ONE PATH FORWARD

“We need [to] support to our law enforcement officers and agents as they defend against invasive, violent, insurrectionist mobs that seek to protect invaders and military aged males belonging to identified foreign terrorist organizations, and who seek to prevent the deportation of criminal aliens.” — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. 

This language of domestic war against “the other” is the essence of T****ism and the signature policy of his second term. The goal is purging disfavored racial and cultural groups from society. 

The essence of MAGA is the establishment of an ultra-conservative autocracy and snuffing out so-called “woke” ideas like DEI and the entire liberal agenda of the Democratic majorities of the previous decades.

For Donald, the end and the means are one and the same. His lust for dictatorial power sees this as such a crucial necessity that it justifies indiscriminate law-breaking and violations of the Constitution.

So as an end to itself, T****’s promise of mass deportations is also a means to impose a police state. Los Angeles is a test to see how far he can go in crushing dissent. T****’s policies and actions are not popular with the electorate, and ruling the population by fear is necessary for a fundamentally weak dictator. 

If we wish to keep our democracy, we cannot remain silent, we cannot acquiesce; T****’s decline and fall are neither pre-ordained nor certain. Protest is our first means to counter Donald’s plans. Refusal to co-operate is the second. The ballot box is the third. That is our One Path Forward. 

                        DEFY    RESIST    REMOVE

That is the Bernhard Perspective

7/15

I strongly suspect this business about T**** wanting to fire Fed Chairman Powell is a dog and pony show, meant to deflect the storyline away from the Jeffrey Epstein’s secret file allegedly containing the names of rich and powerful men he could blackmail. Donald’s even telling his people  to drop the story altogether, to shut up about it.

And why would he do that? After all, he campaigned on getting the Epstein files out, making them public. It was a major theme at his rallies. He promised. In June he had his AG Pam Bondi claim that she had the files on her desk for review. And now all of a sudden there are no files, no documents, no secret lists, no nothing. Move along folks, nothing to see here. 

The MAGA’s are throwing a major sh*t-fit. After years of conspiracy theories, years of speculation and thousands of podcasts, after years of lies, the whole thing goes the way of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the dodo bird?  Nothing. Nada. Bupkis.

Donald T**** has taken his entire MAGA base and the entire right-wing conspiracy world and thrown them all under the bus. Betrayal down to the toenails. The whole thing was just a fantasy.

Or was it? 

Face it, T**** can’t have it both ways. Either there was an Epstein file or there wasn’t. Either there was a list of rich and powerful men who liked to bang trafficked teenage girls or there wasn’t. Either he and Bondi and all the rest of them were lying then, or they’re lying now. 

If there never was an Epstein file then clearly T****, who’s not that bright, bought into and echoed a widespread Right-wing conspiracy theory with nothing behind it except hot air. For Donald, that wouldn’t have been the first time. 

But what if there is a file? What if there are those incriminating documents, a list of some kind? And what if when Bondi finally got around to reviewing them, she found Donald T****’s name in them? Well that would be a big “oops.” And they would have to try and make the whole thing go away. Which is what they’ve done. 

But if that’s true, it makes T****’s behavior even more bizarre than usual because he would have known all along that his name was on the list. And that being the case, why did he make all those promises about getting the list out and making it public? For all those years, why did he stoke the fires?

Either way, the only explanation I can think of is that, when you come right down to it, Donald T**** is pretty damn stupid. 

AT THE RISK OF REPEATING MYSELF

Donald T**** is a man with no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He is a brazen, sexual abusing pathological liar, a depraved and shameless con man, bigoted and sociopathic criminal. 

Under-educated, crude and vulgar, unsophisticated and unschooled in history, government, science or the arts, he has no concern for the Constitution and he has sworn to uphold laws for which he has no respect. He is a dangerous, old soulless man with dementia who lacks empathy, compassion and basic humanity.

It is clear from his actions in his second term that Donald T*** is a fascist and a  wannabe tyrant. He has no thoughts and gives no care to anyone besides himself, his greed and his lust for power. He is willfully attempting to dismantle the American Democracy along the lines of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, and we know this because he has said so. 

I do not believe T**** will voluntarily leave office on January 20, 2026. He wasn’t going to last time and he won’t the next time, either. The people must be prepared to protect and defend their democratic institutions every way they can.

That is the Bernhard Perspective. 

 TO HELL WITH BLACK HISTORY

This year, Donald T****’s nascent racism was evident as he specifically refused to recognize the Juneteenth holiday. Claiming there were too many “non-working” federal holidays, Mr. T****’s decision to brush off Juneteenth smacks of political cynicism as well as hypocrisy. After all, he signed the proclamation creating Juneteenth as a national holiday in his first presidential term. Nor was it always thus.

At the time, he claimed credit for drawing national attention to the event, boasting that he “made Juneteenth very famous.” And in 2020 he agreed to reschedule a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 21 because it was perceived as insensitive; that was the date of the 1921 Tulsa massacre. 

So after creating the holiday, promoting the holiday, giving deference to it’s message and milking it for all the political benefit he could muster, Donald saw no further use for it. And since he doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about Black people anyway, his final act of betrayal was almost predictable.

He threatened to scrap it. 

thebernhardperspective.com

The Bernhard Perspective

Here is John F. Kennedy Jr., in  2021: “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.” This is profoundly not true, however he has never retracted this statement. In fact, he defended it during his Senate confirmation hearings in 2025. 

For years now Kennedy has been perpetuating this belief that Black people are biologically different from White people. He claims that this justifies different and ultimately unequal treatment for Blacks people versus Whites. 

However, in medicine, as in science, the concept of “race” is a social construct and has no meaning in those disciplines. And although general assumptions can be made, you cannot look at someone’s genes and accurately identify what color or “race” they are. Kennedy’s belief is little more than scientific racism. 

Such beliefs, however, are not the stuff of fantasy or conspiracy. Real-life examples include when, in the 1990s, researchers noticed that Black individuals had faster kidney filtration rates than Whites. It was believed, therefore, that Black people had better-functioning kidneys than White people. 

This is not true, either. However, this finding led to the inclusion of a race-based adjustment in kidney function tests which artificially increased the estimated kidney function for Black patients by 16%. These calculations led to misdiagnosis, incorrect drug dosing, and delays in necessary treatments up to and including transplants and even death. 

Similarly, implementation of Kennedy’s racial bias will result in the under-vaccination of Blacks. This will inevitably lead to those patents contracting unnecessary illnesses and, in extreme cases, even death from diseases that are wholly preventable through vaccination. 

Kennedy’s immune system-based racism has sinister real-life political consequences as well. It is a first step in the suppression and ultimate elimination of the Black population. If you’re not thinking Black genocide, you should be. 

So, based on his expressed belief about Blacks and vaccinations, is the Secretary of Health and Human Services a racist? Yes. And do the senators who confirmed him for that post know this and does this make them racists? Yes.

And is this proposed suppression of the Black population by our Director of Health and Human Services via an altered inoculation program a contemporary expression of Nazi-ism? Yes. And does President Donald T**** who nominated him for the position know this? Yes. 

That’s Conservatives for you, that’s MAGA for you and that’s T**** for you. Are they pretty much all liars, racists and Nazis? I submit it is a case of: “A thief by any other name..”

There is, of course. one way fight against this scourge, the rise of the Nazi fascists who are ruling in our country. There is one way to keep America from falling into the abyss. There is One Path Forward. 

 RESIST

7/7

DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS

Eight years ago, after a previous flood in the Texas Hill Country, officials debated whether more needed to be done to create a warning system along the banks of the Guadalupe River. 

There was a series of summer camps along the river. For years they were kept safe with a phone tree: When floodwaters started raging upriver, camp leaders warned those downriver of the flood surge coming their way. It had always worked; little else was done. 

Kerr County county officials contemplated installing a flood warning system in 2017, but it was rejected as too expensive. So when catastrophic floodwaters surged along the Guadalupe last weekend, there were no sirens or early flood monitors. And no phone tree.

The National Weather Service Office that serves Kerr County was short six employees, including the meteorologist responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management. Investigations are “under way.” 

There were late-night text alerts, that’s about all. However, some areas have limited cell service, especially along the River, and some residents may have been asleep when they were issued. Some were received, others not, and some apparently ignored. Also, despite the warnings, some officials did not issue evacuation orders, and there are questions about why.

At a  budget meeting in May, county commissioners were looking at a flood warning system being developed by a regional agency. However, a County official said in a recent interview that local residents had been resistant to new spending.“Taxpayers wouldn’t pay for it,” he said.

Well perhaps those local residents might reconsider now. But in the meantime, the county officials deny responsibility for the disaster and lean towards a brazenly depraved excuse for doing so little to avert the weekend’s human tragedy. 

They blame the victims. 

NOT LIKE US

The growing intolerance of minorities and, in particular the LBGTQ community which challenges tradition, is rampant in T****’s MAGA America. It should not be necessary to point out that the totalitarian governments of the 20th century jailed and killed freethinkers, outliers or simply “the other.”

But it’s a cliché that seems to need repeating, since contemporary autocrats follow the same path, and as with the right-wing MAGA’s in this country, many of them, like Adolf Hitler, included the targeting of LGBTQ people.

In the T**** era this has already begun. Hatred and rejection of LBGTQ Americans, along with the bigoted dogma that goes with it, is an important part of the MAGA’s autocratic agenda. Its purpose is no less than to take away the rights of people whose life imperatives and choices they don’t like. 

Indeed, dictatorial power rejects humanity and compassion as it contrives to subject the population to it’s hateful will. Under an autocrat’s tyrannical hand those of good faith have few options in defense of the targeted, the marginalized and the oppressed. 

But they must be defended. The conscience of humanity demands nothing less. People of goodwill must respond to that imperative. Our fellow citizens, our fellow human beings depend on it. On us. 

Silence works in the oppressor’s favor. There is really only one strategy, one way to oppose this evil and to do what must be done because it is right. In the courts, on the streets, on the ballot and with one voice, there is only one path forward.

  RESIST

RACE IN AMERICA AND DONALD T****

No-one can rationally suggest or pretend that racism in America is a thing of the past. In truth, it is deeply ingrained in our nation’s history and culture; it has become part of who we are. There are racists and bigots in America and probably always will be. But it goes deeper than that. 

Systemic racism exists when policies, practices, and institutions create or maintain racial inequality. It is seen in disparities across key areas of society like education, housing, employment, healthcare, and criminal justice. The overt prejudice of bigots is not a factor in this equation

For example: Black Americans are more likely to attend underfunded schools due to a history of redlining, housing discrimination and school funding based on property taxes. They’re more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and convicted than white Americans (Blacks constitute about 13% of the U.S. population but make up roughly 37% of incarcerated adults). Studies show that Blacks, who are overrepresented among the least wealthy in America, have less access to affordable healthcare, have higher maternal mortality rates and shorter lifespans. In employment, Blacks are still often the “last hired and first fired,” and résumés get fewer callbacks when the names sound like the applicants are African American. Blacks are sparsely represented in the elite ranks of business and government. 

These patterns aren’t explained by individual racist choices. They reflect structures that disadvantage some while privileging others. Bottom line: Systemic racism isn’t about intent, it’s about outcomes. And when inequality is predictable by race, it is because of an ingrained system that has been part of the nation’s history and culture since its inception. 

But yes, there are racists and bigots in America, millions of them to be sure. There is one school of thought which suggests that this is part of human nature; history can attest to that. But there is another school which suggests that race hatred defies humanity and defiles civilization. History can attest to that, too. 

In America the struggle to subsume racism and affirm humanity is etched in ethos and bathed in blood, and there has always been a deep sense of  wrongness about race hatred. This even in the Old South, where slavery was referred to as “our peculiar institution.” They knew it was wrong. 

  Since Abraham Lincoln, only Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson were openly avowed racists and white supremacists. Most other presidents, even those with racist personal beliefs or policies at least gave public statements supporting the idea of racial harmony or equality, even if their actions did not always align with those statements.

Yet, unlike most of these, Donald T**** does not even give lip service to the idea of promoting equality of opportunity in America. His obsession with the term “DEI”” and his efforts to wipe away all traces of “woke” programs designed to promote DEI objectives are concrete proof of this. The same goes for his attempts to re-write American history. References to subjects like slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, voting rights, Black achievements and contributions to American life and culture have by his order disappeared from official government websites and museums. 

At T****’s command, at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis books about the experiences and contributions of Blacks to the war effort during World War II, specifically including the Tuskegee Airmen, the public roles of African-American women, Travon Martin and the broader issues of racial profiling, and the history of feminism in America were all culled form that university’s library. Apparently, those who will be charged with defending our nation are not worthy of learning it’s true history.

The truth is that our nation’s MAGA-in-Chief, Donald T****, is a racist with a long history of bigotry and prejudice. 

In the 1970’s, allegations that he and his father refused to rent apartments to Black tenants led to a federal lawsuit. In 1989 Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers accused of rape. They were innocent. When announcing his first presidential run in 2016, he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

During that first term T**** called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and he imposed travel bans on several majority-Muslim countries. He told four U.S. congresswomen of color to “go back” to the “crime-infested countries from which they came,” even though all are U.S. citizens. And after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville where a counter-protester was killed, he alleged that they were “very fine people.”

Donald T**** and the MAGA/Conservative bigots who now control our country’s government draw a direct correlation between race (ie: being Black) and competency. They use the phrase “DEI hire” as a dog whistle to people of their own kind. The racist nod here is that there is no résumé a Black person could present that would qualify them for high-level corporate or government appointments. 

The understood and unspoken implication among Conservatives ranging from the MAGA’s to the ultra-Right Christian Nationalists and white supremacists is that the country should be run by white people. These are T****’s people; he curries their favor, they support him. He is one of them. 

I am not. My people are not. Most Americans are not. We are right; they are wrong. It’s as simple as that. The fact that the American government is being led by an unabashed and unashamed bigot and racist is patently offensive to people of good conscience. And so it should be.

The question of slavery in this country was settled on the battlefield over a century and a half ago. Jim Crow was abolished and voting rights affirmed in our lifetime. History shows that our nation has won this battle against bigotry and racism before. And we can win it again. 

There is a way to do this. There is a way for people of good faith and conscience to remove the stain of this horrid little man our land, a way to take back what is ours: our country. With our votes we can remove all of his cult-following MAGA lemmings everywhere from office. And our hearts and minds can we resolve to defy Donald T****, everywhere, all the time. We can resolve to take the One Path Forward. 

                                                         RESISTANCE 

TRUMP AS ANTI-SEMITE

On May 22, Donald T*** posted the image on the left on his Truth Social website along with its prophetic although rhetorical caption. On his right, in the lighted window, watching with approval, is the alt-right mascot, Pepe the Frog. That’s a blow-up of him in the right-hand photo.

Pepe’s appearance is no accident. The picture is a shout-out to ultra-Conservative Christian Evangelicals and Nationalists as well as White supremacists and far-Right neo-Nazis, all groups who support T**** and with whom T**** curries favor.  

In truth, Donald has an extensive history of amplifying white supremacist figures and symbolism as well as anti-semitism. According to his first wife, T**** kept a book of Adolph Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed. He called Jew-hating protesters in Charlottesville “good people.” He has dined at his Florida estate with a Holocaust denier and his New Jersey golf club hosted a Nazi sympathizer.

HIs Republican Party has nominated anti-semites for elected offices, including “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson of North Carolina. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson has a history of using antisemitic tropes. JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk have all offered support to a far Right German political party. A former right-wing podcaster now heads the Office of Special Counsel.

This does fly in the face of his outsized support for Israel, but that is not entirely inexplicable. As leaders of Western Democracies who lust for autocratic power, T**** and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are kindred spirits. And the states opposed to Israel are Islamic, and T****’s distain for Moslems is duly noted. 

He once claimed that if he lost in 2024 it would be because Jews who do not support him are “disloyal.” During the campus uprisings over Gaza, he charged that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer used to be Jewish but isn’t any more because of Schumer’s support for a 2-state solution in Palestine. “Wer ein Jude ist, bestimme ich!” ** exclaims Donald T**** (“I decide who is a Jew.”).

Yet in the past, T**** has called himself best friend American Jews have ever had, which he would not need to profess if it were indeed true. (To quote Shakespeare, he “protests too much, methinks.” *) 

In fact, he has gone overboard attempting to curry favor with American Jewry and it is obvious that Trump intentionally surrounds himself with prominent Jews. Not counting his daughter and son-in-law, these include the likes of Stephen  Miller, Barry Cohen, Steven Mnuchin, Jason Greenblatt and EPA chief Lee Zeldin to name but a few.

And this as he claims to support Jewish students he says, with little evidence, are oppressed by waves of anti-Semitic hatred on American college campuses. Clearly, T**** would attest that “some of my best friends are Jews.” And we know what that means. 

This, then, is the true Donald T****: anti-Semitic to the core. He will deny this of course. But since T**** is a compulsive and pathological liar, you cannot believe a word he says.

Besides, talk is cheap and actions can be duplicitous. As Maya Angelou has counseled, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” To which I would add, watch that they don’t overplay their hand. 

#1PathForward

thebernhardperspective.com

*Hamlet, Act III, Scene II.

**Karl Leuger, Mayor of Vienna during Hitler’s formative years.

6/26

ZOHRAN MAMDAN

Donald T*** and his MAGA’s are going apoplectic over the fact that a Democratic Socialist has been chosen to run for mayor in New York. Of course, any mention of the word “socialism” will do this, as they automatically connect it to communism, and they pound away at it because, as we all know, communism is bad. Of course, these idiots have no idea what they’re talking about. There is nothing new about Democratic socialism, and it seems to work pretty well in much of Europe. Consider: 

Democratic socialism is a political and economic philosophy that advocates for a democratically elected government alongside social ownership or control of the major means of production and distribution. It advocates for universal services like healthcare and education, robust welfare programs, workers’ rights, and economic policies that reduce inequality while maintaining individual rights. It supports capitalism but rejects the idea that the bulk of a nation’s wealth flows upwards while the workers who produce that wealth struggle to maintain a comfortable place in society. 

Democratic socialism specifically rejects centralized, autocratic rule and promotes change through democratic processes and active citizen participation. Myself, I don’t see anything horrible or objectionable in any of that; I am a Democratic socialist. 

However, given the public face and espoused policies of Donald T****, his MAGA’s, his Ultra-Right Conservatives, Christian Nationalist and white supremacist supporters, I suspect that the things they cannot accept nor tolerate about Zohran Mamdani have less to do with his politics, of which they are fundamentally ignorant, than the fact that he is a Moslem, and he’s not white. 

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