OPINION//OPEN FORUM

Intimidation is a powerful weapon. And it comes in many forms — especially in the age of Trump

Toilets are left on a Berkeley street in 2010. A commode sent anonymously to the author appears to send an ominous message about his anti-Trump opinions.

Two Toilets on the Street – 2:02 p.m. – Berkeley These reminded me of outhouses in the Saline Valley, where two toilets were side by side, no door, with the desert as a backdrop. Camera Settings: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, ISO 640, 1/60, f 22, 24mm lensLiz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle

By David Kirp

June 21, 2025 (SFChronicle.com)

Intimidation is a powerful weapon.

President Donald Trump and his MAGA acolytes have taken a page from the classic autocrats’ playbook, deploying fear to stifle opposition. Anyone who runs afoul of the movement risks the threat of a nasty reprisal.

The threat of physical attacks on lawmakers and their families, fueled by the Trump regime’s inflammatory rhetoric, is a reason why some Republican members of Congress are playing possum.

“We are all afraid,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said, speaking on behalf of colleagues who are fearful of speaking for themselves.

One of the most widely used scare tactics against federal judges who have overturned executive orders involves anonymously sending a pizza to their homes. 

This isn’t just a prank. It’s psychological warfare, a black humor way to convey an ominous message — we know where you live and where your family lives.

“Be afraid” is the message. “Be very afraid.”

I get it. I have my own psychological warfare story. While it’s unnerving, I’m still standing. 

In my case, it was a commode, not a pizza, that I received.

It recently arrived at the local post office in a beat-up cardboard box, a few days after the Chronicle published an opinion piece in which I described my ambivalence about living in Donald Trump’s America, where democracy is under siege. 

My husband, Niko, picked up the box. Because it was too big to fit into the car, he opened it and brought it into the house.

“Here’s the commode you ordered,” he told me.

“Say what?” I replied, or words to that effect. “I didn’t order it.” 

At first, Niko was disbelieving.

“Maybe you bought it by accident,” he suggested, as if someone might buy a commode in a fit of absence of mind. To convince him, I called Amazon, which confirmed that I hadn’t ordered it. 

The box didn’t contain a note of explanation from the anonymous sender. Amazon, the shipper for a third-party vendor, was clueless and the manufacturer was unhelpful.

Being sent an unwanted commode sounds like the punch line of a bad joke, but it puts me in the same camp as the judges who are getting those pizzas. 

To me, the message was plain: “We are targeting you and your husband, not just by outing you but also by delivering something that’s usually needed by people of a certain age — people like you. Commodes cost more than pizzas (the one I received sells for $42.98 on Amazon), but we’re willing to spend a considerable amount of money to intimidate you.”

“Why me?” I wondered, once I decoded the implications of my “gift.” I’m no firebrand leading the charge against the tyrant in the White House.

For a number of years, I taught a large undergraduate class at UC Berkeley called the “Ethics in the Age of Trump” — the running joke was that it would be a very short course. Mentioning Berkeley to a MAGA acolyte is certainly a bit like enraging the bull with a red cape.

My writings have invariably taken positions that are diametrically opposed to the Trump wood-chopper agenda. Apparently, that’s enough to put me on a list of undesirables.

After my Chronicle column ran, I received a bevy of emails that demanded — in language unfit for a family newspaper — that I, the “scum of the Earth,” do the country a favor and leave immediately.

I’m not easily cowed.

I shrugged off the emails. I know from experience that if you take a controversial position in an opinion piece, you can expect obscene rants. But if the purpose of sending me the commode was to shut me up or convince me to depart, the strategy backfired. 

Trump and his MAGA wolf pack want their opponents to “self-deport” because it smooths the glide path to autocracy.

To hell with that.

Instead of rushing to buy a one-way ticket to a saner country, I’ve doubled down on my opposition to the endless stream of outrages emanating from Washington and to the imminent threat to the rule of law posed by the autocrat in the White House.

Millions of Americans have been demoralized by the Trump blitzkrieg. The zigzags can leave you gasping: sky-high tariffs one day, lower tariffs the next day; humiliate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, then send arms to Ukraine, but threaten to walk away from the war and hand Russia a victory. 

The litany of inconsistencies is endless: sledgehammer Columbia University into retreating on academic freedom, then tell the university today that its obeisance doesn’t get it off the hook; require public schools to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, then back down when New York says “no”; propose to annex Canada, then make nice with the prime minister.  

The passivity of many of Trump’s opponents during the first five months of his presidency resembles the despondency of the mice in famed psychologist B.F. Skinner’s lab. When they were exposed to random punishments, the mice simply stopped trying.

Yet now, as the implications of the president’s misdeeds sink in, many Americans are trying to figure out how they can fight back. If you’ve read this far, my hunch is that you may be in this camp.

Here’s my advice — do not take it lying down. 

There are many ways to oppose this regime — joining demonstrations, writing and phoning your congressional representatives, enlisting in a political campaign, supporting immigrants when federal immigration agents swoop in and contributing to organizations that are defending the rule of law. Doubtlessly, you’ll come up with other possibilities that work for you.

What’s crucial is that you combat the curse of fatalism — that you keep from becoming one of Skinner’s mice — since that’s precisely how the authoritarian administration wants you to react. Overcome your fear. (Yes, I’m still working on that part, too.) Find a way of contributing to the survival of democracy that works for you. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Meanwhile, the commode episode has a happy ending — my local senior center was pleased to take it off my hands.

Inadvertently, the mystery sender did a good deed.

David Kirp is a professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

― James Baldwin

James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. Wikipedia

Issued on: 21/06/2025

By: Diya GUPTA/ FRANCE 24

The UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Saturday that an Israeli strike had hit a centrifuge manufacturing workshop at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site, but said that the attack would have “no radiological consequences” due to the lack of nuclear material at the site. Read our liveblog to see how the day’s events unfolded.

This liveblog is no longer being updated. For more coverage of the Israel-Iran war, click here. 

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity — one that comes alive in this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:

THE WHOLE OF IT
by Hannah Fries

If you step back, you can see it all
on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children
grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins
like saffron filaments. Further still, and see
your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean,
tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great-
great grandchildren drawing their names
in the sand with sticks. The seas
rising and falling, ice scraping the earth,
and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs,
protected places. First light on the first day
of your life, and first light of first stars.
And in this way, every death, each apparent ending,
might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven
into one memory, so that always is
this tree, and the long days of falling in love
over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf,
and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.

Couple with Hannah’s magnificent poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on befriending time.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

Perhaps the most perilous consequence of uncertain times, times that hurl us into helplessness and disorientation, is that they turn human beings into opinion machines. We dope our pain and confusion with false certainties that stifle the willingness to understand (the nuances of the situation, the complexity of the wider context, what it’s like to be the other person) with the will to be right. Our duels of self-righteousness can be fought over whose turn it is to take out the trash or who should govern the country, they can take place on the scale of the planet in the language of nuclear weapons or on the scale of the kitchen table in the code language of lovers, but they are always a betrayal of our deepest humanity — the capacity to understand, the longing to be understood, the knowledge that everyone is doing the best they can with the tools they’ve got and the cards they’ve been dealt.

Corinna Luyken, maker of tender and thoughtful illustrated aids for living, animates the absurdity of these duels with playfulness and charm in The Arguers (public library).

The story begins as a bickering over whether a brush or a comb would better detangle the king’s beard and ends up, in the wildfire way of righteousness, as an argument about everything and a national sport.

Soon they argued all the time,
until no one could remember
when the arguing had started
or over what,
or by whom.

They argue with each other and with the flowers and the stones.

They grow so skilled at it — “they could argue forward and backward, right side up and upside down… in fog and sun and sleet and snow” — that the king and queen decide to hold a contest for their nation or arguers.

On the day of the contest, things take an unintended turn.

The story ends with a wink, but is at heart a warning: arguing is counterfeit problem-solving, an argument is a barricade against understanding, and self-righteousness is a fist you open to find your kindness crushed.

Couple The Arguers with philosopher Daniel Dennett on how to criticize with kindness, then revisit Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality.

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The year is 1937. Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905–August 14, 1994) — Bulgarian, Jewish, living in Austria as the Nazis are rising to power — has just lost his mother; his mother, whose bottomless love had nurtured the talent that would win him the Nobel Prize in his seventies; his mother, who had raised him alone after his father’s death when Elias was seven (the kind of “wound that turns into a lung through which you breathe,” he would later reflect).

Having left chemistry to study philosophy, trading the science of life for the art of learning to die, Canetti, aged thirty-two, decides to write a book “against” death, defying it without denying it, this shadow of life that is also its spark, the very thing that makes it shimmer with aliveness. He would work on it for the next half century until his own death, filling two thousand pages with reflections and aphorisms posthumously distilled into The Book Against Death (public library).

Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare 1946 edition of the essays of Montaigne

Perhaps Canetti’s reckoning with death is so virtuosic in articulating the potency and poignancy of life because it keeps inverting the lens from the microscopic to the telescopic and back again as he mourns his mother and mourns the world. Everything is suddenly personal, his suffering a fractal of the suffering and everyone else’s suffering a mirror image of his own.

Coming to feel that “with every destroyed city a piece of his own life falls away,” he searches for the borders of compassion and finds none:

Am I Nuremberg? Am I Munich? I am every building in which children sleep. I am every open square across which feet scurry.

And yet alongside this overwhelming brokenness, so universal and therefore so intimate, is also a greater wholeness that he is, as all visionaries are, able to glimpse through the ruins:

Above the shattered world there stretches a pure blue heaven, which continues to hold it together.

It is this blue, this color of longing for life, that saturates the meaning of life amid the darkness of death. Three years into the war, he vows:

Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death.

Available as a print.

Not everyone, not even the great minds, had Canetti’s defiance. “We must love one another or die,” W.H. Auden had entreated humanity in one of the greatest poems ever written as the war was breaking out, and then, in what may be the most poignant one-word revision in the history of literature and one of the saddest in the history of the human spirit, he had rewritten that epitaphic last line in the wake of the war: “We must love one another and die.” While Auden was ceding his optimism, Muriel Rukeyser — as great a poet and a greater spirit — was celebrating a different vision of life beyond notions of triumph and defeat in one of the greatest books ever written: “All the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”

Canetti shares her lens on the political, but for him it is polished with the most deeply personal. In an entry from June 1942, he writes:

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true.

[…]

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

Echoing Ernest Hemingway (“No one you love is ever dead,” he had written in a stirring letter of consolation to a bereaved friend) and echoing Emily Dickinson (“Each that we lose takes part of us / A crescent still abides / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides,” she had written in her reckoning with love and loss upon her own mother’s death), Canetti contemplates the immortality of love in the living:

The souls of the dead are in others, namely those left behind… Only the dead have lost one another completely.

The final card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, available as stand-alone print benefitting the Audubon Society.

In the prime of his life, he is already facing the losses that loom over anyone who loves:

I want anything to do with fewer and fewer people, mainly so that I can never get over the pain of losing them.

Not knowing that in the decades ahead he would lose the love of his life, marry again and lose her too, lose his younger brother, lose a retinue of friends — some to mass murder, some to suicide, some to the entropy that will take us all if we are lucky enough to grow old — he writes from the fortunate platform of his healthy thirties:

We carry the most important thing around inside ourselves for forty or fifty years before we risk articulating it. Therefore there is no way to measure all that is lost with those who die too early. Everyone dies early.

Art by Charlotte Pardi from Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved — a soulful Danish illustrated meditation on love and loss

And yet his mother’s death is precisely what awakened Canetti to life — his own life and the life of the world. (“Death is our friend,” Rilke had written when Canetti was a teenager, “precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”) Beneath it all pulsates his unflinching intimacy with the elemental reality of living:

We do not die of sadness — out of sadness we live on.

At the crux of Canetti’s disquisition on the menace and meaning of death is a passionate inquiry into what it means to be alive. A decade before Edward Abbey contemplated how to live and how (not) to die and a decade after Simone de Beauvoir composed her resolutions for a life worth living, Canetti itemizes the priorities of a good life:

To live at least long enough to know all human customs and events; to retrieve all of life that has passed, since we are denied that which will come; to pull yourself together before you disappear; to be worthy of your own birth; to think of the sacrifices made at the expense of others’ every breath; to not glorify suffering, even though you are alive because of it; to only keep for yourself that which cannot be given away until it is ripe for others and hands itself on; to hate every person’s death as if it were your own, and to at last be at peace with everything, but never with death.

Complement these passages from The Book Against Death with a heron’s antidote to death, then revisit Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness, Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, and Alan Lightman on what happens when we die.

Charlie Chaplin Mar 10, 2016• Subscribe to our channel: http://bit.ly/TheChaplinFilms • Get it on iTunes: http://bit.ly/iTunesGreatDictatorSpeech • “We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…” The Great Dictator © Roy Export S.A.S. Learn more about The Great Dictator at http://bit.ly/GreatDictatorFilm • Facebook:   / charliechaplinofficial  

Text:

The Final Speech from The Great Dictator:

I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!

Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Final speech from The Great Dictator Copyright © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved

(Contributed by Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.)

Forbes Breaking News Jun 21, 2025 During his “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was informed that President Trump had launched strikes on Iran. Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more: https://account.forbes.com/membership…

FULL SPEECH:

Forbes Breaking News Jun 21, 2025 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) holds a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more: https://account.forbes.com/membership…

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 21, 2025 Edward R. Close, PhD, is author of Transcendental Physics. He is coauthor (with Vernon Neppe) of Reality Begins with Consciousness: A Paradigm Shift That Works. He is also author of a lengthy chapter titled “The Mathematical Unification of Time, Space, Matter, Energy, and Consciousness” in Is Consciousness Primary? edited by Gary Schwartz and Marjorie Woollacott. In this video, rebooted from 2019, he describes the history of the double-slit experiments that confirmed the mysterious wave-particle duality of photons. This work began prior to the development of quantum physics. Later, physicist John Wheeler proposed the delayed-choice modification of this experiment that further confirmed the role of the conscious observer in the manifestation of observable reality. The mysteries of quantum physics are also highlighted in the EPR paradox as developed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on September 19, 2019)

“The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction.”

― Toni Morrison

Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.