Vanderbilt AAUP press release about the Vanderbilt Faculty Senate voting overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution opposing the President's proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education as an unconstitutional & illegal infringement on rights & freedoms.
vanderbiltaaup.org/2025/10/09/v...
BREAKING: Northwestern University has agreed to pay the U.S. Treasury $75 million, over the course of three years as part of an agreement with the federal government to restore funding and end investigations into the university
Full statement from NU below:
Some can't wait to be given an opportunity to say yes (shrug)
The president of Oakwood University said the school wants to sign on to the Trump administration's Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education — if the DOE makes some changes.
religionnews.com/2025/11/24/a...
If you cave, as Brown did, you don't save yourself. The regime will just take away your funding anyway: "On Monday [Dec 22, 2025], the Department of Education announced that it would conduct a 'program review' of Brown to determine if it had violated safety and security requirements that schools must meet to receive federal aid."
"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato."
surreal times
dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...
"President Trump has backtracked on a major point in negotiations with Harvard, dropping his administration’s demand for a $200 million payment to the government in hopes of finally resolving the administration’s conflicts with the university, according to four people briefed on the matter."
Homeland Security @DHSgov posts to X today:
The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear:
Remigration now.
8:38 AM Nov 28, 2025
A reminder for those who are not aware: "remigration" is the process of deporting all non-white people from a country. It includes citizens and is, by definition, ethnic cleansing.
And to be clear: this is not fake. I just screenshot it myself.
In addition to being illegal and invalid, this does not make sense.
Trump claims “any document” signed by Joe Biden is “hereby terminated.”
He calls out executive orders later but obviously “any document” would be much broader and include legislation.
(He can’t legally do that but, as always, we get to watch how far he can push this without repercussions)
Most importantly, studies that don’t simply correlate educational attainment and voting decision but include and control for other factors clearly indicate that the “education polarization” narrative vastly overestimates the impact of education. Study after study suggests that education functions mostly as a proxy for other factors that have a much greater impact on political attitudes and decisions. The most important among those by far is racial resentment. As a concept, racial resentment is not necessarily the same as biological racism (meaning: the assumption that some races are biologically inferior/superior). Since the 1980s, for instance, the American National Election Studies (ANES) attempt to measure racial resentment by asking people whether they believe the significant wealth and income discrepancies between Black and white Americans are mostly a result of racist discrimination or rather a function of Black cultural deficiencies (a lacking working morale, perhaps, or pathologies of the Black family; or maybe Black people simply don’t try hard enough)? Based on their responses, people are placed on a scale from lower to higher levels of racial resentment. The correlation between where people fall on the racial resentment scale and their voting decisions is vastly stronger than that between voting and educational attainment. In the 2020 election, for instance, almost 90 percent of the people with low racial resentment scores voted for Joe Biden; over 90 percent of those at the higher end of the racial resentment scale supported Donald Trump. Talk about “polarization.”
His blog is paywalled. I'm a paid subscriber, and perhaps you can become one too.
Anyhow, what interests me about this passage is the recognition of how the idea of "biology" can be used to wield epistemic authority while saying things that are actually false.
This is linked to the idea of "biology" as it is used to attempt to correct and corral trans people, which I've been thinking about lately.
Three blog posts that arrived today — Nov 18, 2025:
Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann tells us this today (Is the Epstein Scandal an Outlier or America’s Oldest Crusade Laid Bare?: How a single predator exposed a centuries-old system built to shield wealthy white men from accountability and forced the country to confront a truth its institutions have long concealed..., The Hartmann Report):
From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.
We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.
That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.
The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.
The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.
He continues:
The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.
The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.
It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).
In 1957, William F. Buckley wrote "Why the South Must Prevail" in which he asserted that white people are "the advanced race" and therefore, regardless of whether they are a numerical majority, "will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way." White people are "entitled" to do this, he said.
Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.
By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.
Most USAmericans, however, "don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men."
Jared Yates Sexton
"We cannot let this desensitize us. We cannot, in any way, shape, or form, no matter how much it gets discussed or casually mentioned, allow this to simply become something that happened. In an era of ascendant fascism, we must keep our bearings and protect our ability to be shocked and horrified." (Jared Yates Sexton, It's Rotten All the Way Down: Epstein, Trump, and the Twilight of the Elites, Dispatches From a Collapsing State) The story here
"is how thoroughly and irredeemably America’s institutions have been corrupted.
Epstein’s 'friends' are everywhere. They are giants of finance, academic leaders, politicians. There is nary a corner of power within the United States that hasn’t been infected with his evil."
Further:
"These men knew Epstein and committed these crimes because they were in positions of power and their willingness to do so is inextricably linked to their willingness to carry out the projects power deems necessary. In other words, they were in their positions to engage in these crimes because they were the kind of people who would be willing to commit these crimes and that is what capitalism requires."
These are people whose jobs are "to engineer wars that kill millions of innocent people, to protect systems of intentional inequality and intentional scarcity, to ward off necessary reforms that would give people healthcare that could help them live longer lives, to deny them affordable housing, to conspire to create economic systems in which wages are kept below the poverty level, which leaves people endangered, terrified, dysregulated, to press your thumb on the balance in favor of your cohorts in the realm of wealth and power over living, breathing humans..."
Hurting children "is a thrill to those who have so thoroughly shut themselves off to basic empathy or compassion. They do not see you or me or anyone besides members of their circle as human or deserving of dignity." And apart from the thrill it might give them, being known within their circle to have done it is "the marker of reaching a certain level of power."
"What the QAnon conspiracy theory got correct was that elites were engaging in these crimes, but like all Right Wing conspiracy theories, it removed the financial incentives from the acts, creating merely a story of supernatural evil. But this didn’t happen because these criminals are doing it in the service of Evil. They’re doing it as part of their membership in a class status that has learned, correctly, they will not be prosecuted, they will not lose status or wealth, they will not fail, and their successes are directly linked to their willingness, and even eagerness, to hurt innocent people."
We know it's wrong:
"Epstein gives us an incredibly recognizable symbol of the corruption. Anyone with a conscience knows this is and was wrong. Watching Trump cultists contort themselves with every revelation, including trying to normalize grown men raping young girls, is something we can never forget or turn away from. It is madness. Unadulterated madness."
"Follow this entirely invented need for an immigration crackdown to its natural conclusion and you get secret police working directly for the president in the streets of cities that largely oppose his regime. Pull the bad-faith thread long enough – feed the unreality that necessitates a crackdown for long enough – and you get people like Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino cosplaying the gestapo, terrorizing American communities with a vile little grin, ignoring court orders from judges unwilling to enforce their rulings against his brutality and persistent law breaking, and leading the immigration "crackdown" that was so long ago mainstreamed by the newspapers run by rich guys who prioritize Republicans' feelings over all else. Feed this bad-faith machine enough and it'll shit out something shaped like Bovino, a man who takes glamour shots dressed as an SS officer and takes his orders from fascist influencers on the the democracy-incompatible X platform formerly known as Twitter.
* * *
The legitimization of immigration as a national emergency has given rise to men like Bovino, men who have waited patiently in the shadows for national leaders who will unleash pain and terror upon populations they hate and fear based on a version of reality that makes the unconscionable not just viable, but necessary. A vile man like Bovino would still be seething in the shadows, unknown to you and me, if Americans had not been conditioned to believe an immigration "crackdown" was in order.
* * *
We have been told over and over and over again that crackdowns are a legitimate part of a democracy's immigration policy. When we wriggle out of this fascist hell – and there's every reason to believe we will – we have to say clearly and forcefully that there is no place for a crackdown on immigration because there is nothing on which to crack down. Unless you buy into Greg Bovino's monstrously convenient worldview."
How POTUS behaves
Given all that context, it makes sense that POTUS calls a woman a "piggy."
"President Donald Trump on Thursday attacked a journalist for asking a basic question during a Thanksgiving media availability after he spoke to U.S. service members, part of a recent trend of insults he’s hurled at the women who cover him.
“Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person?” he asked the reporter during a tense exchange about the suspect in Wednesday’s attack on two National Guard members in Washington, D.C.
* * *
He called Katie Rogers of the New York Times “ugly” after she co-bylined a report on his lighter schedule as he ages. He chastised ABC’s Mary Bruce for asking what he called “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question” about having Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Oval Office."
Newly released Epstein Files contain photos that look like surveillance stills of a man resembling Prince Andrew with a young woman at Epstein's Manhattan residence.
Tucker Carlson has become the latest TV star in Russia. See how. Erin Burnett Out Front. CNN's Matthew Chance looks at the increasing appearances of Tucker Carlson on Russian state TV as the Kremlin sees propaganda value in the former Fox News anchor. CNN, May 23, 2024
"Prominent white nationalist livestreamer Nick Fuentes achieved a major milestone with his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Oct. 27. Fuentes’ explicit admiration of Adolf Hitler, his antisemitism, accusations of a “cult-like atmosphere” among his fanbase, and his involvement in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally that brought neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Klansmen to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, has left him ostracized in some, though not all, mainstream right-wing circles. Carlson’s podcast has also featured Republican lawmakers, including then-vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. While Carlson’s decision to host Fuentes on his show received significant criticism and pushback, the two-hour-long episode was one of several major appearances by Fuentes on right-wing streaming shows since Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September, amid calls among the hard right to blame the left and to advocate for more extreme views and actions."
"On Oct. 27, Carlson hosted Fuentes for a friendly, multi-hour interview. In it, Fuentes promoted classic antisemitic tropes about “organized Jewry” and “Zionist Jews.” Carlson, while offering gentle pushback, largely validated the interview’s premise, railing against “Christian Zionists” as being “seized by this brain virus.”
Carlson previously had attacked Fuentes and his army of “incels” and “Groypers.” But during the new interview, Carlson ripped off this zinger: “I’m sorry I called you gay, by the way.” Carlson also conceded that he at first thought Fuentes was “a fed.”
It seems Carlson has seen the light and accepted the Groyper Gospel.
X, now a haven for right-wing Groyper extremism, along with other portions of the internet, exploded. The backlash from “Con Inc.,” however, was immediate, with many conservatives demanding the movement’s leaders condemn Carlson for platforming a notorious online antisemite, sexist and racist."
Also:
"A new fault line is quickly dividing American conservatism: A political strategy called “No Enemies to the Right.”
This philosophy, sometimes abbreviated NETR, operates on a simple logic: All political “punching” must be directed toward the Left, which is seen as the primary — if not only — existential threat to the conservative (and even white Christian) way of life.
* * *
Instead of condemning Carlson or Fuentes, he [Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation] defended Carlson on the explicit principle of NETR: “The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”"
* * *
This event is not an outlier; it is the logical conclusion of the NETR philosophy. As columnists in publications from The Free Press to Newsweek have argued, NETR is a form of moral relativism. By refusing to police its own borders, a movement is inevitably overrun by its worst elements.
The political crisis is a battle for the soul of conservatism."
"Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts made it crystal clear Thursday that his rightwing think tank is not distancing itself from Tucker Carlson over his hourslong interview with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes." Heritage Foundation Defends Tucker Carlson Over His Interview With Holocaust Denier: The group's president denounced "attacking our friends on the right." Lydia O'Connor, HuffPost, Oct 30, 2025
After spending much of his second presidency trying to get multiple journalists and comedians pulled off-air, Trump now says no one can tell Tucker Carlson whom to interview. The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump on Sunday brushed aside concerns about conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with a far-right activist known for his antisemitic views, which has caused a schism within the Republican Party.
Trump defended Carlson, saying the former Fox News host has “said good things about me over the years.” He said if Carlson wants to interview Nick Fuentes, whose followers see themselves as working to preserve America’s white, Christian identity, then “people have to decide.” Trump did not criticize Carlson or Fuentes.
* * *
Trump told reporters as he prepared to fly back to Washington from a weekend in Florida that when it comes to Carlson, “You can’t tell him who to interview.”
“If he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out,” Trump said. “People have to decide.”
Suzanne Schneider, "L’Affaire Carlson" (NY Review of Books, December 21, 2025):
"On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he told a hall full of the conservative think tank’s staff and fellows in a video leaked to The Washington Free Beacon. A week earlier Roberts had recorded a staunch defense of Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the stridently racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic online personality, had split the conservative world in two."
The GOP’s Effort To Rein In Bigotry Is Too Little Too Late: The conservative uproar over Tucker Carlson hosting the racist antisemite Nick Fuentes comes long after Donald Trump took down any boundaries restraining the far-right. Paul Blumenthal, HuffPost, Nov 18, 2025
Imagine we'll see a lot of this stuff coming up in the next few years: Right-wing parties who created uneasy political coalitions by taking advantage of hyper-online shut ins realising they can't really control or contain them. Also a reason why they'll become very pro regulating social media
Marjorie Taylor Greene was raised Catholic but converted to evangelicalism in 2011 because, Virginia Heffernan explains, "she was disgusted by systemic rape of children by clergy and because she (like Steve Bannon and J.D. Vance) despises as demonic the increasingly progressive Papacy. She cheered the death of Pope Francis, whom she called Satanic." However, "it’s not impossible that Greene is freshly drawn to the religion of her childhood. Fuentes’s anti-Israel Trad Cath scene, which also loathed Francis and now rejects Pope Leo, could easily call to her. She has defended Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, who is also playing footsie with Trad Caths, for hosting him on his show. In July, she singled out the destruction of a Catholic Church in Gaza as her reason to vote to cut funding for Israel. What’s more, if pedophilia is now the province of Trump and Epstein, rather than of the Catholic priesthood, she might be able to sneak over to the Trad Cath movement with moral impunity." (emphasis mine)
The media fell in love with Trump — the most mendacious person in the world — because he gave them “interesting stories” and now they’re doing the same with her for the exact same reason
Charlie Kirk’s death is tearing MAGA apart: The killing of the Turning Point USA founder didn’t unify the base — it triggered infighting, Amanda Marcotte, Salon, Nov 24, 2025
On today's Tucker Carlson show, he makes clear that he believes that the US fought on the wrong side in World War II. In particular he says that the UK was mistaken to declare war on Germany just because it invaded Poland. And he has lots of sympathy for Herr Hitler throughout.
PIERS: “You’re not gay?”
FUENTES: “No. But women are very difficult to be around.”
P: “Should they vote?”
F: “No.”
PIERS: “They should stay home?”
FUENTES: “Yeah.”
PIERS: “So you’re just a misogynistic dinosaur. Have you ever had sex?”
FUENTES: “No.”
PIERS: “Wow. Says the guy who never got laid.”
"A simmering battle over the future of President Donald Trump’s political movement exploded on one of the right’s biggest stages Thursday, [Dec 18, 2025] as prominent conservative influencers used Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference to attack each other and their competing visions. ... First up was Ben Shapiro, who described Tucker Carlson and others as grifters and charlatans, guilty of misleading their audiences with falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Shapiro sharply criticized Carlson, a former Fox News host, for interviewing outspoken antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast, calling it “an act of moral imbecility.”" (Associated Press, CNN)
"This isn’t the Republican Party anymore. It’s the ‘America First’ Party. It’s the ‘Make America Great Again’ Party. And we are not going back!”
— Don Jr. Comes Right Out And Says 'This Isn't The Republican Party Anymore'
The president's son took aim at Democrats as well as RINOs ("Republicans in Name Only") in a fiery speech at the Turning Point USA's conference. Curtis M. Wong, HuffPost, Dec 22, 2025
"Fuentes himself has often emphasized that Jews have no place in America, that they needed to convert or should be summarily executed; he has professed his admiration for Adolf Hitler and likes to flirt with Holocaust denial. Since he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, MAGA has been embroiled in a heated debate over whether even such positions had a rightful place within the alliance – whether there were any boundaries at all left that kept neo-Nazism at bay, even just rhetorically? Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and an extremist online scene have long been influential on the Right. No longer content to be tacitly tolerated, they are attempting to pull the entire coalition further to the right and officially put an aggressive antisemitism at its center."
— Thomas Zimmer, What the “MAGA Civil War” is Really About, Democracy Americana, December 19, 2025
The Boy Who Lost His Leash: Tucker Carlson was always one stern phone call away from the abyss. Then Rupert stopped calling. And now two Americans are dead in Minneapolis. Joshua Powell, Powell House Press, Jan 27, 2026
Twenty-one months ago, Tucker Carlson told the 2024 Republican National Convention that Donald Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt amounted to “divine intervention” — that God had chosen to save Trump because he had a plan for him to lead the country.
“Something bigger is going on here,” Carlson said.
Today, Carlson is offering an almost polar-opposite argument about Trump. He seemed to intimate during his show Monday [April 6, 2026] that Trump might be the antichrist.
That rhetorical flourish capped Carlson’s harshest public criticism of Trump to date. While the former Fox News host has been highly critical of the Iran war before — and somewhat more gently critical of Trump the man, at least publicly — the gloves were off on Monday like never before.
you do not have to hand it to tucker carlson or marjorie taylor greene or alex jones or megyn kelly. they're all rats who see trump as a sinking ship and they're getting ready to jump in preparation for their next act. you do not have to fall for it.
In November 2017, I left my home in Boston and moved out of the United States.
The next month, a train called Brightline began running in Florida. According to this story, it causes many more fatalities than other trains, including other trains in Florida — over the last eight years, "at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides," according to federal data. And it's a relatively small railroad that serves only six stops. The question is, What makes Brightline different?
A ‘Death Train’ Is Haunting South Florida: The Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States, but it has one big, unignorable problem. Written by Kaitlyn Tiffany, photographs and videos by Aleksey Kondratyev, The Atlantic, October 22, 2025
This passage in the middle of the story helps me understand what it looks like on the ground:
...once-familiar environments have been transformed. Take, for example, the story of Joann DePina, a 49-year-old mother of two who was killed by a Brightline train in January. DePina was walking over the tracks that cut through her neighborhood, but she was doing so on a well-worn footpath. She was technically trespassing, but there weren’t any fences or no trespassing signs, and it was a logical thing to do. DePina rented a room in a sober-living house on one side of the tracks and was crossing to get to a group meeting on the other side. She had been in recovery since 2017 and was saving money to move into her own apartment.
I walked along the tracks with her aunt Maria Furtado in May. Furtado showed me the footpath, next to the white cross she’d put up in her niece’s memory. In person, it was clear why people would walk there: The tracks split the neighborhood in half, with tightly packed houses on one side and a row of businesses on the other. To get around the tracks legally would require walking down to an intersection to cross, then walking back, adding at least 10 minutes. Taking a shortcut over the tracks looks easy enough, and it was probably easy to do so safely during the decades when freight trains were the only traffic. Hence the worn path.
... As we talked, Furtado pointed behind me. I turned around and saw a Brightline train coming toward us—only a few seconds away, at most. The train whipped past—it’s powered by quiet diesel-electric locomotives and goes 79 miles per hour through that part of its route. It was easy to put myself in DePina’s place. She was walking at night, and she didn’t hear or see anything coming. Her timing was horrible.
* * *
In her opinion, someone should have to put up a fence along parts of the tracks that cut through neighborhoods—whether that’s the city or the state or Brightline, she doesn’t much care. Being from Massachusetts and having some familiarity with northern commuter trains, she also liked the idea of the tracks being elevated, even a little bit, to deter people from walking over them.
In 2023, Peter Boghossian, who I'm sure was never previously concerned with the proportion of butch lesbians in the human population, was suddenly concerned that there are too many trans men:
A Clippings Scrapbook: The Life, Times, and Records of Wendy Carlos: Synth pioneer Wendy Carlos has given us eighteen albums, a massive website of personal writings and archival recordings, and a generation of trans synthesizer enthusiasts in her wake. For Halloween, we’re taking a look at her writings, her work, and the queer musicians she’s influenced. by Piper Bly, Assigned Media, Nov 4, 2025
"To say that she’s an innovator in electronic music would be a significant understatement. She not only wrote the scores for films such as A Clockwork Orange and TRON, but played a role in developing the first commercially available Robert Moog synthesizer. Moreover, she did all this as a trans woman in the 1960s and 70s." — Quinn, "Dead Battery: Notes on Wendy Carlos, Han Kang, and a car that wouldn’t start," Medium, April 14, 2026
