Kareem Abdul Jabaar, among the greatest NBA players in the history of basketball, has become, in my view, among the greatest public intellectuals in our nation today. Kareem writes every week in his “Official Newsletter” on sports, politics and pop culture and how they define America. In every missive, his moral compass helps clarify the meaning of what we’re experiencing as a people and nation. He also entertains with short video clips in sports, pop music, and the natural world. This week, for example, he showed a video of a fox in the dead of winter in North Dakota hunting field mice through three feet of snow, leaping high into the air and diving head-first after the wild canine hears the slightest rustle of sound beneath the snow-surface, and then coming up with a mouse in its mouth 75 percent of the time.  

This week (April 18, 2025) Kareem also wrote a “Halleluyah” piece about Harvard President Alan Garber refusing to bend the knee to Trump. And he notes that the Wall Street Journal predicted that Trump will be impeached a third time – hard to believe, but he makes the case writing:

“Defying the U.S. Supreme Court is the most blatant admission that Trump is angling to be a dictator. Will he be impeached before he’s amassed enough power to overturn the government—which he’s been doing for months—or will the GOP put their country ahead of their careers before it’s too late?”

Kareem is smart and his newsletters are always thoughtful, informative and entertaining.

And then there is my friend and Senator Adam Schiff, who every night posts a YouTube of between five and ten minutes in which he reviews the outrage of the day perpetrated by Donald Trump and his administration. Always focused and thoughtful, Adam offers his viewpoint about each particular event. In this one, he describes President Trump’s blatant disobeying of lawful court orders, as Trump’s advisors and allies cheer him on, following the mind-numbing injustice of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who remains trapped in a jail in El Salvador. Watch that video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGTIELDTHOo

I add two quotations from more than one hundred years ago in American history that inform us about what we are facing as a people and nation in these exceptionally disturbing days of federal government stupidity, illegality and overreach. The first is from the writings of the former Chief Justice of the United States, Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), who anticipated the current moment in our history nearly a century ago, and what is required of us today:

“No greater mistake can be made than to think that our institutions are fixed or may not be changed for the worse. … Increasing prosperity tends to breed indifference and to corrupt moral soundness. Glaring inequalities in condition create discontent and strain the democratic relation. The vicious are the willing, and the ignorant are unconscious instruments of political artifice. Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses. … The peril of this nation is not in any foreign foe. We, the people, are its power, its peril, and its hope.”

The second are the words of Carl Schurz (1829-1906), the German-American revolutionary, statesman, and reformer:

“We have come to a point where it is loyalty to resist and treason to submit.”

Both Kareem Abdul Jabaar and Senator Adam Schiff are, among others across the nation, leading the way in our resistance.