<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are my columns, reviews, interviews, essays, videos, podcasts, and radio interviews, presented chronologically, from the most recently published, back to some from the 1990s. Many of these appear also in this website’s thematic sections. (See the left-hand column of the homepage). Here below, Asterisks (*) indicate items’ relative importance to me, even if not to you<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What enabled Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> to exploit his victims, clients, accomplices, and apologists? <\/strong>The intrepid sites AlterNet<\/em> and Reset.doc <\/em>published my explanation in March, 2026. But my first encounter with someone like Epstein came in 1982, as i recounted in\u00a0\u201cWhat\u2019s Really Wrong With Fred Richmond?\u201d<\/strong><\/a>, an essay for The Village Voice<\/em>.\u00a0The\u00a0Voice<\/em>\u00a0has just now re-published it digitally,\u00a0<\/a><\/strong>with an editor\u2019s note. AlterNet<\/em><\/a><\/strong>. These reckonings connect our civic sink-pits of 1982 and 2026 instructively and unnervingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Germans are tracking U.S. political upheavals intently <\/strong><\/a>with a mixture of schadenfreude <\/em>and deepening worry that Americans are succumbing to assaults on liberal democracy like those that overwhelmed in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. Visiting the country in recent years, I’ve encountered individuals who’ve displaced lingering guilt about fascism and antisemitism into furious new accusations of me and other Americans who they believe are courting similar follies. Sensing what’s risky about drawing such analogies, Benjamin Piel<\/a><\/strong>, editor-in-chief of Weser Kurier<\/em> newspaper<\/a>, <\/strong>which serves approximately 200,000 readers in the old Hanseatic city-state of Bremen, interviewed me there in December, 2025. Here’s the paper’s English translation of our interview, <\/a><\/strong>which it published in German. If you’re attentive to analogies between American Trumpism and German fascism, please also read my essays: 1. “Cleansing Ourselves of Trumpism” <\/a>and: 2. “Augustus? Hitler? He’s Neither, but a Bit of Both”<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early on, some of us saw ICE coming. <\/strong>In August, 2025, I foresaw with uncanny specificity how \u201claw enforcement\u201d like ICE\u2019s would go lethally wrong. Posting this in The New Republic <\/em><\/strong>months before the murderous occupation of Minneapolis, I recounted how, in the 1990s, some New York City police officers (and this journalist) foresaw and opposed precedents for Trumpian authoritarian policing.<\/a><\/strong> On the passing of neoconservative warrior Norman Podhoretz, at 95 in December, 2025: <\/strong>I wouldn’t change a word of my assessment in 2000<\/a><\/strong> of his belligerent, empty “truth-telling.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Yale students resisted both<\/em> left’ish political correctness and right’ish media nonsense<\/a><\/strong> about themselves during a campus (and a national-media) upheaval in 2015. Having witnessed it at the time, I dashed off this letter to set the record straight when the controversy was being discussed 10 years later. Yale Daily News, Nov. 13, 2025<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Labor unions have their faults and abuses, but so do unions’ critics, <\/strong>and, even more so, big investors, corporate employers, and their many celebrants and apologists, among them the pundit David Brooks. I wrote about unions in this light in 2011, <\/a><\/strong>when the effects of the 2008 near-meltdown of American finance and, indeed, of American capitalism were still being felt. We may not be far from a disastrous repeat performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n In American mass shootings, The Killers R Us<\/a><\/strong>, Reset<\/em>.doc, Oct 3, 2025<\/strong>. This column, written in English, is now in Italian as well as in English on the international site Reset.org. Few gun-control advocates in America understand this piece’s explanation of what’s driving the acceleration of gun violence and of of unconstitutional, unconscionable, militarized law enforcement n the U.S. Those causes include gun manufacturers and their lobbying and marketing. But equally important is seemingly anodyne commercial-corporate “speech” and First Amendment jurisprudence that has expanded hollow speech’s destructive reach into our lives. Toward the end of the column, I link one of my ‘signature’ essays (from the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>) about how hollow speech enables hostile speech. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sore Loser? A lie that ‘free speech’ crusader Greg Lukianoff doesn’t retract.<\/a><\/strong> July 15, 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Zorhan Mamdani, an immigrant and a Muslim who won New York City’s June, 2025 ranked-choice Democratic primary nomination for Mayor, <\/a><\/strong>reminds me in striking ways of the late New York Governor Mario Cuomo, whose “come-from-behind” victory in the 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary I followed memorably in a profile that I link here. The parallels and the ironies are instructive, not least because Mamdani defeated Mario Cuomo’s son Andrew in the first round of the 2025 election. The New Republic, <\/em>June 25, 2025.<\/strong> (Also at RealClearPolitics<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Politomix<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, and other sites.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n A precedent for journalists facing Trump <\/a><\/strong>was set 40 years ago on by John Berthelsen, an American reporter facing an authoritarian political leader in Malaysia. Here I present Berthelsen’s recent account, in The Asia Sentinel<\/em>, of his long-ago ordeal and of how he, his then-publishers, and a high-court judge faced down a would-be dictator. (Posted here May 20, 2025)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOrwell\u2019s \u2018Smelly Little Orthodoxies\u2019 and Ours,\u201d<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>in George Orwell: Into the Twenty-First Century, (Thomas Cushman and John Rodden, editors), 2004. This essay, written for a conference on Orwell at Wellesley College in May, 2003, to mark the centenary of his birth, explains how his work and Alexis de Tocqueville\u2019s helped me to understand my own difficult experiences in American journalism. Prepared originally for the Centenary Conference on Orwell at Wellesley College, May, 2003.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n ***How “conservatives” became radicals \u2014 and learned to love big government<\/a><\/strong>, Salon<\/em>, May 13, 2025<\/strong>. This Salon<\/em> post extends my 2022 essay for the History News Network<\/em>, Eying Return to Power, Conservatives Learn to Love the Administrative State | <\/a>History News Network<\/a><\/em>.<\/strong> And, now, Raw Story <\/em>has picked up my Salon<\/em> essay<\/a><\/strong>, and so have Yahoo<\/em><\/strong> and MSN,<\/strong> <\/em>paraphrasing it at length to emphasize my warning that religious rightists are “hijacking conservatism” with statist, big-government strategies that contradict traditional American-conservative doctrines. In 2022, many Americans were yearning for or dreading a Trumpist\/Republican “Red Wave” conquest of the liberal “administrative state.” But now that that “Red Wave” has indeed triumphed by recapturing the White House, Congress, and some of the judiciary, its champions aren’t destroying the administrative state, as Steve Bannon and Elon Musk have claimed; they’re reconfiguring it into a leaner, meaner tool for a dictator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *** Plus ca change?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>In 1970, in a letter to The New York Times<\/em>, I knocked the U.S. Secret Service for tracking anti-Vietnam War protestors. I was 23, a year out of college. A good liberal education and a plausible civic-republican culture encouraged me in writing this brief public remonstrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n **** Life After ‘Diversity’<\/a> To understand the current controversy over Trump’s unremitting assault on “D.E.I.” protocols (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) in business corporations and public institutions, read an argument against<\/em> “diversity” protocols that I made in my book Liberal Racism <\/em>in 1997. That was long before anyone imagined that someone like Trump would win control of our government and public discourse. Hideous though his and MAGA’s premises and policies are, I’ve never departed from my conviction that it was liberals who, in “a colossal blunder,” opened new doors to those racist assaults. I described that blunder in Liberal Racism<\/em>, whose introductory chapter is linked above. Twenty-five years later, I reiterated that argument in “Scrapping the Color Code,”<\/a><\/strong> for Commonweal<\/em>. And in 2024,<\/em> I made it again, showing that Jonathan Holloway Was Far More Than Rutgers\u2019s First Black President | The New Republic<\/strong><\/a>. But first read the Life After ‘Diversity’<\/a><\/strong> link to understand what we should have known in 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n **Is Trump Augustus, or Hitler? He’s neither, yet he’s more than a bit of both.<\/a><\/strong> Salon<\/em>, Feb. 17, 2025. Picked up by AlterNet,<\/em> May 23<\/a><\/strong>. (The same essay is posted here<\/a><\/strong> on jimsleeper.com, with a few additional photos.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n The right-wing, Trumpist Breitbart website<\/strong><\/a> tried to discredit my Hitler analogy, drawing more than 1300 comments, most of them deranged. My image of Trump is much broader (and deeper) than Hitlerian, so be sure to see how I draw that analogy and how I contextualize it in the Salon and AlterNet posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *** America’s Decline and Fall: To understand Trump, read Edward Gibbon and the American republic’s own founders.<\/a><\/strong> Commonweal <\/em>magazine, Nov. 24, 2024. This 100-year-old magazine characterizes itself as “Catholic. Independent. Opinionated.” I can attest to that, even as a democratic socialist and non-Catholic who’s written for Commonweal<\/em> occasionally since the 1980s. Here I evoke the prospect of an authoritarian American regime, citing warnings from the republic’s founders and from Edward Gibbon’s account, which the founders had read, of how the ancient Roman republic slipped into self-delusion and surrendered to seductive but intimidating pressures. Gibbon “wrote” his own 18th Century English biases into his account of Rome’s fall, but he wasn’t wrong to assume that human nature hadn’t changed much between the 1st Century and the 18th and that he was right to highlight the continuities. Are 21st Century Americans slipping or sleepwalking into an abyss now, too, as ancient Romans did and as our founders feared that we would? Gibbon had his prejudices, but he may have been prophetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n **’An Existential Battle’: American news media’s prospects under Trump,<\/a> <\/strong>The Guardian,<\/em> Nov. 23, 2024. A comment by me to Guardian<\/em> senior American correspondent Edward Helmore gave this piece its title, and my observations appear here a few times. A truly free press can’t pretend to be “neutral” about lies and broken civic norms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Elise Stefanik’s Audience of One: How Anti-Woke Showboating Got Her the UN Job<\/strong>,<\/a> Salon,<\/em> November 16, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than racism or sexism, Dems were defeated by their own neoliberal corporatism<\/a><\/strong>, Salon,<\/em> November 10, 2024. (This was Salon’s<\/em> most popular article that day, with more than 25,000 views in the first few hours.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n **Trump and his money men are repeating ‘the Hitler mistake’ | Salon.com<\/strong><\/a> Posted on Election Day, Nov. 5<\/a>,<\/strong> 2024. (Also at RealClearMarkets<\/em><\/a><\/strong>). This is an adaptation, for the larger readerships, of a letter that I’d written to Yale’s Class of 1969 about one of us, Stephen Schwarzman, and Trump.<\/a> <\/strong>in October, 2024. Schwarzman has been prominent even among other billionaires in backing Trump since 2016 and in the closing months of the 2024 campaigns. Read all about it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n ****Autumn, 2024:<\/strong> What IS<\/em> it about ‘the Jews,’ American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?<\/strong><\/a> The answers are older and deeper than many Americans know, and they aren’t easy. I offer them in a personal testament in three dimensions: biblically Hebraic, 17th century Protestant-Calvinist, and American autobiographical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was torn for months about undertaking this essay, knowing that no “side” in the Israel\/Palestine conflict will feel supported by it. Some will “read into” this essay whatever they’ve come to it wanting to take away from it, and they’ll miss or skip what they don’t want to see. (Several editors dived under their desks or jumped out of windows instead of publishing this.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Salon<\/em> posted it originally on March 31, 2024. <\/a><\/strong>Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center featured it<\/a><\/strong> almost immediately, prefacing excerpts from it with analysis by the center’s director Roger Berkowitz. The international association Reset: Dialogue of Civilizations, re-posted the essay<\/a><\/strong> in full and translated it into Italian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individual bloggers and associations with whom I don’t always agree gave it well-balanced presentations: Former U.S. trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz commended it <\/a><\/strong>to his Substack readers. Righting America,<\/em> <\/a><\/strong>an evangelical forum for scholarly conversation about Christianity, culture, and politics in America, posted the essay in its entirety, notwithstanding my vigorous criticisms of evangelical Christian “support” for Zionism.<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been writing about the subject in several venues since 2009, when my essay “American Brethren: Hebrews and Puritans <\/strong><\/a>was published by the now-defunct World Affairs Journa<\/em>l and was taken up by the History News Network, <\/em>where it’s online. I also tackled the subject in 2015 in an Atlantic <\/em>article, “Gifts of the Puritans”,<\/strong><\/a> adapted from a piece that I wrote for DEMOCRACY JOURNAL<\/strong><\/a>. <\/strong>In 2019. I reviewed Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers’ As a City on a Hill <\/em><\/strong><\/a> for the Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Please read and share What IS<\/em> it about \u2018the Jews\u2019, American Protestants, and Israel\/Palestine?<\/strong><\/a> This link gives you the essay, preceded by a brief, interesting A-I summary of how the essay has been received.<\/p>\n\n\n\n _______________________________________________________________________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n **Jonathan Holloway Has Been Far More Than Rutgers\u2019 First Black President | The New Republic<\/strong><\/a>, September 20, 2024. His resignation from the university’s presidency has been driven by toxic crosscurrents coming from the left and the right, whose campus representatives are so often intellectually and strategically self defeating. “Social justice warriors” and militant conservatives dine out so often on their adversaries’ mistakes that they forget how to cook anything more affirming for themselves and the rest of us and abandon their kitchens to ideologues or to opportunists who know how to press their buttons instead of enlarging their thinking. Both sides deplete liberal education’s ethos of open dialogue and rigorous inquiry (which you can listen to me explaining here<\/a><\/strong>). Holloway, who transcends racial “identity politics” and neoliberal elitism, exemplifies what’s essential to higher education. His resignation doesn’t vindicate either extreme. It should embarrass both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *** What Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza should have taught us. <\/a><\/strong>This column, posted on Talking Points Memo in 2009, disappeared from that site not long afterwards and hasn’t been seen again until I resurrected it recently, in the summer of 2024, for reasons that I present in an Author’s Note. (See also my column on Israel’s embattled, dysfunctional mindset, <\/a><\/strong>posted by History News Network<\/em>, September, 2009)<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***What’s happening to liberal education beyond the U.S. and, in consequence, domestically?<\/strong> An interview with the Carnegie Council for Ethics & International Affairs.<\/a><\/strong> This 2015<\/a> interview is newly relevant now (and it’s a classic, for the ages: Would you change a single word now?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n August 23, 2024,<\/strong> Can Harris\/Walz rescue true diversity from the clutches of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” mandates? <\/a>Salon<\/em><\/strong>: Posted just after the Democratic National Convention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n July 22, 2024, <\/strong> Biden’s decision — and his colleagues and news media’s decline. <\/a><\/strong>I’ll support any Democrat against Trump, but, to do that, I’ll need to suppress my doubts about how Biden’s own fellow Democrats in government, his donors, and members of the media are handling him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n July 18, 2024:<\/strong> Whose decline is more severe: Joe Biden’s or the news media’s? – The Berkshire Edge<\/em><\/strong><\/a>. For all we know right now, Biden may tell us tomorrow that, on the advice of his doctor, he won’t run in November, or even that he’ll step down now and make Kamala Harris the incumbent president. The following was written in mid-July, in the hope that he would stay in. Whatever the consequences of his decision, I worry that our news media have declined much more severely than Biden has done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** March 29, 2024: Is the Israel\/Hamas War upending Israel’s “long, secret love affair” with Singapore?<\/a><\/strong> I’ve posted the latest — and the backstory on that special relationship — on the indispensably independent Asia Sentinel<\/em> <\/strong>website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *** In January, 2024, The Washington Monthly<\/em><\/strong> re-posted a 2015 essay, “Israel and the Politics of Paroxysm,”<\/a><\/strong> in which I warned that Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election was dooming the country and the region. That essay has been <\/a>flagged by Roger Berkowitz, <\/a>director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard, and by the writer Lawrence Weschler<\/a> as useful now that technological and social riptides are rendering wars hopeless as solutions to conflicts. In 2013, I recounted how a recent visit to Israel had deepened my doubts about prospects for peace. (Israel’s politics in 2013 foreshadowed darkly its situation in 2023<\/a><\/strong>.) We’re on the brink because we’ve ignored or distorted warning signs and opportunities for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This Ivy-bred Orwell had a lot to tell us. The New Republic<\/em>, Sept. 4, 2023<\/a><\/strong>. In 1939 Malcolm Ross, a graduate of the elite Hotchkiss School and Yale College, published Death of a Yale Man<\/em>, his memoir-cum-jeremiad-cum report on labor struggles and inequality in the 1930s. Like George Orwell, Ross had gone “down and out” to face realities and hard truths that most members of his social class finessed or suppressed. Ross’ truth-telling has been forgotten, as Orwell’s might have been had the latter not published best-selling novels years after he bore non-fictional witness to grinding inequality. Ross published novels, too, but they went nowhere, and his Death of a Yale Man<\/em>, too, was forgotten. I’m glad that I’ve “rediscovered” it. Perhaps you will be, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n