“By designating Indigenous Peoples’ Day a federal holiday, we take a small but important step toward recognizing the injustices in our nation’s history and uplifting the vibrant traditions, history, and culture of all Indigenous communities – an integral part of the cultural fabric of the United States.”
Filed under News
“The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, 1945
This was bound to happen. Donald Trump’s fragile ego has compelled him to bar certain media outlets from the White House. No elected official likes everything said or written about them – certainly not in the press. But outright forbidding reporters or journalists from covering important national matters is blatant censorship.
It’s ironic that recently Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House. Jinping oversees one of the world’s strictest systems of censorship. At the 2024 World Internet Conference, he emphasized establishing a “community with a shared future in cyberspace”. But he also stated that, while citizens have the right to express their thoughts online, that freedom requires “order” and governance. Various human rights groups and free speech organizations, such as Reporters Without Borders, have openly condemned Jinping’s control of the Chinese media.
As Banned Books Week 2026 comes to a close – and as a natural born writer – I know I shouldn’t be surprised that a despot disguised as a democratically-elected president like Trump would launch such attacks on the media. I’m really not. But I’m angry – not just a pissed off upset type of angry. I mean truly fucking angry!
During Trump’s first term in office, a former friend posted a photo on his Facebook page of the late Francisco Franco who ruled Spain from the late 1930s until his death in 1975. I’ve often referred to him as Western Europe’s last dictator. The picture was a formal photographic portrait – a “Glamor Shots” type of image – with Franco attired in military regalia.
I expressed my disappointment at the image and pointed out that Franco was an oppressive tyrant who terrorized his own people for some four decades, including heavily censoring media outlets. Millions of Spanish citizens either were imprisoned or disappeared, as usually happens in totalitarian states. But then I noted the obvious: my then-friend was a devout Trump disciple. “Of course you would think so highly of Franco.”
I don’t want the U.S. to sink to that level. Societies are supposed to evolve; that is, improve and grow. With right-wing extremists in positions of power, it seems we’re doing the opposite.
Image: Dave Granlund
Filed under Essays
“We’re coming for the books. We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”
Dan Patrick, Texas Lieutenant Governor
PEN America: Banned Books List 2026
Keep writing and keep fighting!
Filed under News
Events in the month of October for writers and readers
National Book Month
National Reading Group Month
“I have pleaded (labor’s) case, not in the quavering tones of a feeble mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”
In my decades of writing fiction – attending seminars and workshops, listening to and reading essays on the craft of various published authors – I’ve realized there are only 4 basic tenets of achieving that lofty and often unattainable goal of becoming a truly successful scribe.
They are:
Image: Awesome Content
Filed under Essays
Events in the month of September for writers and readers
National Hispanic Heritage Month
National Suicide Prevention Month
World Alzheimer’s Month
Filed under News
The photo above shows a landline desk phone my parents got some 30 years ago beside a cell phone I got in 2017. One of them died a long, slow, painful death, and the other is still functioning fully and completely. Anyone older than 30 surely can figure out which is which.
I got my first cell phone in October 2001. At the time only about half of all households in the U.S. had at least one cell phone. They were commonly associated with business professionals and the elite. Now it seems everyone and their pets own such a device. Since 2001 I’ve gone through at least 5 cell phones. To put things in perspective, I still have a digital clock/radio my parents bought me in 1978, and it’s been functioning ever since.
My truck is 20 years old. That’s the longest I’ve ever had a vehicle, and I find it somewhat surprising. Products of almost any kind in recent years just don’t seem to last too long. That a cell phone would crash faster than Donald Trump’s economic plans says quite a bit about the companies that build these devices.
No wonder American consumers are cynical!
But I now feel it’s a corporate conspiracy. Large companies now deliberately make products with a finite lifespan; therefore, people have to buy replacements or repair their current items. I guess it’s a scheme devised to keep people financially destitute.
Or maybe it’s just that too much of these things are made overseas where workers don’t really give a shit how they put it together.
Regardless, it’s amazing what consumers have to do now to remain viable members of society.
Filed under Essays
“Inspiring kids to love to read became my mission. In the beginning, my hope was simply to inspire the children in my home county but here we are today with a worldwide program that gives a book a month to well over 3 million children.”
Filed under News
