Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

Martin Luther King in "Letters from a Birmingham jail" "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”  Why aren't there more people in the streets objecting to ICE agents actions?

 The Mollen Commission, named after former Judge Milton Mollen, was created in 1992 by NYC's Mayor Dinkins to investigate police officers after several were arrested on drug charges in Suffolk County. The Mollen Commission recommended several changes to recruitment and retention that Trump and his advisors should consider when hiring ICE personnel. The Mollen Commission Report found that the rising crime of the 1980ss "led to a striking increase in the rate of hiring new officers accompanied by a systemic failure to conduct thorough background checks and hold applicants to standards beyond the stated automatic disqualifiers." IN effect the conclusion was that "approximately 20 percent of the officers suspended or dismissed should never have been admitted into the department." There were obvious red flags before they were hired which were ignored. Just as shocking, 88 percent of the officers in the study "entered the Police Academy before the completion of t...

  This is Edward R. Murrow in 1954 (I changed Joe McCarthy to Trump) - "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will 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 - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Trump's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation, we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the wo...