Jon Rauch

How can we recover the mutually cooperative understanding between religious faiths and liberal democracy?

An upcoming LibCon2025 panel—featuring Mustafa Akyol, @jonrauch.bsky.social, @michaelrwear.bsky.social, and Rabbi Gideon Sylvester—will explore.

Register: form.jotform.com/251499093035...

The Justice Department seeks voter and election information from at least 19 states, AP finds The Justice Department is ramping up an effort to get election data from the states. According to an Associated Press tally, the department's voting section has requested copies of voter registration ...

I know we're already tracking more worries than we can keep up with, but this belongs on your radar. DOJ's demands for voter data are (a) unprecedented in scope and (b) of questionable legality. apnews.com/article/just...

A D.O.J. Whistleblower Speaks Out

If the rule of law continues, it will be because of people like Erez Reuveni. Play this inspiring interview and pass it to friends. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/p...

Jeffrey Epstein victims and family blast Trump for Ghislaine Maxwell prison transfer President Donald Trump and the Justice Department face criticism for not releasing information about the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Uh-huh. Nothing to see here. Convicted sex offenders are moved to minimum security all the time, without explanation, after meeting with senior Justice Dept officials who were also the President's personal lawyer... www.cnbc.com/2025/08/01/j...

This gets pretty technical, but worth noting the bottom line: Trump has made an unlawful appointment, asserted unlimited executive authority, and attacked judges as "rogue" for following the law. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what...

Get ready for Supreme Court Justice Emil Bove. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

"Blackmailing was nearly ubiquitous. Across five different frontier AI models from five different companies, the best behaving AIs chose blackmail 79 percent of the time. The worst behaved blackmailed in 96 percent of cases." I'm sorry, Dave; I can't do that. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ai-m...

Why Marriage Survives The institution has adapted, and is showing new signs of resilience.

Marriage is rebounding. I assume opponents of same-sex marriage--who insisted it would harm marriage and kids--will acknowledge that they were wrong? www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Google's AI has an interesting idea here, actually.

Former Intel Chief Banned From Dog’s Graduation Ceremony The pettiness of the administration’s retribution campaign begins to bite.

The petty vindictiveness of this is almost unbelievable. www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

Liberalism for the 21st Century - ISMA Join some of the world’s leading liberal thinkers, journalists, and advocates for two days dedicated to countering the rise of illiberalism and charting a course forward for a liberalism that can answ...

Join me and a stellar cast at the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism's second annual conference on how to understand and defend our endangered liberal democratic experiment. Last year's featured thoughtful speakers and good hallway conversations. conference.ismaglobal.org#speakers

Palestinian Authority Daily: Hamas Is Preventing Gaza Residents From Reaching Aid Distribution Centers In its June 19, 2025 editorial, the Palestinian Authority Al-Hayat Al-Jadida daily stated that Hamas is murdering and otherwise preventing Gaza residents from reaching the U.S.-backed humanitarian aid...

Seems like news, if true. www.memri.org/reports/pale...

Conclusion: we won’t really know what has just happened with Columbia until we see what happens with Harvard and other universities. But…knowing what I do about Trump and the people around him, I'm more alarmed than relieved.

“We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on western civilization itself. The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.” I don’t see any limiting principle there.

My guess is that Trump himself is satisfied to strike opportunistically and pulls back when he meets political resistance; but I don’t think that’s true of Vought, Miller, Vance, Rufo, et al. They are committed to what Trump promised in 2023...

The fact that the eventual settlement was not as bad as it might have been is beside the point; the real message here is, “Resistance is futile. Who wants to be next?” So our predominant reaction should be ALARM.

READING 2 - THE CAT IS DEAD. True, the outcome could have been worse, but this was a display of dominance by an administration that will come back for more. The president demonstrated that he can use all the tools of federal authority to threaten the existence of any university that displeases him.

While the initial attack was extreme, it proved to be a negotiating tactic that was effective in producing a timely and proportionate outcome that does not violate Columbia’s rights or academic freedom in a fundamental way. So our predominant reaction should be RELIEF.

READING 1 - THE CAT IS ALIVE. Yes, the administration pushed the envelope, but that was necessary to get Columbia’s attention. The university behaved badly and deserves to be sanctioned. Normal procedures would have dragged on for months if not years.

How, then, should we assess the settlement? Here's the problem: it's Schrödinger's cat. Two possibilities, and we won't know until the box is opened.

Harvard will likely prevail in many of its challenges. Denial of due process, for instance, was almost certainly illegal. But Columbia isn’t as strong financially as Harvard and its failures to protect Jewish students were more egregious, so realistically it had no choice but to settle.

So…Columbia? The Admin’s attack is sinister and dangerous however you look at it. I don’t believe that the underlying rationale is primarily to rein in antisemitism; the demands went far beyond what’s justifiable on that basis. The real goal is to make an example of Columbia...inflict pain.

Of course, authoritarians can also be blatant. (Ask Abrego Garcia.) Often, tho, they don’t want us to know exactly how far their lawbreaking may go or even _has_ gone; rather, they want to acclimate us to illegality gradually, without quite sparking civil unrest or an effective elite response.

Authoritarians, if they’re shrewd, operate through ambiguity. They take steps which can be read either as anti-democratic turning points or as unprecedented but acceptable. Only in retrospect, depending on what happens next, is it possible to know whether any particular step was an inflection point.

What have we learned from the $200 million Columbia University settlement with the Trump Administration? Should we be relieved…or alarmed? Micro-essay!

Two senior NOAA officials were just placed on leave. Both led ‘Sharpiegate’ inquiry While the reasoning behind the move is not clear, the two officials affected led the investigation into whether NOAA’s scientific integrity policies were violated during the so-called Sharpiegate scan...

Just a coincidence. "Two senior NOAA officials were just placed on leave. Both led ‘Sharpiegate’ inquiry." sg.news.yahoo.com/two-senior-n...

"Reviving a 19th-century patronage model, the Trump administration seeks to replace the civil service’s merit-based system with one that rewards loyalty. This patronage system threatens to erode the expertise on which state capacity depends." www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

Why I Signed On To the Manhattan Institute Call to Reform Academia This post is in three sections:

I disagree with Lee Jussim, who IMO greatly underestimates the dangers posed by federal (actually, presidential) control of universities, but he's a smart guy and his case for the recent Manhattan Inst. statement deserves thought. unsafescience.substack.com/p/why-i-sign...

Targeting higher education is an essential tool in the autocratic playbook | Brookings The targeting of higher education institutions in the U.S. is reminiscent of authoritarian strategies in other countries.

A warning to signers of the Manhattan Inst. statement: "Our global research demonstrates that targeting individual institutions of higher education often starts with an example to induce compliance but quickly spreads to restrict academic freedom." www.brookings.edu/articles/tar...