Last week, Gov. JB Pritzker accurately forewarned the people of Illinois and our country about the dangers of Donald Trump, and correctly identified the similarities between Trump’s lawless aggression and rise to power, and that of Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich.
That same evening, WTTW and other public television stations in the U. S. broadcast the chilling documentary “Plunderer: The Life and Times of A Nazi Art Thief.” Hitler’s rise to power and his invasion, seizing and control of art and cultural institutions was coupled with his criminalizing and demonizing groups of people. Such labeling and laws censored such artists, writers and citizens and the first step in Hitler’s eradication of people themselves.
Trump’s serial attacks on the nation’s cultural institutions, performing arts centers and related federally funded agencies together with Trump’s illegal and disruptive attacks, denial of rights and differentiation of people in the LGBTQ community across America are marching in lockstep with Hitler as well.
Trump’s usurping the authority and control over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by firing its respected president, Deborah Rutter, and naming himself as chairman is a damaging step to assert Trump’s extreme politically shaped cultural values.
Trump’s defunding and closing of the President John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston is an intentional disruption of an unbroken chain of history that not even the assassination of President Kennedy could break.
Trump’s removal of the archivist of the U. S. violates the statutory political independence and neutrality of the National Archives and Records Administration. It is both a violation of the First Amendment rights of citizens to know what government is doing in their name, and undermines the legislative branch power of constitutional checks and balances needed for Congress ensure government accountability for the federal spending and programs it authorizes.
Granting Trump such power over the National Archives will thwart the documentation and transparency of the constitutional crisis being orchestrated by Trump.
Some Illinois Republicans have argued that Pritzker’s comparison of Trump to Hitler is extreme. However, Trump’s visibly extreme behavior, actions, and illegal abuse of authority as president must, as Pritzker courageously stated, be stopped now.
Steven L. Katz, former legislative assistant to the late state Rep. Sidney R. Yates, Washington D.C.
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Academic expertise needed more than ever
While I will miss columnist Gene Lyons, it was good to see two Chicago-area academic experts get to weigh in on current events (Dominic A. Pacyga’s “Chicago, always a sanctuary for the dispossessed,” and Eldon Ham’s “What does the future hold for NFL’s commitment to diversity?”).
Might I suggest that the paper cultivate a team of such contributors? Only in America is the word “academic” used as a synonym for “irrelevant.” But Pacyga and Ham’s op-eds show that professors bring their very relevant expertise to bear on subjects that are often mischaracterized by politicians and the sort of pundits who only read or listen to other pundits on TV or online.
To be more specific: it would be great to read essays from Chicago-area faculty in the biomedical sciences whose research is being disrupted by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s arbitrary cut-offs of funding from the federal government. What will it mean to them (and their students, graduate and undergraduate) to have a lab shut down? What will it mean to the patients in clinical trials that might have led to cures that are now suspended? Would it even be possible to re-start their research into cancer or Alzheimer’s under a new administration or regime? What are the consequences for American science, and everyday Americans who rely on that science, in this unprecedented political situation?
Pundits have opinions about cuts to federal spending, academics can inform your readers about the real-life consequences of these cuts.
Bill Savage, Rogers Park