The Globe and Mail reports:

Yale professors who left the school and accepted positions at the University of Toronto are speaking out about the Trump administration’s attacks on post-secondary institutions, expressing their fears about authoritarianism rising south of the border.

Three Yale professors – all of them vocal critics of President Donald Trump – have recently taken up roles at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.

Earlier this week, philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who has written about fascism and propaganda, announced that he would leave Yale for U of T.

He joins professors Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder, who specialize in Eastern European history. The two academics are married and arrived in Canada last August, on a sabbatical from Yale. Mr. Trump’s re-election in November’s factored heavily into the decision to stay in Canada, according to Prof. Shore.

Jason Stanley is in philosophy as opposed to history, and he’s a smug enforcer of trans ideology, but Shore and Snyder are another matter.

Prof. Snyder has written extensively on tyranny. In January, U.S. Vice-President JD Vance tweeted that he was an “embarrassment” to Yale after the professor criticized the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.

Prof. Shore wrote the 2018 book Ukrainian Night about the 2014 revolution. The couple’s friends and colleagues protested in the Maidan; a student of her husband’s was killed by snipers, she said. Less than two years later, when Mr. Trump won his first election, Prof. Shore felt “an immediate sense of terror.”

She was not the only one.

H/t Seanna

Micromanaging all the museums.

Trump on Thursday ordered that “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” be removed from the Smithsonian Institution, the vast museum and research complex that is a premier exhibition space for U.S. history and culture.

That’s not his job. His power and authority are not infinite, and I really doubt they stretch to telling the Smithsonian what it can and can’t include in its museums.

According to Trump’s order, the Democratic Biden administration “pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, inflecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives.”

Is it divisive though? Which is more divisive: insisting that “America’s promotion of liberty” has been without flaw throughout its history, or acknowledging the well-documented fact that many people were systematically denied liberty in America for most of its history? The thing about the second is that it doesn’t ignore the existence of people who know all too well that their grandparents and great-grandparents and so on were officially, by law, enforced by torture, denied liberty in America. Trump on the other hand does deny that, which is very easy for him because his grandparents weren’t whipped by their owners.

Samuel Johnson said it best in 1775: “”How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

It’s so fascinating when they do this.

Why?

Women perving on men in public toilets is not a thing.

Men perving on women in public toilets is most definitely a thing.

So WHY the FUCK do these imbeciles proudly make the men’s toilets exclusive to men while making the women’s toilets open to everyone?

Other than sheer deep-dyed loathing of women?

Law firms fight back.

Two major law firms are taking the Trump administration to court on Friday, seeking to block executive orders that the firms say target them for zealous representation of clients and their hearty pro bono work.

The lawsuit by the Jenner & Block firm, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C., alleges violations of the First Amendment guarantees to free speech and free association. It also alleges the order violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by hurting the firm’s ability to practice law; and violates the Sixth Amendment, for undermining the relationship between attorneys and their clients, and clients’ right to lawyers of their choosing.

And Amendment forty seventy leventy for trying to micromanage something that’s none of his god damn business.

A separate lawsuit by the WilmerHale law firm said the executive action Trump took on Thursday punishes the firm for employing former special counsel Robert Mueller and other public servants who worked alongside him.

WilmerHale’s lawsuit said the White House is retaliating against it for representing the Democratic National Committee, the campaigns of Democratic politicians Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and for suing the administration this year over its firing of several inspectors general.

The lawsuits come after President Trump signed executive orders this week, which attempted to restrict both firms’ access to federal buildings, yank any active security clearances held by its personnel, and direct government employees not to meet with the firm or its members.

In short he’s totalizing as totally as he can get away with, so we all have to hope he can’t get away with this.

Jenner, which employs about 500 lawyers, has one of the nation’s strongest pro bono programs, which represents immigrants and LGBTQ people, among other clients.

Trump referred to some of that work in his March 25 executive order. 

Jenner works pro bono, Trump works pro malo.

I love it when people I don’t like show up on my doorstep demanding dinner.

When he arrives in Greenland on Friday, Vice President JD Vance is not going to get much of a welcome from Greenlanders.

Mr. Vance will be the highest-ranking American official ever to visit the island.

But the government of Greenland never invited him and after all that President Trump has said about his desire to “get” the island, many Greenlanders don’t want Mr. Vance coming at all. Mr. Vance is scheduled to visit a remote American military base on the northern coast, far from any town.

Military base. Geddit? MILITARY BASE? They’re so subtle.

The White House’s original plan was more ambitious. Usha Vance, the second lady, had announced that she was going to attend a famous dog sled race this weekend and see other cultural sites, in an effort to bring the United States and Greenland closer.

But the plan backfired. Protesters were gearing up to line the road from the airport in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. The island’s government blasted the visit as unwanted and “highly aggressive.” And the organizers of the dog sled race released a pointed statement saying they had never asked Ms. Vance to attend in the first place.

It’s so trumpy to think that “visiting” people you’re openly promising to conquer and dominate is a real thing you can do. Vance and spouse are not “visiting” Greenland, they’re taunting and bullying it.

I hope they get frostbite.

The Smithsonian must present US history as one long list of Very Excellent Things.

Trump issued an executive order Thursday evening promising to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed over the past five years.

There can’t be anything “divisive” in Smithy museums. Hmmm. That means Smithy museums have to be empty. Everything is “divisive” to someone. People aren’t clones of each other, so their thoughts can differ, so there is never any guarantee that not one single person will say No.

The institution, the official keeper of the American story, has operated independently as a public-private partnership created by an act of Congress in 1846. The order comes as the institution has been expanding over decades to include a wider, richer and more diverse telling of the nation’s history.

“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

You mean slavery? You mean slavery, don’t you. And you mean the genocides and removals of indigenous people. And you mean the exploitation of workers. And you mean the generalized contempt for women. And let’s not forget the internments of WWII.

There’s a lot to admire in our history, sure, but there’s also a lot to deplore. Pretending there’s nothing to deplore is just fatuous, and won’t fool anyone. Locking murderous rapist Uncle Harry in the attic won’t make his family look better.

More like Nazis every day.

While there is a lot of focus on the major scandals involving Donald Trump’s administration, it’s important we don’t lose sight of what’s happening inside this country, where we are witnessing the federal government snatch people right off the streets for their political speech. The latest, most chilling example of that happened Tuesday outside of Boston, when Rumeysa Ozturk, a Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar at Tufts University, was taken off a residential street in Somerville, Massachusetts.

At 5:15 p.m., Ozturk, who came to the United States from Turkey on a student visa, had just left her apartment when, as video obtained by NBC News shows, she was approached by a man in a dark hoodie and hat who grabbed her hands. In that video, you can see and hear how upset and scared she is. Eventually, an ICE agent finally pulls out a badge and appears to identify himself as law enforcement.

Pause for question. Why do they do that? Why don’t they wear uniforms and badges and make it clear who they are? Why simply mug a woman on the street? Sheer sadism?

Ozturk is quickly surrounded by half a dozen cops, all in street clothes with their faces covered by masks. They take her cellphone and physically remove her backpack. She is then handcuffed as a bystander films and asks how anyone is supposed to know these people are law enforcement officials. The ICE agents then lead the terrified woman to their unmarked vehicles and drive off.

Now, if all that were not chilling enough, an attorney for Ozturk released a statement earlier Wednesday saying in part: “We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her. … No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

Tuesday night, a district court judge ordered Ozturk not be moved out of Massachusetts “without first providing advance notice.” But late the next afternoon, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee locator, Ozturk is currently being held in a south Louisiana ICE processing center, nearly 2,000 miles from where she was snatched off the street.

This is what fascist states do. It’s not what liberal/democratic states do. The fascism is here already, a couple of months in.

Also by the way the future fines will be much bigger.

Universities could face multi-million-pound fines for breaches of freedom of speech rules, the Office for Students (OfS) said.

The University of Sussex was fined £585,000 after the OfS said its equality policy – which included rules to “positively represent trans people” – could prevent staff and students voicing opposing views. Sussex was investigated after Prof Kathleen Stock left the university in 2021 accused of transphobia.

Arif Ahmed, OfS director for freedom of speech, said the fine could have been as high as £3.7m and there was “potential for higher fines in the future”.

…

The University of Sussex was the first to be fined under new powers given to the OfS in January.

The higher education regulator’s investigation examined the university’s trans and non-binary equality policy, which said that course material must “positively represent trans people and trans lives” and also said “transphobic propaganda… [would] not be tolerated”.

The watchdog said the “chilling effect” this would have on anyone wanting to voice an opposing view meant the university failed in its duty to uphold freedom of speech on campus.

The tricky thing about trans ideology is that it doesn’t rest on the usual “X people are not bad or inferior/X people are equal/X people should not be singled out for persecution.” It rests on an obvious, absurd, intrusive fiction. That makes trans activism radically different from feminist activism, anti-racism, anti-war activism, labor organizing. One doesn’t have to adopt any bizarre beliefs to campaign for women or workers or immigrants or Other races. But the trans thing is a whole different kettle of fish. First there’s the absurd fiction part (see above) and then there’s the coerced belief part. Both of those are a tough sell, and thus both of them involve a lot of coercion and downright bullying. To the followers of trans ideology that’s part of the fun, but to everyone else that makes the movement exceedingly unattractive. That in turn makes it extra infuriating when university bosses punish people for not submitting to what the movement tells them to submit to.

The University of Sussex plans to legally challenge the OfS findings, vice-chancellor Prof Sasha Roseneil said.

The OfS investigation into the University of Sussex started with the case of Prof Stock in 2021. The OfS report concluded that Prof Stock “felt unable to teach certain topics” and feared disciplinary action as a result of the university’s policy.

Describing the judgement as an “unreasonably absolutist definition of free speech”, the university said the ruling would leave institutions “powerless to prevent abusive, bullying and harassing speech”. The OfS, it added, had pursued a “vindictive and unreasonable campaign” against the university.

Yes but this is the problem – who is really doing the bullying here? Is it the people who don’t want to be ordered to sign up to a fatuous ideology? Or is it the people punishing the people who reject the fatuous ideology?

To belabor the point, it’s not all that hard to accept that in general people should be treated as equals. It’s somewhat hard for people who have been raised to think some kinds of humans should be treated as inferiors, but we’ve seen those people learn better over the past several decades. No really: we have. If you don’t believe me just watch some old movies, say from the 60s & 50s & 40s. Watch and flinch. Learning better is an attainable goal. Lots of people refuse, of course, which is why we’re stuck with Trump yet again, but it’s that they refuse, not that it’s impossible.

But campaigns for “trans rights” aren’t like that. They can’t be like that, because their demands are radically different and the arguments for them are less than convincing.

So, to sum up, the University of Sussex is in for a bumpy ride.

The Defenders of the Holy Genderfaith are vowing revenge.

I wonder what he imagines that “get GC people under oath challenged” can mean. Get them under oath how, where, by what authority, under what circumstances? Is he fantasizing mass arrests, mass incarceration, mass grillings by a heroic prosecutor? For what? On what grounds? Under which dictator?

Stupid little twerp.

Baddy Kennedy is slashing health agencies, because of course he is.

Robert F Kennedy Jr said the nation’s health agencies will cut 10,000 jobs from their 82,000-person workforce – an enormous reduction the US health secretary characterized as streamlining federal bureaucracy amid internal resistance to the administration’s agenda.

The cuts announced on Thursday, along with previous restructuring and voluntary buy-outs, mean the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will lose roughly 20,000 workers.

Kennedy said the department will also close half of its regional offices and create a new agency called the “administration for a healthy America”, or AHA.

Aha, Kennedy wants us all to rely on quack medicine instead of the real kind.

HHS is among the largest branches of the federal government, overseeing a $1.7tn budget and agencies that are household names. Among the agencies under HHS’s oversight are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Not exactly frivolous, one might think. Not superfluous. Not items you want to take an axe to without compelling reasons.

“Any cut you make to a health agency should be done with incredible care and consideration for the hundreds of millions of Americans who rely on their work to stay healthy and get treatment when they’re sick,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, previously the Biden administration’s CMS administrator and now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Taking a “wrecking ball” to health agencies and “laying off thousands of people … doesn’t move us forward”, Brooks-LaSure said.

But surely Kennedy knows for a fact that all those laid off people were not doing anything of value. Doesn’t he?

In current (outrageous) news –

So Vancouver Coastal Health wants nurses who don’t know that men are not women?

Doesn’t that sound like the very short route to medical malpractice? Doesn’t that sound like “First do all the harm you can”? Doesn’t that sound like the flat negation of any reasonable hiring/keeping criterion for medical professionals?

What next? Firing nurses and doctors who can’t can tell the difference between people and rabbits, cormorants, rattlesnakes, bowls of soup?

Aw. Nobody wants her to knock on the door.

“American representatives have been walking around, practically knocking on one door after another in the past few days to ask if people might be interested in a visit from the Vice President’s wife. Everywhere, the answer was the same: ‘No, thanks.’” Source; TV2.

My answer would have been “Hell no” at best.

Still struggling mightily to square the circle:

The University of Edinburgh’s new trans policy could be illegal, leaving the cash-strapped institution open to legal challenge. 

The document — a copy of which has been obtained by The Herald — tells staff they can use “the toilet facilities that align with their gender identity” rather than their biological sex, even if they do not have a gender recognition certificate.

As I keep boringly repeating: they’re telling staff the impossible. If you make all the toilet facilities “whatever” then people can’t use the ones that align with their genner idenniny because there are no single genner toilets left. It’s a very simple point: wouldn’t you think people running universities would be able to grasp it? If you make all the toidies for everyone then they’re not for people who don’t want toidies for everyone – which is in fact most people.

Point 2: I consider the “gender recognition certificate” wholly irrelevant. A certificate doesn’t change anyone’s sex, end of story.

The institution accepts this means all facilities will effectively become mixed-sex.

But, it seems, still ignores the basic contradiction. When all facilities are mixed-sex nobody gets to choose a single-sex facility, which is what most people prefer. Where’s your “we all get what we want!!” now, you damn fools?

An equality impact assessment carried out ahead of the new policy taking effect late last month states that, “as a matter of law, access to facilities on the basis of gender identity makes those facilities mixed-sex rather than single-sex facilities”.

Why yes! Thank you for noticing! Now if only the university could grasp the point.

It’s so touching to see men encouraging men to play hockey – one of the more dangerous sports available – against women. Their skulls and arms and legs will be fine, so who cares if the women’s will be smashed?

Aw, really, not even one person?? That’s just sad.

Still captured.

Democrat Jonah Wheeler stood alone before a capacity crowd in the Peterborough Town Hall as critics, leaders in his own party, and even some childhood friends railed against the 22-year-old state representative’s vote for legislation deemed “transphobic” by progressive activists.

Wheeler (D-Peterborough) was unapologetic during Tuesday night’s question and answer session sponsored by the Peterborough League of Women Voters as he explained why he broke with his party and voted for HB 148. The bill protects the right of local institutions to keep biological males out of women’s locker rooms and bathrooms.

“Nobody should be discriminated against because of who they are,” Wheeler said. “We can respect trans women, and we can respect the rights of women who object to having trans women in their spaces.”

“You can do whatever you feel like, but your rights end when the rights of another begin. Government is about the balance of rights,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler explained that some biological women had approached him asking that he protect their spaces. “What was I supposed to do — ignore these women?” Several people in the crowd said, “Yes! Yes!”

Well thanks a lot, massively progressive people of Peterborough New Hampshire. Men who say they are women matter and women don’t. Men get whatever they demand and women just have to lump it. What a Utopia you are creating.

New Hampshire Democrats have repeatedly and publicly accused Wheeler, who is Black, of supporting “Jim Crow” policies by supporting women’s-only spaces.

Wow, that’s nice.

HB 148 does not impose a blanket ban on transgender people, but allows local institutions and local sports authorities to set their own policies they deem appropriate. Wheeler refuses to consider the women who spoke to him in favor of the bill as somehow bigoted or transphobic.

…

Executive Councilor Karen Liot Hill, the lone Democrat on the council, stood up to condemn Wheeler’s vote, saying the bill is part of the “racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic” Project 2025 movement pushed by Republican President Donald Trump.

But voting to let men use women’s spaces is itself misogynistic, to put it mildly.

“I’m very sad to think New Hampshire is rolling back civil rights protections for Granite Staters,” Liot Hill said.

But what about civil rights protections for Granite State women?

Dan Grosz with the Peterborough Democratic Executive Committee read a statement on behalf of the party condemning Wheeler and Leishman’s vote. 

“We must express our deep concern and disapproval over your recent voting records,” Grosz read. “While we respect your right to vote your conscience, our conscience compels us to publicly voice our opposition to your actions.”

What a filthy pack of bullies. Honestly. All this fervor on behalf of a tiny number of men who like to pretend to be women.

Bad BBC. Bad. Sit. SIT. You’re a very bad BBC.

University of Sussex fined £585k in transphobia free speech row

That’s on the main page. If you click on the link you get “University of Sussex fined £585k in transgender free speech row”

Spot the difference? Transphobia v transgender free speech.

Bad bad BBC.

Breaking news in Sussex rebuke drama – our good friend latsot has turned up one of those sinister Connections that can explain so much.

The Financial Times on Sussex and Stock and all that:

An English university is set to be fined a record £585,000 over allegations it failed to uphold free speech and academic freedom, in a landmark ruling in the debate over student rights on campus.

England’s higher education regulator found “significant and serious breaches” of free speech and governance issues at the University of Sussex, according to a draft press release seen by the Financial Times.

The Office for Students press release, to be published on Wednesday, said a policy intended to prevent abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus had created “a chilling effect” that might cause staff and students to “self-censor”.

Well that’s the thing, isn’t it – that “certain groups” bit. The policy was there to prevent what the university considered abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus and not others. It was there to protect people who claimed to be the sex they weren’t, and not people who realize it’s impossible to be the sex you aren’t. Very definitely not those people: those people were framed as the aggressors, never the aggressed.

The OfS report marks the end of an inquiry that began more than three years ago. It was spawned by the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who said she was forced out of the university in 2021 by a three-year campaign of bullying and character assassination.

For why? For because she’s aware that sex is not like a coat you can put on and take off. For because she realizes that sex is determined in utero and can’t be swapped because we decide we don’t like ours and want that other one instead.

Sussex, ranked joint 26th out of 104 UK institutions in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024, has reacted furiously to the OfS fine.

Sasha Roseneil, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the regulator had decreed “free speech absolutism as the fundamental principle” for universities.

Roseneil claimed the regulator had “refused to speak to us” and that the fine imposed was “wholly disproportionate”. She said the university had defended Stock’s right to pursue her academic work and express her “lawful beliefs”.

No it didn’t. It may have uttered pious banalities, but it didn’t stop the students bullying her.

She added that the ruling made it now “virtually impossible for universities to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying, to protect groups subject to harmful propaganda, or to determine that stereotyped assumptions should not be relied upon in the university curriculum”.

Wtf is that supposed to mean? That universities ought to be free to tell academics they can’t say men are not women because that’s a “stereotyped assumption”? That is what it’s supposed to mean, right? From a university vice-chancellor?

Not quick learners, are they.

Big news!

An English university is set to be fined a record £585,000 over allegations it failed to uphold free speech and academic freedom, in a landmark ruling in the debate over student rights on campus.

England’s higher education regulator found “significant and serious breaches” of free speech and governance issues at the University of Sussex, according to a draft press release seen by the Financial Times.

The Office for Students press release, to be published on Wednesday, said policies intended to prevent abuse or harassment of certain groups on campus had created “a chilling effect” that might cause staff and students to “self-censor”.

It didn’t help that “abuse” and “harassment” were defined so broadly in one sense and so narrowly in another. Anything short of passionate agreement that Joe is now Josephina is abuse & harassment, while promising to beat up or rape or silence women who know men are not women is just obvious simple justice. Naturally people self-censor.

The OfS report marks the end of an inquiry that began more than three years ago. It was spawned by the case of Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who said she was forced out of the university in 2021 by a three-year campaign of bullying and character assassination.

Like lots of us, I’m familiar with the bullying and character assassination approach, albeit on a much smaller and less important scale.

The ruling by the OfS, which was established in 2017, will send a strong message to higher education institutions trying to balance the prevention of “hate speech” on campus and the defence of free speech.

The university, ranked joint 26th out of 104 UK institutions in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2024, has reacted furiously. Sasha Roseneil, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the regulator had decreed “free speech absolutism as the fundamental principle” for universities.

Roseneil claimed the regulator had “refused to speak to us” and that the fine imposed was “wholly disproportionate”. She said the university had defended Stock’s right to pursue her academic work and express her “lawful beliefs”.

She added that the ruling made it now “virtually impossible for universities to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying, to protect groups subject to harmful propaganda, or to determine that stereotyped assumptions should not be relied upon in the university curriculum”.

And yet what did Sussex University do to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying of Kathleen Stock? And by “stereotyped assumptions” does she mean the “assumption” that men are not women and women are not men? Because if she does, she’s arguing for nonsensical assumptions to be relied on in the university curriculum.