politics – Edward Trimnell Books

The world before CNN: less information and fuller lives

Ted Turner passed on May 6 after a long, busy life. While his enterprises were numerous, he is best remembered for the Cable News Network, aka CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980.

Most of us did not get CNN right away. Even middle-class households were slow to adopt cable. Americans really did believe that we could exist with access to only four or five television stations in those days.

My parents purchased a cable subscription with CNN included in 1982. For many years, CNN included a partner channel called CNN Headline News. The idea was simple: all the major headlines in thirty minutes.

CNN has become controversial in recent years, depending on one’s political sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the network as “fake news.” Early on, CNN was mostly apolitical and mostly dedicated to reporting the news in an objective manner. There were no significant controversies like that back then.

On the contrary, pretty much everyone believed that there was something amazing about CNN. Prior to that, if you wanted to watch the news, you had to tune in right around dinnertime. The local news ran from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., and the national news ran on each major network afterward.

Either that or (gasp!) read the newspaper. Most Americans had longer attention spans in those days, and actually didn’t mind reading the newspaper, but that’s another topic for another day.

I watched CNN sporadically during the 1980s, but I was a high school kid for most of that period. My CNN obsession began in 1989, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. About a year after that came the first Gulf War. For both events, I was tuned in to CNN multiple times throughout the day.

Bad things happened before CNN became common in American homes. There were wars, government scandals, and troubling international events like the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.

Although I was a kid then, I don’t believe that most American adults ignored national and global problems. There was, however, a commonly held belief that attention was best directed closer to home. Plenty of Americans were dismayed at Nixon’s corruption, or Carter’s bumbling, but there was generally less outrage about the news.

Maybe this was because there were fewer news broadcasts to consume. (And this was long, long before the internet or social media). This made faraway events, including events taking place in another American city, genuinely remote.

It’s also worth noting that in 1980, almost all American adults of childbearing age were married. Most had children. Their personal lives were full and demanding.

This is another way in which 2026 is far removed from 1980. Nowadays, only about a third of young American adults are married, and even fewer have children.

Perhaps that makes it easier to sell them on the notion that the news is more important than their daily lives, that events in Washington DC are more urgent and pressing than events taking place in their living rooms.

Sadly, for all too many Americans in 2026, that is genuinely the case.

In 1980, it usually wasn’t.

-ET

Political violence and “punch Nazis” LARPing

A USA Today columnist, Dace Potas, has sounded the alarm on the normalization of political violence in leftwing, progressive circles. He specifically cites the posthumous mockery of Charlie Kirk and his widow, which has taken a decidedly creepy and ghoulish turn. The name of his piece is: “The left normalizes political violence. We can’t accept it.” You should read it.

Dace Potas is writing editorials for USA Today, while I’m just some guy in Ohio. But I saw this coming a few years ago, when the catchphrase “punch Nazis” became commonplace in progressive spaces online.

Why shouldn’t we want to punch Nazis, you ask. Isn’t that what Harrison Ford did in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

That’s all fine and good, if you’ve got a time machine and you’d like to go back and slug it out with a brigade of the Waffen SS. Be my guest, if you can pull that off. Knock yourself out.

But in most cases, what you actually read about is young punks carrying out cowardly attacks on 80-year-old men wearing Trump hats.

A part of me isn’t surprised. Folks on the far-left fringe have long engaged in a version of “stolen valor”, vis-a-vis World War II veterans, few of whom are still alive to speak for themselves. (Note: My maternal grandfather was a World War II veteran who engaged in combat with the real, historical Nazis—the ones who spoke German. My maternal grandfather lived well into my adult life. We had many long discussions. My maternal grandfather would have had nothing but disdain for twenty-first-century “antifa” goons.)

What “fighting Nazis” really looks like: my grandfather manning an anti-aircraft gun in the Atlantic, 1943

Here’s the problem with the whole “punching Nazis” thing. Who gets to decide who is a “Nazi”?

The historical Nazis are all dead. (A few may be living out the last of their days in nursing homes in Germany. They would be over one hundred years old in 2026.)

Okay, what about homegrown, American Nazis? The American Nazi Party, which had a grand total of 500 members in the late 1960s, doesn’t really exist today.

What about the Ku Klux Klan? There are fewer than 5,000 of them in the USA in 2026, scattered throughout the country. They mostly exist online.

So you’re not punching non-existent “Nazis”. And you can’t even find a genuine, sheet-wearing klansman to punch in Toledo or Poughkeepsie.

So who is it that you want to punch?

Let’s cut the BS, and define what is really going on here. What “punching Nazis” means in practice is: labeling those who disagree with you as ‘Nazis’ so that you can justify political violence against them, while LARPing as a member of the 82^nd Airborne, circa 1944.

Likewise, “Antifa” is—if you’ll pardon my technical jargon here—a complete bullshit term. Calling yourself “antifascist” does not make you a freedom fighter, any more than me calling myself “Taylor Swift’s boyfriend” would make me that. If you want to fight fascism, join a branch of the US military, because they’re the last US-based organization to actually do that.

This doesn’t mean you have to silently agree with everyone on the political right. I certainly don’t. I find Matt Walsh (to pick one name at random) to be an insufferable killjoy who wants to outlaw all biblically non-compliant forms of sex (based on his interpretation of Scripture, of course).

But to compare Matt Walsh to Reinhard Heydrich is gross hyperbole at best…and it is the encouragement of political violence at worst, if accompanied by rants about “punching Nazis”.

-ET

Above: A self-styled Captain America (the comic book shirt on a grown man speaks volumes) encourages people LARPing as antifascists to engage in street violence against people LARPing as Nazis.

Everyone in this scenario is nuts. There are no heroes here (and certainly none that rise to the level of the men and women who fought in World War II).

A pox on both their houses, basically.

Rename American English?

We may soon have a linguistic version of President Trump’s 2025 “Gulf of America” stunt. There is a proposal within MAGA circles to rename our national language, American English, to “American”. This would be done in commemoration of America’s 250th birthday this summer.

The proposal is gaining traction on venues like Fox & Friends. The president may or may not be too busy (with minor complications like the Iran war) to give this idea full consideration before July.

This is a dumb idea, and characteristic of the anti-intellectualism rampant in populist circles. If carried to its logical implications, this would mean that any language spoken in more than one country would have to be renamed for political/nationalistic purposes.

No more Spanish in Mexico, Chile, and Guatemala. Henceforth, the Spanish spoken in these nations would be called “Mexican”, “Chilean”, and “Guatemalan”. No more German in Austria. No more Portuguese in Brazil.

American English descended from British English. Everyone seems to agree about that. And yes: American English is distinctive, as are the versions of English spoken in Australia and Canada.

At what point should a language be called something different, though? That’s easy: when it becomes mutually unintelligible with its source language.

English, German, and Dutch all share common roots. There is some crossover vocabulary. But an English speaker doesn’t automatically understand German or Dutch. These are different languages.

All of us can understand the English spoken in the UK, Canada, or Australia. Which is why they’re all the same language.

-ET

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35^th president.

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

View it on Amazon: Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House

Kristen Clarke, Harvard, and “race science”

Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”. At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.

Clarke based her letter on…race science.

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.

“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.

“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].

“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”

Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.

Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.

Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.

Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.

Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)

This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.

This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.

Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.

Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.

What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.

We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.

I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.

I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.

Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.

Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.

-ET