NY GOP Forms Armed Militia for No Known Purpose & Publishers Fight Back Over Library Book Bans
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: Superman and poet Langston Hughes comments on what America stands for.
Democrats sue GOP county executive over armed volunteer unit they say amounts to an illegal militia: A Republican tries to form a private army despite having one of the largest law enforcement organizations in the state. Feel safer?
Lawmakers flooded with calls about Elon Musk: ‘It is a deluge on DOGE’: I’m encouraged by the onslaught of calls from voters expressing their anger and confusion.
Publishers, a library and others sue over Idaho’s law restricting youth access to ‘harmful’ books: Trump ordered an end to government investigations into book banning as an infringement on free speech. Wait, banning books isn’t an interference with free speech but investigating bans is?
Kareem’s Video Break: The Capybara makes its delightful debut.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner: Carl’s Jr. promotes a Hangover Burger, but are they also promoting over-drinking?
What I’m Watching: Four exciting suspense shows have been keeping me up: Paradise, The Hunting Party, Prime Target, and The Night Agent.
Kareem’s Sports Moments: When I see an athlete make a shot this amazing, I have to redefine what is impossible.
The Nicholas Brothers and Cab Calloway Perform “Jumpin’ Jive”: This clip from Stormy Weather shows the energy and joy that is swing.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
Superman’s motto from the 1940s radio series
“Truth, Justice, and the American Way” was proudly announced with every episode of Superman when I was a kid. As a Black child during one of the most tumultuous times for civil rights, I knew that the phrase was more aspirational than reality. But that was okay because at least we were striving toward achieving that goal. Being on a basketball team didn’t mean we had to win the championship, but we were going to try our hardest to. I guess that’s how I’ve always thought of America: We may stumble now and then, but we have our eyes on the prize of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” The American Way, for me, was living by the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, which constantly evolved to be more inclusive, compassionate, and supportive of its people. A neighbor helping a neighbor—regardless of their heritage.
For the first time in my life, I’ve come to doubt that America is aspiring toward this motto. Instead, it’s in full retreat from those ideals.
In a week of daily news bombs detailing the dismantling of America as if it were a garage sale, this statistic that I read this morning said everything about what our president has turned this country into: “8,340 women and girls likely to die from pregnancy complications due to Trump’s 90-day USAid shutdown” (“Deaths predicted amid the chaos of Elon Musk’s shutdown of USAid”). Does this make Trump and Musk mass murderers because they did something unnecessary for personal political gain that they knew would cause the deaths of thousands? Yes. Yes, it does. And it makes us accessories.
The purging of the FBI, CIA, and all federal agencies meant to protect the American people from anyone who does not profess agreement with Trump’s vague and destructive agenda is basically a political coup. Unelected people are allowed to roam freely through our most protected information, rewriting computer code that leaves our national security vulnerable and information about private citizens ripe for the picking.
Throughout the election, Trump and all his GOP loyalists kept throwing around accusations against their Democratic opponents of being communists, socialists, Marxists, and fascists—even though they aren’t philosophically compatible. That’s okay because they knew their target audience only thought of those words as placeholders for the Powerful Federal Government, which is their biggest bogeyman.
Look what they got. A federal government that wants to buy TikTok (and have a source of national propaganda), that wants to deregulate to the point that no one is safe from corporate exploitation, reduce taxes on billionaires, and make up for it with tariffs that are disguised taxes on the average person.
Worse, they have a federal government that stands for greed, incompetence, and, well, mass murder. That is the new “American Way.”
To remind us of the dream of America so we know what we’re fighting for—and to honor Black History Month, which Trump has virtually banned acknowledging in federal government offices—here are a few stanzas of Langston Hughes’ powerful poem, “Let America Be America Again” (read the entire poem here.):
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.(It never was America to me.)
…Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
That poem inspires me to continue to make the American Way the embodiment of Truth and Justice rather than what is currently becoming. I want to feel the surge of pride for my country again, rather than embarrassment and guilt as our leaders retreat from the Age of Reason into the Age of Treason.
In 2021, DC changed Superman’s motto to “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.” I can get behind that. After all, to borrow from Robert Browning, our country’s reach should exceed its grasp, else what is a democracy for?