The historians all saw this coming. In a prophetic post from long long ago (2023), Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains the authoritarian playbook, and it all starts with stifling the universities.

As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it’s worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

She then reviews the strategies used by tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, César Ruiz Danyau, and Ron DeSantis, who all cracked down hard on the universities. Their usual approach is to declare themselves the guardians of public morality, while deploring the licentiousness and depravity going on with young people in college (an idea that can only be fostered if you’re totally ignorant of what’s going on in college — most of my students are more worried about grades, social rank, and what they’re going to do after they graduate.) Of course LGBTQ students are great scapegoats, but only if your imagination is unfettered by reality.

Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of “public trusts” run by Orbán cronies.

LGBTQ students are even more worried about the future than our cis-het students. The authoritarian impulse is always to find the most threatened minority and bully them as an example to everyone else. They must destroy anyone who deviates from the mandatory, uniform pattern of behavior that the dictator demands…which means they must accuse both variations from the required breeder lifestyle and those who think seriously about the cultural consequences of our actions of being agents of chaos.

Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly targeted as agents of the destruction of family, decency, and nation as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.

Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.

This was all written before the presidential election, at a time when many of us were pretty confident that the electorate couldn’t possibly put a criminal grifter in charge. Ha ha ha, we were so innocent.

Warning: cancel your travel plans. The US is not a viable destination anymore.

Read this account by a Canadian professor who was trying to give a lecture in this country.

So much bureaucracy. So much confusion. So many intrusions into privacy. He didn’t make it to his talk, and had to struggle to get out of the us.

Stay home. Don’t come here. Maybe if we overcome these horrible people and make some steps to recover, then we’ll deserve your company.

If this weren’t so horrifying, it would be ridiculous. Trump & Co. want to eliminate federal support for libraries.

When President Trump recently proposed eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), librarians and educators voiced outrage, confusion and fear. Soon afterward, the appointment of Keith E Sonderling as acting director of IMLS highlighted the administration’s intention to reshape the agency’s priorities toward “promoting American exceptionalism” and cultivating “patriotism”.

This is where Moms for Liberty and all those reactionary assholes who get worked up about drag queen story hour have gotten us. They’ve long wanted to police the content of libraries, so why not go all the way and get rid of them altogether? Especially since librarians tend to be sticklers for the free dissemination of knowledge.

They’re trying to close the Department of Education, too. So their vision of the future is no schools, no libraries, and every woman staying home and homeschooling their swarm of kids using conservatively approved materials. I guess they’ll plan on recruiting the scientists and engineers and medical professionals society needs from abroad…except that they hate immigrants, too.

What libraries we have left will be propaganda outlets. This whole insane notion of “American exceptionalism” has poisoned our country and wrecked our ability to cooperate and collaborate with everyone else in the world, and now it’s official American policy.

I’m not at all happy to be finding myself living in one of those dystopian YA novels.

Don’t blame Minnesota for the mess we’re in.

The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.

It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.

We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.

The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.

After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.

I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.

Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.

That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.

That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.

They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.

Vivian Wilson is interviewed in Teen Vogue. She is not a nepo baby — she’s been cut off from the sperm donor, Elon Musk, who contributed in a minimal way to her birth.

Wilson entered the public consciousness because of her father, but not for typical nepo baby reasons. (Before you ask, Wilson says she’s been financially independent from her father since she came out as trans in 2020, so you can stop sending her Venmo requests for thousands of dollars, something she says has happened before.) At the time, she was trying to disconnect herself from Musk, eventually writing in a 2022 petition to legally change her name that she doesn’t “wish to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form.” Though she’d never publicly spoken about Musk before then, her attempt to distance herself from him is what ultimately drew her into the public eye.

“I have a sharp tongue,” Wilson tells Teen Vogue in her second-ever published interview. “When you spend all of COVID [lockdown] in online communities of queer people who are constantly getting into drama and trying to read each other, [you] learn how to make a response very quickly, and you learn how to be funny and snap at someone else in a comedic way…. Getting into fights with other queer teenagers — that’s how you learn how to be quick and witty.” Much like her father, Wilson is extremely online; unlike her father, she’s really good at it.

In my personal experience, this holds up: the gay and trans people I’ve known are all great conversationalists with a wicked sense of humor. She definitely did not inherit that from her terrible father.

I’m sympatico with her politics, and not Musk’s.

TV: Isaacson described your politics as “radical Marxism” in the book. Do you consider yourself a Marxist?
VW: I’m a leftist, not a Marxist. I describe myself by the things that I personally believe in and the things that I feel are pretty common sense, if you think about it for more than two seconds. I believe in [universal basic income]. I believe in free health care. I believe food, shelter, and water are human rights. I believe that wealth inequality is one of the biggest problems of the United States right now, especially of our generation. I feel like workers should be fairly compensated for the work that they do, and I don’t feel like wealth should be hoarded by these mega-billionaires who are the top 1%, who only have their own interests at heart. I’ve met some of these billionaires — they’re not very good people. I don’t think any of them are.

I don’t think that’s an unusual perspective, and I think most Americans would agree with that, if they weren’t poisoned by the lie that those goals are being stolen from them by immigrants and gay/trans people. It’s the position that all Democrats should take, except for the unfortunate fact that that party is led by people seduced by money and power.

A French scientist flew into Houston to attend a conference, and DHS searched his luggage. To their horror, they found…a phone. That contained messages that were disrespectful to Donald Trump, and his policies that are wrecking science. This is now considered criminal activity in America.

During the search, officers rebuked him for messages “which conveyed a hatred toward Trump and could be considered to be terrorism”, the same source claimed. Another source cited by AFP said the officers claimed the messages were “hateful and conspiracy”.

The Telegraph has not seen the content of the messages.

The FBI then opened an investigation into the researcher, but “the charges were abandoned”, according to the second source.

The incident occurred on March 9, and the researcher was sent back to Europe the following day after authorities confiscated his personal and professional equipment.

Gosh, I sure hope no law enforcement officials have read my blog, because I’m second to no one in my hatred and contempt for everyone involved in the current administration.

Fuck Trump, his lapdog Vance, and everyone who voted for him, too.

A sophomore undergraduate student at Brown University named Alex Shieh is trying to get on board the DOGE train by exposing all the waste and fraud going on at his school. He has started a website called Bloat@Brown to catalog all the criminal waste, and he’s desperately spamming Twitter to get Elon Musk’s attention.

He has a methodology that he documents. He’s feeding the list of Brown University employees to an AI he has loaded with an algorithm to identify all the bad actors in the university hierarchy, which seems to be flagging everyone other than Alex Shieh himself, who is a legacy admission, the son of a wealthy alum. This is the entirety of his program.

Bloat@Brown’s algorithm scrapes publicly available internet sources for each employee and role (brown.edu pages, articles, LinkedIn pages, job postings, etc.) and searches our database for co-workers with similar roles—similar to how a human would conduct internet research. These online sources are passed to an LLM, which makes its judgments solely based on the retrieved sources.

His program sorts through all the positions at Brown, sorting them into three categories: illegal jobs, redundant jobs, and bullshit jobs. I’m relieved that we don’t have a similar naive young student here at UMM passing judgement on me.

Here’s how he defines “illegal jobs”.

DEI: Does the role involve diversity, equity, and inclusion, which may violate the Civil Rights Act following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard?

Antisemitism: Has the employee publicly voiced antisemitic ideas, which the Trump Administration asserts is a violation of the Civil Rights Act?

You can tell his mind has been poisoned by conservatives. They all think that any role that allows a non-white person, or non-male person, is criminal. Also, you know that he’s going to label opposition to murdering Palestinians as anti-semitism.

His “redundancy” is similarly gooey.

Automation: Can the role be automated using current technology?

Overlap: Is the employee assigned to responsibilities that could otherwise be completed by other employees with overlapping responsibilities?

I’d be in trouble here. Our biology discipline employs 9 faculty — what a waste! All you need is one biologist, right? I’m sure Mr Shieh is fully aware of the breadth of biology and knows exactly how many people you need to teach it.

The real fun begins when he starts describing “bullshit jobs”. He has probably never worked in a real job in his life, but he knows which ones are unnecessary, because he read a book once.

“Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” is a 2018 book by David Graeber that describes five types of useless jobs.

Flunkie: Does the role exist primarily to make one’s boss feel more important (e.g., receptionists, assistants, etc.)?

Goon: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to fight or deceive others on behalf of the university (e.g., litigators, PR specialists, marketers, etc.)?

Duct Taper: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to make temporary fixes to systems that could be permanently streamlined (e.g., data entry, IT maintenance staff, etc.)?

Box Ticker: Is the employee’s primary responsibility to create superfluous outputs (e.g., memo writers, newsletter writers, etc.)?

Taskmaster: Is the employee a manager whose primary responsibility is to assign unnecessary tasks to their subordinates (e.g., middle management)?

Cool. So all receptionists and secretaries and assistants do is fluff the ego of the boss? Good to know. Personally, I’ve found the staff indispensable — they keep all the records, they know where stuff is, they track deadlines, they organize everything. My university would fall apart without them. At Brown, though, I guess the college president handles all the details; the faculty are all independent and don’t get reminders of all the work outside teaching and research that they’re expected to do.

I guess recruiting and PR at Brown is done by “goons” running around, lying about the university, and fighting prospective students. Every Fall a new crop of freshmen are hog-tied and dumped into the dorms. Yeah, let’s get rid of those guys.

Can he get any more patronizing? Maintenance staff are just “duct tapers”; why not set up university IT right from the very beginning, so you don’t need someone to patch it and maintain it? Also, no one needs “data”, let alone someone to “enter” it.

There is something called institutional memory, and it’s preserved by all those memos and documents that someone has to write, and that get sent around to all of us. That’s the glue that makes a university an institution with a purpose and a body of procedures to keep it running.

I guess we need to get rid of all middle management, it doesn’t do anything. All we need is a president who tells us what to do, and then the faculty who do the teaching and research, and anything in between is superfluous. Wait, who is doing the accounting to make sure I get a paycheck? Who is maintaining the buildings and infrastructure? Who turns on the heat in the winter? You mean I have to do all that now, because Alex Shieh thinks it would be more efficient?

Every university has a few entitled students — I was once told by a student that I needed to run down to the prep room to get some reagents for him right now because he “pays my salary” — but Alex Shieh takes that to a whole new level. I think maybe part of his education ought to be spending some time serving as a flunkie, a goon, taping ducts and ticking boxes. But he doesn’t have to because he’s apparently a rich privileged child of a rich privileged mommy and daddy.

There’s a fun discussion of Alex Shieh on Bluesky. He’s been following Musk’s lead and writing to the employees of Brown University and demanding that they justify their job, and getting some replies.

Oh, that poor little boy is getting dragged.