Could someone explain to me how Marc Andreesen has so much clout? Everything I’ve ever read by him says he’s a flaming goofball and wanna-be fascist. Here he is expounding on academia.

So he is afraid that the white children of Trump voters, a notoriously ignorant group that hates education (especially secular education), is being displaced from educational opportunities by ambitious immigrants and go-getter minorities. This is a non-issue. We’re supposed to prioritize lazy students (or to be fair, students who have been deprived of a good basic education by America’s fucked-up public education policy) over students who are willing to work hard because their parents voted for Trump? What an insane proposal.

As usual, this the dream of freaked out conservatives who think student radicals are dictating the course of higher education. Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason. As Henry Farrell says

…most mainstream American commentary about free speech in the modern American university labors under a misconception. It regularly suggests that out of control students and crazy professors are running the place. There is an entire intellectual industry of centrist and conservative commentary driving this narrative, including people like Bari Weiss, the proprietor of the Free Press, who made her bones by working with The David Project to attack Columbia professors for purported anti-Semitism. Marc Andreessen claims that “politically radical institutions” are driving a leftward shift by teaching students “how to be America-hating communists.”

Anyone who has day-to-day experience with actual American students knows that these claims are complete horseshit. Some students are left, some moderate, some conservative. Most are more interested in getting jobs than burning flags. America-Hating Communism 101 is not, actually, a required course on most campuses. Econ 101 often is. And those who are protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza? They have something to protest.

I know my students, and they’re diverse and you can’t pigeonhole them into the caricatures Weiss and Andreesen have fabricated. These students are here to learn — or to get certified for a better job — and they definitely do not sign up for a buttload of debt and years of work so they can tear down the establishment. What happens is they get into an environment where they are expected to pay attention to the world, and history, and politics, and they are outraged, honestly and righteously. You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality. It’s also the case that even if the student body was full of bomb-throwing radicals, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t control our curriculum, and they don’t even control our big money investments, or the appointments of our faculty and administrators.

Ideally, I consider the students to be the voice of the university’s conscience, which is all too often ignored.

If you think students and a radical faculty are in charge, look at this news from Duke University.

Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle.

Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the school’s basic science units, which include departments ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology and various centers and institutes such as the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasingly difficult to come by due to slowdowns in grant review processes, an uptick in terminations and a lack of new funding opportunities since President Donald Trump assumed office.

Under the guidelines, each department must establish a minimum expectation for external grant funding. Tenured faculty members who do not meet the threshold — measured as a three-year average — would be given the option to either enter a 12-month “Safe Harbor” period, after which further inability to meet productivity standards will result in salary reductions, or consider career transition alternatives.

I guarantee you that the faculty did not approve massive salary cuts, tied to getting grants at a time when the government is destroying the apparatus of grant disbursement. This was a decision made in contradiction to faculty interests.

Farrell also made this lovely table that compares the perceived hierarchy of power within academia to the actual, little known (to the public, or to asshole pundits like Andreesen and Weiss) hierarchy.

I guess I’m at about level 4 in the distribution of power at the university, and even that’s misleading. If we were to plot the influence quantitatively, we’d have to use a power law distribution. Everything is in the hands of the board of trustees. Even where we faculty have some say in decisions, we can be overruled by the Board. Tenure, for instance, is proposed by faculty, but then has to be approved by the president, who then passes on the nomination to the Board, who can kill the idea without anything like a hearing or a discussion from the affected parties.

And students? Hah. Sorry. If students want to affect the administration of the university, they have to SCREAM and take over buildings and do all the things conservative hate, because they have no other options.

I hate it, but this Epstein story is destroying my confidence in government, which was already in tatters by Trump’s election. Now Mike Johnson has shut down the house of representatives early, sending everyone home for an early vacation, in order to prevent a vote to release the Epstein files? That’s a blatant coverup. The secrets are dribbling out…now we learn that Trump is mentioned many times in the files, but we don’t know the context.

It’s also raising questions we should have considered long ago. How did Epstein transition from high school teacher to billionaire with a private plane and his very own island? Personally, I’d like to know how to do that, but if it involves sex trafficking I’ll pass. Is the market for young girls that lucrative? Who is buying that access?

I’m also wondering if giving someone a billion dollars flips a switch in their brain and turns them into predators on children, or if being a predatory pedophile makes it easier to become a billionaire. Either way, it’s another reason to outlaw billionaires.

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) snuck a provision into a bill to fund the EPA that decreed that the Kennedy Center opera house would be renamed for…Melania Trump, a woman with no artistic talent or inclination, but who, presumably, sometimes sleeps with the president.

It’s a cult, I tell you.

Anyway, it’s unlikely that the bill will pass, and even if it did, I imagine the next time a Democrat is elected (if one is allowed to be elected), this is one of those things that would be casually and quickly deleted. I kind of hope Trump’s entire effort to buy his way into an association with the arts would be expunged at the first opportunity, because his idea of art is nothing but tacky kitsch, thinly plated with gold-colored stuff.

Adam Schiff is generally a good guy on the issues, but like many Democratic leaders, he’s wearing rose colored glasses and has a weird view of the past.

Reagan was an unholy nightmare. Trump may be worse, but please don’t paper over the crimes of Reagan: the death of so many people afflicted with HIV, Iran-contra, the enabling of right-wing media, training the electorate to accept brain dead idiocy in the president. The roots of our current problems were planted in the 1980s by the Republican apparatus, and we should not be treating Reagan as a paragon.

Would we be better off with Ronald Reagan in the presidency? I don’t think so.

This new Superman movie has triggered the same hysterical over-reaction that Barbie did: accuse it of being “woke”, be outraged that Superman was portrayed as an immigrant (like he’s always been portrayed), centering the story on kindness and opposition to war (ditto). The spectacle here isn’t the movie — it’s just a movie — but the way right-wing pundits have exploded with over-the-top hatred of the themes of the movie. It’s bizarre and stupid. Amanda Marcotte has an explanation for why they’re doing this.

The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life. The ultimate goal is to persuade people to reject movies, music, TV and other cultural artifacts as “woke” or “Satanic,” and turn exclusively to MAGA influencers for their entertainment needs. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire even has a movie studio where they turn out subpar content that only has an audience because they’ve convinced right-wingers to eschew quality films as too “liberal.”

My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new “Superman” movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s “woke” propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left. Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister. The attacks on “Superman” are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values.

A positive story about an immigrant treating people with kindness defies the current Republican program. They need to demonize “wokeness” before people realize that mass deportations and concentration camps and giving a con artist a free run over the resources of the country is a bad idea.

This is part of a larger and far more serious effort by Trump and the MAGA movement to rewrite history, and therefore, to rewrite what the story of America even is. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been hyperfocused on erasing all acknowledgement that women, people of color and queer people have long served in the military, all to prop up his childish fantasy that the only real heroes are white men. Under the guise of stopping “DEI,” shorthand for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Republicans are waging war on libraries and museums, censoring books and displays that reflect the basic truth that the U.S. has always been a multi-ethnic society. Republicans are getting increasingly aggressive about spreading Christian nationalist lies that the U.S. was founded as a functional theocracy, when it was intended to be a secular nation.

The Superman gambit is the pop culture version of this. In one sense, it’s not as big of a deal as the Trump administration systematically removing Black historical figures from the public record. But it’s still deeply troubling, precisely because it’s an attack on a story that’s so fundamental to American culture. The right understands how crucial storytelling is to the way a society views itself. Superman’s origin story is as much a part of the American identity as Betsy Ross and Abraham Lincoln. Before most of us grow up and learn the more complex story of how the United States was built by waves of immigrants who often endured plenty of racist resistance, we were warmed up to the idea by learning that the Man of Steel is an immigrant who hid his true nature until he realized he needed to unveil it to be a force for good.

It is just a movie, but it’s also a story to instill values that still, despite all attempts to erase them, are part of the American myth, and myths matter.

I tried to be fair and compare this “woke” movie to a right-wing counterpart, and there have been several examples in recent years. I’ve actually seen Run Hide Fight, an example of conservative myth-building. This one reinforces those tales of “rugged individualism” with the story of a school taken over by a group of psychopathic students who are ultimately by a girl who has had gun training and isn’t afraid to gun down the bad guys. It’s…fine? Professionally made, but ultimately boring and about as realistic as Superman, and I don’t feel like shrieking that it’s heralding the downfall of America. It’s just a predictable power-fantasy, which to the right-wing means using that power to kill the bad people.

Another movie that I haven’t seen, but have seen enough clips and reviews that I think I can judge it, was Lady Ballers, a movie about male athletes triumphing by pretending to be trans so they compete against women’s teams. It’s another power fantasy, where they pretend that all men are physically superior to women so they can humiliate those women who play basketball.

Neither of those movies had the appeal of Superman. Maybe the right-wingers need to stop and assess and focus on whatever positive values they want to promote, rather than imagining their enemies, fellow Americans, caricatured and crushed. It’s going to be hard since they’ve already crossed out truth, justice, equality, fairness, and empathy from their list of goals, which makes any story they come up with un-compelling.

In the comments, we got a mild objection to the term “Alligator Auschwitz”, which is fair, except that it reminded me of this cartoon.

“Remember: When discussing modern atrocities that sicken the conscience, we must always be SCRUPULOUSLY FAIR.”

We have to give our regime time to mature and rise to the level of mass murder.

Although, to be totally fair to the other side, I’d rather we did the scolding before the death camp fires up the ovens.

The magnitude of the approval of immigration surprises me a bit. Almost 80% of Americans think immigration is a good thing? And approval has been about 50% for the last two decades? So how did these Republican assholes get elected? Hatred of immigrants and others was their big campaign issue!

What doesn’t make sense is that the Republicans are terrorizing Los Angeles with paramilitary goon squads; they’re making mass deportations of thousands of people; the worst Supreme Court in American history (that includes the Taney court) is giving carte blanche to Trump; and for some reason, the Democrats are practically supine and largely avoiding capitalizing on this weakness in the electorate.

It’s gotten so bad that one college in California is treating ICE like a plague.

California State University, Los Angeles, is giving professors the option of moving their classes online due to students’ fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Heather Lattimer, university provost and vice president for academic affairs, said in a letter to faculty this week, according to the Los Angeles Times, that she had heard students are “scared to take public transit and fearful of driving to campus.”

Lattimer said faculty have “the option of working remotely for a limited time due to extraordinary circumstances they are facing.”

I remember when we made those same accommodations for COVID. I guess Republicans are just another disease.

The word is that ICE agents are sad. You don’t like them!

he reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

“It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told me. He called the job “mission impossible.”

Poor babies.

Recently, they’ve been whining about a “700%” increase in assaults on ICE agents, but that isn’t as bad as it sounds — they’re phrasing the numbers to make them sound much, much worse than they are. It’s just the standard conservative persecution complex.

While ICE has previously stuck to publishing percentages, Melugin was given raw data, reporting 79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year.

For comparison, from January through May, the New York Police Department reported 970 assaults on uniformed officers in the city (granted, the NYPD employs about 15,000 more officers than ICE does—though Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would lessen the gap).

They’re not getting beat up. ICE is recognizing that the general public holds them in contempt and that their own organization is authoritarian and abuses its own members. I’m not going to feel sorry for them, though.

I recently spoke with a dozen current and former ICE agents and officers about morale at the agency since Trump took office. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of losing their job or being subjected to a polygraph exam. They described varying levels of dissatisfaction but weren’t looking to complain or expecting sympathy—certainly not at a time when many Americans have been disturbed by video clips of masked and hooded officers seizing immigrants who were not engaged in any obvious criminal behavior. The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.

No mass resignations yet? That’s too bad. Crank up the pressure, everyone — not in the form of physical violence, but do let America’s brown shirts know that they are hated, that they are despised and hurting the America they claim to love. More effective than punching them (I know, that would be so satisfying, even if it puts you in jail) would be looking them in the eye, shaking your head sadly, and walking away to phone your representative and write a letter to your local newspaper explaining how wretchedly criminal the thugs of ICE are.