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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The ruin of institutions [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-01
We begin today with Ian Bogost of The Atlantic writing that the Trump Administration’s moves against America’s colleges and universities will change the college experience as many of us have known it.
But college life as we know it may soon come to an end. Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future. [...] ...Yes, academic freedom is at stake, along with scientific progress. But the government’s attacks also threaten something far more tangible to future college students and their parents. The entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools—the brochure-ready college life that you may once have experienced yourself, and to which your children may aspire—is itself at risk of ruination. Few administrators have talked about this risk in public, but they take a different tone in private as they try to figure out how broken budgets can be fixed. I’ve spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.
Coral Davenport of The New York Times reports that Musk and his minions now have access to a payroll system for federal employees.
The move overruled objections from senior IT staff who feared it could compromise highly sensitive government personnel information, including by making it more vulnerable to terrorist cyberattacks, these people said. By accessing the system, which is housed at the Interior Department, the DOGE workers now have visibility into sensitive employee information, such as Social Security numbers, and the ability to more easily hire and fire workers, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. The DOGE workers had tried for about two weeks to obtain administrative access to the program, known as the Federal Personnel and Payroll System, the two people said. The dispute came to a head on Saturday, as the DOGE workers obtained the access and then placed two of the IT officials who had resisted them on administrative leave and under investigation, the people said.
Chris Geidner of LawDork reports that a federal judge has declared that the Alabama Attorney General’s threats to prosecute those who seek out-ofstate abortions are unconstitutional.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s threats to prosecute abortion funds and other helping Alabamians to obtain abortions out of state are unconstitutional, a federal judge declared on Monday in a first-of-its-kind ruling. Marshall’s threats were unconstitutional on multiple grounds, including the right to travel and the First Amendment, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled in a 131-page opinion. The threatened prosecutions followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Shortly thereafter, as detailed by Thompson, Marshall “stated that his office would exercise its authority to prosecute violations of the 2019 abortion ban and Alabama’s conspiracy laws, which could include attempts to procure an out-of-state abortion.“ [...] After nearly two years of litigation — including a decision last year rejecting Marshall’s request to dismiss the challenges, which was covered at Law Dork — Thompson, a Carter appointee, issued a final judgment in the case on Monday...
Paul Krugman writes for his Substack about the delusions of business folk that the tacky shoe salesman was going to be good for business.
A few weeks ago Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator and a darling of the MAGA set, announced that he was imposing profit-margin caps — basically price controls — on groceries. I intended to write something about that as a warning that something similar might happen in the United States, that businesspeople were fools if they assumed that Donald Trump was on their side. Unfortunately, I never got around to writing that post. So I missed my chance to be prophetic, because it has already happened: Trump reportedly told auto executives sometime in March not to raise prices in response to tariffs. He denies that he said it, but the reporting looks solid. His headline-making assertion that he “couldn’t care less” about rising car prices seems to have been about imported autos, not domestic production. The reason I expected Trump to follow in Orban’s footsteps is that Trump, like Orban, clearly doesn’t have any fixed principles other than power and self-aggrandizement. Under Trump, policy won’t reflect any consistent ideology. It will, instead, change with his perception of personal advantage, his temper tantrums, his whims and his malignant narcisissim. If he doesn’t like rising prices, he’ll try to stop inflation through bullying. In short, MAGA will be very bad for business.
Rann Miller of Salon concludes that many white people may be willing to settle for a guarantee of white mediocrity.
The rationale of white people who’ve accepted privilege in exchange for power in solidarity, what W.E.B. DuBois coined the racial bribe — the deliberate and strategic method of the planter elite class to extend special privileges to poor whites to drive a wedge between them and enslaved African people — is that a Black person in a position of power and authority is unqualified. Specifically, it is the belief that affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are merely a euphemism, implying that a Black person, or a person of color, was hired for a position or selected to attend a prestigious institution solely to fulfill a quota. Rather than accept that affirmative action and DEI initiatives address the systemic racist practices and policies of the past that prevent African Americans and other historically oppressed and underrepresented groups from gaining access to positions they are qualified for, many white individuals believe that only they are capable of holding positions and occupying spaces of power, privilege and authority. What this scandal shows is that the practice of hiring unqualified and mediocre white people — and calling it making America great — can, and has, compromised national security. And yet, many white people are so convinced that Black people and other people of color are wholly unqualified to lead, specifically those who don’t think like or act like them. [...] The Trump administration's removal of all DEI initiatives through executive orders will undoubtedly keep people uninformed and restrict others from attaining positions and places of power and influence. But it’s important to understand that a driving reason for these executive orders is to appease the racism he has fomented among his voter base. The consequence of this is the perpetuation of white mediocrity.
What trips me all the way out is that I’d be the first to say that there are highly qualified white people that can hold those positions, of course. Racism isn’t MAGA’s only problem.
Jon Henley of the Guardian summarizes polling that indicates that Western Europeans favor retaliatory tariffs agains the United States.
The US president appears likely to unleash a range of tariffs, varying from country to country, on Wednesday, which he has called Liberation Day. He also said last week that a 25% levy on cars shipped to the US would come into force the next day. Many European firms are likely to be hit hard. Some, including Germany’s car manufacturers and France’s luxury goods firms and wine, champagne and spirits makers, rely on exports to the US for up to 20% of their income. The EU has already pledged a “timely, robust and calibrated” response to Washington’s plans, which experts predict are likely to depress output, drive up prices and fuel a trade war. Global markets and the dollar fell on Mondayafter Trump crushed hopes that what he calls “reciprocal tariffs” – arguing that trading partners are cheating the US – would only target countries with the largest trade imbalances. A YouGov survey carried out in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK found that if the US tariffs went ahead, large majorities – ranging from 79% of respondents in Denmark to 56% in Italy – favoured retaliatory levies on US imports.
Finally today, historian David Blight writes for The New York Times about the executive order that will, among other things, change the way that the Smithsonian Institution operates.
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