Letters to the Editor | May 23, 2025

All public lands, from the Gulf of Mexico to our country’s last pristine wilderness, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, will be open for leasing, development, and extraction if the 2025 reconciliation bill passes. Our judicial means of protecting America the beautiful against the oil, gas, mining, and logging companies is also being denied. Section 80121 would exempt from judicial review any rights of way, easements, permits, or other necessary authorizations for the exploration, development, production, and transportation of oil and gas that is granted by the Bureau of Land Management.

Under Section 80151, companies can now pay a fee for an expedited environmental impact study of their project and be insulated against any judicial challenges to that study. No one affected by the project will have legal recourse to challenge the impact study findings. Section 80161 proposes filing fees for submitting protests against oil and gas lease sales. This is yet another way to silence any opposition to environmental destruction. There is nothing in the natural resource section of this bill that advances clean air or clean water or fights climate change. Please call your legislator and tell them to vote no on the 2025 reconciliation bill.

Karen Scherer, Phoenixville

Will Bunch vividly details the strong-arm efforts of the current administration to control discourse in higher ed, but a more thoughtful column would have acknowledged that American campuses, instead of being safe spaces for sharing divergent views, have systematically excluded anyone who might seem to differ from the orthodoxies of the far left. For a decade or more, self-policed students and teachers have lived in fear of making an innocuous remark that might be misinterpreted and denounced. I’m an art historian, and in a lecture at the University of Minnesota I described Tiffany’s ability to exploit the properties of stained glass. I was attacked afterward for using the word “exploit” — “that’s a bad word. It should never be used” in any context, apparently. Possibly it might “trigger” someone. Fortunately, I did not lose my job, but many others have not been so lucky. I have no sympathy for Donald Trump and his cronies, but to a certain extent we are reaping what we’ve sown.

Judy Neiswander, Philadelphia

Years ago, Trump told us that he was a “stable genius,” but now he has offered irrefutable proof of his above average faculties. He wants to annex Panama, Canada, Greenland, and Gaza too. Gaza has been reduced to rubbles, he says, so Gazans can no longer live there. Out of humanitarian concerns, some nice country should stand up and take all of them in, so that salivating developers can start building the “riviera of the Middle East.” He has not provided more details about this plan, but the best guess is that he plans to allow Gazans to move to the U.S. After all, once all the undocumented immigrants have been kicked out, the U.S. will need a new workforce for the country to function. Gazans will do just fine. Our president, the stable genius, will kill two birds with one stone.

Chiara Nappi, Princeton, crnappi@gmail.com

There should be no shame in our students learning from books on Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, President Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, Jim Thorpe, Anne Frank, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, Malala Yousafzai, U.S. Japanese internment camps, and Native American history. Yet books on these historical figures and events are being banned because according to Donald Trump, “we have an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.” Make no mistake, they are talking about white Christian students. They are not talking about Black students, brown students, students of Asian or Native American heritage, or of Jewish or Muslim faith.

What’s next, banned books on Kamala Harris, Simone Biles, Jennifer Lopez, and Beyoncé? Will conservative school districts ban books on them, because students might feel shamed by reading their stories? They say that ignorance is bliss, but our students should not be raised in ignorance or prejudice. Minority students and students of different religious backgrounds have the right to learn their history. As do white Christian students so they may be more enlightened about the world around them. End institutionalized prejudice.

Gerald Koren, Exton

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