The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

Mayors of blue cities poised to feel the economic hit of President Donald Trump’s feud with universities are lining up behind one message for the schools: don’t cave.

The Trump administration’s decision to withhold federal funds from schools that don’t abandon diversity efforts and adopt new antisemitism policies is forcing universities to submit or risk losing the cash. That financial fallout could start to bleed into the communities these universities call home. Harvard froze its hiring and Northwestern University began laying off hundreds of employees amid funding cuts and new restrictions.

Despite the economic risks many cities face if their universities are at odds with a raft of White House policies, some mayors argue the stakes are about free speech and the future of academia.

“It’s my hope that Duke does remain firm on their values,” said Leonardo Williams, the Democratic mayor of Durham, North Carolina, where the university is based. “These are bumpy times and the reality is, if we’re going to get our asses handed to us, then we’re going to get our asses handed to us with our values intact.”

Duke University and its health system are the largest employers in Durham — a combo Williams said contributes more than $2 billion to the local economy. But nearly 600 Duke employees took buyouts in the spring after the school made plans to downsize amid Trump administration threats to curb spending. Duke later began involuntary layoffs in August, after $108 million in federal funds for its medical school was frozen over alleged civil rights violations.

Mayors count on the dollars generated for local businesses by the students, staff and faculty of the universities, the people the schools educate and train and the research dollars they attract.

But the list of colleges having their federal cash threatened by the Trump administration as part of an escalation of a civil rights investigation continues to grow.

George Mason University recently joined the ranks of Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Northwestern, Duke, Cornell and the University of California, Los Angeles in drawing Trump’s ire. While GMU hasn’t had a large swath of its federal research funding frozen, the school is risking its access to federal financial student aid if it refuses to agree to the administration’s demands...

Extortionists and bullies prey on the weak, and caving to them only makes them come back for more concessions.  Of course it shouldn't be this way, but because a felonious, amoral, corrupt slug was elected president (twice!), here we are.  It's good that more Democrats from the local to the state to the national level are fighting back in unison.

The bad:

A teen who opened fire in a Colorado high school this week was active on a so-called "violent gore" site months before the attack, the Anti-Defamation League said in a report released Friday.

Colorado officials said Desmond Holly, 16, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot after injuring two students at Evergreen High School, had been "radicalized by an extremist network," but did not provide further details. 

According to the ADL report, several school shooters in the past year, including Holly, had been active on the same website, which the organization says is known for hosting content backing white supremacist ideas as well as material portraying graphic violence against both people and animals. People can navigate to the website, WatchPeopleDie, and access a forum where they can watch real images of beheadings, shootings and other violence. The site started on Reddit, before being banned in March 2019.

"We're talking about thousands of people who are on these spaces," ADL Senior Vice President of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence, Oren Segal, told CBS News. "There's no friction to access— anybody can do it."

Beverly Kingston, the director of Colorado University's Center For The Study and Prevention of Violence, told CBS Colorado that school shooters often exhibit similarities in their behavior and have been known to pay tribute to other mass shooters. The website Holly used was also frequented, the ADL says, by other individuals who have carried out school shootings. They include 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who shot and killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian school in Wisconsin last year, and Solomon Henderson, a 17-year-old who committed a shooting that killed one and wounded another at Antioch High School in Nashville in January...

Meanwhile, those who might be in a position to do something about this are fully invested in pointing fingers away from themselves and in turning up the hate and anger against imagined perps several notches. 

The ugly:

Action will be taken against foreigners in the United States who are considered to be “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s death, a top state department official has said.

The statement comes in a wider context of an aggressive crackdown on free speech and dissenting views in the US under the second Trump administration, especially when it comes to campus protests sparked by Israel’s war on Gaza.

In a post on X on Thursday morning, the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, wrote that “foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country” and said he had directed consular officials to “undertake appropriate action” against those deemed to be “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s death on social media.

Landau invited X users to bring such cases to his attention in the comments of his post, which he said would be monitored by consular officials.  [snip]

A state department spokesperson said: “This administration does not believe that the United States should grant visas to persons whose presence in our country does not align with US national security interests.”

Previously the Trump administration has directed investigators at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), who would typically target human traffickers and drug smugglers, to track down foreign students who may have shown sympathy for the Palestinian cause or criticized Israel in social media posts. The administration has gone after those who have taken part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations across university campuses.

Investigators also now look for “anti-American” views, including on social media, when assessing the applications of people wanting to live in the United States, with diplomats instructed to look for “indications of hostility towards citizens, culture or founding principles of United States” in someone’s online presence.  [snip]

New social media vetting measures for international students applying to study in the US even include a requirement for individuals to unlock their social media profiles for review before receiving educational and exchange visas.

Expanding such social media vetting to encompass commentary on an event such as Kirk’s death would be a significant expansion of the administration’s efforts to restrict dissenting views and opinions, particularly of “foreigners” in the US...

It's rather ironic, in a hypocritical way, that the MAGAts are reacting to the killing of their "free speech" hero Charlie Kirk with this crackdown on ... free speech.  But, as you may have observed, it's been open warfare on "free speech" even when it comes to citizens pointing out and commenting on Kirk's views and hateful rhetoric in an "unkind" way.  Just ask Matthew Dowd or any of the other countless people who have found that it's free speech for me, not for thee at the cost of their jobs.