Editor’s Note: Welcome to new subscribers. I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to point out the purposeful destruction of the historic and legendary Washington Post by Jeff Bezos. As the owner, instead of the current dismantling, he could’ve sold it to his wife, or set it up with its own trust fund like England's The Guardian. There’s something completely unnecessarily and stereotypical spoiled billionaire about this.

The one major difference that has always separated our democracy from becoming like a Russia or China is a strong free press. We don’t make shit up on behalf of an administration, or make things easier by paying what smells like a bribe with a side of popcorn.

I hope you will think of this with any future use of Amazon services.

When the long emergency of the current regime is done, we will need to re-prioritize the study of history.

Somewhere along the way, we really got off track. I’ve heard numerous students over the years lament that they have to take this stuff instead of being able to focus on courses that give them a career. If you watch any late night television or social media, you will see numerous instances of Americans being stopped in the street and given short history quizzes.

The results are embarrassing.

And when education is perceived by students as a chore, that’s a problem.

I’m not sure where the blame lies for this: boring teachers, no talk of history at home, no regular practice of reading, or the final legacy of an American get-rich-quick ideology. Whatever the cause, this is the time to be thinking, because we are on the cusp of protracted, internal violence.​

Imagine what it is to be a scientist in the lab who has the eureka moment that leads to a cure, or the soldier who made it ashore on D‑Day only to lie wounded all night along a fence and a row of trees, hoping his comrades would find him first. Understanding how others live and what they did or didn’t accomplish helps to develop the empathy factor. If you can appreciate the experiences of others, it will influence your own actions and responses.

When researchers ask Americans whether violence is part of the political toolkit, the answers are increasingly concerning. A recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that about 30 percent of Americans now say citizens may have to resort to violence to get the country back on track, up sharply from 19 percent the year before. A separate survey reports that roughly two in ten Americans agree that violence may be needed to save the country, with support scattered across party lines rather than confined to one camp. At the same time, nearly nine in ten Americans say political violence is a problem, and a majority call it a major problem, which suggests a population both fearful of violence and strangely resigned to it.

While we know that the Civil War brought death and destruction, or that segregation and the civil rights movement led to public assaults and murder, many of us seem unable to feel what those experiences must have been like, and are too quick to opt for a guns‑and‑boots approach. The fatalism goes global. In an international YouGov survey on war and NATO, only 28 percent of Americans thought there “definitely” or “probably” will be a time when there are no wars on Earth, while about 62 percent said such a future is unlikely or impossible. Asked to imagine the next fifty years, most respondents expected the world to become less peaceful, not more.

These are not the answers of a species confident in its ability to learn and discern. They sound more like people lulled into a doctrine of winners and losers.

Yet the historical record is more complicated than such pessimism allows. A comparative study of over 1,000 mammal species in Nature suggested that if humans followed a purely evolutionary baseline, we would expect about 2 percent of deaths from interpersonal violence, which is roughly what we see in some early historical periods, but over centuries, with the spread of states and laws, the concept of individual rights, and norms against cruelty, many forms of routine violence shifted downward, from homicide rates in early modern Europe to dueling (poor Alexander Hamilton) and public executions. The decline is not smooth, as we still experience atrocities like WWII concentration camps, Rwanda, or even Gaza, but it shows that large shifts in how much violence societies tolerate can be limited.

We have to be brutally honest to keep this up, by learning from past mistakes but also being able to handle change better. As one anthropological synthesis points out, rates vary wildly depending on how societies are organized, how resources are distributed, and what stories people tell themselves about who counts as fully human. Recent studies surmise that the evidence supports many cultures surviving for centuries in peaceful existence. Anthropologists like Agustín Fuentes and others argue that when we declare violence “unavoidable,” we create a self‑fulfilling prophecy: we design institutions, media, and education around the expectation of aggression, then act surprised when aggression shows up. This was most likely what led President Eisenhower to his famous farewell warning on the rise of the military‑industrial complex, something we have entirely unheeded.​

In other words, “human nature” can be too often used as an excuse to justify war and brutality and make it easier to live with the consequences, yet history reminds us that we choose, and we can choose differently.​

That’s where we are today.

We do, in fact, have the technical capacity to feed, clothe, and house everyone on the planet at a basic level, given current global income and food production. The obstacles are political: concentrated wealth, fragile democracies, and institutions that reward short‑term gains over long‑term stability. A scholar recently described war as a human institution, not a force of nature, and argued that sustained peace is possible precisely because the things that drive war can be addressed. Rising inequality, social fragmentation, and the erosion of liberal democracy are pushing us in the opposite direction, but those trends are man‑made.

So the question becomes sharper. If we could meet basic human needs and choose not to, then violence stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a policy. Our bloodshed becomes the cost of protecting hierarchies that benefit a few (Trump, Epstein, N. Korea, Putin, etc.).

Studying history works to strip away the excuses. It shows that the United States may have been founded on a relationship with violence (slavery, the War of Independence, Indian removal), but it need not continue that way.

If nearly a third of our neighbors can now imagine political violence as a legitimate tool, it is a warning that legal, democratic channels are not working. If most of us cannot imagine a world without war, it says more about our civic education than about our biology.​

The real importance of understanding history is that it examines the gap between what we have tolerated and what we might yet demand. It refuses to let “human nature” carry the blame for choices made in our names. And it asks whether we can define strength not by feeding a war‑making machine, but by impeding violence.​

If we want to avoid violence, start by curbing monopolies, shaming excessive wealth, and reorienting the education model to humans first, and business second.​

If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, you know I usually reserve this section for stories that aren’t directly about the current administration. I’m making an exception today because I want you to see what I think is taking shape.

In some form, I expect this president to use this faux investigation as a rationale to undermine future elections, starting with the midterms. I’m not someone who defaults to conspiracy, but sowing doubt about norms has been their main game since the Stop the Steal nonsense. In the deeply manipulative way this president operates, he has already floated the idea of nationalizing elections, the way they do it in Russia and China. ​He continues to show a total disdain and betrayal of basic American principles.

More is coming.

Future actions can be predicted based on past behavior, and with this president, there will be nothing true or fair. This is about power and money, and if the American experiment has to be warped to serve those ends, then that, too, is on the table.

Be prepared to act to protect the sanctity of voting and free and fair elections. They are depending on people being fearful enough not to show up, not to vote, and not to give a shit.

These are letters from students across America on their study of history. For several years, I was a judge in an annual state history fair contest (remember the science fair - same sort of thing). I got to where I really enjoyed interpretation, where students act as historical characters and tell stories, whether it was the Freedom Riders, a nurse in WWII, or an English knight.

History is the eyewitness to a multitude of realities we can’t and shouldn’t ignore. It’s the base from whence we know if we are making progress. I loved reading these, and hope you will, too.

And Now….

This is Black History Month, and with overt racism making a comeback, this is a time to know your history. The better we understand the struggle, the better we know ourselves. The more we can prepare for the future after the regime. We should be proud of our American history, even the parts where we got things wrong, for they will usually give us the best reasons to continue evolving.

Be grateful, and remember: Be an excellent human.