Sarah J. Jackson

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

Trump sent a 'compact' to our universities. They should reject this devil's bargain. Any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would forever be subservient to the whims of the government.

New from me and @brendannyhan.bsky.social

Why Trump's "Compact for Academic Excellence" is a devil's bargain and should be rejected in all forms

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

A group of apparent armed agents assemble at the end of a street, as seen from the perspective of a person in inflatable frog costume, their frog’s eyes dominating the foreground. The Ice facility in downtown Portland on Monday. Photograph: Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/AFP/Getty Images

Incredible (via www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...)

that said: I think the "it's not fascism unless they're good at it" brand of analysis probably isn't the move

Anyway it got really quiet. It was bleak. Then we started talking about organizing so there is that? Hey please join @aaup.org folks.

‘Fear and hopelessness’: study finds one in four professors consider leaving US south Survey by American Association of Professors shows nearly quarter of respondents are switching due to states’s politics

Discussing this phenomenon w/ a group of profs. Someone morbidly joked, “& northern profs are fleeing the country.” The next person said…”even if we were all willing & able to abandon this place there are not enough jobs for us globally and the U.S. employs a huge # of international scholars too.”

“Why Sergio?”: Deportation ends 36-year dream for celebrated Waco chef Sergio Garcia built a wide following for his regional Mexican cuisine over the decades, becoming a favorite of the White House press corps visiting Waco during the Bush presidency. Then in March, ICE ...

Man…man.

www.texastribune.org/2025/10/07/t...

CBS Has Been in Conservative Sights for Decades It was once deemed the "Communist Broadcasting System" by conservative activists.

Check out my latest, this time for Time magazine’s Made By History series:

time.com/7318570/cbs-...

It’s Banned Book Week. A time to call out the real enemies of freedom. 

Our fight is not just to stop the banning of books. It is not just to preserve our right to speak.
 
Our fight is to secure democracy and ensure the freedom of all of us to live.

Join us now.

Great work Rudy, thank you to you and the blacksky team for carrying so much labor on all this

I hear and see your concerns. Over the weekend, a couple users hosted on Blacksky's PDS were banned from the Bluesky app and thus the Bluesky API servers. This was a weakness of our system I've been aware of and hoped we had more time to address before any kind of public incident. 1/11

I spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵

We need updated reporting on POTUS’s own *rare* acknowledgement he might not be getting accurate info.

His Portland unreality is being fabricated by Fox-Murdochs, Portland GOP + who controls his Pres. Daily Briefing.

h/t @robertmackey.bsky.social
@froomkin.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/robe...

An aside: there is an interesting absolutionism happening w/ some folks saying they won’t see it b/c of these critiques. Your choice. I engage w/ deeply flawed art and media all the time b/c it’s part of the Zeitgeist and I find it useful to understand how these forms attempt to engage politics.

The idea that a Black woman revolutionary of a cell that radical would sell her people and herself out that quickly to avoid jail time is not it. I get that part of the supposed critique is that the state infiltrates & turns folks witness on each other but in that context, timeline, character? No.

Whoaaa how profoundly disappointing and also predictable

Another—I am not an outlier among Black women reviewers of this film :)

I hadn’t seen this review from @brookeobie.bsky.social until it was just dropped in the replies but I’m moving it up because I think it’s worth reading how someone who is a Black women critic is responding to this film

Oh Brooke is great. I hadn’t seen this review but a lot of what she says here is how I felt too.

And it felt like the line of satirizing and shaming the weird racialized sexual politics of fascists by representing Black women characters in the exact way they image us is uh…a little too fine.

Yeah this looks like a convo that gets to it. Ultimately, the target audience for this film is not me. I’m a biracial Black woman; so for people like me to be central to the plot but feel completely off was unsettling. The Black women were props for the white male characters to develop around.

I think folks who know Black revolutionary history and are bothered by age old pernicious stereotyping of Black women will find it hard not to notice. It felt especially hard for me in the wake of Assata crossing over.

Also, and again, maybe just me. But the more I thought about it the more I felt the film Children of Men (2006) did it better.

Well…

I am not a film critic. I am an expert on race, gender and media. I thought it totally missed the mark on those things. I understand it feels profoundly relevant to the political moment. I understand why parts feel cathartic. I was distracted by feeling like the gender/race politics were from 1970.

I saw One Battle After Another and did not enjoy it. I am clearly the outlier but I thought the sexual politics of the film were bad. The representation of Black women revolutionaries was painful and I think the fixation on interracial sex and a mixed race character is a hackneyed trope.

Oof

Dwayne has his job back because we organized for it. We fight or we die. Join AAUP today www.aaup.org/join

AAUP President Todd Wolfson unpacks the dangerous consequences of the Trump administration’s compact, which aims to exert ideological control over universities and colleges. As Wolfson makes clear, this partisan incursion into higher education affects ALL sectors.

@proftwolf.bsky.social