This is the only rapture I recognize (and Blondie of course)

Restricting visas doesn’t lead to hiring non-immigrants—it leads to hiring foreigners. For every H-1B visa rejection, multinationals add ~0.4–0.9 foreign employees, especially in R&D hubs like India, China, and Canada. via @florianederer.bsky.social

populism, as we understand it in the present era is a kind of post-materialism; it rests on a taken-for-granted assumption that basic problems of order are in hand, that progress cannot unravel no matter what we do, and that we can all therefore act out like children

Wrote about how California needs to get serious about the urban disorder our failure to build housing has created.

Just imagine having your 4th and 1st amendment rights taken away and cheering it.

These guys have really been playing the long game. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/w...

There’s competition, I know. But threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of the affiliates of an entire “big-3” television network unless they stop their evening talk show host from criticizing the president has to be one of the biggest First Amendment violations in U.S. history.

Random, but if you ever get a chance to see SG Goodman live jump on it.

The first thing conservatives should do if they want young conservatives to go into academia is stop calling professors “the enemies of America.” The second thing they should do is stop making working conditions worse for professors.

If you're around APSA later this afternoon, I'll be presenting on a Politics of Administrative Burden panel at 4, along with @jaeyeonkim.bsky.social. My paper introduces new measures of administrative burden associated with accessing abortion in the patchwork landscape of abortion laws. Swing by!

Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. Mark Twain

What if ICE is standing around outside the polls arresting people off the street in heavily Latino areas? What if the National Guard are deployed outside the polls in heavily Black areas?

Yesterday I posted my op-ed in the Inquirer (gift link: share.inquirer.com/M8nPzg) Today I want to highlight all the other excellent op-eds - anyone engaged with higher education should want to read these. If you go to any one article in the collection, you'll get this box with all of them:

I recently drove across the country and listened to the entire Rolling Stones discography in order (I’ve listened to all of these albums many times but never like this 😁). Here is the top 20. Worst album (by far): Dirty Work. The lesson: even if you’ve hit rock bottom in your job you can improve. 😂

New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

This was taken on a very pleasant evening in Des Moines, Iowa. The Philly people would be so mad if they knew about this.

Firing apolitical and independent military and intelligence leaders, taking personal control of federal law enforcement and expanding its role, launching show investigations to intimidate critics and opponents—I dunno, seems like these actions aren’t just wacky but kind of fit together in a pattern?

How does this in itself not cause a recession, let alone the tariffs. bsky.app/profile/mccr...

Brain drain is bad. Cc: United States

The reason why fundraising text read like scams is because they are. The political fundraising system has imported the tactics of elder financial fraud. These tactics are designed to filter out skeptics and specifically target and exploit seniors. 95% of scam PAC donors are 65+, costing > $500m.

How is the president seeing "dollar signs" and using the money for his pet programs a legal predicate for punishing universities? If Joe Biden "saw dollars signs" in car dealerships and demanded that they pay fines to fund green energy programs, would the Times cover it this way?

A study in Poland found that doctors appeared less likely to detect abnormalities during colonoscopies on their own after they'd grown used to help from an AI tool.

People are STILL minimizing b/c the worst hasn't happened. Sure, DC now has military checkpoints, but isn't crime bad there? Sure, people are being dragged away by goon squads, but aren't they mostly illegal? Sure, universities and the media are being strong-armed, but aren't they too liberal?

“We all know what’s coming. Trump is experimenting with using military force to occupy cities. He has said—explicitly—that he intends to expand this program from Washington to other cities. He will attempt to use these tactics to manipulate the 2026 elections.” www.thebulwark.com/p/a-modest-p...

Police state alert 🚨

And foreign students subsidize domestic students by paying full tuition.

One of the ironies of history is that Trump actually deserves a lot of credit for operation warpspeed and now his party is run by anti-vaxxers and the one objectively excellent thing he did he doesn’t even claim.

I’ve been recommending this for decades in intro to American.

My friend asked what is the probability that Alaska ends up as a Russian province by the end of this? Not zero.

Good point. And if universities are anti-Semitic we have civil rights laws to handle this very possibly. There is absolutely no need or justification for extra legal “deals“ with universities.

This was a fringe idea a couple of years ago, pushed by DeSantis and conservative lawyers, and now it is a key argument for government censorship of campus speech.

Border Patrol agents assembled outside a Los Angeles museum where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a rally and news conference on congressional redistricting. Local elected officials expressed outrage that the agents decided to stand there in a brazen show of force. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/u...

This is the only take. Hoping the Republicans who believe in democratic norms would take back the party hasn’t worked.

I don’t think the humanities are researching or doing the gender-affirming surgeries. Sorry pal, we are all in this together.

The problem with this analysis is that it seeks to interpret what Trump’s authoritarian takeover of DC means to _him_, but barely touches on what will it mean for the residents of the city or for our democracy when a president invokes faux emergencies to claim power. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/u...

Of all the American institutions that are failing in this moment the Republican Party deserves the most blame, but the media is probably a close second. Still covering Trump 2 as if it is normal politics is very dangerous.

To Mao, countryside has restorative benefits for city dwellers www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/u...

Looking forward to President AOC forcing Baylor and BYU to pay $500 million to reproductive health programs to continue to be eligible for federal grants. Even if you hate “woke libs” if you can’t see why this type of stuff is very bad I don’t know what to tell you.

Do you think she will be featured in the next Harvard alumni magazine? www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...

I’ve been writing about the politics and impact of Donald Trump on the US and world, with special attention to Europe and the University of Michigan, and most of it is free to read. This thread, in order, brings it all together. I hope it’s useful as a resource on the different issues.

The fact that universities might agree to make “deals” with the administration doesn’t make these arrangements legal. If I go outside and someone pulls out a gun and asks for my wallet I’ll probably give it to them!

Withholding the funded and approved grants is illegal as is the attempt to get the university to pay an amount that was made up completely out of thin air to restore the illegally withheld funding. None of this is the least bit debatable. Do better New York Times.

Not sure why what “Trump wants” should be a criteria for agreements with universities. He is acting outside of any legal constraints and his demands are increasingly reminding me of “Dr. Evil” from the Austin Powers films.

Rather than parroting Trump’s language—although I’m not sure that he has used the “cathedrals of liberalism” language, which, as somebody noted in the responses, evokes Curtis Yarvin—it is the job of the Times to scrutinize its efforts to destroy higher education without any legal predicate.

The mafia state

Total 🦗 from the “socialism” crowd that spent the last 50 years accusing <checks notes> the Democrats of not respecting private property, free markets, limited government, the Marketplace Of Ideas, & the very sacred institution of Capitalism.

Casual misogyny and misandry is everywhere on social media. It’s truly insane the ideas that people have and will openly express about massive, heterogeneous groups of people. And it’s not all young people.