DL Open Thread: Sunday, February 9, 2025
‘Make Musk The Villain’. I agree with Chris Murphy:
“I don’t think economic populism really sells to anybody unless you’re naming names. When you engage in sort of just general critiques of billionaires or special interests, I think that falls flat,” Murphy said. “Donald Trump is really good at naming enemies, particular individuals or particular groups.”
Now, less than three weeks into Trump’s second term, Murphy is pushing Democrats to adopt a more aggressive approach that specifically targets the president’s infatuation with billionaire CEOs. The top villain should be Elon Musk, given his role in trying to slash the bureaucracy.
“I don’t think you can avoid him. And he is a proxy for the broader corruption, which is the handover of our government to billionaires and the theft of wealth and resources from ordinary Americans to make the billionaires happier,” Murphy said during a 40-minute interview Thursday in his Senate office.
Put as briefly as possible, NIH medical research grants are divided into funds for this specific study (“direct”) and funds that go to the institution which houses the lab conducting the study and the infrastructure that makes it possible (“indirect”). That latter category is a major funding source for research universities and academic medical centers. Last night’s directive reduces that stream of funding somewhere between 50% and 75%. The precise breakdown ranges from institution to institution. But that’s a good measure of the level of funding cuts we’re talking about.
On the why, I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural belief that universities and colleges are institutional loci of opposition to MAGA and Trumpism. So you can knock them out of commission in a broader political and culture war by simply defunding them.
On a secondary level, once you’ve established that these grants are at the political pleasure of the chief executive, they’re a powerful tool for disciplining these institutions. Criticize President Trump and watch half your budget disappear. This latter model is very much the one pursued by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary: discipline the universities and bring them under political and patronage control. Putting it all together, it’s very much a move in a broader culture war, seeing universities as the breeding ground of cosmopolitan, liberal, empirical values in the society. So you either destroy them or put them on a tight leash.
Why it may not work: Southern universities and Big Pharma have major stakes in this as well. And they’re calling their congresscritters.
Beavers Take Matters Into Their Own Hands Teeth. Save Czech government $1.2 mill:
When a long-planned infrastructure project in the Czech Republic hit a snag, beavers took the reins.
Beavers have no regard for human laws, so even if they’d known that the construction of a dam in the nation’s Brdy region had stalled due to permitting complications, they wouldn’t have cared.
The project had been in the planning stages for seven years, and was slated to cost the equivalent of $1.2 million, according to National Geographic. But as officials hashed out the details of securing the necessary permits, a local beaver colony took matters into its own paws, building a natural dam in the perfect location to create a thriving wetland for free.
Humans across the world are increasingly embracing the benefits of beaver structural engineering. In 2023, California introduced a policy aimed at restoring the animals in areas where their presence ― and the dams they build― can create a healthy ecosystem for other animals, replenish groundwater and even provide wildfire protection.
Uh-oh. California beavers become an endangered species in 3-2-1…
Trump Targets Transgendered. Students this time:
The U.S. Department of Education told employees late Friday that it will end all programs, contracts and policies that “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex,” carrying out President Donald Trump’s vow to restrict transgender rights.
The broad language in the email did not specify which programs or policies would be impacted, or how many schools or students might be affected. But the order appears designed to target programs that in recent years supported transgender students — school-based mental health services and support for homeless students, for example.
“These corrective measures will include thorough review and subsequent termination of Departmental programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices,” according to the email sent to department employees and obtained by ProPublica.
In this fascist administration, transgendered people are the new Jews. With institutions folding everywhere:
President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders targeting transgender people has resulted in an immediate catastrophe for trans people, their families, and those who seek to work with them. Federal agencies have scrambled to scrub so-called “gender ideology” from websites and agency guidance, removing valuable information about HIV prevention, research into health disparities, and webpages about sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Meanwhile, federal employees are ordered to remove pronouns in their email signatures, and agencies have banned Pride events.
Whether Trump’s executive orders have any teeth—the ACLU and Lambda Legal, among other civil rights organizations, argue they don’t—the mere threat of enforcing those orders has been enough to overturn what have become norms. Instead of waiting for agencies to go through formal rulemaking, a process that requires public input and takes years, or for courts to weigh in on whether the executive orders are legal, major institutions are capitulating.
Dark Money Groups Behind Anti-DEI Efforts:
A rightwing non-profit group that has published a “DEI Watch List” identifying federal employees allegedly “driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives” is bankrolled by wealthy family foundations and rightwing groups whose origins are often cloaked in a web of financial arrangements that obscure the original donors.
One recent list created by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) includes the names of mostly Black people with roles in government health alleged to have some ties to diversity initiatives. Another targets education department employees, and another calls out the “most subversive immigration bureaucrats”.
Read the whole thing. You’ll find out a lot about the seemingly-endless tendrils of these dark-money groups.
What do you want to talk about?
I saw ‘Eureka Day’ last night, and if we get out the Trump years with anything like America left – it will be taught alongside Animal Farm as a painfully on point allegory.
The play skewers a group of well-meaning but hopelessly self-sabotaging progressives trying to run a private elementary school in Berkeley. The play, ostensibly about a school board’s vaccine policy debate, becomes a sharp, funny, and painfully familiar exploration of how liberal ideals collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.
The characters—earnest, self-congratulatory, and terrified of causing offense—tie themselves in knots trying to balance inclusivity, equity, and consensus. The result? Chaos. No one wants to assert authority, and common sense is the first casualty. It’s a masterclass in how progressive infighting and allegiance to compromise has ceded the high ground entirely to reactionary forces.
Sound familiar? It should. We see this same paralysis play out in national and local politics, where Democrats often struggle to counter right-wing narratives because they’re too busy debating themselves over language and ideological purity. The result is an opening for bad-faith actors who weaponize liberal indecision to push regressive policies.
Eureka Day is funny at times but for me the humor is blunted by events that have unfolded in after it was written.
FYI, friends, Paul Kane, the author of the WaPo Chris Murphy story, is a Pulitzer-winning UD grad who got his start in the ’90s freelancing for the much loved and long-gone weekly Crossroads sections at the News Journal.
Thanks to the many Bezos-inspired departures, many of us are down on the Post, but there’s still a lot of quality there and I’m glad that Paul is still part of that team.
I forget where I saw it, but someone had a good idea: Every time these dopes say DEI, ask them what it stands for. Make them say out loud that they’re against diversity, equity and inclusion.
They love to say DEI almost as much as Philly fans like to say E-A-G-L-E-S.
I saw it on a Facebook post (I know you’re not there) from David May Jr.