The World Turned Upside Down

Mar 31, 2025

Israel: The World's Most Psychopathic Family

When people show you who they are, believe them...

The Average College Student Today by Hilarius Bookbinder

I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.

First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.

As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.

Reading

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegan’s Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.

I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.

Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.

They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.

This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.

Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read.

Writing

Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: With the UGM its all about our journey in life, not the destination. He beleives we need to take time to enjoy the little things becuase life is short and you never gonna know what happens. Sometimes he contradicts himself cause sometimes you say one thing but then you think something else later. It’s all relative.

You probably think that’s satire. Either that, or it looks like this:

Exam question: Describe the attitude of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man towards acting in one’s own self-interest, and how this is connected to his concerns about free will. Are his views self-contradictory?

Student: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man paradoxically rejects the idea that people always act in their own self-interest, arguing instead that humans often behave irrationally to assert their free will. He criticizes rationalist philosophies like utilitarianism, which he sees as reducing individuals to predictable mechanisms, and insists that people may choose suffering just to prove their autonomy. However, his stance is self-contradictory—while he champions free will, he is paralyzed by inaction and self-loathing, trapped in a cycle of bitterness. Through this, Dostoevsky explores the tension between reason, free will, and self-interest, exposing the complexities of human motivation.

That’s right, ChatGPT. The students cheat. I’ve written about cheating in “Why AI is Destroying Academic Integrity,” so I won’t repeat it here, but the cheating tsunami has definitely changed what assignments I give. I can’t assign papers any more because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.

Arithmetic

I’m less informed to speak out on this one, but my math prof friends tell me that their students are increasingly less capable and less willing to put in the effort. As a result they have had to make their tests easier with fewer hard problems. When I was a first semester freshman (at a private SLAC, yes, but it wasn’t CalTech) I took Calculus 1. Second semester I took Calculus 2. I don’t think pre-calculus was even a thing back then. Now apparently pre-calc counts as an advanced content course. My psych prof friends who teach statistics have similarly lamented having to water down the content over time.

Symbolic Logic was a requirement when I was a grad student. The course was a cross-listed upper-division undergrad/grad class. Jaegwon Kim taught the course, and our sole textbook was W. V. Quine’s Methods of Logic, which we worked through in its entirety. I think we spent two weeks on propositional logic before moving on to the predicate calculus. We proved compactness, soundness, and completeness, and probably some other theorems I forget. There is no possible way our students, unless they were math or computer science majors, would survive that class.

What’s changed?

The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.

Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.Subscribe

What has changed exactly?

Chronic absenteeism. As a friend in Sociology put it, “Attendance is a HUGE problem—many just treat class as optional.” Last semester across all sections, my average student missed two weeks of class. Actually it was more than that, since I’m not counting excused absences or students who eventually withdrew. A friend in Mathematics told me, “Students are less respectful of the university experience —attendance, lateness, e-mails to me about nonsense, less sense of responsibility.”
Disappearing students. Students routinely just vanish at some point during the semester. They don’t officially drop or withdraw from the course, they simply quit coming. No email, no notification to anyone in authority about some problem. They just pull an Amelia Earhart. It’s gotten to the point that on the first day of class, especially in lower-division, I tell the students, “look to your right. Now look to your left. One of you will be gone by the end of the semester. Don’t let it be you.”
They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes. Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom. I’m supposed to believe that they suddenly, urgently need the toilet, but the reality is that they are going to look at their phones. They know I’ll call them out on it in class, so instead they walk out. I’ve even told them to plan ahead and pee before class, like you tell a small child before a road trip, but it has no effect. They can’t make it an hour without getting their phone fix.
They want me to do their work for them. During the Covid lockdown, faculty bent over backwards in every way we knew how to accommodate students during an unprecedented (in our lifetimes) health crisis. Now students expect that as a matter of routine. I am frequently asked for my PowerPoint slides, which basically function for me as lecture notes. It is unimaginable to me that I would have ever asked one of my professors for their own lecture notes. No, you can’t have my slides. Get the notes from a classmate. Read the book. Come to office hours for a conversation if you are still confused after the preceding steps. Last week I had an email from a student who essentially asked me to recap an entire week’s worth of lecture material for him prior to yesterday’s midterm. No, I’m not doing that. I’m not writing you a 3000-word email. Try coming to class.
Pretending to type notes in their laptops. I hate laptops in class, but if I try to ban them the students will just run to Accommodative Services and get them to tell me that the student must use a laptop or they will explode into tiny pieces. But I know for a fact that note-taking is at best a small part of what they are doing. Last semester I had a good student tell me, “hey you know that kid who sits in front of me with the laptop? Yeah, I thought you should know that all he does in class is gamble on his computer.” Gambling, looking at the socials, whatever, they are not listening to me or participating in discussion. They are staring at a screen.
Indifference. Like everyone else, I allow students to make up missed work if they have an excused absence. No, you can’t make up the midterm because you were hungover and slept through your alarm, but you can if you had Covid. Then they just don’t show up. A missed quiz from a month ago might as well have happened in the Stone Age; students can’t be bothered to make it up or even talk to me about it because they just don’t care.
It’s the phones, stupid. They are absolutely addicted to their phones. When I go work out at the Campus Rec Center, easily half of the students there are just sitting on the machines scrolling on their phones. I was talking with a retired faculty member at the Rec this morning who works out all the time. He said he has done six sets waiting for a student to put down their phone and get off the machine he wanted. The students can’t get off their phones for an hour to do a voluntary activity they chose for fun. Sometimes I’m amazed they ever leave their goon caves at all.

I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for awhile, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.

We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down. As if it is somehow the fault of the faculty. It’s not our fault. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.

All this might sound like an angry rant. I’m not sure. I’m not angry, though, not at all. I’m just sad. One thing all faculty have to learn is that the students are not us. We can’t expect them all to burn with the sacred fire we have for our disciplines, to see philosophy, psychology, math, physics, sociology or economics as the divine light of reason in a world of shadow. Our job is to kindle that flame, and we’re trying to get that spark to catch, but it is getting harder and harder and we don’t know what to do.

Poet's Nook: "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper" by Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back

in the grasses.

I hear you. I know

this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious

on this earth.

But what are you trying

to be free of?

The living? The miraculous

task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

Musings

'Game over': Yale Fascism Expert Moving to Canada Because US is Becoming a 'dictatorship' by Alex Henderson

Source: Alternet

Quite often, Americans who threaten to leave the United States for political reasons don't follow through when they see how complex the immigration laws of other countries can be. But during Donald Trump's second presidency, some well-known Americans really are expressing their worries about the United States' current political climate by moving to other countries.

Liberal actress Rosie O'Donnell, an outspoken Trump critic, is now living in the Republic of Ireland. And Jason Stanley, a Yale University professor known for his expertise on fascism, is accepting a job offer in Canada — as he fears the U.S. is becoming increasingly authoritarian.

Stanley, author of the 2018 book, "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them," accepted a position at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. And he is speaking out about his reasons for leaving the U.S.

Stanley told the website The Daily Nous that he is moving to Canada "to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship." And he believes that Columbia University in New York City and other colleges are making a huge mistake by capitulating to Trump rather than fighting back against his war on academia.

"When I saw Columbia completely capitulate," Stanley told the Daily Nous, "and I saw this vocabulary of: well, we're going to work behind the scenes because we're not going to get targeted — that whole way of thinking pre-supposes that some universities will get targeted, and you don't want to be one of those universities. And that's just a losing strategy. You've got to just band together and say an attack on one university is an attack on all universities. And maybe you lose that fight, but you’re certainly going to lose this one if you give up before you fight."

Stanley continued, "Columbia was just such a warning. I just became very worried because I didn't see a strong enough reaction in other universities to side with Columbia. I see Yale trying not to be a target. And as I said, that's a losing strategy."

Stanley's decision to move to Canada is inspiring some strong reactions on Social Media.

On Bluesky, 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, "When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave US universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry."

Bluesky user Franklin Seal fears that the U.S. has passed the point of no return, posting, "If you are only beginning to worry now, you are part of the problem. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to stop Hitler was in 1923. The best time to stop Trump was 2016. Now the professors are leaving. Soon, the stampede. Moving to Canada? Might not be safe much longer."

Journalist Etan Nechin views Stanley's departure from the U.S. as a troubling sign.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Nechin wrote, "Philosopher Jason Stanley leaving Yale for Canada 'because of the political climate' should set off serious alarm bells. 'Brain drain' is just a sanitized phrase meaning the flight of conscience and intellect from a country where probing at truths becomes a dangerous task."

On X, PBS' "Amanpour & Company" posted video of an interview in which Stanley discussed his decision to leave the U.S.

The professor/author told 'Amanpour & Company''s Michele Martin, "I would not do this if I saw all of our universities banding together. But it's not just the universities, Michele. It's the law firms, it's all of our American institutions…. Now, we see universities, including my university, saying things like: We're going to keep our head down so we're not targeted. As soon as I heard that vocabulary, I knew, sort of, it might be that the game is over. Because you're not banding together if you say, 'We're going to keep our head down.'"

On Mysticism: Simon Critchley in Conversation with Cornel West

On October 15, 2024, Pioneer Works hosted a launch for Simon Critchley’s new book, On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy. The event featured a special dialogue between the author and his longtime friend, Dr. Cornel West—on his new book, medieval Christian figures, the boundaries of faith and reason, and so much more.

Simon Critchley is a philosopher and the author of over twenty books, including works of philosophy and books on Greek tragedy, dead philosophers, David Bowie, football, and suicide. His latest title explores the practice and history of mysticism, as well as its ties to occult knowledge, and the works of Flannery O'Connor and T.S. Eliot.

Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on Education

Source: Chris Hedges Report

The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism.

Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to abolish the Department of Education and terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine.

Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power — in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism — are erased.

There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.

“One of the most significant threats that a class hierarchy can face is a universally accessible and excellent public school system,” writes Jason Stanley in Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future:

“The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely — and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy — is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods.

The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education.”

I taught Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in a New Jersey prison classroom. Zinn’s book is one of the primary targets of the far-right. Trump denounced Zinn in 2020 at the White House Conference on American History, saying, “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”

Teaching Zinn in Prison

Zinn implodes the lies used to glorify the conquest of the Americas. He allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of Native Americans, immigrants, the enslaved, women, union leaders, persecuted socialists, anarchists and communists, abolitionists, anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and the poor.

He holds up the testimonies of Sojourner Truth, Chief Joseph, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

As I gave my lectures I would hear students mutter “Damn” or “We been lied to.”

Zinn makes clear that organized militant forces opened up democratic space in American society. None of these democratic rights — the abolition of slavery, the right to strike, equality for women, Social Security, the eight-hour work day, civil rights — were given to us by a benevolent ruling class. It involved struggle and self-sacrifice. Zinn, in short, explains how democracy works.

Zinn’s book was revered in my cramped prison classroom. It was revered because my students intimately understood how white privilege, racism, capitalism, poverty, police, the courts and lies peddled by the powerful, deformed their communities and their lives.

Zinn allowed them to hear, for the first time, the voices of their ancestors. He wrote history, not myth. He not only educated my students, but empowered them. I had always admired Zinn. After that class I too revered him.

Zinn, when he was teaching at Spelman College, a historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, became involved in the civil rights movement. He served on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He marched with his students demanding civil rights. Spelman’s president was not amused.

“I was fired for insubordination,” Zinn recalled. “Which happened to be true.”

Learning to Question Dogma

Education is meant to be subversive. It gives students the ability and the language to ask questions about reigning assumptions and ideas. It questions dogma and ideology. It can, as Zinn writes, “counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate.”

It lifts up the voices of the marginalized and oppressed to honor a plurality of perspectives and experiences. This leads, when education works, to empathy and understanding, a desire to right historical wrongs, to make society better. It fosters the common good.

Education is not only about knowledge, it is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about, as James Baldwin writes in his essay “The Creative Process,” the ability to drive “to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”

The rightwing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book,

“intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included — like Black Americans, for instance — are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”

The integrity and quality of public higher education in America has been under assault for decades, as Ellen Schrecker documents in her book The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s.

The protests on college campuses in the 1960s, Schrecker points out, saw “the enemies of the liberal academy” attack its “ideological and financial underpinnings.”

Tuitions, once low, if not free, have soared, and with them tremendous student debt. State legislators and the federal government have slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often lacking benefits, as well as job security.

Nearly 75 percent of the instruction at colleges and universities is in the hands of adjuncts, part-time lecturers and non-tenure-track full-time faculty, who have no hope of being granted tenure, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

Public institutions, which serve 80 percent of the nation’s students, are chronically short of funding and basic resources. Higher education has evolved, even at major research universities, into vocational training, no longer a vehicle for learning but economic mobility.

The assault sees elite schools, where tuition can run over $80,000 a year, cater to the wealthy and the privileged, locking out the poor and the working class.

“The current academy functions primarily to replicate an increasingly inequitable status quo, it is hard to imagine how it could be restructured to serve a more democratic purpose without external pressure for something like universal free higher education,” Schrecker writes.

Totalitarian societies do not teach students how to think but what to think. They churn out students who are historically and politically illiterate, blinded by an enforced historical amnesia. They seek to produce servants and apologists who conform, not critics and rebels. Liberal arts colleges, for this reason, do not exist in totalitarian states.

Book Bans

PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools nationwide since 2021, a number, PEN writes, “not seen since the Red Scare McCarthy era of the 1950s.” These books include titles such as The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, The Color Purple by Alice Walker and Maus, the graphic novel on the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman.

The most important human activity, as Socrates and Plato remind us, is not action, but contemplation, echoing the wisdom enshrined in eastern philosophy. We cannot change the world if we cannot understand it. By digesting and critiquing the philosophers and realities of the past, we become independent thinkers in the present.

We are able to articulate our own values and beliefs, often in opposition to what these ancient philosophers advocated. A capacity to think, to ask the right questions, however is a threat to totalitarian regimes seeking to inculcate a blind obedience to authority.

Unconscious civilizations are totalitarian wastelands. They replicate and embrace dead ideas, captured in José Clemente Orozco’s mural “The Epic of American Civilization” where skeletons in academic robes bring forth baby skeletons.

“Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in the ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

As bad as things are, they are about to get much worse. The nation’s educational system is being dragged into the slaughterhouse, where it will be dismembered and privatized. The corporations profiting from the charter schools system and online colleges — whose primary concern is certainly not with education — replace real teachers with non-unionized, poorly trained instructors.

Students, rather than being educated, will be taught by rote and fed the familiar tropes of authoritarian playbooks — paeans to white supremacy, national purity, patriarchy and the nation’s duty to impose its “virtues” on others by force.

This mass indoctrination will not only ensure ignorance, but obedience. And that is the point.

Why Trump is Waging War on Academia by David Schultz

Source: CP

There are a multitude of reasons why Donald Trump and his supporters are waging war against colleges and universities. But among the reasons is a simple one–historically conservative reactionary regimes hate intellectuals.

Trump and his supporters hate higher education for obvious reasons. Those with college degrees are not his supporters and voted against him in 2024. Colleges are full of students and professors who vote for Democrats and they have visibly protested against his policies or embraced issues such as opposition to Israel’s war against the Palestinians, support for transgender rights, or DEI in general. One could argue that Trump’s populism is rooted in what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “anti-intellectualism” in American life. Americans generally hate smart people, labeling them as Alabama Governor did as “pointy-headed intellectuals,” or in the words of Vice-President Spiro Agnew who lumped them together with the media to call them “An effete core of impudent snobs.”

But there is something here and it is the traditional hatred of intellectuals by reactionary regimes. There is a story regarding the trial of Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci who was part of the opposition party in the parliament to Benito Mussolini and the fascists. Gramsci was arrested and at his trial the prosecution declared: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.” Gramsci’s crime was providing the intellectual ideas to challenge the ruling power. Despite his punishment. His Prison Notebooks were secretly written and disseminated.

Gramsci’s thesis was that the battle against fascism was in part an ideological fight for the hearts and minds of the people. Battles for power may take place in parliament or in the streets but they are also fought in mass pop culture as well as in universities and colleges to influence and counter the propaganda of the ruling class and government. Controlling intellectuals and what they think and say is part of how the fascists, the nazis, and other authoritarian and reactionary regimes maintain power.

Education and learning are about critical thinking. It is about subjecting power and dogma to truth. It is about questioning, challenging, and imagining alternative realities or unmasking facades. It is as philosopher Immanuel Kant declared: “Dare to Know.” College is where one learns to reject authority for the sake of authority, to ask “Why not?” in response to “Why?” It is to reject what is accepted as a matter of fact and suggest that what is traditionally accepted as truth may not be so. If done right, a liberal arts education is inherently subversive and in the spirit of John Dewey, that task is not to produce the next generation of docile uneducated workers, but instead to foster the next generation of democratic citizens. By its very nature, higher education should produce the antithesis of political passivity and blind obedience.

This is why every authoritarian regime seeks to control what people think. It does that in its school curriculum and via book bans. But it also does that in terms of who is hired to teach and what they teach. It is a battle over indoctrination. Universities and intellectuals, for Gramsci, lead the charge to counter this battle for hearts and minds. It should come as no surprise why Trump and many Republicans before him have hated higher education. Arguing that there are more than two sexes, that gender roles are socially constructed, that perhaps capitalism exploits workers or that the rich do not deserve their fortunes, is not what they want to hear. Education is not to serve the interests of democracy, self-discovery, or personal enrichment, it is to teach subservience to the status quo.

Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and crackdown on higher education may be intensely personal and vindictive. But it is also part of a predictable agenda to control and eliminate the intellectual seeds of opposition.

Smash & Grab:Trump’s Shockingly Lawless Second Term by Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng

Source: Rolling Stone

There were less than four days to go until Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second time. In those final days of the presidential transition, Trump and his team were busy finalizing their blitz of executive actions, which included a widespread crackdown on civil rights, trans Americans, and diversity programs. Trump’s government-in-waiting was putting the finishing touches on plans for a startlingly nativist propaganda campaign, which would soon feature an “ASMR” video of officials preparing to fly migrants to camps at Guantánamo Bay.

Trump had preemptively allocated an astounding amount of power to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, giving him near free rein to desecrate the federal workforce. And the president-elect was giddy about one of his more depraved opening acts still to come: the mass pardons and commutations for his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Amid all of this, the incoming president had something else on his mind: his meme coin. The Friday night before his inauguration, Trump announced he was launching his own cryptocurrency called “Trump Meme” — a purely speculative asset, comparable to a digital baseball card, with no inherent value or use. The price of $TRUMP quickly blew up, surging from around $6 to $74, generating billions of dollars on paper for the Trump family.

The launch was so successful that First Lady Melania Trump quickly raced her own meme coin out the door, too, less than 24 hours before Trump’s inauguration — a move that caused $TRUMP to begin crashing. By late February, the coin was trading at around $13. The earliest investors likely made huge profits; hundreds of thousands of suckers appear to have lost big. The Trump family will make a killing no matter what: By early February, his family and their partners had made nearly $100 million on trading fees.

In the final days of the transition and even during his early presidency, Trump privately encouraged close allies — in big business and on Capitol Hill — to buy his meme coin, according to a source familiar with the matter and one Republican lawmaker. He’d even do this over dinner.

“Of course he did,” the GOP lawmaker recounts. “He told the whole country to do it [via an X post], so why wouldn’t he tell the people he knows? There’s nothing wrong with that.” The lawmaker refused to say whether they invested — though if they bought any Trump coin more than an hour or two after it launched, they would have lost big.

The meme coin was a blatant cash grab, to the point that one of Trump’s former White House communications directors denounced it as “Idi Amin-level corruption.” It wasn’t even the Trump family’s first foray into crypto — during the 2024 campaign, his family announced the creation of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial.

As he promised on the campaign trail, Trump has worked aggressively to push the crypto industry’s interests in Washington and ensure the incredibly risky assets operate with little regulation, signing an executive order to promote crypto, announcing a “crypto strategic reserve,” and naming an industry ally to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of February, Trump’s SEC moved to throw out its prosecution of Justin Sun — who had been charged with marketing unregistered crypto securities and manipulating the market for a crypto token — after Sun’s investments in World Liberty Financial reportedly netted the Trump family $56 million in fees.

The crypto caper is a perfect encapsulation of the bold-faced graft at the heart of the new Trump presidency: Uber-wealthy elites are poised to cash in, while ordinary people get hosed. And public policy will be designed to encourage this exact outcome.

“Compared to other major corruption scandals since the 1870s, this administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all, because never before has a president been willing and able to blatantly use the office to make massive personal profit,” says Kedric Payne, the Campaign Legal Center’s general counsel and senior director for ethics. “Compared to his first term, he’s more strategic and more prepared to engage in corruption — and he’s taken big steps to wipe out any possible enforcement against his actions. An example of this is his financial interest in crypto, while at the same time shaping the policy to allow that very industry to flourish.”

Payne adds: “The blatant nature of this is genuinely new, which I think a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around. Normal corruption involves lobbyists providing gifts and perks and campaign contributions to lawmakers in hopes they will receive beneficial legislation. These are acts that directly benefit Trump’s bottom line.” (The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.)

“This administration is shaping up to be the most corrupt of them all.”

WHILE STILL IN its infancy, Trump’s second administration has been a shocking expression of corruption, lawlessness, and cruelty, with an even higher level of chaos than Americans had grown to expect from the former game-show host. It’s clear now his critics were correct about what a Trump win would mean; if anything, many of them undersold the threat he would pose.

At the center of the horror show is Elon Musk, who spent $290 million boosting Trump and Republicans in the last election cycle. In return, Musk was put in charge of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump and Musk have used this not-so-legitimate office to blitz through constitutional checks and balances and long-standing federal laws in order to consolidate and expand presidential power, so they can dismantle whole agencies and purge the workforce to make it more MAGA.

With Musk and his team of young far-right helpers at DOGE leading the way, the Trump administration has moved to fire tens of thousands of federal employees with no basis at all — ranging from the vast majority of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development, America’s foreign aid bureau; some health care workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs; staffers who take care of our great national parks; and employees at the Federal Aviation Administration who keep the skies safe. (They also fired hundreds of staffers at the agency that manages America’s nuclear weapons before attempting to hire them back.)

Veterans make up 30 percent of the federal workforce — so Americans who served our country are all but assured to absorb the brunt of Trump and Musk’s mass firings. Moreover, Musk and DOGE specifically sought to cancel hundreds of Veterans Affairs contracts that would eviscerate the department’s ability to provide promised care and benefits; according to Washington Technology, a magazine for government contractors, most of the contracts targeted were held by service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.

“Congress estimates 50,000 veterans will lose jobs, homes, and more,” says Michael Embrich, a former policy adviser to the secretary of Veterans Affairs, adding: “Those who swore to defend democracy will now have their pursuit of happiness stripped by two of the richest and most powerful men ever to skirt serving in the public interest.”

‘Paying to See the President’
In a short time, the ethical quandaries of Trump’s first term have begun to look comparatively small. Outside of the crypto space, there are so many different ways for businesses — or foreign interests — to put money directly in the coffers of the president and his family.

During the campaign last year, Trump privately discussed jacking up the price for membership at his private Florida club and estate Mar-a-Lago, because members are “paying to see the president.”

After Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris, top CEOs and corporate executives amped up their visits to the president’s Palm Beach club — with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, suits from the pharmaceutical industry, and many others making a show of kissing the ring.

Senior staff at lobbying outfits and a variety of corporate giants immediately began planning retreats, galas, and annual meetings at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump-branded golf resorts and event spaces — so they could shovel cash to Trump. One longtime D.C. lobbyist referred to these payments as “tips” for the president. Wired separately reports Trump’s Super PAC has charged $1 million per seat at Mar-a-Lago events with the president; one-on-one meetings cost $5 million.

Even the first lady has been making deals — including an outlandish agreement with Amazon. The company signed a $40 million deal with Melania Trump for a documentary film that, as one Amazon source puts it, “nobody asked for.” Other studios, to the extent they were interested, reportedly offered far lower sums. It’s expected that most of the money will go directly to Melania. She personally pitched Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, about the film project, directed by disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago in December, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Becoming president again has given Trump leverage to resolve his often frivolous lawsuits against Big Tech companies and large corporate-owned media outlets, and to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts. In one case, he has already wielded the weight of the Federal Communications Commission against a media company he’s suing.

ABC, owned by Disney, announced in December it would pay $15 million to resolve Trump’s lawsuit over George Stephanopoulos’ claim that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in civil lawsuits from E. Jean Carroll. (Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse.”) In late January, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over Facebook suspending his social media accounts after he fomented the Jan. 6 riot.

The Facebook and ABC payments went to Trump’s new presidential library and museum slush fund. In the case of Trump’s settlement with X, Musk didn’t even bother with the library fund, and instead negotiated a $10 million deal with Trump that will reportedly benefit the president personally. Trump has claimed he gave Musk “a big discount.”

Obvious Conflicts
The $10 million deal with Trump might be smart for Musk after all, given that his relationship with the president has made him one of the world’s most powerful people and put him in a position to profit off the government even more.

Musk’s DOGE team has demanded sweeping access across the federal government to sensitive data and systems in order to enact firings, cancel projects, and cut off payments to entities that Trump and Musk don’t like. The upshot for Musk is he now has access to an unparalleled trove of data about every American as well as his competitors. The opportunities for conflicts of interest are endless, given Musk’s businesses.

As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at the Stetson University College of Law, puts it, “The number of potential conflicts of interest are legion.”

The Trump White House has argued that Musk can police his own activities — and choose to excuse himself from DOGE’s work overseeing certain contracts or funding if he believes it poses a conflict. Musk, for his part, has suggested that the public will hold him accountable regarding any conflict — people won’t “be shy about saying that,” he said in a press conference with Trump.

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
“We would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest,” Trump volunteered, before waving away any concerns: “He’s a successful guy. That’s why we want him doing this.” Trump later publicly added one potential restriction: “Anything to do with possibly even space, we won’t let Elon partake in that,” he said.

That would make sense, since Musk’s company SpaceX has received billions in contracts from NASA.

When it was reported in February that the Trump administration was targeting NASA for a round of painful cuts — potentially 10 percent of the space agency’s workforce — the agency was abruptly let off the hook. Within hours of those reports emerging, NASA staff were told that they could take a breath: At least for the moment, those cuts were postponed, or maybe called off for good.

The reason? Musk and his allies personally intervened to forestall the reported haircut, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

As he tears through the federal workforce, Musk is cashing in on new and existing contracts, including with agencies that regulate his businesses.

After Musk and DOGE cut hundreds of jobs at the FAA, an agency that previously fined Musk’s SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations, news outlets reported the agency was preparing to hire Starlink, owned by SpaceX, to upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. As Rolling Stone reported, before anything was official, FAA officials quietly directed staff to find tens of millions of dollars to fund a Starlink deal.

“If Musk is in charge of hiring and firing workers at the FAA, then getting a no-bid FAA contract to provide services would be an epic conflict of interest,” says Torres-Spelliscy. “If this is the case, then he is basically paying himself with taxpayer funds through a part of the government he partially controls through his ability to fire people.”

Talk of hiring Starlink has come up elsewhere. According to a source familiar with the matter, during the first few weeks of the second Trump era, DOGE personnel reached out to officials at the FBI and Justice Department — and asked if the bureau had ever thought about adopting Starlink for sensitive operations and surveillance.

“I wanted to vomit,” this source says, adding that there is no conceivable reason the FBI would need Starlink.

The administration has also shielded Musk’s X platform from potential oversight, pausing the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which polices big banks and other financial institutions, such as peer-to-peer payment apps. Musk is working with Visa to offer a peer-to-peer payment service called X Money Account.

Other agencies scrutinizing Musk’s businesses have faced steep job cuts — including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has been investigating Tesla’s self-driving technology.

“To the extent that Musk is hiring and firing people all over the U.S. executive branch, he is not in arm’s-length transactions with government regulators,” Torres-Spelliscy says. “With respect to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he would be both the regulator [NHTSA] and the regulated [Tesla].”

Lawlessness is core to Musk’s DOGE project and Trump’s slash-and-burn agenda for his second administration. The president’s mass-firing campaign and efforts to expand executive power depend on his and his cronies’ willingness to ignore the Constitution, existing federal laws passed by Congress, and any expectations of transparency.

Musk has not been appointed or confirmed; he is a “special government employee,” a designation that allows him to bypass a Senate confirmation process and avoid publicly disclosing his vast financial holdings.

“Special government employees do not go around directing people in agencies and telling them what to do,” says Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “If you’re directing people in agencies and telling them what to do, under the appointments clause of the Constitution, you need to be appointed and confirmed by the Senate.”

The office Musk has led, DOGE, was created by rebranding the U.S. Digital Service — a technology unit that was housed within the president’s Office of Management and Budget. Musk and Trump have attempted to bestow the office with expansive authorities never granted by Congress. (They also moved DOGE into the executive office of the president, to shield it from open-record laws.)

In court, the Justice Department has claimed that “Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself” — even as Musk publicly threatened to fire any federal employees who failed to respond to his HR emails asking them, “What did you do last week?”

Meanwhile, DOGE has worked to help the Trump administration claw back funds appropriated by Congress, including $80 million taken right out of New York City bank accounts. Those funds, meant to help the city house asylum seekers, were removed after Musk falsely claimed that DOGE had “discovered” that disaster-relief funds were “being spent on high-end hotels for illegals.”

There’s a term for this type of act: impoundment. Trump pledged to try this during the 2024 campaign. However, the Constitution does not give the president the power to impound, freeze, or refuse to spend funds appropriated by Congress.

“It’s pretty clear as a textual matter, and the history is even clearer, that the president needs to defer to Congress, and cannot override Congress’ specific appropriations,” says Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor and expert in executive power. He notes that Musk “has deputies who are directly pushing the buttons that are blocking payments,” thanks to DOGE’s unprecedented access to America’s payment systems.

Trump is challenging the Constitution in other ways. The president has attempted, via executive order, to end birthright citizenship — the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. (A judge appointed by Ronald Reagan found Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional.”)

“He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

Donald Trump
Compounding the constitutional threat, Vice President J.D. Vance has suggested Trump can ignore judges’ rulings, and Trump has publicly threatened to “look at” judges who rule against DOGE’s efforts to gut federal agencies and freeze their funds.

“At this point, there’s enough reporting to suggest that Elon Musk is exercising invalid power that the Constitution doesn’t allow,” says Shugerman. “He should not have executive power at all if it hasn’t been established by Congress,” Shugerman continues. “The executive power he’s exercising is that of a department head or principal officer, and he has not been confirmed. Elon Musk is unconstitutional.”

‘What Are You Gonna Do About It?’
Since the dawn of his first administration, Trump has told his followers: “Promises made, promises kept.” One 2024 vow he’s kept was his pledge to make the federal government as autocratically MAGA and cultish as possible.

During the Presidents’ Day weekend in mid-February, Trump screamed the quiet part out loud, writing online: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In paraphrasing an apparently fake Napoleon quote, Trump effectively declared that he thinks he can break any law he wants.

In a more sane time, this sort of expression from the U.S. commander in chief would be a scandal. After all, the president is — due to the American Revolution — not a king. Trump and his staff soon doubled down, outright calling him “THE KING.”

It would be easier to dismiss these words as mere trolling if Trump were not seeking to consolidate unchecked power. In his first month back in office, Trump moved to purge the FBI and Justice Department as vengeance for the criminal investigations he’s faced. He’s quickly turned the DOJ into a political arm of the White House and a protection racket for him, his friends, and allies — and a weapon against his enemies, real or perceived.

Almost as soon as he was sworn in, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone there was a sudden, jarring information clampdown at the DOJ. Senior career officials at the Justice Department were suddenly cut out of daily conference calls and meetings to go over top-line threats or prime suspects that the feds were focusing on. Trump’s political appointees repeatedly warned Justice Department career officials and attorneys that failure to comply with Trump’s interpretation of the law — however illegal it may sound — is grounds for removal.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump told several confidants that his new Justice Department would not be conducting any more, in his framing, “illegal” federal investigations of Trump’s Republican pals. Already, the president and his administration are following through on that.

Ed Martin, Trump’s new interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has publicly pledged to “protect DOGE,” and described his team as “President Trump’s lawyers.” More ominously, in February, his office reportedly declined to sign off on an arrest warrant for MAGA Florida Rep. Cory Mills, after he was accused of physically assaulting a 27-year-old woman. At the same time, Martin has publicly threatened to investigate Democratic lawmakers over their criticisms of Musk and the conservative Supreme Court.

After Trump took office again, the Justice Department’s interest in corruption-busting quickly evaporated, and the department announced it was ending its focus on foreign bribery and influence. The DOJ also moved to throw out its corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams so that he could more fully devote his “attention and resources” to assisting Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The ensuing scandal triggered a wave of resignations at the Department of Justice that included prosecutors who had clerked for staunchly conservative justices. In another presidency, it would have been the defining, darkest episode. In Trump 2.0, it was another day, another week, another chance for the president and his people to practice their guiding, Sopranos-style legal principle, which is simply — in the words of one conservative attorney close to Trump and his inner sanctum — “What are you gonna do about it?”

Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump’s Tyranny? by Ralph Nader

Source: Nader

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

Mar 18, 2025