Whelp, given the news that Columbia University has also surrendered to Trump's fascist demands to avoid retaliatory (and likely illegal) funding cuts, I guess this Vichy establishment thing is a whole ass beat now. Hiding behind the laughably dishonest idea of fighting a grossly distorted definition of "antisemitism" the regime is moving towards the standard authoritarian goal of controlling higher education institutes; it's first target, Columbia, has surrendered without offering even token resistance and as you can imagine, the decision was not popular with people who aren't sniveling collaborators:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-columbia-demands

'Columbia Has Lost Something It May Never Regain': Outrage as the University Yields to Trump's Demands

"Columbia University received a wave of criticism on Friday after it agreed to a number of demands from the Trump administration as part of negotiations over $400 million in federal grants and contracts that the Trump administration had pulled due to the school's alleged "inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students."

The school agreed to a ban on masks and to appoint a senior vice provost with broad power to oversee both the department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studied and the school's Center for Palestine Studies, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Also, Columbia has hired over 30 "special officers" who will have the ability to remove individuals from campus and arrest them, per the memo from the school announcing the update."

Although this article is short, and mostly focuses on (wholly deserved) criticism of Columbia University for caving completely to fascist intimidation, there's actually a lot to unpack about the larger situation here:

- as in the case of the Paul Weiss capitulation story, the greater evil here remains a fascist Trump regime engaging in what amounts to extortion, to further its attacks on protesters, civil rights activists, and higher education in America.

- while on the surface Columbia's concessions to the regime may appear small, they foundationally attack free speech rights on campus, and the academic freedom of the institute, to the point that I'm not even sure you can still call Columbia a university now. Allowing a Trump regime that defines opposing genocide as antisemitism, protest as terrorism, and criticizing the US government as a threat to national security, to influence a department's curriculum, helping it to identify students engaged in constitutionally-protected protests, and literally embedding a small police department's worth of goon squad murderpigs inside the facilities to more expediently violate the rights of protestors, are each in and of themselves damning examples of fascist collaboration that fundamentally invalidate everything Columbia claims it stands for.

- as I've mentioned elsewhere, it's important to understand that "Trump is not threatening to jail or deport anyone running these big law firms and prestigious universities. He's threatening them with funding cuts, lack of access to federal contracts, and harassment investigations." This in turn means that by collaborating with the Trump regime (based on fascist word games and lies that, by capitulating, Columbia itself is helping to transform into enforced reality) the administrators running Columbia, just like the law firm Paul Weiss above, are effectively declaring that there is a monetary cost above which they will happily collaborate with fascism to actively harm their own students and our larger society.

- I realize that $400M in government funding is a lot of money, but we're talking about a university with a $14.8B (with a b) endowment, and one of the wealthiest alumni and donor bases in America. I don't find the senior administrator quoted in this story's excuse that "the federal government had too many ways to take back money from the university" credible, and even if I did you're still saying there's a price point where you'll normalize authoritarianism and support the activates of a fascist regime against your own students. If the price of keeping grand ole Columbia in a "recognizable form" is helping a fascist government install a fascist dictatorship that *will* end in mass graves, then that price is too damn high.

- they literally didn't even *try* to take the Trump regime to court over this.

- since there was no court case, and no legal settlement, the Trump regime is not bound by anyone to cease its attacks on Columbia, or barred from issuing further demands. If tomorrow, Trump decides that the University has to open up a phrenology department, devote its resources to investigating "anti-white racism" on campus, and let one of Elon Musk's DOGE minions run all of its scientific research, he can simply threaten Columbia's funding again to get what he wants. The university now works for Trump; even if they don't realize it yet.

#Trump #Fascism #Columbia #Education #CivilRights

It should also be noted that the details above, do not reflect the full scope of the University of Columbia's capitulation to the Trump regime. As this March 14th, 2025 explainer from Al Jazeera notes, the University already announced it had targeted a number of students who participated in the occupation of Hamilton Hall as part of campus-wide anti-genocide protests for suspension, expulsion, or revoked their degrees:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/14/columbia-expels-suspends-students-after-government-threats-what-we-know

Columbia expels, suspends students after government threats: What we know

"Then, on Thursday, Columbia announced that students involved in last year’s Hamilton Hall protest have received multiple-year suspensions or outright expulsions following the university’s investigations. The months-long process was carried out by the school’s University Judicial Board, and included hearings for each student involved.

“Columbia is committed to enforcing the University’s Rules and Policies and improving our disciplinary processes,” the university said.

Others who have since graduated will have their degrees revoked, it added. The names and precise number of students sanctioned by the judicial board were not revealed.

According to The Associated Press news agency, several other students have been notified by university officials that they are also under investigation for sharing social media posts in support of Palestinian people or joining “unauthorised” protests."

Although the precise number of students targeted for reprisal was unknown at the time of publication, other sources have since reported that 22 students or former students were affected; including Grant Miner, president of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) union, who was set to begin negotiations between SWC and Columbia and present demands to protect international and undocumented student workers, the very next day.

Finally, while apologists have pointed out that the disciplinary process behind Columbia's reprisals had been conducted over the course of the prior year, I personally think that excuse falls flat. Der Führer himself threatened that "American students will be permanently expelled, or depending on the crime, arrested" in a proclamation on Truth Social clearly targeting anti-genocide campus protestors; three days later the Trump regime issued its demands to Columbia, and three days after that ICE kidnapped former Columbia student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil while university officials, who had been warned by Khalil that the Trump regime was targeting him, stood by and did nothing. Furthermore, given that until now the disciplinary body investigating student protestors at Columbia had only issued suspensions, I don't think you need to be Columbo to connect the dots and realize this is all part of the same surrender to and collaboration with fascism by the university here.

#Fascism #Trump #Education #ColumbiaUniversity #AntiGenocideProtests #SWC #MahmoudKhalil #GrantMiner #HamiltonHall

Of course, all of this still leaves the question of does Columbia actually "stand for" anything at all? This is after all the university that unleashed police violence against protestors on its own campus, punished professors who took a stand against genocide, and banned student groups protesting Israel's crimes against humanity in Gaza and the US government that underwrote them, long before Trump took office. There is a strong pro-Zionist bent to much of the school's administration, and at least one large alumni group celebrated Trump's original funding cuts. Although it's a little older now, and Columbia has since surrendered to Trump's control whether they realize it or not, this March 8th piece by Columbia alum Natasha Leonard, writing in the Intercept sums up a lot of the ways the university was already enacting a pro-genocide agenda that isn't all that different from Trump's.

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/08/columbia-trump-funding-gaza-israel/

Columbia Bent Over Backward to Appease Right-Wing, Pro-Israel Attacks — And Trump Still Cut Federal Funding

"Antisemitism is no doubt a legitimate concern in a country led by antisemites; the Trump administration and pro-Israel organizations’ concerns are anything but legitimate. So far, Columbia’s purported crackdown on antisemitism has included anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic repression, the consistent conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and a willingness to only prioritize the concerns of certain Jewish voices, while silencing the dissent of the dozens of anti-Zionist Jews on campus.

“This is not about antisemitism. It is about crushing dissent,” said Reinhold Martin, a Columbia historian of architecture and president of the university’s American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, chapter. “And for those who take the Trump administration’s actions at face value, remember Charlottesville.”

Martin was referring, of course, to the 2017 white supremacist gathering, where neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a fascist murdered an antifascist counter-protester with his car, and Trump responded by calling participants “some very fine people.”

I chose this article in part because Leonard offers a Jewish perspective on the weaponization of antisemitism, by a regime full of confirmed antisemites, to support Israel's genocide in Gaza, while attacking academic freedom, protest rights, and the ability of international students legally studying in the United States to criticize the regime; her perspective is one the regime would prefer you not even know exists. The piece also offers a pretty good catalogue of the ways Columbia was already willing to violate the rights of its students, including but not limited to, unleashing horrifying police violence on entirely non-violent protestors occupying a building on campus. Crucially, Leonard also offers a structural critique about why the modern neoliberal university, and Columbia in particular, is ideologically more aligned with, and thus more susceptible to being control by a fascist regime like Trump's, than US universities have been in the past. It's a great article, and you really should read it all.

Finally of course, the overarching content of Leonard's piece proves two points about Columbia's capitulation that I mentioned in this thread already; that the university could have fought back, it just didn't want to, and that appeasing the fascist Trump regime now won't stop them from demanding more later, just as appeasing GOP inquisitors on the hill, and a Biden administration funding and supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza was no guarantee Trump wouldn't seek to destroy or take control of Columbia in the future, as he has now indeed done. If they didn't have to surrender, and capitulating isn't guaranteed to stop the fascist assault on the university anyway, you have to at least wonder if a university administration that's largely pro-Zionist, and wholly contemptuous of both its staff, and students, simply wanted to do so for ideological reasons.

Well, this one hits closer to home than I'd like. The University of Michigan has become the latest extremely wealthy ($19.2B endowment as of June 30, 2024) US higher education institute to capitulate to Trump, and in doing so further the regime's efforts to enforce a white supremacist worldview on education in America.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/28/university-michigan-ends-dei-program

University of Michigan shutters its flagship diversity program

“The federal government is determined to dismantle and control higher education and to make our institutions more uniform, more inequitable, and more exclusive,” Rebekah Modrak, the chair of the faculty senate, wrote in an email to colleagues about the decision, according to the Detroit Free Press. “They are using the power of the government to engineer a sweeping culture change towards white supremacy. Unfortunately, University of Michigan leaders seem determined to comply and to collaborate in our own destruction.”

As someone intimately familiar with how UM operates, the administrator's decision to surrender completely in the face of Trump's threats to cut all federal funding is hardly surprising; although it is extremely disappointing. Michigan is in many ways the perfect model of the neoliberal (capitalist) university; it receives over a billion dollars a year in federal research funding, and the school had already cut back on its diversity initiatives in admissions and hiring in response to a 6-3 fascist high SCOTUS striking down Affirmative Action. As in the case with Columbia, I am fairly certain the school's wealthy alumni base, access to some of the finest lawyers in America, and massive endowment would have allowed it to fight Trump's extortion in court; and that decision would be largely supported by students, faculty, and even the (Democrat controlled) state government. Despite this, a conflict-adverse administration that has transformed UM into a money printing machine over the past couple of decades in particular, was never going to risk perhaps billions of dollars in funding; even if it means capitulating to fascism. While some may be inclined to forgive Michigan's leadership for their cowardice given those stakes, I will once again remind folks that if you don't stand for opposing extortion, fascism, and white supremacy, why should anyone believe you stand for anything at all?

Worse still, is that Michigan's rational for groveling before Trump's white nationalist agenda tries to have it both ways, while (not so) subtly reinforcing white supremacist propaganda and world views. The university touts the groundbreaking success of its expansive DEI programs; while simultaneously pretending they're unconcerned with ending these programs because racism is over or something, I guess. The administration also points to the myriad of fascist executive orders and threats issued by the Trump regime, but then offers up the excuse that "some in our campus community have voiced frustration that they did not feel included in DEI initiatives and that the programming fell short in fostering connections among diverse groups" - as if Trump's orders and Michigan's actions have anything at all to do with "fostering connections among diverse groups" or helping people the DEI initiative wasn't helping enough. Finally the UM administration promises to continue to foster "multiculturalism" and states it remains "steadfast in our dedication to academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of expression" - as if Trump can't threaten Michigan's funding again to cancel programs that foster "multiculturalism" (another word fascists use instead of slurs), or terms like "academic freedom" mean anything in light of the Faustian (non) bargain the University has struck here.

The sad truth here is that out of nothing more than greed and cowardice, the University of Michigan has given Downmarket Mussolini and his white nationalist agenda a victory that will ring across the nation. The UM DEI program was expanded in part to counteract the rise of white nationalist politics during the first Trump presidency, it was a highly successful endeavor that was considered a model for other schools to copy nationally, and Michigan's commitment to diversity programs was genuine. If a northern liberal school with more money than god and every reason to fight back, won't take on the Trump regime's fascist agenda, who else is going to have the courage to do so?

#Fascism #Trump #Education #UniversityOfMichigan #UM #DEI #WhiteNationalism #PorkReich #WhiteSupremacy #Collaboration #VichyEstablishment #Capitalism

And another white shoe DC law firm decides to capitulate to fascism rather than fight; even as their colleagues at other firms are successfully getting restraining orders to block Trump's strongarm tactics. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom (typically shortened to just "Skadden") joins the firm Paul Weiss on the wall of infamy and cowardice, with a "deal" that's even more collaborationist with, again - fascists and a fascist agenda.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/skadden-arps-deal-trump

'Pathetic': Elite Law Firm Blasted for Striking Deal With Trump Administration

"The firm has agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono legal services to the federal government during his administration "and beyond," according to a Truth Social post from U.S. President Donald Trump. Also, the "firm will not engage in illegal" diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) "discrimination and preferences," according to the post, which also noted that the firm proactively reached out to the administration about an agreement.

Speaking at the White House on Friday, Trump called the deal "essentially a settlement," according to Reuters.

"Pathetic when the richest and most powerful lawyers in America won't stand up for the profession that made them rich and powerful," wrote U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) on X on Friday, reacting to earlier reporting that the firm was in discussions with the White House over a deal."

In addition to the $100M of pro bono work for the Trump regime, other outlets are reporting that Skadden has promised to offer fellowships to "conservative" (so, fascist, because conservative means fascist in this political environment) law graduates, and take cases for conservative causes - which I think we can safely parse to mean things like "reverse racism" lawsuits, and anti-gender discrimination cases that involve "protecting women" by persecuting trans women. Did I mention that Skadden took these steps preemptively, as in before Trump even issued an executive order targeting them?

As in the case of Paul Weiss, and various wealthy Universities in America, the simple truth is that these folks are choosing to actively collaborate with fascists, and reinforcing the twisted unreality imposed by a fascist regime, for nothing more than money. We have a term for people who help fascists, do fascism, for money - it's fascist collaborator, or simply just "fascist." Like all the others, Skadden thinks they're striking a deal to stop Der Führer's assault on their very lucrative enterprise; and like the others, they'll soon discover that they work for Trump now, and there's no amount of appeasement that will change that.

#Fascism #Trump #BigLaw #Skadden #Collaboration #VichyEstablishment #Courts #Law

If you're wondering why the pundit class and the mainstream media organizations that employ them have been so tepid in their criticism of Trump, so unwilling to name the fascist beast and draw the logical conclusions the regime's actions imply, perhaps it's because they know they've been complicit in this fascist nightmare? As Joan Westenberg notes in this brilliant March 15th drag out piece, the normalization of the fascist ideology the Trump regime is running on now has many fathers in American society, and not all of them are folks who'd want to be known as supporters of MAGA fascism; but that's precisely the role they've served, for personal gain:

https://www.theindex.media/the-pundit-class-played-devils-advocate-now-the-devils-at-the-door/

The Pundit Class Played Devil’s Advocate. Now the Devil’s at the Door.

"A revolving door of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post columnists made a career of platforming people who—either blatantly or through implication—argued that transgender people shouldn't exist. That democracy had "gone too far." They raged against "wokeism" because they couldn’t conceive of a world where it wouldn’t prevail. They bemoaned "cancel culture" not because they cared about free speech, but because they mistakenly believed the right-wing ideologues they dined with had been cast out for good.

In their intellectual stupor, they decided that the forces of social change were so overpowering and unstoppable that the world needed a voice to speak up against them in an infernal balancing act. And it felt daring, didn't it? To be the literary equivalent of the Cool Girl—not like those Other Girls who care about freedom, equity, history, and common sense.

They dressed themselves up as the beatniks of cultural commentary. They convinced themselves of their "underground" status. They basked in institutional protection, indulging in a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of mock dissent where the stakes were always someone else's problem. They positioned themselves as lone voices against an imagined tide of unthinking dogma, pretending that they were fighting against orthodoxy when, in reality, they were just reinforcing the status quo with a hipster filter. They weren't holding truth to power. They were selling a brand: rebellion without responsibility, provocation without principle, and the posture of dissent with none of the burden of consequence.

They dined on the aesthetic of courage without ever taking a risk. And why not? The market for disaffected liberals playing footsie with fascists was lucrative and full of opportunities for highbrow grift."

#Fascism #Trump #Media #NYT #WaPo #WSJ #Collaboration #Transphobia #MigrantRights #Normalization #Propaganda #Complicity #MAGA #PorkReich