A Liberal Dose, January 7, 2026 "Have You No Sense of Decency?"

A LIBERAL DOSE, January 7, 2026

"Have You No Sense of Decency?"

Troy D. Smith

Five years ago.

Five years ago saw the Capital stormed for the first time since the War of 1812. Like the rest of the world, I sat and watched in horror as MAGA faithful, spurred on by Donald Trump, surged into the building and viciously assaulted police officers, wandered the halls calling out for Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, erected a scaffold to hang the Vice-President for his refusal to obey Trump's wish for him to refuse to certify the results of the election, thereby setting the stage for a fake elector scheme to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election. Watch the body cam footage of the Capital police... it's horrifying. And the lame-duck president was sitting in the White House watching it on television and cheering the rioters instead of calling for them to stop, or ordering forces in to quell them, and saying that maybe his VP deserved to be lynched anyway. Anyone with the slightest grasp on history recognized this as a potential Reichstag moment -that Trump was stalling, hoping the crowd would get even more violent so that when he finally did call in troops he could declare martial law and forcibly stay in power. Heck, as I said at the time, you don't even have to know history- you just have to have paid attention to Star Wars. It was an attempted insurrection, and on that day everyone knew it, no matter how hard they now try to retcon the events and their own reactions to it.

It was one of the worst days in U.S. history.

Many of us took consolation in the fact it didn't work, and that the shear ignominy of it would be a stake in the orange Nosferatu's heart. Many of us were heartened when Congress voted to impeach him even though he only had a couple of weeks in office; a conviction in such an impeachment would mean he would never be able to run for any public office again, and America would have successfully dodged a fascist bullet. Of course, Senate Republicans -led by Mitch McConnell, whose wife Elaine Chao served as Transportation Secretary and had been the object of ethnic slurs by the president, and who resigned from her position in protest after the riot. So McConnell knew how dangerous a returned Trump would be. But he, and most other Republican Senators, refused to convict the president despite overwhelming evidence -to appease Trump's voters and keep their loyalty in the midterms. They gambled that Trump's political career was over. Despite that, Americans like me breathed a sigh of relief. Biden was successfully installed and, we hoped, things could return to some semblance of normal.

Two or three weeks later I was approached by an officer of my home county's Democratic Party, who had in turn been approached by the editor of my hometown paper. They needed a leftwing contributor to balance their opinion page -at that time they had two conservative columnists, both of them very far to the right. They could find no volunteers, and I was told there was some trepidation over death threats for people publicly espousing a liberal perspective in a town that had gone almost 80% for Trump in the recent election. And thus I was able to add "newspaper columnist" to my resume. For almost five years I wrote that weekly column, which I titled "A Liberal Dose." To my surprise, a lot of people over those years told me how much the column meant to them and how often they agreed with me on things even if they were Republicans. My very favorite comment: "It's very rare to see a white person stand up for us Black folks in this town- and I have NEVER seen a white person stand up for Indians here." Despite that, even some of my conservative friends (including a couple whose opinions on such matters are based on their professional backgrounds) frequently expressed concern for my personal safety.  

This is the first essay I've put up in over two months, since shortly after my newspaper column (and in fact the whole opinion page) was cancelled due to the high number of death threats I (and the staff, it sounded like) received in the week after Charlie Kirk's death. At the time, I said I was going to keep putting these things out on my blog, and I did a couple, but at one point it looked like a larger paper might be picking up my column, so I was waiting to see how that played out. However, more than one member of my family implored me not to do that, when there were already enough people in my hometown that apparently wanted to shoot me. I felt like I had to honor that, especially since they might also be endangered by my actions. If left to my own devices, I would have plunged ahead -I've always said I'm just smart enough to know when to shut up, and just dumb enough not to. I'm glad my family is here to help me take stock of such things. It is worth noting that my wife, who makes her living selling jewelry online, was kicked off of her main platform at around the same time for comments she made condemning Christian Nationalism on her own Facebook page, which has been a hit on our pocketbook, and in a world where professors were being fired around the country for expressing any opinions about Charlie Kirk, the possibility of that happening to me could cost us our mortgage and our health insurance (though thankfully, in one of the worst cases of such injustice, a judge just in the past day or two found in favor of the professor -also in Tennessee, though not my university -and he has his job back, plus $500,000).

But it is past time for me to speak out again, at least in this format if not in print. This despite the fact that -due to MAGA -I'm having to take extraordinary security and defense measures -but so are all of our neighboring countries, apparently.

I've seen a lot of confusion online about U.S. actions in Venezuela, due no doubt to how shocking it is. I mean, the U.S. has embarked on many imperialist ventures in its existence, but we almost always PRETEND like that's not what we're doing. There's an element of that here- the Trump administration has repeatedly stated that the goal is to cut off the fentanyl coming to the United States... despite the fact everyone knows Venezuela isn't where fentanyl enters the U.S. No, the shocking part is that Trump is saying the quiet part out loud. He is announcing now that it is all about Venezuela's oil, which we are going to take because, somehow, it BELONGS to us. And we are going to "run their country" until they get a leader we approve of. He also reiterated his goal to possess Greenland, hinting he might use military measures to do so -and people know now that they have to take any and all of his childish threats seriously, because no matter how stupid and undemocratic they sound, there is always a possibility he will carry them out. He also made totally-not-veiled threats against Mexico and Cuba.

In other words, there is a very real danger we may enter a shooting-war with Venezuela. And Mexico and Cuba, and potentially other Latin American countries. And, if we invade Greenland, we will be at war with all our NATO allies. This is not a joke, nor is it an exaggeration.

Observers correctly point to this as part of a return to "spheres of influence" diplomacy, which was the norm until WWII (and which helped LEAD to WWII, with appeasement of Hitler). As many have pointed out, it is eerily like the dividing up of the three major nations in the novel 1984. In essence, it seems like the plan is to divide the whole world among the U.S. (who would get the whole western hemisphere, including Greenland and Canada), Russia (who would get Europe and perhaps Eurasia), and China, who would get Asia. In this scenario, the three powers would be like, I suppose, the Axis on which the world turns (and I sure hope you get that reference, but if you're under a certain age -due to MAGA attacks on truthful teaching of history over the last decade -I can't count on it.) Looking at it in that framework, suddenly it all makes perfect sense -from Trump's touting of the Monroe (now apparently Don-roe, according to him) Doctrine and actions in Latin America, to his frequent statements coveting Canada and Greenland, to his unbelievable deference to Putin no matter what he does in his own "sphere." Our nation in currently led by people who don't even PRETEND to love democracy and freedom, or the Constitution, or anything other than money and raw power- for their own narrow group of cronies.

And meanwhile, here at home, the military is patrolling the streets of American cities. Democracy is being strangled. The very concepts of history, truth, and objective fact are being strangled. And masked secret police are arresting people without warrants and apparently now shooting them in the face for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could go on and on, but the short version is: in almost every way, in one year's time, our country has been traveling at dizzying speed down the road of fascism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship.

Just like we kept telling people it would, but many were not listening because the cost of eggs had gone up.

On the day of the 2021 insurrection, out of curiosity, I got on Facebook and checked the timelines of my most conservative, pro-MAGA friends and acquaintances. Crickets. And I knew why: they were in shock like the rest of us, and were too deeply ashamed to say a word. Until a few days later, when they started making excuses and/or denying we had even seen what we saw that day.  I checked their timelines yesterday, the 5th anniversary of the insurrection and just a few days after the attack on Venezuela- they were crowing and bragging about both things. I checked them today, after a full day of news about the murder of that poor woman by masked ICE agents in Minneapolis -a white woman, mind you, who from what I have heard so far might not have even been there protesting, she may have just been passing through and got stuck. Guess what? CRICKETS. Because they know. They know how wring this is, and they are ashamed of it, and scared to stick their heads up and be recognized as supporting it. Until tomorrow, or maybe the next day, when they will have gathered up their nerve and are once more vacillating between denying the obvious facts and gloating and crowing over it.

I am reminded of the words of then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams during the lead up to the 1820 Missouri Compromise, about Southern supporters of slavery: "They have betrayed the secrets of their soul." That is, despite all their talk about freedom and democracy, at the end of the day they loved their white supremacy. He added that if there were one thing the country OUGHT to be broken over, it was the cruel hypocrisy of slavery. Of course, you may not see that quote at the Smithsonian, where the Trump administration has complained they talk too much about "how bad" slavery was and they should just skip over it.

I am reminded also of the words of Thomas Paine in The Crisis, published in Philadelphia in December of 1776, when things were looking bleak for the Revolution -and which was read aloud to George Washington's troops right before they crossed the Delaware River:

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

These ARE the times that try our souls. Everything about our country, and its promise, and its potential though yet to be fulfilled, is being stripped away daily in real time before our very eyes. But this is NOT the time to shrink back. It is the time to stand up and be loud. It is time to speak out about where we stand; it is time to heap shame on the heads of these aggressors just as abolitionists did in the 19th century, all while telling our misled neighbors that THIS IS NOT WHAT THEY VOTED FOR. They voted for lower prices and no more wars. They were roped in by the illusory scam of a professional con artist who hungered for nothing but more money, public adulation, and raw unlimited (kinglike) power... and it's okay for those misled neighbors to admit it, and to now demand something better.

In the 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy had America tied in knots, rife with paranoia and turning on one another. His mad accusations and actions seemed to amplify day-by-day, until some feared it would destroy the country. Until people started to stand up. Until CBS anchorman Edward R. Murrow aired exposes of McCarthyism, telling the American people, "We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men." Until lawyer Joseph Welch said, on live television and to McCarthy's face, ""Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" And America began to wake up.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? Well, the greater part of the American people, who do not support any of this behavior, do. Now it's time to wake up the rest of them.

I close with this official statement from the Tennessee Democratic Party, of which I am proud to serve on the executive committee- and never before prouder than today.

--Troy D. Smith is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU., nor are they connected in any way with his job- they are his own opinions on matters of public concern, and an expression of his First Amendment freedom of speech.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

 

 

 

A Liberal Dose, October 5, 2025 "Free Should the Scholar Be, Free and Brave"

 A Liberal Dose, October 5, 2025 

"Free Should the Scholar Be, Free and Brave"

Troy D. Smith

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Every fall since 2012 (except the year I was faculty senate president and had a lighter teaching load), I have taught a section of what Tennessee Tech University calls HONORS 1010. It is basically an orientation class for incoming Honors freshmen. I am one of several people who teach it each fall. The goal, both of the Honors program and of myself, has always been to make students think deeply about WHY they are in college, what it is for, and what it can be used for, instead of an exercise in jumping through hoops and learning how to fill out paperwork. It is my particular goal to inspire students in their first semester. There is nothing wrong in going to college to do well, I tell them... but you can also go to college to do GOOD.

For most of those years, I have been sharing with students an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "The American Scholar," a work I was first exposed to as a college freshman (thanks, Linda Mercer Learman!) I read the excerpt to them, pausing here and there to reframe the prose in 21st century vernacular to make sure they understand. To my delight, this year the director of the Honors program has recommended that everyone teaching the class share this excerpt and discuss it.

I actually wrote about "The American Scholar" two or three years ago in my newspaper column, which as you may know was canceled recently due to a dramatic uptick in threats against my life. But I am revisiting it, because it is more pertinent now than it has ever been... and because it is more pertinent to ME than it has ever been. 

Here is the excerpt from "The American Scholar," first delivered as a speech by Emerson in 1837, that I share:

"In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, 'without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.' Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar, by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its nature, inspect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — which lies no great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, — by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow."

And here are my thoughts, interpretations, and re-phrasings of it:

A scholar -a seeker of knowledge and learning -must be brave. They must face the political issues of their day, no matter how scary they are, because being a scholar does not give you a free pass when it comes to danger and controversy -if anything, it puts you in the crosshairs. The scholars are always among the first classes that authoritarians and dictators come for, lest they continue to bring understanding, education, or inspiration to the people. For that matter, so are the poets, the artists, and even the comedians.

So turn and face those issues, those problems. The more you learn about them, the less frightening they are. Once you gain knowledge about those issues, it is your duty to spread it -because, at that point, any of the bad things plaguing us all can only do so if YOU ALLOW IT. So do not allow it. Do not be silent. Do not be fearful.

Emperors, autocrats, and tyrants hold power only insomuch as people believe it to be hopeless to oppose them. It is never hopeless. To paraphrase a certain Jedi Master, they can never win -for if they strike us down they only make us stronger. They act always in weakness, never in true strength. Never in truth.

The world is his who can see through its pretension. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.

So look up from your microscopes, your rhymes, and the misleading safety of your diversions. Take your head out of the sand. It is time to look around us with courage, with determination, and to light our way with the sacred torch of truth and knowledge. 

To be free, you must be brave.

  

--Troy D. Smith is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU., nor are they connected in any way with his job- they are his own opinions on matters of public concern, and an expression of his First Amendment freedom of speech.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, September 23, 2025 "Why Are They All So Angry?"

 

Welcome to my first blog in my post-newspaper career. As many of you know, my regular column -and the whole opinion page -was ended recently by my hometown paper, over legitimate concern for my well-being due to several anonymous death threats they received about me in the days after Charlie Kirk's killing (even though I had not said a word about it). So now I am back to the days when my opinion pieces only appear on my own blog. It is incredible how violent things have gotten, and how quickly, and the degree of absolute rage on the right.

I am reminded of a clip from The Joy Reid Show six days ago. She summed it up perfectly, but I disagree with her final assessment. I am going to paste a lengthy quote from her statements below, plus a link to the actual segment.

"Why are y'all so angry? You have the White House. You have both houses of Congress. You have a Supreme Court that is completely obedient to your president. They're willing to give him unlimited power. They're willing to say that he can take Seal Team 6 and kill anybody he wants.... they're willing to say that ICE can racially profile anyone they want. You guys have everything you want -you have legal racial profiling, you've ended DEI, you've ended affirmative action, you have everything. Why are y'all so angry? You've banned all of our books. You've banned Black History. You've banned the 1619 project. You don't have to compete with women for jobs, you've chased them out of the military... you've gotten rid of all the Black History in the museums, museums are terrified... they're afraid to tell the real history. People who work for the federal government are afraid to say the word black. You've canceled black scholarships, I guess you're damn near ready to get rid of HBCUs... What more do you want? What are you so angry about? ...You've almost got the pilgrims again -you can come and cough on the Natives and wipe them all out... yet you're still so angry. I genuinely don't understand it."

I'm with her so far. The MAGA right has literally everything they wanted, yet they are still frothing at the mouth in fury, demanding liberals be fired or shot or both. What is the source of that anger?

Reid has a theory. "What y'all are angry about is that while you've gotten everything you wanted on the right, we on the left won't give you love for it, we won't respect you for it, we won't hail you for it. You want us to fete you, you want us to embrace you... you don't just want to run us and tell us what to do and tell us what to think and what to read and tell us what history we can have... what you really want is to sit at our table... you're mad at us because we do not want to be with you."

While there may be some truth to that, it does not explain the depth of MAGA rage. They don't really care if we like them or not. They don't want to be in our club, or have us in theirs. There is something deeper at work.

"Making America Great Again", for many people, means returning to the social structure and mores of the early 1950s, before the Civil Rights Movement. A period of white male dominance. True, all of those people are not white (though a good 95-99% of them are) and not all are male, but they are all invested in that patriarchal racial hierarchy of yesteryear, and either want to be white-adjacent if they are minorities, or seen as good obedient submissive women. Either way, it is an appeal to the protections they perceive to get from a racial patriarchy.

They are invested in the structure that, essentially, this country was built on, and feel threatened by efforts to move away from that structure. Even, and in some ways especially, by us folks that Reid called "the spicy white people".

They are angry because they've even HAD to take over the government and use the force of law to return us all to yesteryear. Their position should have never been threatened or questioned to begin with. They're not mad because they want us to love them, they're mad because THEY WANT US TO KNOW OUR PLACE AND KEEP IT. And they expect us to be obsequiously grateful for even being allowed to be in that place at all. They are not sad little schoolchildren crying because the other kids are excluding them for their rudeness -they are Eric Cartman, screaming at the top of his lungs, "Respect my authoritay!"

Any hint of resistance to that authority on our part -or even questioning the rightness of it -must be crushed immediately as harshly as possible. "Those people" need to learn their place.

This was the impetus of the wave of violent racial pogroms after WWI that started with the Red Summer of 1919 and culminated in Rosewood and Tulsa later. In almost every single case, the riot started when a group of racist white folks were enraged at the sight of a black veteran in uniform, comporting himself with dignity like he was equal -being "uppity".

As the Compromise of 1820, establishing a dividing line in the country between slave and free states, was being debated, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had some thoughts. Those who mouthed platitudes about loving freedom, and even of admitting slavery was wrong, were still taking action to preserve it. About such people, Adams said "They have betrayed the secret of their souls." That secret being- they liked being "superior." And they began agitating for a war to preserve that superiority.

Some of my conservative friends are going to read this and say I am full of crap. To them, I say look deep into your soul and ask yourself why YOU are so angry, even though you're getting everything you said you wanted. And share your reasons with us. Meanwhile I have some conservative friends who are NOT filled with the same sort of rage. What is the difference? What do some carry inside themselves that others don't?

Think about it.

  

--Troy D. Smith is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU., nor are they connected in any way with his job- they are his own opinions on matters of public concern, and an expression of his First Amendment freedom of speech.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, September 16, 2025 "Final Newspaper Column"

 A Liberal Dose

"Final Newspaper Column"

Troy D. Smith

I started writing my "Liberal Dose" column in the Sparta Expositor in February, 2021, weeks after the Jan. 6 Insurrection. In the more than 4-and-a-half years since, I have covered a lot of topics on there... and, after a brief time of optimism and relief, watched our country go backward instead of forward at a rate, and to an extent, I could not have imagined in my worst nightmares.

And, I regret to inform you, that column has come to an end -at least in print, though I will continue publishing it online on my blog.

I was informed this morning that the paper is dropping the whole opinion section -due to the increased amount, and disturbing nature, of death threats to me over the past several days. I already received some from time to time, but since the assassination of Charlie Kirk it has apparently skyrocketed, and the editor does not want to risk my life.

"Well, you know," I started to say to her over the phone, and she cut in: "Yes, I know, you'll keep doing it online anyway."

I told her that my column for this week -after the wave of professors being fired for their responses to Kirk's death, and after several VERY disturbing incidences lately of truth and honesty in higher education being imperiled -had been going to be entitled "Things it is currently safe for me to talk about," followed by a half-page of blank space.

The only comment I have made about Charlie Kirk's death was a few days ago, on social media. This is an exact quote of it: "It is sad -and deeply hypocritical -to see conservative friends celebrating Charlie Kirk as a free speech icon and in the same breath rejoicing over people being fired from their jobs for expressing their opinion of him."

To which my own sister and niece responded by cussing me out, calling me names, and blocking me -saying how dare I compare someone losing their job to someone losing their life. I would very much like to tell them that as of today my job AND my life are in danger, but I can't. Because they blocked me. Over that very innocuous statement, which neither celebrated Kirk's death nor criticized his memory.

That's the country we are now living in.

For about a week after the election in November, I was in a deeply introspective, sobered mood. I was mourning, actually. I wasn't mourning an election, or even my country. I was mourning myself. Because I knew that the results of that vote made it very much a statistical possibility I would be fired from my job, arrested, or murdered in the next year. Because I know myself, and I know I will not be silenced. Even if I tried, I would not succeed for long -like the prophet Jeremiah, the truth would cry out from my bones.

At the end of that week, I accepted the likelihood, and set back to work. I did not share with a living soul what I was feeling that week, though I have done so since. The odds of all those things have gone up considerably in just the past few days.

And I will not be silenced. I can NOT be silenced, for the truth will always live on -it spreads from ear to ear and from soul to soul to everyone who hears or reads my words, and everyone who hears or reads theirs, rippling across the universe. I am only a note in that symphony, and I intend for that note to be as full and as powerful and as true as it can possibly be.

Future generations will stand in judgment of authoritarians and the people who, either through fear, greed, weakness, or meanness, follow them... like all those who went before them. And no future efforts to scrub truth from history will endure for long.

As a youth I chose my own role models and heroes -from history, literature, and popular culture. Atticus Finch, Will Kane, Rick Blaine... William Tynedale, MLK, and, most of all, Jesus... and yes, Peter Parker. One individual standing up for truth and justice does make a difference, whether it seems like it or not at the time, and myriads of such individuals together can turn a tide.

Or to quote King Arthur in Camelot: "Less than a drop in the great, blue motion of the sunlit sea. But it seems that some of the drops sparkle. Some of them DO SPARKLE!!"

Or, to quote Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha:

"This is my quest, to follow that star

No matter how hopeless, no matter how far

To fight for the right without question or pause

To be willing to march into Hell for a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this

That one man, scorned and covered with scars

Still strove with his last ounce of courage

To reach the unreachable star."

Or, to quote Jean Valjean (and the whole cast) in the finale of Les Miserables:

Take my hand

And lead me to salvation

Take my love

For love is everlasting

And remember

The truth that once was spoken:

To love another person is to see the face of God...

Do you hear the people sing?

Lost in the valley of the night

It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light

For the wretched of the earth

There is a flame that never dies

Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise

They will live again in freedom in the garden of the lord

They will walk behind the ploughshare

They will put away the sword

The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!

Will you join in our crusade?

Who will be strong and stand with me?

Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?

Do you hear the people sing?

Say, do you hear the distant drums?

It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!"

All those musicals and movies, and characters, have meant a lot to me. 30 years ago, at the dawn of the internet age, I chose the chat name Paladin... in part because of the TV western hero, but mostly for the meaning of that word (which people younger than me, sadly, only know as the very skewed role-playing type): A knight without a master, looking for a righteous cause to lend his sword, and his life. Not right MAKES right, to again quote from Camelot, but might FOR right. That is among the highest aspirations of humanity.

With these few words, most of them not my own, I have told you who I am. As, I hope, my actions have shown you. I will not betray who I am, and what I believe, even though the world crumble around me. And all my words, and all my actions, come from a place of love and not a place of hate.

Godspeed. And power to the people.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 5, 2025 “American Carnage -But Only in Blue States”

 

A Liberal Dose

“American Carnage -But Only in Blue States”

Troy D. Smith

 

Last October, on the first of two trips I took to the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina to deliver donated food supplies after the hurricane, one of my undergrad students volunteered to come along to help load and unload. This was, of course, a wonderful thing for him to do, and speaks highly to his character. We had about a four-hour drive each way, which gave us plenty of time for conversation. We talked about many things, and it was very enjoyable.

At one point, the topic of conversation turned to places he would like to visit, and New York City came up. He hesitated on that one, though, because (he said) he knew that the city was unbelievably violent, and that the murder rate was through the roof and getting worse every day. I asked him where he got his information, and he said it was all over the news. Of course, it was NOT all over the news -it was only all over CONSERVATIVE news outlets.

I told him that I lived in New York City in 1988 and 1989, and that back then it WAS a very dangerous place, much like what he was describing, and that when I was his age and living there I’d had about a half-a-dozen threatening and potentially violent encounters. However, I pointed out, my wife and I had recently spent a week there -so I could show her the neighborhoods where I lived and worked -and I had been amazed at how SAFE everything seemed. I did not feel endangered once the whole week, and 35+ years ago there had never been a single week when I had not.

“Well,” he said, “you must not have been in the right parts of the city.” I responded that I was in the exact same parts where I had felt so unsafe in the 1980s, and that the change was undeniable and incredible. I looked up the stats after our conversation- the last year I was there, 1989, there were 1,905 murders. That was the second-highest in the history of the city -the first highest was the following year, 1990, when it reached 2,245. Know how many there were in the past year? 375. One-fifth as many. Despite my personal, eyewitness experience, my student did not quite buy my assertion that the city was generally much less dangerous and I would feel perfectly safe living there now.

Another story. Last year I had a grant to do a crime statistics study, and was able to hire several of my students to work on it. At one point I overheard their conversation in the computer lab; one of them, who had identified himself as extremely conservative, was confused by the results they were finding. “These numbers must be wrong,” he said, “they’re way too low, everyone knows we have been in a huge crime wave the last few years.” “Where did you hear that?” his classmates asked, and he replied, “it’s been all over the news.” “No it hasn’t,” they said, and one of them added, “you should get better news sources.”

Another story. My wife and I are close friends with a couple who live in Los Angeles, and talk with them on the phone often. I would describe this couple as moderate, slightly right-of-center. The husband works in the entertainment industry and the wife is a police detective. A few months ago we called them while the protests were going on -at the point of our conversation, Trump had mobilized the National Guard, and within a week afterwards he had sent in the U.S. Marines. You may have heard one of his spokespeople last week saying he had rescued the city from complete destruction despite the mayor and governor trying to refuse that.

During our conversation with our friends that particular week, I asked if they felt safe. The response from these folks (that I am pretty certain voted three times for Trump) was that, if they hadn’t seen so many news items and video on conservative networks, they would never have even known anything was going on. The protests that triggered Trump’s response were in one small neighborhood. They were honestly flabbergasted that the military was being sent in.

You may have noticed a theme -I have. People who follow the president’s social media and/or watch conservative news outlets have a vastly misinformed idea of how dangerous the world around them is. They have a vision of, as Trump put it in his first inaugural address, “American carnage” which the rest of us don’t experience. This is managed by finding isolated incidents and amplifying them over and over, making it look like that is the norm -when the facts indicate differently.

President Trump followed up the military occupation of Los Angeles with the military occupation of Washington, D.C. He is now ramping up to do the same in Chicago, and has indicated Baltimore will be next. D.C., by the way, has their lowest crime rate in thirty years, and the crime rates in Chicago and Baltimore have been steadily falling. Of course, even one violent crime is unacceptable, especially if it involves you or a loved one -but the numbers do not support a need for practical martial law.

Know where the crime rates are much higher than in those cities? New Orleans. St. Louis. Memphis. Have you heard any threats to send the military to occupy those cities? Of course not -they are in red states. Trump and his supporters have convinced a good portion of the country that “American carnage” is unfolding in specifically BLUE cities and states, and so far every one of those cities has a Black mayor.

Gee, I wonder what that could all mean?

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE 

A Liberal Dose, August 15, 2025 “Neville Chamberlain and the Appeasing of Dictators”

 

A Liberal Dose

“Neville Chamberlain and the Appeasing of Dictators”

Troy D. Smith

 

I was only nine years old when my uncle Edgar passed away, but I remember that he hated Neville Chamberlain.

He talked with me often about history. I distinctly remember his explanation of the fall of the Roman Empire. He had all 25 volumes of the 1972 Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia of WWII, which I read from cover to cover multiple times (and which now have a place of honor in my campus office).

Classical Rome was an interest of his -but WWII was personal. You see, my uncle Edgar (he married my mother’s sister) was a Czech Jew, and a Holocaust refugee. He was 23 years old when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia. He and two of his brothers escaped from  the country -his older brother and him to Cuba, and from Cuba to the U.S. (at that time our country was not allowing Jewish refugees entry, and their ship from Cuba was one of the last we allowed in). His younger brother went to North Africa and joined the French Foreign Legion to fight Nazis. Almost all of their extended family were killed in the Holocaust. That younger brother’s wife survived Auschwitz -I remember seeing the numbers tattooed on her arm.

Starting in 1936, Hitler started occupying lands Hitler had lost in WWI, such as the Rhineland, and then strong-armed Austria into being annexed to Germany. Then, in 1938, he demanded that the Sudetenland -a region of Czechoslovakia where many Germans lived -be given to Germany. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, met with Hitler -without inviting any Czech government officials  -and basically gave the Fuhrer everything he wanted, receiving nothing in return except a promise from Hitler that he would now be satisfied and not try to take away anything else. Chamberlain and the Royal Family declared the agreement a guarantee of “peace in our time”, while some -including Chamberlain’s political rival Winston Churchill -said that appeasing a bully would do nothing but embolden them to take more. Czechs, meanwhile, felt -rightly -that they had been thrown under the bus. Sure enough, within six months Hitler had invaded and occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia and started rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. Including my uncle’s family. Within six months after that Hitler invaded Poland, and WWII was officially underway.

In the almost nine decades since then, the name of Neville Chamberlain has been a code word for weakness, cowardice, and appeasement of dictators. To be compared to Chamberlain has been about as big an insult as any politician could suffer (other than being compared to Hitler).

This week, a lot of observers have been comparing Donald Trump to Neville Chamberlain. Trump, of course, promised to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict “on day one”, and has been angrily writing letters demanding to know why he hasn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize yet. In his recent meetings with Putin and Zelensky, he has blamed the war on Ukraine, saying that Zelensky is at fault for not simply giving Russia all the Ukrainian land they want, and that Zelensky has the power to “end this war right now.” Of course, the reality is that Russia has invaded a sovereign nation in an effort to take their land away (starting in 2014 with Crimea). PUTIN could end the war today, by simply going home. Blaming Ukraine would be like calling FDR selfish and irresponsible for sending thousands of his people to their deaths instead of simply handing Hawaii, and maybe California, over to the Japanese in 1941. It would be like saying a mugging victim is at fault for not handing their money over faster, and making them give the mugger more in compensation for their trouble. The fact is that Ukraine voluntarily gave up all their nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War, because the U.S. promised to protect them from Russia. But that happened more than two days ago, so Trump has no concept of it.

At least Neville Chamberlain -and the French who also abandoned Czechoslovakia, and who surrendered to the Germans in 1940 -did so because their countries had been devastated by world war only twenty years earlier and their people wanted to avoid any risk of suffering that again. Donald Trump is throwing Ukraine under the bus because… he wants Putin to like him. It is embarrassing how he fawns over the Russian dictator.

The whole situation tells us several things about Donald Trump. He thinks democracies are weak, but loves authoritarians -he wants to be like them, and he wants to be let into their club. He also views everything as transactional – he can not even conceive of a person, or a nation, doing something out of principles or ideals. He has on multiple occasions referred to U.S. military personnel, especially those who willingly gave their life for their country, as losers and suckers. “What’s in it for them?” he said. He cannot wrap his mind around the idea of standing up to a bully that is far stronger than you out of principle, or love of your country, instead of just giving them what they want. As he wants everyone to do with him.

It is a sad, sad turn of events when Americans chose such a morally weak, bootlicking sycophant to represent us on the world stage… and delude themselves into thinking he is “strong.” All bullies are ultimately weak little people who try to hide that weakness by picking on those smaller than them. Tossing them to bigger bullies so they will like you -that’s even weaker and more pathetic.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

 Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

 

 

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE