To the Editor:
Using the word Nazi or Gestapo to describe political opponents is profoundly offensive to millions of people. Obviously, the people who are inclined to use these words have no idea about the history surrounding their meaning.
The Nazis were brutal murderers responsible for killing millions of Jews and other individuals. They terrorized and starved populations of the countries they invaded. Being born in France I spent the first five years of my life under their control, and my mom and I (my dad was a prisoner of war for five years) suffered from the lack of food and freedom.
These professional agitators have been trained and paid to impede the work of duly authorized government personnel in order to protect criminals and illegal aliens so the Democrat Party will have more voters.
These agitators are so naive they have no concept of what being an American citizen offers them, and how fortunate they are to live in this country.
Huguette Johnson,
Fillmore, Ca.
****
To the Editor:
I noticed that four letters were published last week, though only three were addressed in the editor’s response. I hope at some point there will be room to engage the questions raised in the fourth.
In the meantime, I’d like to respond to a remark made in one of the published letters that mocked “liberal Supreme Court justices who can’t say what a woman is.”
For most of history, people assumed sex and gender were simple, fixed categories. That assumption made sense when our tools for understanding human biology and development were limited. But over the past several decades, advances in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology have painted a more complex picture.
Science has shown us that biological sex itself is not a strict binary. Variations in chromosomes, hormones, and physical development are well documented in medical literature. Gender identity—the internal sense of oneself as male, female, both, neither, or somewhere in between—appears to arise from a complex interaction of biology and development, not from ideology or fashion. For many people, sex and gender align neatly. For others, they do not. For some, it’s very difficult to accept the science since it challenges their fundamental assumptions.
This is not abstract theory. It shows up in real families and real classrooms, including our own. Some adolescents experience gender not as a rigid wall but as a spectrum. They are not broken or indulging a trend—and confusion, when it exists, is often part of a thoughtful process of self-understanding.
Mockery does not help them do that. Neither does pretending that scientific inquiry stopped decades ago.
We can disagree about policy, law, or language without denying what research has uncovered or what families experience. People have always experienced questioning and confusion, but in our culture were forced to hide or suppress. Now, with the backing of science, they are able to be open about their true selves.
Understanding has always expanded as knowledge grows. That is not a threat to society—any more than it was when we learned that the earth revolves around the sun. It simply challenges us to grow with it.
Pat Collins,
Fillmore, Ca.
****
To the Editor:
Martin, have you ever noticed the common denominator of Trumpian political issues that “tire” or “bore” you? They’re all things you don’t want to know or can’t defend.
“Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots.” It arrives inch-by-inch with voter fatigue or indifference, elevation of hatred for an “enemy within”: the racial or religious “other,” or dissenters. Assaults on the Free Press. Government-concocted claims of “national emergency” or “national security threats” to encourage fear and “patriotic” compliance, including a willingness to disbelieve their own eyes.
Trump has often and publicly expressed admiration for, and connection with, dictators Orban, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Xi. Trump proudly displays a picture in the WH of himself with Putin at the disastrous meeting in AK last summer. The pattern is unmistakable, for open eyes. But, “some do not see it, any more than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.” Until one day, it is suddenly over his head. The FBI, and Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, joined in a search of the Fulton County, GA, Secretary of State’s office, and seizure of voting materials including ballots from the 2020 election. Meanwhile, the DOJ has demanded that states submit their voter rolls to the feds, and some red states have obediently complied, though multiple election audits revealed no significant voting errors anywhere in 2020. Minority voter rolls have been purged in many blue and purple states. Trump frequently tests the public reaction by “joking” that there is no need to have another national election in 2026 or 2028. It’s no secret; Trump intends to manipulate the midterms. MAGA seems fine with it, as the corn grows over their heads.
One of last week’s other LTTEs lauded Trump’s unique success in “bringing peace to the world.” I wish it were true, but Trump’s reckless foreign adventures in Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and threats to Iran and Greenland are hardly “peaceful.” Buckle up, because Trump’s recent letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister informed that, because Sweden snubbed him for the Nobel Peace Prize, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”
Trump’s “Board of Peace” is not, as you assume, committed to “world peace.” It is committed to a “piece of the action” in Gaza. Kushner’s plans for luxury resorts and high rises are already in progress.
Martin, last week you said, “The people who live there [Gazan Palestinians] love to shed blood” (while you are merely indifferent to it). The West created this tragedy by displacing Palestinians from their homeland to assuage our consciences after the horrors of WWII, and by allowing Israel to systematically deny Palestinian rights and herd them to one small Gazan patch for final expulsion.
Now, the world’s billionaires have been invited to cash in on the genocide. And our president is the lifetime Chairman of the Board.
Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca.