part of the reason people don't want the history of this period taught or understood is to make this illegible to people. it's easy to swallow thought ending cliches about which venerated figure was a "man of their times" if you remain studiously unaware of what their times actually were

“Here’s the ballot in plain English: If you’re wealthy, the state promises to protect your fortune forever. If you’re poor and unlucky enough to be accused of a crime, the state promises to protect the public from you (whether or not you’ve been convicted).” thebarbedwire.com/2025/10/07/t...

Keep talking to people who aren't already hallucinating with the fascists. Keep noticing that what they say isn't what is real. It's difficult to maintain independence of thought, they know that. Find people who think outside of the fascists' propaganda.

Universities considering capitulating to the Trump “conditions” should use this real world example to understand they will simply be destroying their own institution. bsky.app/profile/nich...

If administrators can dictate what professors teach in the classroom, based on their idea of what politicians want, there is *already* no "academic freedom." The violation of that boundary ended it. There is only whatever politicians haven't yet thought to denounce, and only until they denounce it.

This is the study that the Trump administration removed from all government websites this week. It analyzed hundreds of ideologically motivated attacks over the past 35 years and found that the majority of attacks are committed by far-right extremists. web.archive.org/web/20250911...

2) Insisting that colleges only protect free speech if a privately funded org that has no direct role in university governance says they do is a strange way to promote free expression and intellectual diversity. 2/

"you are the ones with the most to lose. My colleagues & I may have to leave this cherished institution & that would be a great loss for us. But we have already lived lives of consequence and can find other pursuits. You, however, would lose the education you deserve." 🔥 thebatt.com/news/anonymo...

IT IS TIME.

Our first article in 3.2 is Ryan Cheek and Isidore Dorpenyo’s "Deny, Defend, Depose: Structuring Permission for Bureaucratic Indifference, Slow (Civic) Violence, and the Institutional Betrayal of DEI.” They explore how DDD functions rhetorically amidst increasing legislative attacks on DEI work. 1/2

The TCSJ special issue co-editors have written a dedication for Kymberly, with a statement from the UMass Amherst Composition and Rhetoric program, where Morquecho was to begin her PhD program this fall. Read the dedication here: techcommsocialjustice.org/index.php/tc... 2/2

We are thrilled to share Vol. 3, Issue 2! Contributors include R.J. Lambert, Randall W. Monty, Kymberly Morquecho, Sarah Warren-Riley (Eds.), Ryan Cheek, Isidore Dorpenyo, Sara DiCaglio, Nick Sanders, S. Marek Muller, David Rooney, Sarah Riddick, Elena Kalodner-Martin, and Courtney Fallon.

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...

That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year.

If professors can be fired for discussing topics not explicitly mentioned in the course description and/or not toeing the ideological line of elected political leaders, there is no academic freedom in Texas.

researchers are where the content comes from; it doesn't grow on the Wikipedia tree

"school shooting industry"

I don't want to start a thing so I'll just say that there will never be a good argument for privatizing USPS. That would be like privatizing libraries. The aim of services isn't to be run for profit, they are for serving the greater good, which USPS has been extremely successful at.

It's seven years since we posted on Twitter about how kids kept coming into the library asking if we had any books about FORTNITE. We didn't back then, and we'd never heard of it so we tried asking what it was.

“He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.” —Declaration of Independence, 1776

Our comment on the DOE CWG report is done. It tips the scales at 439 pages, approx. 3x longer than the DOE report. This is related to Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. Example: refuting one sentence.

'blue states closed too early' is said by the same people who are working to close public schools, so you know it's not that they care about children's education.

“But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

Autocrats "rule by law"--twist the law to their advantage--instead of following the "rule of law," which binds them: www.propublica.org/article/texa...

The assertion of technology “rights” and the systematic removal of human rights are part of the same fascist project.

🎯

the dream of not having to think is powerful though rarely articulated and it governs a lot of people’s overt hierarchies of disciplinary knowledge and of public intellectual. If thinking is not over quickly, it must not be a very serious discipline

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The GOP spent at least 24 years working the refs saying that Dems, esp. a Black Dem president, was hurtling us toward left-wing authoritarianism that few were willing to acknowledge that they were laying the foundations for a racist, Christian nationalist, right-wing fascism.

Last Book: The Minotaur of Calle Lanza by Zito Madu Current Read: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild Last Added to TBR: Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello Next: Luster by Raven Leilani

“accurately describing current events makes me uncomfortable” is a real problem people are just gonna have to get over

Schrödinger's humanities: Simultaneously moribund and dying in a world in which students increasingly only want to major in STEM and business, and also so powerful that they can inculcate dangerous, subversive ideologies like gender theory and post-colonialism in impressionable young people.

This moment is *not* about the question "do you think things have gotten too woke in the last ten years?" It's about the questions "do you believe in independent research under conditions of academic freedom? Do you believe in civil society and intermediate associations free of political control?

I’ve seen a huge uptick in students migrating to Linux the last couple years because of the ways Microsoft has started integrating AI into Windows. And I teach *English majors.*

The adamant elite refusal to call bullshit is a big part of How We Got Here. The prevailing cultural attitude for years is you must not, under any circumstances, treat anything as bad faith. You are obligated to find some reasonable idea and engage with that, even if you distort to get there.

Other parallels: attacks on women's health and trans rights, defunding public schools, and the W. admin's pretext for invading the Middle East.

every moral panic about communication tech since ancient Greek freakouts over the invention of writing has been correct in some important way

‘We had the same moral panic about TV’ is a common refrain when people bring up social media, but like, in terms of social-political impacts, it’s hard to not see the ‘moral panic’ about TV as at least partially vindicated! A reality TV star is president! He’s filling his admin with Fox News hosts!

You don’t see the payments to influencers by politicians. You don’t see the talking points circulated in messaging groups that very much exist and manipulate platforms and policies. You can’t FOIA for that. Don’t mistake the absence of information for nothing to hide.

every band that forms in a small town puts out a debut album where the theme is “please god get me out of here”

If you think cuts to funding science is somehow caught up in the “culture wars that have nothing to do with science,” you are missing the point. The entire project of education as a public good is under threat, and a threat to one university is a threat to all. We have to stand together #UCLAResist

Dance-punk research getting flagged.

That “may” in the headline is hilariously bad. Cementing rich white rule is (and has long been) the point of most GOP policy and that is definitely the case for selective admissions.

Group 1: trying to cheat so they can win Group 2: quits the field, so game ends and they can't cheat to win Group 1: they're cheating! Punish the cheaters!

most people want a quick and simple answer to why AI systems encode/exacerbate societal and historical bias/injustice and due to the reductive but common thinking of "bias in, bias out," the obvious culprit often is training data but this is not entirely true 1/

Reminder that Congress is out of session and it is the perfect time to look up when your members will be near you and tell them in person how you are affected by all this fuckery. Try to think of one specific ask -- stop funding genocide, stop tariffs, whatever you feel most strongly about.

Re Boomers: "generation of reactionaries, neo-fascists, would-be authoritarians, and crack-pot science-conspiracy theorists who have grown up in the most peaceful, prosperous, and healthy age in human history undo some of the most magnanimous things humans have ever done for one another"