Santa Ono was hoping to be appointed to the presidency of the University of Florida. I have sad news.

On Tuesday afternoon, Ono’s presidency was shot down in a 6-10 vote by the Florida Board of Governors, the governing board for the state’s university system. The move was made after prominent Florida conservatives questioned Ono’s past support of DEI and alleged inaction on combating antisemitism.

He was formerly the president of the University of Michigan. He wasn’t well liked there, either.

University leaders, faculty and alumni took aim at Ono for various reasons, from his decisions to curb DEI efforts on the Ann Arbor campus to his crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters to alleging he too easily changes his views on issues.

He seems to have been a wishy-washy Trumpian.

Ono oversaw cuts to the university’s long-standing diversity, equity and inclusion programs. This includes March moves to discontinue UM’s DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan and close its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Office for Health Equity and Inclusion.
…
Ono also saw criticism from both sides on his handling of pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitism on the Ann Arbor campus. At least 50 people have been arrested in connection with pro-Palestine protesting at the Ann Arbor university since October 2023.

I’m a bit exasperated with this predictable rhetorical trick of claiming that protesting a genocide is “anti-semitic”. I don’t think murdering civilians is a standard Jewish value.

This is the family of Kasper Eriksen. He was a Danish citizen who emigrated to the US and started a family in Mississippi.

Look at them! They’re perfect! Blonde and probably blue-eyed, coming from one of the “good” countries, and Kasper even made Xitter posts praising Trump. It’s not like he’s from one of the 12 countries that were just fully excluded from sending people to the US (curiously, those banned countries just happen to be full of brown people.)

And Kasper was a model alien, he was even close to achieving US citizenship!

Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime. He has not been accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document. Form I-751, appropriately clinical, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence,” was just one of the endless documents he needed on his decade-plus journey to American citizenship.

Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of.

Oh, right, he neglected to fill out one form, missed a deadline, and when he went in to an immigration center to dot that final ‘i’ and cross that last ‘t’, ICE put him in chains and shipped him off to a detention center in Louisiana, where…

He spends most of his day in a wide cell, housing upwards of 90 other detained immigrants at a time. He gets a couple of hours of yard time each day, a routine pleasure he says is critical to his sanity. Even so, Kasper has already lost about 25 pounds during his detention.

This shouldn’t be a plea for special treatment for a white man. The ICE administrators were apparently dismayed that they had to lock up someone who was “obviously” an acceptable member of society — I wonder if they ever feel the same way about detainees with a less Danish accent — but nobody should be treated this way.

Nathalia Rocha Dickson, an immigration attorney in Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 6 interview that violent, criminal narratives are increasingly employed to justify a crackdown on all immigrants, the majority of whom have done nothing wrong.

“The government is more interested in feeding into rhetoric—these ugly stories about immigration. We’re feeding a monster for an administration that is not really concerned about the rule of law,” she said.

Dickson has represented clients in detention and deportation for eight years now. What strikes her most about the new deportation regime is how arbitrarily it operates. “It’s totally random. This is the stupidity of it,” she said. “There’s no way for you to determine who’s gonna be picked up and who’s not. You may show up for a scheduled hearing and get picked up. You may be driving and get pulled over. It’s really, really crazy right now.”

The lesson here should be that ICE must be disbanded and immigration should be welcoming immigrants. They’re a rogue, criminal organization — America’s new SS.

By the way, there was a massive raid on a Minneapolis taqueria the other day, with police claiming it was drug-related. So why were ICE agents involved? Why were they dressed and armed like this, with masks covering their faces?

I’m happy to report that the people of Minneapolis swarmed these thugs and no arrests were made. Seriously, when someone in a military-style uniform, masked and carrying a rifle is spotted, it is a citizen’s duty to make their job more difficult.

I also like the cleverness of Ukraine’s recent attack: smuggling over a hundred drones on trucks to military airports deep into Russia, then suddenly launching them to blow up billions of dollars worth of bombers on the runway. Brilliant! And terrifying!

I imagine that military planners in countries all around the world are panicking right now at the idea that a poorer country can build $600 devices and sneakily destroy their pretty fancy mega-million dollar toys before they can be used to reduce a village to rubble. They’ve introduced so much uncertainty into the Great Game!

I also appreciate the beauty of the drone launches. Those trucks were like egg sacs, they opened up, and a swarm of little multi-limbed creatures emerged to float into the air and disperse. I’ve seen phenomena like that so many times, it’s no wonder they called it Operation Spiderweb.

Now…please don’t terrorize my country or me with your flying weapons, no matter how adorkably comparable to spiders they are.