I've been reading the galleys for @jkirchick 's forthcoming book, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. It's as if Jamie flipped a switch to reveal a room of the house that had never before been seen in full light. Beautifully written too us.macmillan.com/books/97816277…
@jkirchick .@jkirchick Secret City seems destined to become both a standard text of US history - and a hugely popular bestseller.
Thing I learned today from @jkirchick "Secret City": the Eisenhower administration National Security Adviser who codified the 1953 ban on employing homosexuals in any federal agency - including eg the National Zoo - was himself gay according to his own later discovered diary
@jkirchick "All told, an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 federal employees lost their jobs owing to homosexuality in the 1950s alone ..." Kirchick, Secret City, p. 184.
Thing I learned today from @jkirchick "Secret City": that the first and most important of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories - devised by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison - was a wild fantasy that Kennedy had fallen victim to a murderous homosexual cabal.
Thing I learned today from @jkirchick "Secret City": the gay Vietnam vet who lunged for the gun and saved President Ford from an assassin in 1975 ... was inadvertently outed by his own heroism. His father banned him from his mother's funeral, and he then drank himself to death
Thing I already knew, but was reminded of by @jkirchick “Secret City”: first president to host a same-sex couple overnight in the White House? Ronald Reagan (p 525)
When an appointee came out as gay to Reagan , he replied “So are half my friends - and all of Nancy’s” (526)
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Biden making the same error w/r/t Israel that he previously made with Ukraine: trying to micro-manage from a distance somebody else's defensive war by limiting categories of weapons. This error doesn't limit war. This error prolongs war, by denying the ally the means of success.
I often think the Biden foreign policy would produce more success if its architects were less clever. "Give the Ukrainians/Israelis enough that they don't lose, but not enough to win" is an idea to baffle all lesser minds.
The micro-management of Israel's war is one part of a much bigger scheme: an Arab force to police Gaza, reform of the Palestinian Authority, a Saudi-US defense agreement, etc. etc.
Less clever people would have arrived at a simpler plan: fight Hamas until it's beaten.
Every dictator who ever seized power justified his coup as an official act for the good of the state.
Between November 2020 and January 2021, Donald Trump attempted a coup d'etat. Fortunately, power is harder to seize in the United States than in other countries. Fortunately too the outcome of the 2020 election was too clear to be subverted. Fortunately also ...
Fortunately also Trump's coup was countered by constitutionally loyal Republicans like his own vice president. Fortunately finally, the would-be coup-makers were unusually stupid, crazy, lazy, and inept. But still - Trump as president attempted a coup d'etat.
The defendant's presence at his criminal trial is not an inconvenience or imposition, as Trump's partisans complain. The defendant's presence is a *right,* guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. 1/x
The right to be present at one's trial is precious. But it is not absolute. The Supreme Court has ruled that presence at a trial can be forfeited by persistently bad behavior. 2/x
In Illinois v Allen (1970), the Supreme Court considered three options for dealing with "disruptive, contumacious, stubbornly defiant defendants": binding and gagging them, holding them in civil contempt, or temporarily removing them from the courtroom until they behave. 3/x
No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires. lapresse.ca/actualites/car…
The Jew as vampire is one of the deepest myths of western culture. The 1922 film Nosferatu that inspired the La Presse cartoon also inspired Nazi cartoonists of the Third Reich anumuseum.org.il/blog/myth-vamp…
La Presse has removed the image, here's a screen shot. It substitutes Benjamin Netanyahu's face in an iconic still from the 1922 movie, Nosferatu. That film was riddled with antisemitic images and themes and directly inspired antisemitic cartoons in the Nazi press of the 1920s and 1930s.