Let's Row Together

Obey! When you decide not to stand up to tyrannical rule, you teach the bully and empower him to demand more. Let us praise those who refused to obey.

Let’s pick up where we left off.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, my talk about my fight against gender discrimination was erased from the National Archives schedule.

Three days later – and a few hours after I published last week’s Substack on this topic – Trump fired the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, whose agency staff had erased my talk.

So much for the effectiveness of this agency’s “anticipatory obedience.”

The Archivist is gone.

And my once-scheduled March 4th talk is still erased.

In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote about “anticipatory obedience.” His No. 1 lesson is “Do not obey in advance.”

Here’s what I learned from my own lesson: Don’t believe that cleaning the slate of what you think might be offensive activities will save you from the wrath, retribution and ruthlessness of a bullying autocrat. The bullying autocrat takes from your actions the fuel he needs to propel his pushing, prodding, and commanding of those whose future obedience he seeks.

Where do we look for heroes?

In most tragedies, heroes emerge.

So, where do we look for ours?

In a time when the U.S. Senate acquiesces: Senator Jon Ossoff: “If a couple of years ago, I told you that the Senate was about to put America’s health in this man’s hands, you’d probably tell me the Senate has lost its mind.” (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, Feb. 13, 2025),

In a time when the House of Representatives colludes: Speaker Johnson trades his leadership for the “honor” of being Trump’s supplicant.

In this time we look to people whose solemn duty it is uphold the law - to judges, to a U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon, to the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity section, to his three deputy chiefs, and to a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division. (Yes, I'm aware that members of Congress and the executive branch swear an other “to support and defend” the Constitution, but …, well, I’ll leave this observation at that.)

We look to Danielle Sassoon, above, whom Trump appointed on January 21 as interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Sassoon defied a Justice Department order to drop its public corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, delivered by Trump’s former defense attorney (Emil Bove is now #2 at the U.S. Justice Department), by resigning her leadership position at what is known as “the sovereign district.” She didn’t go quietly, charging the Justice Department with acceding to the Mayor’s lawyers “quid pro quo” of having Adams assist the White House with its ICE pursuits. She also forcefully conveyed her confidence that Adams committed the crimes in the indictment. She also wrote that before Bove’s order reached her the Southern District’s prosecutors were preparing to charge him with additional crimes of “destroying evidence and instructing others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.”

Just so we don’t leap - or aren’t pushed via misinformation – to conclusions about Sassoon’s political leanings, she is a contributor to The Federalist and clerked with the late-Justice Scalia. In her letter to the Justice Department, Sassoon described its action would set a "breathtaking and dangerous precedent."

At other times in our history these courageous acts of defiance would be our nation’s banner headlines like those from the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon administration.

Yet, I doubt today that more than five percent of Americans — and this is me being overly optimistic – know or care what these people did!

I’d wager fewer than .01 percent of American citizens could name the U.S. Attorney who just resigned.

Amid the ceaseless onslaught of executive commands – and the silence greeting too many – this story is, at best, a developing story crowded out by the breaking news of so many others.

For me, however, to witness the acts of women and men leading us with integrity and sacrificing their jobs to oppose the U.S. Justice Department’s unethical, if not illegal order, restores my faith, perhaps only temporarily, in the protective bulwarks built into our American democracy.

Yet, I also read scholars writing about our democratic institutions who give us reason to worry that this judicial bulwark won’t hold.

“The way to stop an authoritarian is to stand up to them,” Heather Cox Richardson said, in her interview yesterday with Katie Couric, when she also admitted, “America’s best days are behind us. But I think we’re also writing its end days, which is profoundly sad. Still, I’m not ready to give up on it.” Katie Couric interview with Heather Cox Richardson

Maya Sin, professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, described this week what worries her about depending on the courts: “One challenge is speed: The Trump administration is moving much faster than courts do, or even can. The other is authority: The courts’ ability to compel government action is limited, and also slow. And that doesn’t even factor in statements by Trump, Vice President JD Vance and “special government employee” multibillionaire Elon Musk. All three have indicated that they are open to ignoring court rulings and have even threatened to seek the impeachment of judges who rule in ways they don’t like.” Published on The Conversation

Stepping Out of My Lane

When I began writing Let’s Row Together on December 6, 2023, I hadn’t heard the term “anticipatory obedience.” Nor could I imagine 14 months later I’d be writing about Danielle Sassoon as the woman exemplifying what integrity and courage looks like in America.

I didn’t think I’d need to.

Certainly, there will be some among my readers ready to tell me to get back in my lane … to resume writing about girls, women and sports and the gender inequities that still run rampant in sports and stop writing about our political situation.

But here’s the deal: No citizen, including me, can pretend we’re living in usual times.

In my view, this means each of us must speak up, in ways we can, when we see wrong happening in our nation. I’m choosing to do this through my Substack and, in doing so, I am moving myself off the sidelines and into the ring of action, albeit as limited as this current capacity of mine to act might be.

Let me simply add this: In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let us now Praise Famous Men. Clearly, it’s time for a reset. So, now is the time for each of us to praise Danielle Sassoon, a woman, in whatever way we can.

Building my Bridge Back to Sports

Here’s the bridge I’m using to walk myself back into that sports arena, while you’ll see how I refuse to take my eyes off of on our nation’s well-being.

For this, I’m joined my friend, Robert Lipsyte, an author whose sports columnist days at the New York Post overlapped with my time at Sports Illustrated. This week he sent me his essay, How to Bump, Lump, Crumple, and Eventually Dump Donald Trump, which was published on TomDispatch. In it, he reminded us of lessons he learned in standing up to the schoolyard bully who tormented him as a youth, and has informed the story he tells in his just released book, Rhino’s Run.

Robert Lipsyte writing about Rhino’s Run, but really about what it takes to resist: “Resistance begins with ‘embracing the suck’ (old military slang for acknowledging the morass we’re in). Part of such an approach is understanding that, in opposing Trumpworld, you could get a torn pocket here, a lost job there, maybe even risky confrontations in the street. But without resistance, count on one thing: it will only get worse.” From his essay, How to Bump, Lump, Crumple, and Eventually Dump Donald Trump

So much for moving out of my lane!

This time, it’s actually true that I’m moving back into my sports lane. With this …

A RECORD BREAKING PERFORMANCE for JUJU WATKINS

USC outperformed No. 1 UCLA, 71-60, in its cross-town rivalry, handing UCLA it first loss of the season. Juju Watkins, the Trojan’s star guard, took over the collegiate women’s basketball spotlight, as USC moved into the #1 spot in women’s collegiate basketball rankings.

Even as spotlights shine on women's sports, let’s not forget that women athletes are a long ways from achieving anything close to economic equity with their male peers.

Coco Gauff is again the highest-paid woman athlete with $30.4M, but her total earnings fall below the $37.5M cutoff for the top 100; she ranks No. 125 on a longer list. Freeskier Eileen Gu ranked second among women athletes with $22.1M; among all athletes, she shows up outside the top 250. Sportico, Feb. 12, 2025

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