Leading democratic politicians should make plans to be in Springfield on February 4th

I get the wider cultural resonance of Springsteen, but for early 2000s punk rock kids, the fact that NOFX came out of retirement to put out a song about Minnesota Nazis is also an exciting development in the resistance. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU6s...

I know all eyes are on Minneapolis, but there's a fast-approaching nightmare in Springfield, Ohio. Trump is revoking protected status for tens of thousands of Haitians living there on Feb. 3. Reportedly, on Feb. 4, 1000 ICE agents are arriving to remove this population. Ethnic cleansing.

Congress is not powerless. Democrats must unify around an actual agenda. 1. Vote no on DHS funding bill. 2. Repeal the multi-year $75 billion funding for ICE. 3. End qualified immunity for ICE agents. 4. Investigate and prosecute every single ICE agent who broke the law.

If they are doing this to white people in broad daylight imagine what they are doing to non-white people in detention facilities.

ICE is now responsible for 66% of the homicides in Minneapolis this year.

At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.

If the US were a geopolitical rival the headlines would be like: US Secret Police Execute Second Dissident In the Streets As Militarized Occupation Enters Sixth Week

I hate this so, so much.

This is the sort of statement that was expected from every university president and law firm partner over the last year. That those statements weren’t made played a huge part in where we are now and people will remember.

See you there!

A remarkable trend that will come as a shock to you if your only info about NYC is from this Fox News. Homicides in NYC... 1990: 2,262 1993: 1,927 1998: 629 2001: 649 2013: 335 2019: 320 2021: 488 2024: 382 2025 (as of 12/28): 302

It certainly appears that the United States government is run by neo-Nazis.

Actually that's just JD Vance's life because people yell at him everywhere he goes

Today I fulfilled my millennial dream and appeared on @vox's Today, Explained podcast, talking about Trump's executive order around homelessness and civil commitments. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

We are pleased to announce that Alex Barnard's CONSERVATORSHIP was named Honorable Mention for the 2025 Best Book Award from the Sociology of Mental Health Section, American Sociological Association. buff.ly/LqsQROV @avbsoc.bsky.social @asasmh.bsky.social #MentalHealth #PublicPolicy

Going to revisit my notes from reading "Citizen and Subject" from qualifying exams to try to make sense of NYC Mayoral Election.

the books – even for seminars in recent trends in the area, then the books aren’t selling. The Press might as well price them like Cambridge or Routledge, at a level that assumes no one will buy them. In my view, we need a Bandcamp moment – people realizing their friends won’t have bands ... 9/

Here's a long thread on an issue dear to my heart. This Tuesday evening I’m doing an Intellectual Publics with Macarena Gomez-Barris on publishing. Like last year’s conversation with Denise Cruz, or the prior year’s with Racquel Gates, we will talk about how to find a publisher, turn a thesis... 1/

Glad my alma mater is mobilizing alums for higher ed. Admin should be doing the same with faculty: giving stipends to write op eds, go back to our hometowns to talk about the value of what we do, blasting us with e-mails to call Congress. NYU admin, meanwhile, doing zilch. standup.princeton.edu

Someone once said Gavin Newsom looks like the Marvel President announcing that all the mutants are going to be quarantined, and now he's ordering municipalities to expel one of society's most marginalized and stigmatized groups, so I guess that was spot on. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/u...

No signature from my employer. But no worries: as the univ attended by the President's son, in the top-10 targets of Trump's anti-semitism investigation, and extremely dependent on international students, NYU will certainly stay under the radar. Thus has no need to mobilize to defend higher ed.

Between this and Princeton Eisengruber's interview, NYU's president doesn't even have to come up with her own talking points to stand up the Trump administration. She just needs a spine.

Shit, I might actually have to give to Annual Giving this year. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/p...

Walking outside Père Lachaise cemetery where they list the names of the ~96,000 Parisians killed in WWI. A sobering reminder that rekindling colonial ambitions, trashing multilateral institutions, and pushing European rearmament is playing with fire in a very scary way.

🎵 Here we go, Tigers, here we go * clap clap *

The plus side of Trump going after the country club of the Ivy League is we don't even have to pretend this is about anything other than destroying universities as such - regardless of their orientation towards DEI, student protest, antisemitism, etc.

NYU, this is your chance to get out of the Ivy League's shadow.

Essential reading: rich universities with huge endowments should be acting as arsenals of academic freedom - financing the research the administration is cutting, funding the programs Trump is targeting, and going on the attack in the legal sphere. www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/o...

Signed!

And then Trump said “oh that’s great, now I am happy, and I will certainly not come back with further demands” and they all lived happily ever after. www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

I sincerely think that universities should suspend their productivity standards for scientists and ask them instead to hold town halls in schools, public libraries, museums, shopping malls, and anywhere else and communicate what is being lost with the collapse of the research ecosystem.

We really don't spend enough time just stating that Trump hates good things. Green infrastructure and biking are among the best things in cities and only retrograde losers think otherwise.

Again, Jews were less than 1% of the German population in 1933.

How will academia respond to the attacks from Washington?

Like so many people touched by him, I am at an utter loss for what to say about the passing of Professor Michael Burawoy, but wrote up some memories anyway: alexvbarnard.org/2025/02/05/m...

Wow, who would have thought universities collecting the names of students engaged in peaceful protests, and publicizing them via disciplinary proceses, the spring before a potential takeover by a malevolent presidential administration, would turn out badly. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

The way that university officials have begun to treat “peaceful” and “disruptive” as antonyms, when they in fact are not antonyms, is the kind of violence to language that one expects of authoritarians

Very excited that #Conservatorship won the 2024 Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the Medical Sociology Section! Would be thrilled to share my work at your colloquium / medical sociology class / garden party in the next year!

Very excited for this virtual joint presentation on Friday at 3:00 p.m. with @NeilMGong on "Fixing Public Psychiatric Care" through the Problem-Solving Sociology Workshop. All our welcome, zoom link available here: sites.google.com/view/problem...

The great @avbsoc.bsky.social just gave a terrific talk on his crucial new book. cup.columbia.edu/book/conserv... Anyone interested in social policy, health, medicine, law, poverty, and the state would benefit from his work.

"The state needs to end its hands-off approach and set clear guidelines so new beds are allocated to the neediest clients, not those from counties that pay more." @avbsoc.bsky.social

One of my fave conversations I've had about #Conservatorship. Appreciate the chance to get beyond the rhetoric and to hear Keris' thoughts on Qs like "What does service resistance mean?" and "how do we respond to the reality of people with SM dying on the streets?" podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Governor Newsom has signed #SB43, a risky experiment in expanding forced treatment in a moment where the need for change seems desperate. Re-upping my take on how to make the reform effective and accountable, and minimize civil rights restrictions: www.latimes.com/opinion/stor...

"We must make governments accountable for helping people." It's both true that CARE courts' main impact might be forcing government to serve needy people, and also totally bizarre that in the U.S. we need courts to make public services serve the public. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/comm...

A new #Conservatorship thread: ERs   (As a reminder, you can still use the code CUP20 to get 20% off my book direct from the publisher. Boo Amazon!)   cup.columbia.edu/book/conserv...

Hello world! Excited that my book, #Conservatorship, is available from Columbia University Press. It examines how California manages to both subject people with mental illness to repeated involuntary care - yet ultimately leave them abandoned on the streets. cup.columbia.edu/book/conserv...