Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Trump-Harris debate last night, and the polls

I watched a little last night, and a bit more today.   Harris was, of course, lightyears better than Biden, and she did make some good points.  But the monster child was not as bad as the gloating on social media would have led one to think (of course, the gloating is partisan, although even some Trump loytalists have admitted Trump lost).  He, in fact, hammered Harris on some real vulnerabilities (e.g., she has no policies), and some of her responses were substantively pretty feeble.  When she hammered him for his crazy tariff ideas, he replied, correctly, that Biden-Harris have left the China tariffs in place.  She never responded to that point.  I can only conclude that the gloating is a result of how despicable Trump is, and what a relief it is to have a moderately competent "debater" on the stage, rather than Mr. feeble-minded.  (Putting his psychological health to one side, the monster child is clearly not as cognitively feeble as Biden:  he is quick on his feet, and quick to lie on point.)

I gather as time went on, Trump became more unhinged, but the fact that Harris scored what seem to anyone sapient good points doesn't mean the election will be anything but obscenely close.

"Authoritarians...are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent"

Certainly true in recent decades, although at other times universities have been complicit in tyranny, rather than sites of resistance.  If Trump wins (which is still a very live possibility), he has various tools at his disposal to undermine even the wealthy private universities, ranging from withholding federal aid on (fake) grounds that universities are discriminating against Jews, to taxing university endowments, to conditioning federal aid on maintaining artifically low tuition.  

Hitler's 1932 campaign

In his most successful campaign, Hitler didn't run on Jew hatred, or Lebensraum, he ran on a promise to heal the economic despair of the Great Depression (which he actually did, but that's another matter):

("Our last hope:  Hitler.")

Trump is no Hitler, despite certain affinities:  unlike Hitler, for example, Trump has no core ideology.  And the significant inflation of the last few years (which is dramatic and visible to every voter every time they go to the supermarket) falls far short of the crisis of global capitalism that was the Great Depression.  Yet our election is still a toss-up, although at least the Democrats have a chance now.  But throwing gold-plated bones to the ruling class is not the path to Democratic victory.  Sherrod Brown, an actual pro-worker Democrat, is going to win re-election to the Senate in "deep red" Ohio, a state Trump is forecast to win by 5-10 points.  What a shame Brown isn't heading the national ticket.

Is it a "problem" that there are so few political "conservatives" in the American academy?

Most contributors to the interesting CHE symposium seem to agree it is, which by my lights is tantamount to admitting that they don't think their academic fields are Wissenschaften.  My essay takes a rather different approach:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures)....

Reforming those defective scientific disciplines is difficult, given academic freedom, but it should not be done in terms of parochial and highly context-sensitive "conservative" and "liberal" categories.  As Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia, candidly admits:

Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

It's true that fascists are underrepresented in the academy.  Is that a problem to be fixed?

Killing hostages is *also* a war crime

Worth remembering that Israel does not have a complete monopoly on them in Gaza.  Hostage families are, correctly, also pointing the finger at Netanyahu, the worst leader in the history of Israel, who deserves to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell.

Trump can still win this election (lawfully)

Those who are big consumers of "election news" and "polls"--which probably includes many readers of this blog--probably have the sense that Harris is going to win this election.   God knows (if S/He existed, that is) I hope the monster child is defeated, and Harris/Walz prevail.   But the reality is that this is very, very far from a sure thing.  The NYT "poll tracker," whose averages are weighted towards polls with more reliable track records, shows Harris leading Trump by just two points nationally, and shows her leading by similarly small margins, or just tied, in all the key battleground states.  2020 polls badly underestimated Trump's support, despite having been burned in 2016 for the same problem.  Are they now accurate?  I have no confidence they are, especially if the underlying problem (as many suspect) is that more Trump voters don't respond to polls.  In 2020, the gold standard NYT/Siena poll had Biden up by 14 points nationally right before the election; Biden's actual margin of victory was 4.5%.  All the good TikTok vibes for Harris are nice and happy, but they don't mean much, since TikTok is not, shall we say, representative of the population at large.  I'd be a lot more comfortable if Harris's margin were more like 5-6%, rather than 2%.   The fact that it is still close is, by itself, appalling, but telling about the pathological condition of the United States.

The election will be decided by people who haven't a clue...

...who don't understand cause and effect, and don't understand the candidates or their policies--like the people regularly interviewed by the NYT in their "American in Focus" series (read a few of those, and weep).  Recall the revealing anecdote from longtime reader S. Wallerstein:

Shopping in an open air market, Mr. Wallerstein was chatting with a Chilean woman about the U.S. election: he expressed his preference for Biden, she expressed that she liked Trump. As the conversation went on, she also revealed that her truly favorite American political figure was Michelle Obama. As Mr. Wallerstein observed: "I realized that for her and for many others, Trump, Biden and Michelle Obama do not represent political positions on the left and right spectrum, but are simply celebrities who appear on TV: some appeal to her and some don't for completely non-political reasons."

Achen & Bartels provide the evidence for the anecdote.  It's all pretty horrifying, of course, but that's the reality:  our fate will be decided by some of the most uninformed and witless people in the electorate.

The specter of Garcetti is haunting the American academy

Even if Trump doesn't win in November, one can expect more and more red states to push the line that public university faculty speech is "government speech," and subject to government control--the latest being Indiana and Purdue Universities!  (See also.)

More on JD Vance and his fascist friends

The quote at the start from Brodsky is very apt ("he said 'look,' he said, 'you Americans, you are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language'"), but this really is ghastly:

J.D. Vance has enthusiastically promoted a book that uses genocidal language to stoke hatred toward both liberals and progressives.

Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

The 283-page screed reads like an effort to incite a civil war. It strains to create a sense of urgent terror in its readers. On nearly every page, it demonizes and dehumanizes “the left”– a vaguely defined group that apparently includes journalists (“the unhuman-occupied media”) and people who believe in things like diversity, equity, social justice and the rule of law. The definition is so broad that it seems most Democrats would qualify as unhumans....

Hobart & William Smith politics professor to return to the classroom this fall...

...after her unlawful suspension for her lawful but "incorrect' extamural speech.   Professor Jodi Dean issued the following statement (which shows how Title VI can be weaponized by the right-wing against universities):

I want to thank everyone who signed, shared, and contributed to crafting the petition supporting academic freedom and calling for my reinstatement. The support of thinkers and scholars across a range of views helped demonstrate the egregious wrong of suspending a faculty member for speaking out in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Many who signed took real professional risk as the crackdown against the movement to end occupation and genocide intensifies such that having your name on a list can subject you to investigation and cancellation.

One of the means of oppression of faculty in the United States is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Department of Education has issued several "Dear Colleague" letters instructing university administrators to be vigilant in ensuring that campuses are free from discrimination and harassment. My institution interpreted this to require removing me from the classroom in case there might have been students who felt threatened by an essay published on the Verso blog. The institution then hired an outside investigator who repeatedly solicited complaints about me from HWS students. Over 100 members of the community were contacted and asked if they had information relevant to an investigation as to whether I had violated HWS policies or standards prohibiting harassment and discrimination. The investigator called this “targeted outreach.”  My lawyer complained about this repeated solicitation but it went on and on. These efforts failed to turn up a single complaint of any illegal conduct on my part (although it did turn up reports of feeling hurt, threatened, and frightened). The investigator concluded that I did not harass or discriminate against anyone and I have been exonerated of these charges. 

The Trump immunity decision

Two views:  less alarmed, very alarmed.  The DC Circuit decision in the same case represents the (sensible) road not taken.  Suffice it to say, the U.S. is doomed, especially if Biden doesn't drop out of the race--if he does, we still might not dodge the Trump bullett (or bomb).  But the next civilized President really needs to wage war on the current super-legislature.

Sleepwalking into disaster: the response to learning that Emperor Biden has no clothes

I've been tweeting various things about this all weekend, but let me summarize here:

1.  Biden was always a middling speaker with limited brainpower, but the disastrous debate performance took that to a wholly new level:  he has been hobbled by his age more than the Democratics had let on.  This was not just a "bad" or "weak" debate performance (like Obama's anomalously weak performance against Romney in 2012), this was a revelation about the extent of his cognitive decline.  A majority of the population has been concerned about his mental competence for months, and it turns out that concern was wholly warranted, and the attempt to dismiss it was a con job.   There's a reason Biden has given fewer interviews than any President in history; there's a reason his staff has been hiding him.  Now we all know.

2.  The day after the debate fiasco, Biden asserted:  “I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job.” What Biden believes is wholly irrelevant, a case study in self-serving biases.  Anyone who has tried to get an elderly parent to give up driving has heard this spiel. It's meaningless:  one has to look at the evidence.  We had 90 minutes of evidence that his mind isn't working, and he can't do the job, which includes advocating for your agenda in public, sometimes without a teleprompter.   That his policy achievements have been substantial for a Democrat is neither here nor there:  most of the work in making that happen is not done by the President.

3.  The repeated blather that "Joe and Jill will have to decide" is an insult to democracy:  this is not a fucking monarchy, this is a democracy, and it's the job of the Democratic Party, Biden's party, to get him to step aside given that the secret is now out.   The Democratic Party, so far, is proving itself as supine to its leader as the Republicans are to theirs.  That's a rather disturbing parallel.

4.  The reason this matters is precisely because a second Trump Presidency will be a disaster, a bigger disaster than the first was.  The Democratic Party effectively suppressed democratic opposition during the primaries, with the result that we have a Democratic nominee most don't want (as poll after poll reveals).  Polls also reveal that Biden is losing, not just nationally, but in almost all the key swing states (when he leads in some swing states in some polls, the leads are not reassuring, and they aren't consistent). 

2016 deja vu all over again (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 12 OF THIS YEAR, UPDATED

It was obvious to me in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was an awful candidate--an opportunistic fake (like her philandering husband), whose only real qualification was her name and resulting institutional connections--and yet it seemed to me inconceivable that Trump could beat her, given how awful the monster-child was (and is).   Duly chastened by that bitter experience, I confess I'm now getting deja vu that we're walking into another, probably worse disaster.  Biden was always a congenial empty vessel, filled with whatever the Democratic consensus du jour was, but he hasn't suffered from decades of vaguely misogynistic demonization as Clinton did.  His problem is different, one exacerbated by the special prosecutor's report about his walking off with classified materials, namely, his age.  It won't do to point out that Trump is not only cognitively impaired, but psychologically disturbed, even though that is obviously true.   Biden looks his age (he's 81), while Trump does not (he's 77); and Biden's verbal and cognitive mistakes do seem to be getting worse.   With most of the electorate, appearances are everything.  The polls probably are not lying about this problem eitehr.  Sure Biden can run on the slogan, "Not a pathological narcissist and fascist like the other guy," but will enough voters notice or care?

The end of academic freedom in Florida? The courts will decide

As I feared, Florida is indeed pushing the envelope on Garcetti and taking the position that faculty speech in the classroom at a public university is under the control of the state government:

Last Friday, Cooper told the three 11th Circuit judges that professors’ speech in the classroom is government speech, and “the state, when it is the speaker, it can choose what it wants to say.” Cooper said a state can “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”

One of the three judges on the panel, a Donald Trump appointee, later asked a question that showed how far Cooper’s argument could extend. The judge posed a hypothetical about how much the state could limit classroom teaching if the judges were to accept Cooper’s arguments: “Could a legislature prohibit professors from saying anything negative about a current gubernatorial administration?”

Cooper replied: “I think, your honor, yes, because in the classroom the professor’s speech is the government’s speech and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints.”

Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told Inside Higher Ed that “the state of Florida is making an extreme argument about the First Amendment that would eliminate academic freedom completely in the classroom, and that is an argument without merit under the First Amendment.”

If the 11th Circuit buys this argument, the Supreme Court will have to weigh in on the reach of Garcetti, and whether there is an exception for public university faculty.

ADDENDUM:  Being an instinctive authoritarian, Florida's Viktor DeSantis also recently vetoed all grants for the arts in Florida.  At least, he didn't denounce the arts as degenerate!

Another decision by the super-legislature that contributes to the U.S. being unlivable

What a disgrace to civilization.  Read the dissent to see how disgraceful and unnecessary this is.

Giorgia Meloni is a neo-Nazi in her soul...

...but you can't say that if you're a prominent Italian academic.  Italian defamation law is very different from American (and even British) law:  there is both civil and criminal defamation, and one can even bring an action for "insult"!   The result is the current fiasco, that is the subject of the prior link.

(Thanks to Allonso Murríel Perez for the pointer.)

Trump, a lifelong de facto criminal, now a de jure one

Thank goodness the New York prosecutors knew what they were doing, and secured a conviction against the monster child, now making him officially a convicted felon.   A quick jury verdict is almost always a finding of guilty, and this case was no different.  The monster child will appeal, and who knows, the conviction might be overturned on appeal.  But that process will take many months, and so the stain of being a convicted criminal may affect the 'independent' voters (those who cannot tell the difference between night and day) come November.

The outcome is gratifying, of course, especially since an acquittal would have been a huge boost for the monster child.  The irony is that this case was not nearly as significant or as strong as two other cases:  the election interference case in Georgia and the federal prosecution for making off with classified materials.  The latter has been derailed by the Trump-appointed hack judge Aileen Cannon, who is a unique embarrassment to the federal judiciary; the former has been derailed by the hack state prosecutor in Georgia, Fani Willis, whose world-historic bad judgment in appointing her unqualified boyfriend as one of the prosecutors now seems to guarantee that this case will not get to trial before the election.   (The third case, the federal prosecution for election interference, has been delayed by the super-legisature, i.e., the Supreme Court, but that case strikes me as far less sturdy than the Georgia and classificed documents cases.)  So everyone owes thanks to the New York prosecutors for moving with dispatch and success to secure a conviction.  (Trump is very unlikely to get a jail sentence, but that won't change the fact that he is a convicted felon.)

On the "upside down" flag outside the house of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito

This is a sharp and informative commentary by law professor Michael Dorf; an excerpt:

Using a symbol of support for Trumpist political violence as a means of responding to a personal insult accusing one of having supported Trumpist political violence is a way of identifying with Trumpism at its most repugnant. It aligns the Alitos with Ginni Thomas and other Trumpist conspiracy theorists. And it works as a rejoinder to the neighbor only insofar as it invokes the crude bullying of Trump and his movement.

Where does that leave us? To my mind, this event is part of a larger pattern I discussed earlier this month: as Trump has taken over the Republican Party, people who continue to identify with its policies increasingly normalize him and his authoritarian movement. One sees a version of this in the suggestion by Professor [Josh] Blackman (in the post linked above) that calling out Alito reflects a "double standard" in light of the fact that Justice Ginsburg didn't face nearly the same level of outrage for her (entirely accurate but nonetheless inappropriate) criticism of Trump in 2016.

Respectfully, that's not a double standard.

The Israel/Gaza catastrophe--(plus the question of 'academic boycotts')

The NYT, which used to be an almost shameless apologist for any US-funded Israeli crimes, has turned a corner, it appears:  this article about the rise of the religious crazies in Israel (in the immortal words of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan, "Fundamentalism is the mortal enemy of civilized humanity") and then this opinion piece revealing what is increasingly obvious to the whole world:

America’s romantic mythology and wishful thinking about Israel encourage a tendency to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the main cause of the ruthlessness in Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 35,000 people. The unpopular, scandal-ridden premier makes a convincing ogre in an oversimplified story.

But Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, the creeping famine, the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods — this, polling suggests, is the war the Israeli public wanted. A January survey found that 94 percent of Jewish Israelis said the force being used against Gaza was appropriate or even insufficient. In February, a poll found that most Jewish Israelis opposed food and medicine getting into Gaza. It was not Mr. Netanyahu alone but also his war cabinet members (including Benny Gantz, often invoked as the moderate alternative to Mr. Netanyahu) who unanimously rejected a Hamas deal to free Israeli hostages and, instead, began an assault on the city of Rafah, overflowing with displaced civilians.

(The failure of Israeli leadership to secure the freedom of Israeli hostages, or even to priotize their freedom, is really quite extraordinary.)

I recommend this talk by my colleague John Mearsheimer about what a disaster all this is for Israel.  John is from New York City, and he has a slightly disarming way of speaking about atrocities, but he is a realist:  his basic view is that morality has nothing to do with the behavior of states, which live in the proverbial Hobbesian state of nature (notwithstanding the recent arrest warrants for Netanyahu and various Hamas criminals--but no one will be arrested, unless Israel captures the Hamas criminals).  As John says, there are four options for Israel, given that they control land (the West Bank, Gaza) that includes over seven million Palestinians: a democratic state for everyone (the benign meaning of "from the river to the sea"); a two-state solution; the existing apartheid; or ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.  As John says, quite correctly, the first two options are off the table as far as Israel is concerned (barring a political revolution there:  see the NYT article, above, about the rise of the religious zealots in Israel), so the media blather about a two-state solution is just pure propaganda:  no one with political power there wants it.  I seem to recall Steve Salaita saying on Twitter (I don't have the energy to track it down), that the real problem for Israel is that the Palestinians still exist.  And that means apartheid (which is tough to maintain), or ethnic cleansing--with the conduct of the war on Gaza suggests ethnic cleansing is the real goal by making Gaza uninhabitable and driving out the population. 

Ron Orban, Viktor DeSantis and the crypto-fascist war on education

Philosopher Jason Stanley comments; an excerpt:

Today’s GOP is laser-focused on education, trying to frighten parents about supposed “Marxist indoctrination” in schools and universities (a common tactic in today’s fascist international; see Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro). As a sign of the topic’s importance, the GOP campaign against schools and universities was central in Trump’s 2020 election bid. In a speech at an event called the White House Conference on American History, Trump declared:

'Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families."

Critical race theory is not "a Marxist doctrine," indeed has nothing to do with Marx, and little to do with Critical Theory.  It's amazing how Marxism serves as an all-purpose bogeyman for these malevolent ignoramuses.

This is how to handle Republican Representatives in their fake hearings

Watch NYC Public School Chancellor David Banks deal with the appalling Rep. Stefanik and another bozo.  Thank God for New Yorkers!  He should have prepped the university Presidents on how to handle these posturing charlatans.

The "Executive Unbound": University President edition

Law professor and public law scholar David Pozen (Columbia) uses recent events at Columbia to look at university governance, drawing some striking analogies with problems familiar from American constitutional and administrative law.

More peaceful protesters subjected to manhandling and arrest: the case of Purchase College

Philosopher Emiliano Diaz, Chair of the Department at Purchase College (one of the smallest colleges in the State University of New York System) writes with a long account of the disturbing response to peaceful protests at his school and the aftermath:

----------------------

Philosophy students at SUNY Purchase have been deeply involved in the pro-palestinian protests on campus.  Sabrina Thompson, a junior in philosophy and president of the Philosophy Society, has been a key organizer.  

On the night of Thursday, May 2, a group of students, led by Thompson and others, attempted to establish an encampment on campus near the dormitories.  They were eventually persuaded not to set up tents, but they were steadfast in their commitment to remain.  At 10pm, when the university quiet hours began, they sat silent in observance of the student code of conduct.  This is when police moved in to disperse them with substantial and violent force (link to a video of the police action below).  In an email about what would transpire, President Milagros Peña cites the "quiet hours" policy as justification for the use of force.  She also notes that fire alarms were set off and that this was disruptive for students who are entering the final weeks of class.  Students have noted that the quiet hour rule is not uniformly enforced. Students regularly congregate in the quad after 10pm without issue. During "Culture Shock," a music festival held on campus near the end of the year, this rule is also flouted.  Fire alarms were set off, but this happened only after the police moved in, and some students are claiming that it was a diversionary tactic meant to distract police and give room to students who wished to flee the violence that unfolded.  President Peña also suggests that "outside agitators" were somehow threatening the safety of the campus.  There was no evidence of immediate or even inchoate threat as the police moved in.  Also, at least some of those who were "outsiders" (a difficult word to parse in the context of a public college) were human rights lawyers invited by a faculty member to observe the protest. 

In all, 70 people were arrested.  In order to jail all of them, Police spread them across Westchester County.  If not for their friends, many of them, college students with few resources and parents who do not live locally, would have been stranded.   According to reports, many were not told the charge during the arrest and were also denied information about arresting officers.  Faculty who were present only to observe, support the students' right to free speech, and help de-escalate the situation were among those arrested.  One of these faculty, who has participated in other protests, noted the lack of training on the part of the officers involved in the arrests. He cited the fact that students were told to disperse but then given no clear means of egress.  Some were even pursued as they tried to leave.  He also noted that he has never witnessed such violence in response to protests.  The next morning, arrested students would find the belongings they were forced to leave behind, pillows, book bags, blankets, and other things, in and strewn around a dumpster.

Exactly as predicted months ago, there is now famine in parts of Gaza...

...and even U.S. officials are saying so.    It's clear that Israel, which is now an international pariah because of its butchery in Gaza, should have followed Thomas Friedman's advice last fall, if only for prudential reasons.

On the SCOTUS oral argument in "Trump v. United States" (i.e., the Presidential immunity case)

Apt commentary from Cornell law professor Michael Dorf; from the opening paragraph:

The positions staked out by the Court's most conservative Justices were themselves Trumpian, not so much in their audacity or mendacity but in their prolixity. It is impossible to interview Trump because while the interviewer tries to fact-check any given false statement (e.g., crime has skyrocketed), Trump's firehose of bullshit emits six or seven more lies. So too during the oral argument: Justices Thomas, Alito, et al made so many spurious arguments that attempting to deal with them one by one feels like a sucker's game.

Deja vu all over again: the right-wing war on college campuses, from the 1960s/early 70s to today

Some apt comparisons.

(Thanks to David Ozonoff for the pointer.)

Campus protests and excessive police responses

What we are witnessing on various campuses--Columbia, NYU, UT Austin, Emory and others--is a predictable consequence of the campaign by the awful Congresswoman Foxx to terrorize universities into suppressing pro-Palestinian speech.  This video from Emory is representative:  an economics professor, concerned by the way the police are manhandling a student, tries to intervene, which police cannot tolerate, and she herself is then thrown to the ground (literally) and handcuffed.  Student encampments in open spaces may violate university rules, although as one report I received from UT Austin indicated, the student protesters were not disrupting classes at all, whereas the heavy-handed police intervention (what else would one expect from the authoritarian-minded Texas Governor Gregg Abbott?) created such a ruckus (including endless bullhorn announcements and orders) that classes were disrupted.   But if encampments violate content-neutral university rules, the correct response is through the university disciplinary process, not mass arrests by the police.   Only where protests actually interfere with university business--teaching and research--might a police response be warranted, but that has not been the case at Columbia or UT Austin, the two cases I've learned the most about.  Will some university leadership finally have the courage to stand up to the Republicans?  After all, what the students are protesting--the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the mass slaughter there--deserves protest, and goes to the alleged core of the First Amendment, namely, political speech.

(There has been some very bad behavior at Columbia, but not by students:  once the unnecessary police intervention last week turned Columbia into a media spectacle, area activists, many openly anti-semitic, descended on Columbia, but their antics have been confined to the streets outside the campus.   Many clueless folks on social media, who don't know the layout of the campus, are circulating videos which clearly show bad behavior by non-students on the streets outside the campus.)

ADDENDUM:  For those not on Twitter, you can see the full video of the police assault on the Emory economics professor here.

Tennessee school teachers may now carry guns

Remarkable.  When I think about what I hate most about this country, the gun craziness looms large.  No civilized society makes it so easy to carry guns.  If you think your kindergarten teacher needs to be armed to protect the little kids from mass murder by a gun-carrying maniac, that is decisive evidence that your gun laws are too lax.

Emerson on Trump

Political theorist Michael Bacon calls my attention to this passage from Emerson's essay "Demonology": 

It would be easy in the political history of every time to furnish examples of this irregular success, men having a force which without virtue, without shining talent, yet makes them prevailing. No equal appears in the field against them. A power goes out from them which draws all men and events to favor them. The crimes they commit, the exposures which follow, and which would ruin any other man, are strangely overlooked, or do more strangely turn to their account.

As this NYT piece the other day made clear, Trump's prospects for winning again in November are very real.   None of this is surprising once one bears in mind the lessons of Achen and Bartels on how democracy really works.

 

Federal antidiscrimination law does not require campus crackdowns

This piece by Cornell law professor Michael Dorf is worth reading.  The Title VI arguments are spurious.

The Columbia University disaster

The administration has completely caved in to the Republican Congressional campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on campus.  What an embarrassment. And this will spread until some university has the courage to stand up and say, "No."

(For more on Columbia, see this discussion by a Columbia law professor of some of the dubious decisions of the administration.)

The actual William F. Buckley, Jr.

A good corrective to the recent whitewash documentary.

Sooner or later someone incited by Trump is going to shoot a judge or lawyer smeared by Trump

We're getting closer to that moment.  In a civilized democracy, laws would exist to penalize such behavior by a public figure.

Introducing Peter Tonguette, fascist lapdog

They're all coming out of the woodwork now.

Protests in Israel against the awful Netanyahu grow

About time; they are fueled, in significant part, by anger over the outrageous fact that this mass murderer has still not gotten the hostages released.  An election now would surely oust him, and perhaps even his coalition with the religious crazies.

Trump, the Mafioso, an ongoing saga

He's now embracing it openly.

(Thanks to Steve Sverdlik for the pointer.)

Jared Kushner, consigliere to Mafia Don Trump, sees real estate opportunity in ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Good capitalist instincts in this guy.

"Seven realities" of the Israel/Palestine situation

A lot of sensible points in this essay by political theorist Alex Gourevitch.

(Thanks to Stefan Sciaraffa for the pointer.)

Blast from the past: an interview with a Dutch publication about Trump before the 2020 election

Came across this recently, and, alas, it is still relevant.

SCOTUS decision on Trump's ballot eligibility

An instructive critique of the decision by law professor Michael Dorf (Cornell).

MAGA crazy says it out loud: we will end democracy

Charming.   I trust the Democrats will run this clip in many advertisements.

The Republican war on higher education (and academic freedom) comes to Indiana

From IHE:

Indiana’s Republican-dominated state Senate wants to do both at once. Earlier this month it passed a bill that takes aim at both tenure and DEI in public colleges and universities, tying them together with language that shifts focus from racial or other notions of diversity toward what it calls “intellectual diversity.” Senate Bill 202, now being debated in the majority-Republican state House of Representatives, defines that term as “multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.”

The legislation would leave it to boards of trustees to determine what intellectual diversity means for individual faculty members’ disciplines, to gauge whether those faculty members have delivered it and to decide how much they should be punished if they fail to do so. Many of these trustees are appointed by the governor, currently Republican Eric Holcomb. Critics have said this means the bill would subject “hiring, tenure, and promotion”—and even employment after earning tenure—to “reviews that judge faculty based on political criteria.”...

Trump's "Brownshirts"

They're out there, and not just on January 6, 2021:

[A]re you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?

Late last month, I listened to a fascinating NPR interview with the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman regarding their new book, “Find Me the Votes,” about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They report that Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis had trouble finding lawyers willing to help prosecute her case against Trump. Even a former Georgia governor turned her down, saying, “Hypothetically speaking, do you want to have a bodyguard follow you around for the rest of your life?”

He wasn’t exaggerating. Willis received an assassination threat so specific that one evening she had to leave her office incognito while a body double wearing a bulletproof vest courageously pretended to be her and offered a target for any possible incoming fire.

How Trump thinks, redux

As we have noted in the past, Trump thinks like a Mafioso.  So to understand Trump, watch this interview with Anthony Casso, who eventually became boss of the Lucchese crime family in NYC, and was notorious (a "homocidal maniac") even by Mafia standards. See especially Mr. Casso's comments on the families of his victims around 9:45 and 12:30:

Recall Trump:  "I love to remember my enemies and I love to get my enemies whenever I can, absolutely. ... So many people that were enemies of mine were wiped out, and I do not really care about that."

American gun craziness, aided and abetted by Supreme Court craziness

Law professor Eric Segall comments.   The Governor of Texas is currently defying the Supreme Court, it's time for civilized governors in civilized states to ignore the Supreme Court's deranged Second Amendment jurisprudence and enact and enforce sensible gun control measures.   (On the general topic of ignoring the Supreme Court, see this discussion.)

More on the campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on campus

Apt comments from my law colleague Tom Ginsburg on a very foolish essay by a Penn law professor.

More Harvard craziness: "controversy" over appointing Harvard's "Director of the Center for Jewish Studies" to lead an anti-semitism taskforce!

Bill Ackman and Larry Summers are both a disgrace, Summers especially so since he should know better.  Ackman is too stupid to know better.  If Harvard caves on this, it would set a really terrible precedent.

America is doomed, part 811: Perlstein on Trump and the hapless Democrats and media

A perceptive essay, please do take a look; this bears quoting:

According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.

The problem is that the likely voters pay no attention, and those who are Republicans will vote for whomever is the Republican nominee, mostly unaware of the stuff Perlstein notes.  Vide Achen & Bartels.

UPDATE:  As if to drive my last point home, the NYT runs this story about Iowa Republicans and their "reasons" for supporting particular candidates:  it is a litany of false beliefs, mistakes about cause and effect, and prejudices borne of religious zealotry.

John Ganz on January 6, Trump and fascism

From the conclusion:

From a certain perspective, the critics who say that talking about fascism takes Trump too seriously are correct: it involves too much hocus-pocus, it cloaks him in a certain dark grandeur, and gives everything a Spenglerian gloom that makes him seem bigger than he is. After all, he’s just a crook and a conman, an idiot. But the phoniness, that bombast, and the ridiculousness was a part of the original thing, too. There has always been a deeply moronic side to fascism. Fascism is perhaps most fundamentally a moron putting on world-historical airs. “Morons trying to make history” — what better way to describe January 6? The second biggest mistake is to take it too seriously. But the first biggest mistake is to not take it seriously enough.