Since I’m today seeing some reasons for not being completely depressed about the future, locally and globally, some comments on the latest news.
The Columbia trustees announced today the appointment of Jennifer Mookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as the next president of Columbia. Given the past behavior of the trustees I had been pessimistic about who would want this job and who they would pick, but from all indications, Mookin seems like a good choice (there’s a statement from her here). I’m cautiously optimistic that she’s coming in with an agenda of turning away from the trustee’s policy over the last year of caving in to dictatorial illegality, repressing dissent and promoting bogus accusations of antisemitism in order to placate the Trump administration.
It will take quite a while to overcome the shameful reputation that Columbia has acquired due to the actions of the trustees. One early thing to watch for is whether Mnookin will maintain the current locked gate policy supposedly keeping us “safe”, or return to an open campus.
Less locally, more people are starting to realize that Yes, It’s Fascism. The people of Minneapolis are providing an inspirational example of what effective resistance to Fascism looks like. When you effectively challenge Fascists they start shooting you. Renee Good and Alex Pretti paid with their lives for their willingness to resist.
So far, it seems that these outrageous murders and the obvious lies about them in the face of overwhelming video evidence are having an effect. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post have editorials criticizing ICE and the Trump administration. Stephen Miller and the other Fascists now in control of the government are facing a decision: back down or keep going. If they continue what they are doing or double down, the resistance movement in Minneapolis will hopefully keep up the fight. Everyone should help with this in any way they can.
The situation has gotten so extreme that even Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have issued condemnatory statements. The only valid criticism that Trump and his people have been able to make about their latest murder victim is that he was guilty of bringing a gun to a protest, but this is just going to split their base in which gun fanatics are heavily represented.
The question now in the US is not whether we have a Fascist regime, but that of how successful it will be in burying democracy and defeating any opposition. One ongoing problem is that many influential groups in the US have found that they can get what they want by going along with Trump. Two examples are our new class of collaborationist oligarchs and those intensely devoted to the genocide in Gaza (Scott Aaronson explains here that Trump is still valuable and necessary to stop people from calling him “genocidal”).
The trustees of Columbia last year decided that the right thing to do when confronted by Fascist power and those collaborating with it was to give in and leave resistance to others (e.g. Harvard). All institutions in the US and elsewhere need to step up now and resist Fascism as much as they can. Perhaps naively, I’m hoping that my institution is now turning towards that path.
That you could read an entire post I wrote devoted to condemning Trump’s recent thuggery in Minneapolis, and take away as your sole summary that I find Trump “still valuable and necessary,” shows that you’ve fully descended to being a propagandist and a hack, if you were ever in life anything more than that. An honest takeaway would be that I’m still perfectly able to condemn fascist thugs for their thuggery, indeed to call for those thugs to be disempowered, prosecuted, and imprisoned—to call for this more publicly and vehemently than the vast majority of my colleagues, and at some risk to myself—even when the thugs in question are nearly the only ones standing between me and the other thugs who chant for my family to be killed. For you to see how far out on a limb I’ve gone for my principles here, would take a leap of moral imagination beyond what you’re capable of.
Scott,
I’m an optimist that the Columbia trustees might be starting to realize what a mistake they made last March, maybe someday you’ll realize that promoting and defending the Fascist assault that they caved in to was a mistake. Sorry to see that today is not that day.
Your idea that Trump’s Fascist thugs are the only thing standing between you and people who want your family killed is, quite literally, insane. Again, you really should seek mental health counseling about this.