Emily Runde

I’m a Teenager In Gaza. And I Am Starving. What hits you first is the exhaustion carved into every face. The sickly pallor. The terrifying weight loss ravaging everyone—yes, including me.

Every time @thenation.com publishes the writing of Lujayn, a teen in the Gaza Strip, I hold my breath while reading. If you read one thing today, make it this: "Don’t you dare preach “child protection” to our children while they are bombed and starved in front of the whole world."

This is an *actual* purity test, and it’s not by leftists, it’s by the ostensible “moderates” — with purity defined as how Muslim you’re not.

Liberals keep trying to reach "reasonable compromises" with conservatives on criminal justice issues – carving out small exceptions to bail reform or allowing involuntary commitment in some situations – and then conservatives just demand more the next year, slowly chipping away at people's freedom.

We urgently need political education about involuntary commitment, because I am terrified by its increasingly consensus position in NYC political discourse.

Graphic with text: “Columbia News: Campus & Community”. Beneath, picture of towering library shelves holding books and boxes. Text beneath: “Is it just us or can fall hurry up and get here already? We’re ready for campus to buzz back to life — and yes, we’re yearning for the smell of pages upon pages of books and the promise of the worlds of knowledge they store inside.”

Students, there’s nothing like the smell of books at Butler Library — while Public Safety puts you in a chokehold!

#ReleaseTheCuomoList

I'm Jewish and I think about antisemitism all the time. I can't tell you how fucking weird it is that Homeland Security posting literal neo-Nazi propaganda generates less discussion about the threat to Jews than a mayoral candidate who believes Palestinians are human beings.

Nice reporting by the Harvard Crimson, which cuts to the chase on the Trump Administration's objectives

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Open Letter to President Claire Shipman from Professor Marianne Hirsch Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender.

Marianne Hirsch's letter to Claire Shipman: "I’m afraid that the actions Columbia has taken, hypocritically encouraged by truly antisemitic U.S. government officials, will have the effect of fomenting anti-Jewish prejudice on a large scale."

riseupcolumbia.substack.com/p/open-lette...

LA Times: "'It backfired,' said one senior administrator at UCLA, reflecting the sense of whiplash. .... 'Within hours of announcing our settlement, the DOJ was on our back.'

WHO COULD'VE SEEN THIS COMING

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0ypqo...

Purdue student detained by ICE and taken to troubled Louisiana holding facility Yeonsoo Go, 20, was detained after her immigration hearing in Manhattan and taken away by ICE agents.

Go, a college student, has a dependent visa (her mother, an Episcopal minister, is here on a religious worker visa), which doesn't expire until Dec. But when she tried to renew it early, ICE nabbed her and sent her halfway across the US to a detention center.
www.wthr.com/article/news...

What the Columbia Settlement Really Means

The Columbia settlement is an “astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to . . . an administration whose disdain for the values of the academy is demonstrated anew every day.” New @knightcolumbia.org analysis of the Columbia settlement, just published. knightcolumbia.org/blog/what-th...

In italics: “We Want to Hear From You!” In graphic including a Columbia University pennant: “Tell Us / What Advice Do You Have for Incoming Columbians?” In plain text: “We’re updating our annual back-to-school guide tor Columbians, new and returning. We want to hear from you, the people who know Columbia best, about your insider tips and tricks for making the most of your time here and having some good fun while doing it. / Share Your Insight.”

Where to start 🙃

This clip...I have no words.

Gaza Humanitarian Fund whistleblower Anthony Aguilar describes ordering pizzas for their site while Palestinians starve.

"He walked 8 km to get there. No shoes. Probably hadn't eaten in days... he set down his bags and he put his hands on my face and he kissed me... he left and the IDF opened up with machine gun fire... There were dead Palestinians. He was one of them."

A five-year-old child.

Most reporting is just not up to the task of registering both that 1) the White House is *attacking* universities *as institutions* 2) the White House is working *with* universities’ boards to achieve *common goals* for remaking and weakening those institutions

Boards of Trustees ***LIKE*** the Trump demands. They ***AGREE*** with them.

They like the idea of putting the screws on activist, lefty, and Muslim students. They like the idea of a whiter student body and conservative curriculum. They want these things and think $200 million is a fair price.

99% of the population doesn’t know what a Board of Trustees is. They think universities are run by the faculty. Which is like thinking line cooks at McDonald’s are making corporate decisions.

My God Green Beret Anthony Agular recounts how a 5-year-old Palestinian kissed his hands to thank him for the food Agular gave him Seconds later, Israeli soldiers shot and killed the starving child ISIS prisoners were treated with more dignity than these children, Agular says

It is not possible to find the words for this.

🎓🩸🤡Harvard Harvarding:
"Harvard announced a new undergraduate study abroad program with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and launched a postdoctoral fellowship for Israeli scientists at Harvard Medical School"
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Assal Rad @AssalRad BBC's Jeremy Bowen: Israelis don't want us to film outside the window at the devastation in Gaza...communities in the north of Gaza are flat, there's nothing left...Israel will not allow reporters, like myself, to enter Gaza to report the story and they don't want us to see it BBC 0:54 embedded video 2:32 AM • 7/29/25 • 340K Views

Israel won’t allow journalists embedded with Jordanian airdrops to film what they’re seeing outside the plane windows, so the BBC’s Bowen describes what he’s seeing:

“Communities in northern Gaza that I knew well…are flat. There’s nothing left of them.”

one reason democrats have a credibility problem is folks like adam schiff were taking smiling photos next to netanyahu two weeks ago

The new Columbia University

But yeah, this was always about antisemitism at Columbia.

A colleague has to meet with the university’s Office of General Counsel who want edits to their program’s website that basically amount to deleting every instance of the word “Black”

The Professors Who Supported the Student Deportation Frenzy GoFundMe donations, social media posts, and board memberships reveal how a handful of faculty members are backing Zionist doxxing outfits.

NEW: While many academics worried about danger to free speech in higher ed during Trump admin's arrests of students for pro-Palestine speech, some liberal arts professors were supporting the groups looking to detain students...sometimes on their own campuses.

www.dropsitenews.com/p/documentin...

Columbia Struck a Deal to Save Research Funding. How Do Its Researchers Feel About That? Faculty and others expressed a mixture of relief and frustration over the deal, under which the university will pay over $200 million to have most of its research funding restored.

I said what I said: "Professors are considering leaving Columbia because of the settlement, said Jacoby and Dixon-Román. 'It’s very demoralizing to teach in a university that’s, from my perspective, acceding to authoritarian demands,' Jacoby said."

www.chronicle.com/article/colu...

going to keep saying: important for a society that would like to keep functioning to discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

‘“Think about that phrase, to ‘socialize all students to campus norms and values.’ That sounds almost like indoctrination, like thought control, and it’s the kind of thing that we rightly decry when it happens in a dictatorship.”’