their sake; that an attack on him is an attack on them, on their character, on their identity, on their sense of sovereignty. And I fear we’re going to see it again.
[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]
It’s tempting to think of January 6, 2021, as but one day in our nation’s history. It’s comforting to view the events of that day—the president inciting a violent mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election—as the result of unprecedented conditions that happened to converge all at once, conditions that are not our national norm.
But perhaps we should view January 6 as the beginning of a new chapter.
It’s worth remembering that Trump, who has long claimed to be a victim of political persecution, threatened to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, throughout the 2016 campaign, reveling in chants of “Lock her up!” at rallies nationwide. (Republicans did not cry foul when the FBI announced an investigation into Clinton just days before the election.) It was during that campaign—as I traveled the country talking with Republican voters, hoping to understand the Trump phenomenon—that I began hearing casual talk of civil war. Those conversations were utterly jarring. People spoke matter-of-factly about amassing arms. Many were preparing for a day when, in their view, violence would become unavoidable.
I remember talking with Lee Stauffacher, a 65-year-old Navy veteran, outside an October Trump rally in Arizona. “I’ve watched this country deteriorate from the law-and-order America I loved into a country where certain people are above the law,” Stauffacher said. “Hillary Clinton is above the law. Illegal immigrants are above the law. Judges have stopped enforcing the laws they don’t agree with.”
Stauffacher went on about his fondness of firearms and his loathing of the Democratic Party. “They want to turn this into some communist country,” he said. “I say, over my dead body.”
[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]
This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.
On December 18, 2019, the day he was impeached for the first time, Trump tweeted a black-and-white photo that showed him pointing into the camera. “THEY’RE NOT AFTER ME … THEY’RE AFTER YOU,” read the caption. “I’M JUST IN THE WAY.”
As I hit the road again in 2020, crisscrossing the nation to get a read on the Republican base, it was apparent that something had changed. There was plenty of that same bombast, all the usual chesty talk of people taking matters into their own hands. But whereas once the rhetoric had felt scattered—rooted in grievances against the left, or opposition to specific laws, or just general discomfort with a country they no longer recognized—the new threats seemed narrow and targeted. Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.
“They’ve been trying to cheat us from the beginning,” Deborah Fuqua-Frey told me outside a Ford plant in Michigan that Trump was visiting during the early days of the pandemic. “First it was Mueller, then it was Russia. Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?”
I asked her to elaborate.
“The deep state,” she said. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party.”
This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.
What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.
“The Obama FBI began spying on President Trump as a candidate,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee tweeted this morning. “If they can do this to Trump, they will do it to you!”
“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”
“If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic,” the Texas Republican Party tweeted. “It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”
[Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law]
It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall. Investigations of President Joe Biden and his son Hunter were already more or less guaranteed; the question now becomes how wide of a net congressional Republicans, in their eagerness to exact vengeance on behalf of Trump and appease a fuming base, cast in probing other people close to the president and his administration.
Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee. If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.
“Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. “Because one day what goes around is going to come around.”
And then what? It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries. Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”
It’s hard to see how any of this gets better. But it’s easy to see how it gets much, much worse.
We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.
Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.
“We face the risk of having to live through a dictatorship once again—and this is inconceivable,” one of the proclamation’s authors warned.
Four weeks after the January 6th insurrection, two leaders of the revivalist New Apostolic Reformation…
In some corners of MAGA-land, a new civil war is getting under way. The FBI’s arrival at Mar-a-Lago yesterday evening to collect evidence in a criminal investigation related to former President Donald Trump is the trigger that some of his supporters needed to suggest that violence is imminent. Predictably, the unverified Twitter accounts of armchair revolutionaries circulated claims such as “I already bought my ammo” and dark talk of “kinetic civil war” and “Civil War 2.0.”
Not to be outdone, the National Rifle Association posted an image of Justice Clarence Thomas above an indignant quotation from a majority opinion he wrote: “The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second class right.’” Verified right-wing influencers got in on the martial rhetoric, too. “Tomorrow is war. Sleep well,” Steven Crowder promised.
The bad news is that much of this talk is sincere. It is intended to intimidate the people investigating Trump’s many abuses of power, and to galvanize and organize his true believers—some of whom already proved on January 6, 2021, that they will commit violence in his name. The latest such propaganda is shocking to read, mostly because the talk of violence comes so casually to Trump’s apologists. It is all out in the open now.
The good news is that some threats remain merely threats. A violent movement either grows or shrinks. Its ideology is not defeated; it simply stops motivating people to action.
[David A. Graham: The Mar-a-Lago raid proves the U.S. isn’t a banana republic]
Trump has a hold on a party that has been offered plenty of exit ramps from its relationship with him, but he is not Voldemort. He has been isolated and humiliated. Many of the individuals who used violence to support him on January 6 are now in jail. His audiences have dwindled. Even on the night of the FBI search, in the area of Florida that he now calls home, an impromptu roadside demonstration in support of him attracted “roughly two dozen” supporters, the Miami Herald reported. “Roughly two dozen” isn’t a revolution. It isn’t even a rally.
For many Americans who wish for a peaceful democracy and remain frustrated about Trump’s continuing influence in Republican primaries, hope springs eternal that someone or something—Robert Mueller, two impeachment drives, and now criminal investigators—will definitively erase his power. But expecting saviors to intervene is the wrong way to think about how the threat of violence from Trump’s supporters might dissipate. Rather, the danger will be over when violent MAGAism becomes a rallying cry for a limited pool of adherents whose online anger fizzles upon contact with the real world.
A win, at this stage, isn’t that Trump’s troops make an apology. It is that they remain an online threat, a cosplay movement, a pretend army that can’t deliver, whose greatest strength is in their heads rather than reality.
[David Frum: Stuck with Trump]
Trump, as a former president of the United States, may be a rather unique leader of a violent insurrection, but that doesn’t make the ongoing, multiyear strategy any less effective. The January 6 committee has adopted a counter-insurrection strategy by portraying Trump squarely as the leader of a violent movement, and not simply the leader of the GOP. But some of his more extreme followers are now turning on one another. Members of the Oath Keepers, for example, have spoken to FBI investigators about matters connected with the Capitol riot—a sign that at least some fear legal penalties more than they fear the consequences of breaking with Trump. If the former president’s legal jeopardy deepens, he will in all likelihood try to raise the level of agitation in the days ahead; he knows how to use language that incites followers to violence without giving them specific instruction.
But allow me at least a glimmer of optimism. “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the poet and author Carl Sandburg famously wrote. And the decline of MAGA looks something like that—just a smattering of people respond to the overheated rhetoric of Trump and his allies. If Trump’s supporters only end up cosplaying a civil war, that itself is a small victory.
Jeet Heer
Overshadowed during his lifetime by his famous brother-in-law William F. Buckley, L. Brent Bozell Jr. has proved the true prophet of the American right.
The post Theocracy Now! The Forgotten Prophet of the Resurgent Right appeared first on The Nation.
John Nichols
Despite facing legal defeats, Trump’s former adviser is scheming Trump’s return—and Trump’s revenge.
The post Steve Bannon’s Endgame appeared first on The Nation.
Salon talks to the retired Army officer about the many threats Donald Trump poses — foreign, domestic, existential
Less than a year ago, the U.S. military, on its way out of Afghanistan, added 10 more names to its ledger of collateral damage in the war it had waged for two decades. A few days after 13 American soldiers and almost 200 Afghan civilians were killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, U.S. officials went looking for a white Toyota that they believed contained a car bomb. They found one, and they vaporized it. Officials initially thought that the strike had killed someone affiliated with Islamic extremists. Instead, the final tally of the dead consisted of one aid worker, two other adults, and seven children. Having fallen within some faraway officer’s acceptable margin of error, those people are now, in the official accounting, no more than details of a tragic but blameless accident. The military investigated itself and decided not to punish those responsible. Before the investigation, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called the strike “righteous.” After the investigation, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, called it a “tragic mistake.”
American literature is necessarily littered with meditations on violence—its ubiquity, its marrow-deep kinship with this country’s mythology of frontiers tamed and destiny manifested. But although Jamil Jan Kochai’s writing touches on these themes, his profound and visceral short-story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, is much more an interrogation of another central facet of modern American violence: its absurdity. More than almost any other work of fiction I’ve read in the post-9/11 era, Kochai’s collection lays bare the surrealism that colors nearly every interaction between one of history’s most powerful empires and the people it considers disposable. By using a fantastical style to describe the ordinary lives lost over the course of the war, Kochai brings into relief the farcical nature of a conflict in which an army can investigate itself for the death of phantom terrorists killed remotely from a control room. The result is a dark literary impeachment, a fable in which the emperor is missing not clothes but a conscience.
Simply detailing the scope and nature of the War on Terror’s carnage is one thing, but Kochai, whose stories feature anthropomorphic monkeys who instigate revolutions and a child’s severed limbs dutifully reattached by his mother, opts for a far less-traveled road, creating a world so preposterous that the violence seems like just another type of everyday absurdity. In a vacuum, Kochai’s characters and scenes would come off as ludicrous, but framed against the past two decades, they reveal how inured we’ve become to the strangeness of war. The book’s central means of indictment is to show us just how terrifyingly routine violence became for anyone who lived through the U.S. military’s prolonged campaign in response to the September 11 attacks.
[Read: What the war in Afghanistan could never do]
Many of the central characters in the collection’s 12 stories are Afghan Americans, immigrants from other parts of the world, or Afghans whose lives the war has ruptured. For the most part, the U.S. is on the sidelines. Kochai creates a deeply powerful inversion, stripping it of agency and giving it as passive a voice as it has given the men, women, and children killed or maimed by stray Hellfires. Coupled with the phantasmagorical streak that runs through many of these stories, this reversal underscores the nonsensical imbalance between the world’s most powerful military and people from one of the poorest places on Earth.
In clumsier hands, such subject matter might result in monotonously dour pieces of fiction. Kochai—who is from Logar, Afghanistan; was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan; and is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University—achieves the opposite. The stories in this collection are wildly divergent in form and style, veering from surreal to photorealistic to, in some cases, both at once. In “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a young man scrounges enough money to buy a new video game set in Afghanistan, only to find his real-life relatives, both dead and alive, populating the game’s open world, to be killed or ignored at the player’s leisure. In “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” an Afghan American Ph.D. student steps in front of his mother’s prayer mat and is transformed into a monkey, setting off a chain of events that culminates in a failed revolution. In “Return to Sender,” the child of a couple living in Kabul disappears, only to be returned to them, gradually, in pieces—a finger, a toe, three eyelashes—which they stitch back together.
There is violence of one kind or another in almost every story in this collection, but in passing so much of it through the prism of impossibility, Kochai condemns both those who perpetrated that violence and those who looked the other way. To ignore the suffering of so many Afghans over these past two decades requires thinking of them as less than human—in his fiction, Kochai simply extends that callous disregard to its illogical extremes. Many of his characters are something other than human: cursed but defiant animals, digital ghosts, giants who toss scimitars into the air hoping to murder Allah but stabbing American fighter planes instead.
Some of the stories are reminiscent of work such as Tommy Orange’s There There—not in substance, but in the way the author pinpoints a strain of wrongdoing not by focusing his attention on those responsible, but instead by simply listing their actions, sometimes in passing. It’s a technique that shows up several times in Kochai’s work, as in the description of Second Lieutenant Billy Casteel in “The Parable of the Goats.” Casteel, a fighter pilot, glides through the Afghan sky, having “just completed his twentieth bombing mission of the year by successfully obliterating forty-six insurgents, twenty-eight of their young wives, one hundred and fifty-six of their children, forty-eight of their sisters, seventy-three of their younger brothers, nineteen of their mothers, ten of their fathers, twenty-two of their chickens, eight of their cows, three of their bulls, an orchard of their trees, and three thousand honeybees, whose death, it was hypothesized, would eventually lead to the extinction of the human race.” While the mismatch of tone and subject matter emphasizes the grotesqueness of this degree of destruction, Kochai also challenges the American tendency to center itself: Here the perpetrator is given only fleeting attention; the victims and consequences afforded the spotlight.
[Read: Exit West and the edge of dystopia]
Reading The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is jarring in this moment of chronic domestic failure. In part, that’s because the Trump era and its aftermath have rendered the violations of the War on Terror ancient history in the American consciousness. But it’s also because so much of our current flavor of violence—the gun massacres to which the favored solution of some Republicans is more guns, a deadly coup attempt during which, as the White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the January 6 committee, the president told staffers that he thought his vice president deserved to be killed—seems tailor-made for the kind of surgically astute absurdity that marks Kochai’s writing. Kochai’s fiction speaks to the human need to make sense of overwhelming violence—who survives it and who doesn’t; who is held culpable and who isn’t. Such questions are often considered the domain of distant others, but Kochai makes his readers confront them head-on. His stories aren’t about some faraway people. There’s no such thing as faraway people.
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I am appalled at the intentional cruelty and shocking incompetence that drove the Trump administration’s family-separation tragedy.
But first, here’s more from The Atlantic.
- What America’s great unwinding would mean for the world
- Beach vacationers are doing it wrong.
- David Petraeus: Afghanistan did not have to turn out this way.
“This is evil.”
Welcome to the week, and allow me to introduce—or reintroduce—myself to you. I’m Tom Nichols, a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where I’m also the proprietor of the Peacefield newsletter. If you’re a regular Daily reader, you might remember that I authored this newsletter in June; I’m back, and I’ll be writing the Daily most days of the week. Along with some of my Atlantic colleagues, I’ll be sharing thoughts and analysis about the day’s news and other issues.
I write, among other things, about the perilous state of democracy in the United States and around the world. Today, I urge you to read The Atlantic’s new cover story by my colleague Caitlin Dickerson about the origins and consequences of the disastrous decision by President Donald Trump and his advisers to curtail illegal immigration by instituting a brutal family-separation policy in which children—including infants and toddlers—were intentionally taken from their parents.
Caitlin’s intense and detailed examination shows that the family-separation policy was not a misunderstanding, or a bureaucratic error, or some sort of overzealous interpretation of otherwise sensible rules. It was, as one government figure told her, “evil,” and intentionally so: The goal of the policy was to pull children from their parents at the border as a deterrent, to inflict so much pain on people trying to enter the United States illegally that no one would be brave or tough enough to keep trying to do it.
Heartbreaking stories of children torn from their parents and then subjected to inhumane detention conditions should afflict the conscience of any decent person. But Americans should also be enraged by the completely dysfunctional nature of their own government. Even if you believe in taking a tough stand against illegal immigration (as I do) the combination of moral rot and bureaucratic incompetence produced outcomes that were far worse than the policy’s designers expected—and they already expected it to be bad.
When Trump officials such as Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions finally got the family-separation policy under way, the immigration system’s courts, shelters, and other assets were almost instantly overwhelmed by a flood of traumatized children. The fallout was so awful and so obvious that soon, even Trump’s people began to backpedal away from it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen—who spoke with Caitlin on the record—admitted that she did not understand how bad the situation would get and that she regretted caving to the pressure to sign the order.
The family-separation nightmare is what can happen when zealots who have no idea what they’re doing get control of the levers of a gigantic and powerful government. Not only were Trump’s aides clueless about how the immigration system worked, but they took pride in their ignorance and saw any attempt to inject facts or caution into the debate as a sign of weakness. “There’s this worship of process,” one member of Miller’s team said. “Process, process, process. Process is code for ‘We can slow down the quick impulses of a fiery political administration with no experts.’ Well, that’s not what was voted for.”
The public never votes for “process,” but that’s how governments work, and it is how, in a system of separated powers, policies are formed, funded, and implemented. But immigration was merely one of many areas in which the Trump White House regarded the Constitution and federal law as little more than annoyances. At one point, according to the notes of a senior DHS official, Trump told Chief of Staff John Kelly “to tell Nielson to, ‘Round them all up and push them back into Mexico. Who cares about the law.’”
According to this official’s notes, “silence followed.”
This silence was part of a persistent cowardice among senior figures in the U.S. government. Opponents of the policy thought that the system, or the courts, or the person in the next office down the hall would somehow stop the cruelty. But the people who wanted to do the right thing—or, at the least, knew how the immigration system actually worked—were shouted down by low-level minions such as Katie Waldman (who was soon to be Mrs. Stephen Miller). This kind of bullying, Caitlin writes, was part of “an administration plagued by insecurity and imposter syndrome.” Whether out of misplaced loyalty or fear of professional repercussions, the professionals just took it. “They made me lie,” claimed one government official who misled Caitlin when she was reporting an earlier story about the policy.
This remarkable article is a cautionary tale for Americans and other citizens of democratic nations, a story of a political monkey’s paw. When people vote for incompetent and cowardly leaders to execute policies founded on ignorance and cruelty, they will get what they asked for—to their shame and regret.
Related:
- The secret history of family separation (Leer este artículo en español.)
- America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses.
Join Caitlin Dickerson and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a live discussion about the secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy on August 12 at 2 p.m. ET. Register here.
Today’s News
- The three men convicted in the 2020 Georgia murder of Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced by a federal judge for hate crimes.
- President Joe Biden visited Kentucky, where severe flooding has killed more than 30 people.
- June 29 was found to be the shortest day on record since scientists began using atomic clocks in 1960.
Dispatches
- I Have Notes: Nicole Chung argues that the proposed Penguin Random House–Simon & Schuster merger would threaten the survival of indie publishers—to the detriment of both writers and readers.
- Humans Being: The new Amazon Prime series Paper Girls explores who we are to our younger selves, Jordan Calhoun writes.
- The Weekly Planet: History’s greatest obstacle to climate progress has finally fallen, Robinson Meyer writes.
Evening Read
(Katie Martin / Jo Imperio / The Atlantic; Getty)
Fish Oil Is Good! No, Bad! No, Good! No, Wait
By Jacob Stern
At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution. “I remember how exciting those studies were when they first came out,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at NYU, told me. “The idea that there were populations of people who were eating fish and were protected against heart disease looked fabulous.”
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in Netflix’s The Sandman. (Netflix)
Read. “Hotel Earth,” a poem from our September issue.
Watch. Netflix’s The Sandman—especially if you’re a fan of the original comic books.
P.S.
The launching of the Webb space telescope has, for many of us, rekindled a fascination with space. I feel it, and I’m now binge-watching two television shows about it: The Star Trek series Strange New Worlds on Paramount+, and the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind—a “what if” alternate history of the Cold War space race. Both of them are throwbacks to a time in the late 1960s‚ when Americans took the conquest of space as their birthright, a natural extension of our technological optimism and can-do approach to the world. I won’t spoil the major plotlines of either for you, but I recommend them both. I miss the days when Americans were space pioneers, and now that the Russians have threatened to pull out of international space cooperation with the United States, I hope that the Americans take up the challenge of space once again.
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.