Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: The Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was packed with developers, politicians and New York celebrities, more than 600 in all, for the funeral of Fred C. Trump, the builder whose no-frills brick rental towers transformed Brooklyn and Queens. Three of his four living children, who had grown up listening to the sermons of the church’s most famous minister, Norman Vincent Peale, offered loving eulogies to their father. Then it was Donald Trump’s…

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NBC News reports: The threat of terrorism — particularly from the far right — should be a major concern for governments on both sides of the Atlantic as coronavirus restrictions continue to ease, according to multiple experts and former law enforcement officials who have experience monitoring violent extremist activity. High unemployment levels due to the pandemic, poor economic prospects and the spread of disinformation through the internet and social media could accelerate radicalization, they said. And after a major drive…

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David Lapan writes: I believe deeply that how our government’s security forces are seen by the American public is critical to their ability to protect us and our ability to maintain a healthy democracy. That belief comes from experience: I served for decades in the U.S. Marine Corps, as a Department of Defense spokesperson, and as the Trump administration’s first Department of Homeland of Security spokesperson. It’s as an American who cares profoundly about the missions of both DOD and…

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Ellis Cose writes: When Trump ran for president, he promised to take America back to greatness. I assumed he wanted to return us to the 1950s, when minorities and women supposedly knew their respective places, and coal and tobacco were king. He apparently had an earlier period in mind: the years right after World War I. In that era, federal agents stormed across America, arresting and deporting presumed enemies of the state. The effort was led by Attorney General A….

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Jonathan Blitzer writes: In early June, after the killing of George Floyd, when tens of thousands of mostly peaceful demonstrators assembled in cities across the country to protest police brutality, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of its agents to patrol the crowds. They cleared space for a Presidential photo op in front of St. John’s Church, in Washington, D.C., by forcibly removing demonstrators, and in New York City they reportedly made at least one arrest at gunpoint. The…

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The New York Times reports: Watching the passing masses of protesters chanting “Freedom!” and “Putin resign!” while passing drivers honked, applauded and offered high-fives, a sidewalk vendor selling little cucumbers and plastic cups of forest raspberries said she would join in, too, if she did not have to work. “There will be a revolution,” the vendor, Irina Lukasheva, 56, predicted. “What did our grandfathers fight for? Not for poverty or for the oligarchs sitting over there in the Kremlin.” The…

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