Dear Commons Community,

Former President Trump said it was “probably” a mistake to appoint Christopher Wray to lead the FBI, attributing the decision partly to a recommendation from former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R).

In an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, Trump, who rarely acknowledges making an error, was asked if it was a mistake for him to put Wray in charge of the FBI. The bureau has recently faced unrelenting criticism from Republicans, including the former president.

“Sadly, it probably was,” Trump said. “You know, he was recommended very strongly by Chris Christie, who is, you know, a sad case.”

Trump went on criticize Christie over his poll numbers in the GOP presidential primary, where the former New Jersey governor has typically polled in the low single digits. Christie has spent much of his campaign attacking Trump over his character, saying he is unfit to serve another term in the White House.

Wray has led the FBI since 2017, when he was appointed by Trump. 

But the former president and his allies have turned sharply critical of Wray and the bureau in the wake of last August’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property as part of an investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents upon leaving the White House.

Some Republicans have called for defunding the FBI, and many on the right have alleged that the bureau is politicized and biased against conservatives.

Wray testified Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where GOP members grilled him on claims of politicization within the bureau. 

Christie has repeatedly and publicly defended Wray, standing by his recommendation that he lead the FBI and pushing back on efforts in the House to go after Wray.

“I think Chris Wray has done a very good job,” Christie said Wednesday after the House hearing. “A lot of the stuff you see today … is theater, that people are trying to raise money for campaigns. Doesn’t mean there aren’t problems at the FBI — there are. But I believe Chris is a guy who can get it fixed, and he’s fixed a lot of them already.”

Christie and Wray have known each other for more than 20 years, from serving in the Justice Department together to Christie hiring Wray as his personal attorney to defend him during the BridgeGate scandal in 2014, when the former New Jersey governor and his allies were accused of creating a traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge in order to cause problems for the mayor of Fort Lee, N.J.

Trump is pathetic and always blames someone else for whatever does not work out for him!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rep. Adam B. Schiff swamped his rivals in the financial race to replace retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein, raising $8.2 million in recent months, according to federal fundraising reports released Saturday.

Schiff collected roughly double the combined total raised by his top Democratic opponents — Reps. Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — in the same period.

Schiff’s windfall was fueled by his June censure by congressional Republicans over his role in investigating former GOP President Trump’s ties to Russia — a reprimand the Burbank Democrat repeatedly highlighted in his fundraising appeals.  As reported by the Los Angeles Times.

“Schiff might as well have paid for this censure, in the sense that it has gotten him exactly what he wants, which is, ‘I’m the person Republicans don’t want to win, and that’s for a reason,'” said Jessica Levinson, an election law professor at Loyola Law School. “Even though he’s such an eloquent and well-spoken lawyer, I don’t know that he could have made the case for himself in the way Republicans did.”

Schiff’s haul far outpaced Porter, an Irvine Democrat who raised $3.1 million in the second quarter of 2023.

In recent years, Schiff and Porter have been among the most prodigious fundraisers in the House. But Porter had to spend nearly $29 million on her tight Orange County reelection bid last year, while Schiff coasted to another term in office and banked his donations.

Lee, an Oakland Democrat, received $1.1 million between April 1 and June 30, according to disclosure documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, which were made public on Saturday. That’s the same amount raised by Democrat Lexi Reese, a Silicon Valley executive seeking the seat in her first run for public office, though Reese contributed about $284,000 of her own money to her campaign.

Though the general election is more than a year away, these figures are crucial in early assessments of the candidates’ prospects as they vie for a rare open Senate seat representing California, home to some of the most expensive media markets in the nation. Television advertising is a requisite in any statewide campaign courting California’s 22 million voters.

Adam Schiff is indeed the candidate that the Republicans would not want to win!

Tony

Kaitlan Collins and Nancy Mace

Dear Commons Community,

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday questioned Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) over why she had called on fellow Republicans to “stop being assholes to women” while also backing a House amendment to block a Defense Department abortion policy.

Earlier that day, the chamber passed the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act with an amendment that would reverse the Pentagon policy, which reimburses travel expenses for service members who are stationed in states banning abortion but want to receive the procedure. A compromise on the final legislation is expected after the Senate passes its own version of the bill.

Mace, who voted in favor of the NDAA in the House, had sent a blunt message to her party over the amendment Thursday.

“If we want to show America that we can come together and that we care about women, we’ve got to stop being assholes to women,” she told CNN’s Manu Raju. “We’ve got to stop targeting women, and do the things that make a real difference.”

On a broadcast of “The Source,” Collins asked Mace about her vote.

“You said yesterday — and I’m quoting you now — that your party needs to ‘stop being assholes to women.’ So, why did you vote for this today?” asked the CNN anchor.

“I want to be consistent on military policy and whether travel — because this is very specific to travel. The military does not pay for abortion services at all. But this was strictly related to travel,” responded Mace, who has previously warned that her party will suffer in 2024 for its support of strict abortion measures.

“And the military does not in any other case reimburse for travel expenses for elected procedures. Now, I did not like the idea of this amendment. These are not issues that I believe we should be voting on right now without some consideration of what we can do to protect women and show that we’re pro-women, which has been my frustration for the better part of the last seven months.”

Collins later asked whether Mace thinks it’s “fair” that a service member in upstate New York has “more access to abortion services and reproductive health options” than a service member in Texas, who would have to travel to receive such care.

“Nothing in here would prohibit a woman from traveling out of state to follow state law,” said Mace, referring to the legislation.

“Nothing would prohibit her from being able to do that. There are no limits on her travel.”

You can’t have it both ways, Nancy!

Tony

Bob Odenkirk on the Writers Guild picket line. Credit…Dana Calvo

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a column this morning commenting on the major issue regarding the Hollywood writers strike:  artificial intelligence.  Entitled, “Watch Out for the Fake Tom Cruise,” she directs our attention to the dangers A.I. poses for many of us.  Below is an excerpt.

Read and heed!

Tony

——————————————————————————————————————————

“Be careful what you wish for, Hollywood studios, as you mess with the primal force of A.I.

Tinseltown is going dark, as the actors join the writers on the picket line. Hollywood’s century-old business model was upended by Covid and also by streaming, which swept in like an occupying army. Then streaming hit a ceiling, and Netflix and Co. scrambled to pivot.

With a dramatically different economic model shaped by transformative technologies — A.I. is a key issue in the strike — the writers and actors want a new deal. And they deserve it.

The Times’s Brooks Barnes describes the mood of the town as très French Revolution, with writers and actors seething in fury over the Marie Antoinette antics of C.E.O.s and studio chiefs collecting humongous paychecks, frolicking in Cannes and jetting to Sun Valley.

Besides pay fairness, writers want to make sure that they’re not rendered irrelevant by algorithms, and actors want to prevent their digital likenesses from coming under new ownership.

It’s a complex issue. Even as writers are demanding that studios not replace them with A.I., some studio execs are no doubt wondering if the writers are being hypocritical: Will they start using A.I. to help them finish their scripts on deadline?

Chatbots are so proficient — and growing more so every second — that many studio suits are probably itching to bypass the middleman screenwriter.

As Puck’s Matthew Belloni said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” “You can say, you know, ‘Here’s the “Social Network” script. Write me a script, but make it about Elon Musk, not Mark Zuckerberg.’”

Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, has long warned that we were cruising for a bruising. As he told me nine years ago, the lords of the cloud were acting as if they had been inventing a digital brain when what they were really doing was making a mash-up of real brains.

He said that when machines translated one language into another, they were leeching from human translators, taking matching phrases from aggregated data; those translators should have the right to negotiate for compensation for unwittingly feeding the A.I. brain.

He also has made the point that Facebook and other social media companies have been extracting our precious data for years, without giving us payment or any of the other rights a first-class citizen would normally have. He said it would be unfair if Hollywood studios created fake versions of actors and then didn’t pay them.

The compensation issue is now center stage. Sarah Silverman joined class-action lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta accusing them of copyright infringement, saying that they “ingested” her work to train their A.I.s.

The ingesting and synthesizing of words, images and music is going on in giant gulps. Indeed, the day is fast approaching when the digerati will be able to make a whole fake movie.

As Lanier said, “They might say, ‘Make me a movie that’s similar to Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible.” However, make sure that none of the synthetic actors can be mistaken for known actors and make sure that we’re not going to get sued, but let’s go right up to the line.’ That’s not quite feasible today, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. It’s just math. And we can do it.”

He said that the Hollywood strikers are just the tip of the iceberg. “People say, ‘Why should we help these fancy, lefty, very well-paid actors? Screw them.’ But if you’re making a living driving a vehicle or working in a place where you use heavy machines like an auto body shop, all kinds of jobs, this is going to create the legal precedents that could protect you in the future, too.” Almost nobody is immune to the risk that A.I. could devalue their economic position, even though A.I. will also have widespread benefits.

“Tech companies would be helped by bringing the whole society into the process of improving how models perform using economic incentives,” Lanier said. But, he added, if we get it wrong on “data dignity,” society will “turn into a misery fast enough.”

“This is really for everybody,” he said of the effort not to be swallowed by A.I. “It might not seem like it, but it really, really is.”

Amid Loss and Grief: Young girls hold banners in Uvalde, Texas. Photo: Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

From Jan. 1 to June 30, the United States endured 28 mass killings, all but one of which involved guns. The death toll rose just about every week, a constant cycle of violence and grief.

Six months. 181 days. 28 mass killings. 140 victims. One country.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“What a ghastly milestone,” said Brent Leatherwood, whose three children were in class at a private Christian school in Nashville on March 27 when a former student killed three children and three adults. “You never think your family would be a part of a statistic like that.”

Leatherwood, a prominent Republican in a state that hasn’t strengthened gun laws, believes something must be done to get guns out of the hands of people who might become violent. The shock of seeing the bloodshed strike so close to home has prompted him to speak out.

“You may as well say Martians have landed, right? It’s hard to wrap your mind around it,” he said.

A mass killing is defined as an occurrence when four or more people are slain, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. A database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University tracks this large-scale violence dating back to 2006.

The 2023 milestone beat the previous record of 27 mass killings, which was only set in the second half of 2022. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago.

“We used to say there were two to three dozen a year,” Fox said. “The fact that there’s 28 in half a year is a staggering statistic.”

Experts attribute the rising bloodshed to a growing population with an increased number of guns in the U.S. Yet for all the headlines, mass killings are statistically rare and represent a fraction of the country’s overall gun violence.

“We need to keep it in perspective,” Fox said.

But the mass violence most often spurs attempts to reform gun laws, even if the efforts are not always successful.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, had urged the General Assembly in the wake of the Nashville school shooting to pass legislation keeping firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others, so-called “red flag laws,” though Lee says the term is politically toxic.

Getting such a measure passed in Tennessee is an uphill climb. The Republican-led Legislature adjourned earlier this year without taking on gun control, prompting Lee to schedule a special session for August.

Leatherwood, a former executive director of the Tennessee Republican Party and now the head of the influential Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, wrote a letter to lawmakers asking them to pass the governor’s proposal.

Leatherwood said he doesn’t want any other family to go through what his children experienced at the time of the shooting when they were in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. One of his kids, preparing for a recent sleepaway camp, asked whether they would be safe there.

“Our child was asking, ‘Do you think that there will be a gunman that comes to this camp? Do I need to be worried about that?’” Leatherwood said.

The Nashville shooter, whose writings Leatherwood and other parents are asking a court to keep private, used three guns in the attack, including an AR-15-style rifle. It was one of at least four mass killings in the first half of 2023 involving such a weapon, according to the database.

Nearly all of the mass killings in the first half of this year, 27 of 28, involved guns. The other was a fire that killed four people in a home in Monroe, Louisiana. A 37-year-old man was arrested on arson and murder charges in connection with the March 31 deaths.

Despite the unprecedented carnage, the National Rifle Association maintains fierce opposition to regulating firearms, including AR-15-style rifles and similar weapons.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ constant efforts to gut the Second Amendment will not usher in safety for Americans; instead, it will only embolden criminals,” NRA spokesman Billy McLaughlin said in a statement. “That is why the NRA continues our fight for self-defense laws. Rest assured, we will never bow, we will never retreat, and we will never apologize for championing the self-defense rights of law-abiding Americans.”

Tito Anchondo’s brother, Andre Anchondo, was among 23 people killed in a 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The gunman was sentenced last week to 90 consecutive life sentences but could face more punishment, including the death penalty. The prosecution of the racist attack on Hispanic shoppers in the border city was one of the U.S. government’s largest hate crime cases.

Andre Anchondo and his wife, Jordan, died shielding their 2-month-old son from bullets. Paul, who escaped with just broken bones, is now 4 years old.

Tito Anchondo said he feels like the country has forgotten about the El Paso victims in the years since and that not nearly enough has been done to stem the bloodshed. He worries about Paul’s future.

“I hope that things can drastically change because this country is going down a very, very slippery slope; a downward spiral,” he said. “It’s just a little unnerving to know that he’s eventually going to go to school with kids that also may bring a gun to school.”

This is isn’t slippery slope.  It is a mile-high cliff!

Tony

Rex Heuermann

Dear Commons Community,

Rex Heuermann, a New York City architect has been arrested in connection with the Gilgo Beach murders, a series of killings of mostly young women that confounded investigators on Long Island for thirteen years, police said yesterday.

Heuermann, 59, was arrested Thursday evening at his Manhattan office and was expected to be arraigned yesterday, said Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison.

“We anticipate an indictment later on this afternoon,” said Harrison, whose agency and the Suffolk County district attorney are leading the investigation.

Heuermann lives in Massapequa in neighboring Nassau County, police said.

The sister of Shannan Gilbert, the first of the 11 victims found slain, said she was “relieved that they finally caught him.”

“It’s been a long time coming and I never gave up hope that one day justice would be served,” Sherre Gilbert said in an email to NBC News. “I’m just happy it happened sooner rather than later. The suspect (Rex) deserves to rot in prison for the rest of his life. He destroyed many lives so while it won’t bring our loved ones back, it does help that one less monster is off the streets and he can’t ever hurt anyone else!”

Heuermann’s arrest came after a spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office said there was a “significant development in the case” but declined to comment further until after a court proceeding..

The news was first reported by News 12 Long Island.

“The focus for me, members of our team, has been on bringing justice for this victims and closure to these families who have suffered,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said at a news press conference. “Today’s developments take us a major step forward in doing exactly that.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed.

“We’ll all be sleeping a lot easier tonight,” Hochul said after the arrest was announced.

Friends of the suspect expressed shock at his arrest. They said he owns a Manhattan architecture firm and belonged to a New York City-based networking group known as The Dream Team.

“I knew him as a friend and a colleague,” a woman who asked not to be identified told NBC News in a telephone interview. “And I am completely surprised…I did not see this coming.”

Actor Billy Baldwin said he graduated with Heuermann in 1981 from Berner High School in Massapequa. He said his former classmate was married and had two children.

“Woke up this morning to learn that the Gilgo Beach serial killer suspect was my high school classmate Rex Heuermann,” the actor tweeted. ““Mind-boggling… Massapequa is in shock.”

Eleven sets of human remains were found on a stretch of highway in Suffolk County after police began searching along Ocean Parkway for Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker from New Jersey who vanished in 2010 after leaving a client’s house in Oak Beach.

During the search, the remains of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, were found on Dec. 11, 2010. Two days later, three more bodies were discovered — Megan Waterman, 22, Amber Lynn Costello, 27, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25.

In March 2011, Suffolk police found the partial remains of Jessica Taylor along Ocean Parkway. Eight years earlier, remains also belonging to Taylor were found in Manorville, police said in 2020.

In April 2011, police uncovered three additional sets of remains. They were of Valerie Mack, 24, a female toddler and a man.

The shocking discoveries continued when two additional bodies were found in Nassau County.

Mack was not identified until 2020.

Gilbert’s remains were eventually discovered by police on Oak Beach in December 2011. According to NBC New York, Gilbert was not the only victim who was a sex worker.

In May 2022, Suffolk County police released 911 audio related to Gilbert’s disappearance. She initially called 911 from inside the home of a client, Joseph Brewer, in Oak Beach shortly before 5 a.m. in 2010.

“There is somebody after me,” she told the dispatcher multiple times. “Somebody’s after me — please,” she said.

Gilbert didn’t specify where she was but said she was on Long Island. At times during the call, she was heard speaking to her driver and security, Michael Pak, saying “Please, get me out of here, Mike.”

At times during the 911 call, Brewer and Pak were heard speaking, trying to get her out of Brewer’s home.

“Come on, let’s go. We’ll all go outside,” Brewer was heard saying.

Gilbert added, “Please, get me out of here, Mike.”

The development comes after a multi-agency task force made up of FBI, New York State Police and Suffolk County authorities was established in February 2022 to “reinvigorate” the investigation.

Incredible arrest after all of these years!

Tony

Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Striking screen actors will begin picketing alongside writers in New York and Los Angeles today in what has become the biggest Hollywood labor fight in decades.

The double-barreled strike will shut down the small number of productions that continued shooting in the two months since screenwriters stopped working.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Many actors made a show of solidarity on the writers’ picket lines, including Fran Drescher, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists president and former star of “The Nanny.” The union’s 65,000-member actors’ branch will now formally join them as fellow strikers.

The two guilds have similar issues with studios and streaming services. They are concerned about contracts keeping up with inflation, residual payments in the streaming era and putting up guardrails against the use of artificial intelligence mimicking their work on film and television shows.

The famous faces of Oscar and Emmy winners will likely be seen with some regularity on picket lines, adding star power to the writers’ demonstrations outside studios and corporate offices.

No talks are planned, and no end is in sight for the work stoppage, the first time both guilds have walked off sets since 1960. During that strike, then-actor Ronald Regan was SAG’s leader.

Drescher delivered a fiery rebuke of studios and streaming services when announcing union leaders’ unanimous vote to strike Thursday.

“We had no choice. We are the victims here. We are being victimized by a very greedy entity,” Drescher said. “I am shocked by the way the people that we have been in business with are treating us. I cannot believe it, quite frankly: How far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs.”

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents employers including Disney, Netflix, Amazon and others, has lamented the walkout, saying it will hurt thousands of workers in industries that support film and television production.

The actors’ strike will impact more than filming. Stars no longer will be allowed to promote their work through red carpet premieres and personal appearances, campaign for Emmy Awards or take part in auditions or rehearsals.

While international shoots technically can continue, the stoppage among U.S.-based writers and performers is likely to have a drag on those, too.

The writers’ strike brought the immediate shutdown of late-night talk shows and “Saturday Night Live,” as well as several scripted shows that have either had their writers’ rooms or production paused, including “Stranger Things” on Netflix,” “Hacks” on Max, and “Family Guy” on Fox. Many more are sure to follow them now that performers also have been pulled.

In solidarity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro had an unusual question about Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, during an extended rant yesterday. “Why is Hunter Biden always in our face?” she asked on her program The Five. She  then slammed him for his well-publicized struggles with addiction over the years. “Why is Hunter Biden always in our face?! Why is this guy at the White House? This guy is either a drug addict or a reformed drug addict. We shouldn’t have to deal with him constantly in our face!”  

Pirro only has to thank her own network – Fox News.  Mediaite checked the transcripts and found Hunter Biden’s name has been uttered on Fox News 393 times since July 1. The Daily Beast noted his name’s use on the network some 1,300 times over the past month ― compared to under 300 on CNN and MSNBC over that same period.

We have all had too much of Hunter Biden and too much of Fox news bringing him up over and over again!

Tony

Hannie Shaft, a resistance fighter in the Netherlands during  World War II. Wikipedia Commons.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times, as part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times, had a piece yesterday on Hannie Shaft, a resistance fighter in the Netherlands during  World War II.  She evolved into an assassin and was known as “the girl with the red hair”  on the Nazi’s most-wanted list.  She worked with two other young women, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who were her close friends and who would survive the war.  The story of these three women is told well in a book entitled, Three Ordinary Girls – The Remarkable Story of Three Dutch Teenagers Who Became Spies, Saboteurs, NAZI Assassins and WW II Heroes, by Tim Brady, that was published last year.  I posted a review on this blog.  I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in the subject.  It is one of the few books which recount the heroic women of World War II.

Tony

 —————————————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Overlooked No More: Hannie Schaft, Resistance Fighter During World War II

She killed Nazis in the Netherlands and was known as “the girl with the red hair” on their most-wanted list. Then she was executed.

By Claire Moses

Claire Moses reported this story from Amsterdam and The Hague, using documents from the 1940s at the Dutch National Archives.

July 7, 2023

It’s April 17, 1945. Two Nazi officers are making a 24-year-old woman walk ahead of them toward the sandy dunes along the Dutch coast. She’s wearing a blue skirt and a red and blue sweater.

She is the Dutch resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, but one might not have recognized her immediately: Her signature red hair has been dyed black.

As she walks, one of the officers fires his gun at the back of her head. The bullet ricochets off her skull and doesn’t kill her. The other officer then shoots her, also in the back of the head, this time at closer range.

That is how Hannie Schaft died, just a few weeks before the end of World War II in Europe. She had been arrested and sent to a prison in Amsterdam about a month earlier, during a random check in Haarlem, her hometown in the Netherlands, when she was found carrying a gun, as well as illegal newspapers and pamphlets from the resistance movement, in her bicycle bag. Initially it wasn’t obvious to the Nazis whom they had arrested, but it soon became evident that it was the woman they had been looking for, the woman known as the “girl with the red hair,” who had shot and killed multiple Nazis and collaborators.

She was born Jannetje Johanna Schaft on Sept. 16, 1920, in a left-wing, middle-class household, to Aafje Talea (Vrijer) Schaft, a homemaker with a progressive streak, and Pieter Schaft, a teacher. Hannie, a name she adopted when she became a resistance fighter, had an older sister, Annie, who had died of diphtheria. As a result, she had a protective childhood, said Liesbeth van der Horst, the director of the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam, which has a display about Schaft that includes her glasses, a version of the gun she carried, and a photo of her and a fellow resistance fighter.

“She was a serious, principled girl,” van der Horst said in an interview. “She was a bookworm.”

She added that despite being shy, Schaft “was proud of her red hair” and how it helped her stand out.

After high school in Haarlem, Schaft studied law at the University of Amsterdam, in the hopes of becoming a human rights lawyer. She was a student when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, plunging the country into war and targeting Jewish citizens. Though Schaft was not Jewish, the occupation set her on a path to political activism.

“As the Nazi regime’s policies got harsher against Jews, her own sense of moral outrage grew stronger,” said Buzzy Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful” (2023), a novel about Schaft’s life. “She started to want to do more.”

She began volunteering for the Red Cross, rolling bandages and making first aid kits for soldiers and helping German refugees. When the Nazi regime required all students in the Netherlands to pledge their loyalty to the occupiers, Schaft, like many others, refused to do so and was forced to drop out.

She maintained the friendships she had formed with two Jewish girls at the university, helping them obtain fake IDs to evade Nazi checkpoints and hiding them as the Nazis continued stripping Jewish citizens of their basic rights.

By the end of the war, more than 100,000 people — nearly 75 percent of all Dutch Jews, the highest percentage of any Western European country — would be deported to concentration camps and murdered.

The resistance, van der Horst said, was not one organized movement but rather a tangle of overlapping networks.

Schaft joined the Resistance Council, a communist group, where she met two sisters, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, who became her close friends and would survive the war. (In March, the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation announced that it had found two letters written by Truus Oversteegen to a friend, in which she mentioned Schaft.)

The armed resistance was an extremely dangerous undertaking, with many fighters arrested and executed. It’s unclear how many attacks can be attributed to Schaft, but researchers say there were at least six.

In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.

Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.

Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”

Dawn Skorczewski, a lecturer at Amsterdam University College, said Schaft’s involvement in the resistance was particularly extraordinary because few women in the movement took up arms.

“It’s unusual that a woman of her age would start killing Nazis in alleyways,” she said in a video call.

Once the Nazis started looking for “the girl with the red hair,” as she was described on their most-wanted list, Schaft disguised herself by dying her hair black and wearing wire-frame glasses.

The Nazis raided Schaft’s parents’ house and arrested them, hoping that she would turn herself in, but they were released nine months later, according to the Resistance Museum.

After Schaft was caught, she admitted her resistance activities. But there is no evidence that she gave the Nazis information about any of her fellow resistance fighters.

After the liberation of the Netherlands on May 5, 1945, Schaft’s body was dug up from a mass grave with hundreds of other people the Nazis had executed. She was the only woman among them.

Later that year, she was buried at the Honorary Cemetery in the seaside town of Bloemendaal, alongside hundreds of other resistance fighters. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands attended the service, according to documents in the Dutch National Archives.

Schaft’s name is well known in the Netherlands. There are streets and schools named after her, and in 1981 she was the subject of a scripted movie called “The Girl With the Red Hair.” An Amsterdam-based postproduction company is planning to polish the original film and rerelease it for the Netherlands Film Festival in September.

Her story is still being uncovered by researchers — a challenging task because resistance fighters worked undercover and often left little evidence behind.

As Jackson, the author of “To Die Beautiful,” noted, “The reason we know about Anne Frank is because she left a diary.”

Schaft, on the other hand, made it a point not to put anything in writing. “That’s true for most people in the resistance,” Jackson said. “There are not a lot of records to look at.”

Benno C. Schmidt Jr. in 1999. .Credit…Fred R. Conrad

Dear Commons Community,

Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale University and later chairman of the CUNY Board of Trusteess, died earlier this week at his home in Millbrook, N.Y. He was 81.  Here at CUNY, Schmidt served as a trustee for seventeen years, during which a number of reforms and changes were made to the system especially with regard to open admissions. He worked well with Chancellor Matt Goldstein and whether you agreed with the reforms or not, in  my opinion, CUNY became a better institution.  Student enrollments grew substantially and there were many new faculty hires after several decades of stagnation.  Below is his obituary.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

The New York Times

Benno Schmidt Jr., a Reforming Leader at Yale and CUNY, Dies at 81

By Clay Risen

July 10, 2023

Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a constitutional law scholar who became one of the country’s leading education executives, bringing difficult but necessary reforms to Yale and the City University of New York, died over the weekend at his home in Millbrook, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 81.

His daughter Elizabeth Hun Schmidt confirmed his death but said the cause had not been determined. It was unclear if he died late Saturday or early Sunday.

A child of Manhattan privilege with a perfect academic pedigree, Mr. Schmidt seemed destined to lead a university like Yale. He was president there for six years, during which he fought with the faculty over painful but necessary budget cuts, changes that left many people bitter but the university better off in its finances and academic direction.

He spent much longer turning around the beleaguered City University of New York, a sprawling system of two- and four-year colleges and graduate programs that once competed for the city’s brightest minds. It had fallen into disarray by the time Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani put him in charge of a rescue task force in 1998.

“CUNY was in a very sad state — it had no energy, no ideas,” Matthew Goldstein, the former chancellor of CUNY who worked closely with Mr. Schmidt, said in a phone interview. “We got hardly any students from Bronx Science or Stuyvesant” — two of the city’s most selective public high schools — “or any of the city’s top schools.”

In 1999, Mr. Schmidt and his colleagues presented a plan to gut-renovate the system, and over the next 17 years, first as vice-chairman and then as chairman of its board, he executed that vision.

Mr. Schmidt hired faculty by the hundreds. He created an honors college and several graduate schools. He boosted SAT scores of admitted students and brought up the bar-exam pass rate at CUNY’s law school from about 25 percent to nearly 80 percent.

Most education executives focus on either the K-12 or college level. Mr. Schmidt did both. He left Yale in 1992 to become chief executive of Edison Schools, a new company with a plan to build a nationwide network of 1,000 for-profit private elementary schools.

Edison never achieved its goal. But under Mr. Schmidt and the company’s founder, the entrepreneur Chris Whittle, Edison helped change the landscape of primary and secondary education by opening the door to charter schools and to other for-profit ventures.

Mr. Schmidt had already achieved renown as an expert in constitutional law when Columbia University selected him to be dean of its law school in 1984. Less than two years later, Yale named him, at age 44, as its 20th president.

He inherited a troubled institution, with a ballooning deficit, crumbling buildings and a frosty relationship with the surrounding city of New Haven.

Mr. Schmidt arranged for Yale to invest $50 million in neighborhoods around campus, primarily in affordable housing. He started a $500 million revamp of Yale’s physical plant. And he went on a whirlwind fund-raising campaign, nearly doubling Yale’s endowment during his six-year tenure, to $3 billion from $1.7 billion.

Though he retained the support of Yale’s board and alumni, he clashed repeatedly with parts of the faculty and student body, who found him aloof and imperious. He forced through major changes at Yale’s business school and, later, in its philosophy department, taking over decisions about hiring and tenure that were traditionally left to faculty.

And though he lived during the week in New Haven, he returned to Manhattan on the weekends, leaving the impression among some that he was not fully committed to the university.

In early 1992, Mr. Schmidt announced that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would need to cut its budget significantly both to shrink the school’s deficit and to make way for expansion in the hard sciences. The plan was, for many, the last straw.

Mr. Schmidt met with hundreds of disgruntled faculty members, and he pointed out that a majority of their number supported what he was doing. But the criticism remained that he had begun major changes without doing the hard work of consensus building.

“Benno was a leader who often didn’t take the time to get his troops to understand what he was doing,” Sam Chauncey, the former secretary of Yale, said in a phone interview. “He had a lot of good ideas, but he was impatient.”

Mr. Whittle first approached Mr. Schmidt about joining Edison in 1991, and a year later just before commencement, he announced his departure, shocking the Yale community.

“I began to feel it was responsible for me to consider leaving Yale,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1992, “because while the university may have been in a kind of emotional upset, the basics of the situation had been stabilized.”

Although Mr. Schmidt continued to have his detractors, many people say Yale is a much better place because of him. Today the university is world renowned in the medical and hard science fields, and its endowment is more than $42 billion.

“Benno was president during a really important transition for Yale,” Peter Salovey, the university’s current president, said in a phone interview. “He helped push the university from being a college with strong professional schools into a university with outstanding professional schools and a college at its center.”

Benno Charles Schmidt Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 1942. Benno Sr. was a founding partner at J.H. Whitney and Co., considered the world’s first firm to specialize in venture capital — a term the elder Mr. Schmidt is credited with coining. Mr. Schmidt’s mother, Martha (Chastain) Schmidt, was a homemaker. After his parents’ divorce, she remarried and took the married name Orgain.

Benno grew up among Manhattan’s upper crust, attending St. Bernard’s School on the Upper East Side, then Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

He studied history at Yale and, after graduating in 1963, went directly into its law school, from which he emerged three years later at the head of his class.

He clerked for Earl Warren, the chief justice of the United States, then spent two years working for the Justice Department before joining Columbia Law School in 1969.

His first three marriages, to Kate Russell, Betsy Siggins and Helen Whitney, ended in divorce. Along with his daughter Elizabeth, he is survived by his wife, Anne McMillen; his son, Benno C. Schmidt III; another daughter, Christina Whitney Helburn; his stepdaughters, Leah Ridpath and Alexandra Toles; his brothers, John and Ralph; his stepsister, Ruth Fleischmann; five grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

At Columbia, Mr. Schmidt established his name as an expert in First Amendment law, both inside the academy and with the general public. Working with the lawyer Floyd Abrams and Fred Friendly, a professor at Columbia’s journalism school, Mr. Schmidt created and hosted a series of televised panel discussions about the Constitution for PBS.

He also took a turn at acting, with brief character roles in two films by Woody Allen, “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) and “Husbands and Wives” (1992). And Mr. Schmidt became known at small venues around New York as an adept folk musician, playing both solo and in a group.

Mr. Schmidt stepped down from the CUNY board in 2016 and left Avenues soon after. He served for many years on the board of the Kauffman Foundation and the New-York Historical Society.

He never lost his commitment to change in education.

“I’d rather take the risk of being wrong,” he told a group of Yale faculty and administrators in early 1992, “than go down in history as the president who did nothing in the face of the real conviction that there was a problem.”