Harvard to Donny: fuck straight off with your fascism

go peddle that shit elsewhere

courage is in short supply these days, so let’s celebrate it when it happens.

Donny Convict has been going hog wild with his Full-Blown Fascism Tour — shredding constitutional rights, ignoring court orders, and generally shitting every democratic principle we hold dear.

a big part of Donny’s crime spree has been bullying universities — vowing to cut their funding unless they agree to do fun things like crush freedom of speech, and allow ‘outside observers’ to make sure that ‘subversive’ ideas aren’t being taught.

university after university has folded under Donny’s threats — which is why it’s super fucking satisfying to see that Harvard has responded to Donny by saying ‘go peddle that shit elsewhere. we’re not complying.’

here’s the crap Donny wanted Harvard to agree to.

The Trump regime threatened to revoke $256 million in federal contracts and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as multiyear grant commitments unless Harvard agreed to “reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is ‘viewpoint diverse,’” among other steps.

isn’t that perfectly Orwellian, “viewpoint diverse”? because the actual goal is the opposite — to ensure that only white supremacist ideologies are taught. and how fucking un-American is it to have government-approved overseers all up in every professor’s shit?

in response, Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, served up a heaping dose of yeah, no, fuck off.

“no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

thank you, Dr. Garber. there’s been so much capitulation going on lately, we’d almost forgotten what taking a principled stand looks like.

you know who’s a lot better than I am at this let’s-put-words-together-and-make-them-inspirational thing? Barack Obama.

“Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.”

and do you know who else took over their nation’s colleges and retooled them to fit their own master-race ideology? of course you do.

The Nazi government’s project of remaking German universities was broadly successful, but it produced unintended consequences. The quality of education suffered significantly as classes were regularly cancelled for political assemblies and students' schedules became filled with ideological and paramilitary training.

the Nazi’s grand experiment in bullying their universities was a fucking disaster, because of course it was. any educator who had the means to, emigrated to the US and elsewhere. the quality of education in Germany tanked.

oh look, history is already repeating itself here.

Stanley said in an interview that Columbia University’s recent actions moved him to accept the offer. Last Friday, Columbia gave in to the Trump administration by agreeing to a series of demands in order to restore $400m in federal funding. These changes include crackdowns on protests, increased security power and “internal reviews” of some academic programs, like the Middle Eastern studies department.

weird how every fucked-up thing that Donny and his minions do, the Nazis did first. I can’t imagine where Team Donny might be getting their ideas, can you?

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here’s another profile in actual courage who we need to be celebrating.

while most Democratic elected officials have been content to merely post on social media about how! outraged! they! are! that Donny has disappeared an innocent person into a Salvadoran slave-labor gulag, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen is actually doing something about it.

In a statement on Monday, Van Hollen said if Abrego Garcia was not in the U.S. by “midweek,” he would “travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release.”

I keep saying this, but it’s true: courage can be contagious.

The idea gained support from several Democratic lawmakers, who said they would be willing to join Van Hollen on the trip.

“We must all stand as a united front against the kidnapping and illegal detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador,” progressive Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., said in a post to X, tagging Van Hollen. “Senator, I am willing to join you and help Organize other members of the House to do the same.”

Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., reshared Frost's post, writing that she was “ready to join” her colleagues in traveling to El Salvador to demand Abrego Garcia's release.

thank you, all. stay angry, and stay loud.

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here’s how you know Donny’s tariff policies are shit-the-bed-level disastrous: even the most MAGA-friendly Senators are beginning to back the fuck away.

check out Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, on Jake Tapper’s show yesterday.

Kennedy, you’ll recall, is an actual Rhodes Scholar. he’s no dope, but he generally does this exaggerated Mushmouth McCornpone act where he pretends to be a moron in order to pander to the low-wattage dipshit who vote for him.

that’s why it’s fascinating to watch him drop the pretense and actually speak in coherent sentences, as he admits to be confounded by Donny’s tariff incoherence.

“here’s what I see. I see a lot of uncertainty. and I think to some extent, it’s intentional. if you listen to the president’s aides the weekend before last, and then listen to them this weekend, you don’t have to be Einstein’s cousin to figure out they were saying things that were inconsistent. now, that raises one of two possibilities to me. either it’s intentional, or these folks aren’t competent to manage a food truck. now, I know them. they’re intelligent people, whether you agree with them or not. so I think the administration, for whatever reason, is obfuscating a little bit. maybe it’s part of the president’s negotiating strategy. I just don’t know. I do know this: tariffs are important, but so are high prices. the trade balance in abstract. the price of eggs is concrete. and we need to be spending a lot of time on reconciliation, redesigning the tax code, deregulating the economy, and reducing spending to get prices down.”

Kennedy almost gets it, but then he has to spoil it at the end by dragging out a tired old wish-list of conservative economic fairy tales — because Republicans gonna Republican.

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hey, have you ever actually read the Declaration of Independence?

you know, the good old Dec of Ind, that document that Mad King Donny definitely hasn’t read — despite claiming to have the original hanging in the Oval Office.

here’s a fun excerpt from the colonists’ list of grievances against Mad King George:

hey, does any of that sound familiar to you?

can you fucking believe that almost 250 years later, we have to deal with this bullshit all over again?

credit: Jesse Duquette

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here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

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this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.