Normalizing Evil

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.

I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.

Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.

Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.

Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been.

People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb. Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled.

Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

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Revisiting “Ordinary Men”

Posted on March 30, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

This is not a full book review. I don’t have the strength to do that right now. Yet, when you are a historian there are certain books that stay with you because they are so provocative. One of them is “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning.

People often forget that the Holocaust in Nazi Germany didn’t just extinguish millions of Jews, but it also exterminated Afro-Germans, Gypsies, LGBTQIA, and people with disabilities. Anything or anyone that was viewed as defective was subject to be put to death. But that’s not exactly what I want to write about here.

The title of this book says it all. This battalion was charged with the duty of marching groups of Jews out to a ditch, having them lay in that ditch; then the battalion would shoot them to death.

The first time they carried out this heinous order, most of the men balked at having to carry out such an awful task. Several men vomited at the sight of the murders; others ran and went AWOL. Yet, most of the men stayed behind and followed their orders.

By the time I got to the end of this book, I was mortified. That same battalion that initially balked at killing Jews that were laid in a ditch now carried out the orders with precision and without blinking. They became professional killers doing a job, not men who once had some empathy, sympathy, and consciences.

We prefer to believe that most people cannot be manipulated and threatened in order to convert them into monsters under the appropriate circumstances. “Ordinary Men“ showed me that it was relatively easy to find and nurture the dark side of human beings.

Those of us who are fighting as hard as we can against the excesses and abuse of Felon 47 need to remember one thing—Felon 47 and the Muskrat are only TWO men. They cannot do what they are doing without willing accomplices.

Stay the course my Fellow Resisters. But watch the people around you and watch your back; and NEVER normalize or explain away bad behavior even when it’s yours.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Dear Ontario: Turn the Lights Off If You Have To

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I was impressed when Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford towed a hardline with Felon 47 who wants to bully Canada into becoming a 51st state. Felon 47 hopes to do this with tariffs.

But here’s what Americans need to know about how ridiculous, mean-spirited and stupid Felon 47 actually is.

Canada is the world’s third largest supplier of energy. Only Saudi Arabia and Russia supply more energy. The United States consumes more energy than it produces.

Canada and the United States’ electrical grids have been integrated well over 100 years for the security of both nations. New England and many parts of the northeastern United States are heavily dependent on Canadian electricity.

Canada is the second largest supplier of hydroelectricity powered by moving water which generates nearly 60 percent of Canada’s electricity. Electricity Canada, which is based in Ontario, provides clean electricity to Canada and the United States.

(Ontario Premier Doug Ford, photo by Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

So, here’s the deal. For now, Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford has decided to hold off on raising tariffs by 25 percent on electricity exported to the US. He still could impose, however, those penalties where consumers in the northern USA see their electric bills go sky high or they could find themselves looking for candles.

Felon 47 has decided to withhold imposing a 25 percent increase in tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel for now. Yet, he is discovering that his role as a bully is being met by leaders who have better sense and materials the United States is dependent on.

Here’s one thing everyone better understand. Canada can survive and thrive even if it cuts its diplomatic and regional ties to the United States. It has already been established that with some adjustments to its economy, Canada can continue to thrive. It is not clear whether the same can be said of the United States.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Revisiting “Late Victorian Holocausts”

Posted on February 12, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

I’m not going to write a full analysis of the late historian Mike Davis’ exceptional book “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.” I do, however, want to revisit it and emphasize a few points Davis made about European colonialism in the late 19th century.

Davis’ examination of famines and droughts in Southeast Asia, China, Africa, and Latin America underscored how indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their land; and their time-honored farming traditions were also dismissed. It created ecological and environmental problems we now deal with today but rarely think about.

Davis acknowledged that land theft, the closing off of common farming areas, and violence against these populations were key components of European colonization and expansion, but he added one more element—the weather.

European colonizers studied El Niño weather patterns to determine when populations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, China, and etcetera, would be at their most vulnerable.

El Niño is part of a long-existing and large weather pattern. During El Niño, areas of the Pacific Ocean experience unusually high surface temperatures. El Niño disrupts typical weather patterns, affects rainfall, temperatures, and etcetera. The period when these waters are much cooler is called La Niña.

Europeans studied when the weather was working against the people and the lands they wished to colonize—The colonizers struck most often at those times proving that famines are human-made.

The book’s preface offers a detailed account of former U. S. President Ulysses Grant and his family on vacation in 1877 after he left office. He and his family visited Europe first, but soon ended up visiting places devastated by famine. Grant took notes about what he saw, but he did not report the degree of ecological destruction he witnessed.

Davis’ book was published in 2001 and it remains a rare gift because his research proved that heads of state and monarchs in the western world tended to ignore the long-term ecological damage from their destruction of natural resources. Indigenous populations were seen as inferior, therefore their farming techniques and cooperation with their native ecologies were dismissed by Europeans as well.

The fires that recently destroyed homes and huge areas of California were made worse by what is called “Hydroclimate Whiplash.” When heavy rains due to El Niño soak the ground leading to the excessive growth of vegetation, what follows next are extremely long dry spells.

The dried up vegetation becomes little more than fuel for fires. The results of El Niño are much more troublesome now due to climate change. It’s not just happening in California. It’s happening everywhere around the world.

What is often left out of discussions about climate change and the usage of El Niño’s disruptive weather patterns, is the racism against and the subjugation of peoples of color by Europeans and others that has aided and abetted climate change crises around the world.

Davis was not the first historian to understand what European colonialism did to the natural environments of countries around the world, but his book “Late Victorian Holocausts” is one of the few histories to recognize that the routine and natural disruptions of El Niño were deliberately weaponized against Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans in horrific ways that few individuals realize.

Crooks and Routh: Dress Rehearsals?

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I’m a historian. We rarely write about anything until some time has passed. What I have written below is speculation right now. I have some serious questions as these two events have played out (or rather, not played out much) in the media:

Do you remember when Felon 47 was at a rally back in July of 2024, and there was an attempt on his life by a 20-year old man named Thomas Matthew Crooks? Remember that?

Crooks shot and killed a supporter in the crowd, injured two people in the crowd, then hit Felon 47 on the ear. I don’t know about you, but the shot that grazed Felon 47’s ear seems suspicious. A bullet aimed at an ear is likely to lodge into the side of someone’s head. Then Crooks was killed. It is now 2025 and there is still no known motive.

Then remember Ryan Wesley Routh, a man in his late fifties, who tried to take a shot at Felon 47 while he was playing on a golf course at Tr*mp International Golf Club in September 2024? The Secret Service shot at least four rounds at Routh who was hiding in the shrubbery with an SKS-styled rifle. Routh survived and was charged with an assassination attempt.

Thomas Matthew Crooks (L); Ryan Wesley Routh (R).

The last actual assassination of a president occurred in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas allegedly by Lee Harvey Oswald. Later a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald as he was being transferred to the county jail. Oswald was shot and killed on live television.

Later in 1981 John Hinckly, Jr. tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan as he was waiving to supporters. Reagan was seriously injured, but he survived.

I bring these events up because killing presidents and presidential candidates has always been extremely difficult. Yet, Felon 47 had two would-be assassins before he ever took office. Were these attempts dress rehearsals? We don’t know.

Here’s the deal. Felon 47 and his puppeteer Elon stay front and center on the news. They remain topics for perpetual discussion and debate.

Right now Felon 47 is all bluster with his threats to invade sovereign nations and put tariffs on everything he can think of while we speculate about the sinister things Elon is doing to our democracy behind the scenes. It is what we don’t see that we need to worry about.

If someone were to actually assassinate Felon 47 who would take his place in the White House? The most logical answer is his Vice-President J. D. Vance.

But we already know that the Republican Party is completely illogical right now; and the Democratic Party is still trying to behave as if they don’t know that the old political play book has been destroyed.

Crooks and Routh could very well be two isolated haters of Felon 47. Yet, both of these men got within striking distance of potentially assassinating Felon 47. Given the excessively high security surrounding presidents and presidential candidates, the real questions are how did these two men get past security and why did they attempt to assassinate Felon 47; and is something else on the agenda?

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: International History

Dear Ontario: Turn the Lights Off If You Have To

Revisiting “Late Victorian Holocausts”