David Zwart

Just going to keep pointing out that they're openly asserting that they think any criticism of the president is tantamount to "hating America" which is, itself, an insult to American values.

One of the terrible things about the conservative elites’ attacks on higher education is that they are giving their constituents the impression that the universe isn’t big, complicated, and fascinating — that it really does take this many people to work out how even a small fraction of it works

Do you know how badly things have to be going in America for us to be owned this hard by the Dutch? The Dutch of all people

A good point in a good thread. The troubling corollary is that we academics *also* internalize these values--we fetishize productivity and the "artifacts" of writing. Were you productive this summer? How long did it take to get that article out the door? Have you published enough for tenure?

Shout this!

@MichellCClark: they made healthcare a commodity, education a debt trap, and housing a speculation market-then told you that poverty is a personal failing. they privatized survival and called it freedom.

That last line hits hard

A lot of this country’s problems boil down to straight white men who see themselves as some sort of default “normal” but any variation on that as “an identity” that is “political”

Anyway, glad to see that the GOP passed a bill that will gut the safety net and build up a paramilitary secret police and there are *still* some political reporters spending time passing along pathetic hit jobs from literal white supremacist trolls.

Good job, guys. You’re helping.

The Black Helicopters that Republicans with which they thought Obama was about to swoop them up any moment were always just a form of psychological projection. Texas right wingers are super-psyched to do a real Jade Helm on LA that will dwarf the Jade Helm of their 2015 imaginations.

Trump Just Went Absolutely Nuclear in Screwing Over MAGA Voters He has persuaded the media and many voters that he’s different from earlier Republicans on economics—but he’s now doubled-down on the GOP’s plutocratic agenda.

For 50 years GOP has relied on 3 big scams:

*deficits pose civilizational threat (when Dem is in WH)
*tax cuts for rich pay for themselves
*safety net cuts needed to purge welfare cheats

w/this bill, Trump's "working class GOP" is supercharging all three

New piece:
newrepublic.com/article/1976...

Republicans Always Chicken Out They try to pretend they’re not going to do whatever Trump says . . . and then they always do it.

“The bill’s unpopular now. But who knows how things will look after months of sustained political propaganda. Who knows how effectively the administration will be able to use the federal government to reshape perceptions, or to tilt the electoral playing field.”

www.thebulwark.com/p/republican...

Here's the truth about tax cuts for the rich.

They explode the federal debt, fuel giant profits at the biggest firms and financial institutions, and stoke a surge in billionaire wealth but do nothing for average working people.

Nothing trickles down — and the tax cuts don't "pay for themselves."

Chart showing effect of GOP budget bill and tariffs

Most important chart of the day, from the Yale Budget Lab; the black dots are the net effect of the budget bill and the tariffs.

The bottom 80% get poorer; only the top 10% come out ahead. Take from the poor and middle class, give to the rich.

budgetlab.yale.edu/research/com...

You have to add up all the red bars and stack them on top of each other to pay for the green bar.

Speaker of the House calling on a sitting governor to be "tarred and feathered."

Just unconscionable rhetoric. Unconscionable.

It's hard to have a democracy when one of the two major parties refuses to treat the other as legitimate and capable of governing.

It's an authoritarian takeover:
1. austerity bill to facilitate theft & clientelism
2. destroying sites of dissent - law firms, unions, unis
3. attacking independent institutions - Congress, courts, states
4. will require violence - militias, ICE, Nat'l Guard, military

None of it is a "distraction"

The same is true for raids on restaurants—rounding up people who are working hard and contributing to their community.

Opinion | 13 students on what studying history taught them about the present Progress can be undone. There’s plenty we don’t know. But change is possible.

"Studying history taught me how to research. And, more important, it taught me how to think, how to listen and how to recognize the quiet moments when the future is asking you to respond." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int...

Trump threatens Musk the same way he did Harvard He threatened to use federal contracts to gain retribution.

I'd put this a bit more sharply than @steveinskeep.bsky.social probably can: Trump simply does not understand any boundary between himself and the government. He has no sense of the public interest and believes the government is an extension of himself personally. open.substack.com/pub/steveins...

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

Start of an excellent thread reacting to the recent 404media article on GenAI in the classroom...

When technology rendered the ox-drawn plow obsolete it was arguably a net gain for society as a whole and for the people who'd previously used that technology. It's hard to see how rendering obsolete the human ability to think critically and write cogently will benefit anyone but the tech elite.

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

The Trump administration is engaging on an all-out assault on the institutions, workers and standards that make learning and knowledge production possible, in the hopes of securing political dominance forever. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Pretty wild to be living in a time when humans are being forced to work in order to even be considered deserving of life or even to be considered human at all, while simultaneously human labor is being systematically eliminated from the concept of work.

The plutocrats in the MAGA coalition want this because it redistributes even more wealth upwards towards them; for the MAGA ideologues, this is about entrenching hierarchies of race, gender, and wealth in service of what they call the “natural” order.

MAGA is at war with egalitarian democracy.

We never took seriously the need to educate teachers and students on how to evaluate websites, so, yes, we have every reason to worry about how they will use AI in their classrooms. #historyteacher #sschat #edusky

@adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com makes a point here that i have alluded to in my work, which is that in key respects trump is an anti-republican (think political theory not political party) figure, who rejects the basic values of the american revolution

The Empire killed Jesus.
God raised him anyway.

Easter is God's protest against violence, injustice, and death.
A holy uprising of love, liberation, and life.

You can't legislate resurrection away.
You can't crucify hope forever.

Christ is risen.

This right here.

Teachers have to know what the work is.

Students have to know what the work is and right now, far too many of them think it's jumping through a hoop to get a grade.

Learning should change you.