Donald Trump and his authoritarian friends have successfully destroyed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the closest this country has gotten to having a useful and effective publicly-funded media. The CPB this week voted to officially shut down, just months after Republicans passed a massive billionaire tax cut plan that stripped the organization of more than $1 billion in funding.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO.”
As we’ve noted previously, right wingers and authoritarians loathe public broadcasting because, in its ideal form, it untethers journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based, corporate media. A media that is easily bullied, cowed, and manipulated by bad actors looking to normalize, downplay, or validate no limit of terrible bullshit (see: CBS, Washington Post, the New York Times, and countless others).
The destruction of the CPB is particularly harmful for local U.S. broadcasting stations. While NPR doesn’t really take all that much money from the public anymore (roughly 1% of NPR’s annual budget comes from the government), the CPB distributed over 70 percent of its funding to about 1,500 public radio and TV stations, which now face existential collapse.
The attacks on the CPB are part of a broader information warfare campaign by the U.S. right wing, which has involved destroying all remaining media consolidation limits, letting radical right wing billionaires buy up major news networks and social media platforms, and launching fake investigations into public broadcasting. They’re afraid of the truth and a functional press, and it’s not subtle.
While Republicans are outwardly hostile to informed consensus, Democrats historically have done a shit job defending journalism or implementing media reform. The press also generally doesn’t like covering this destruction too deeply because consolidated corporate media billionaire ownership doesn’t much like the idea of having to compete with government subsidized alternatives to their bland infotainment dreck.
And even though U.S. public media never truly reached the potential we’ve seen in other countries (usually due to decades of right wing defunding and attacks), this is a generational, devastating loss all the same. Especially in terms of what could have been.
If you recall, Weiss (alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale) helped create the University of Austin in 2021 under the pretense they were creating an “anti-woke” (read: right wing) corrective to “campus leftism running amok” (read: a handful of young people annoyed by systemic racism, broad U.S. corruption, or Benjamin Netanyahu’s industrialized mass murder of toddlers).
The “university” pretended to champion free speech and the truth, but, much like the “renovation” of CBS, the pseudo-university is really part of a larger right wing initiative to reshape journalism and education in order to coddle right wing ideology, eradicate uncomfortable truths right wingers don’t like, and distort reality into a strange, delusional safe space (the exact thing the experiment professes to be combating).
But a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates there’s been a larger recent mass exodus of staff:
“According to LinkedIn, roughly 20 university employees have left this year. That’s a lot for a new institution that had 34 staff members listed on its website this week (the number is separate from faculty). The departures include the president, the provost, the lead fund raiser, the executive director of admissions, as well as people who worked in events, operations, and other positions.”
In addition to a mass exodus of an already small staff, there’s also been a notable departure among key advisors (like Jeffrey Epstein pal Larry Summers) who claim they are only just now figuring out that the entire project might not be entirely on the up and up:
“Over the summer, the provost and the lead fund raiser also left the university, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Summers, the former Harvard president, stepped down from the advisory board in July, saying that he was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates and so am withdrawing.” (His colleagues on the board, Zimmer and Pinker, stepped down shortly after the university’s launch, with Zimmer saying that UATX’s critical statements about higher education “diverged very significantly from my own views.”
The inability (or refusal) of highly educated people to see this project for what it was (a billionaire-backed ideological assault on reality and common sense), doesn’t speak particularly well to our broader cultural awareness or ability to defend ourselves from deep-pocketed bad actors. And while this university, like Weiss’ “new CBS,” may fail due to ham-fisted incompetence, they (and their unlimited budgets) still leave a very ugly mark on informed consensus and a semi-coherent electorate.
On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.
Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.
He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.
The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.
According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.
The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.
Nonetheless, investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious. Multiple attorneys who worked on it told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to sign it.
UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively. Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit, fearing the many ways the government could retaliate against not only UCLA, but the entire university system, which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue. The government has opened probes into all 10 UC campuses, including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone. “Thankfully, they’ve only fucked with UCLA at this point,” said one UC insider privy to the system’s thinking.
To tell this story, ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed public and internal records and interviewed more than 50people, including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations, UC officials and faculty, former government officials, Jewish leaders and legal experts. Some asked not to be identified, for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn’t been authorized to discuss the conflict. The Justice Department and its top officials did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests.
Over three decades leading public colleges, Milliken, 68, a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by “JB,” has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and navigate the culture wars. In an interview, he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC, and UCLA in particular, unparalleled in his career. “There’s nothing like this time,” he said. “This is singular. It’s the toughest.”
On Nov. 14, UC received a temporary reprieve. In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration’s actions against UCLA had “flouted” legal requirements and ordered it to cease all “coercive and retaliatory conduct” against the UC system. Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA’s $584 million in frozen grant funding.
But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal, and many people at UC fear that more attacks are coming. “Even if this holds, there will simply be another move from this administration,” said Anna Markowitz, an associate professor of education at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association, which is among the lawsuit’s plaintiffs. “They have not made it a secret what they wish to do.”
In interviews, UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far. Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism said they are aghast at the way the government has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research.
One of them is Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare and education whose description of his treatment at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump’s DOJ recommended against UCLA. But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds. “These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he told us. “It looks like we’re being used.”
For Trump’s Justice Department, the University of California was a juicy target from the start.
With its 10 campuses, nearly 300,000 students, six medical centers and three national labs, UC is a crown jewel of a blue state — one whose governor, Gavin Newsom, has become one of Trump’s most prominent foes.
Its scientists have won 75 Nobel Prizes, including four this year alone. But as a high-powered science hub, it’s deeply dependent on federal funding, getting some $17.3 billion a year in research grants, student financial aid and reimbursements from government health programs. UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges, including Columbia and Brown, from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Some of Trump’s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs. Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had sued UC officials in 2017 on behalf of two conservative student groups, alleging unfair treatment of conservative speakers they wanted to bring to the Berkeley campus. (UC settled the case a year later, agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay $70,000 in legal costs.) And Trump had named Leo Terrell, the bombastic former Fox News commentator, to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. A UCLA School of Law graduate, Terrell had publicly declared in mid-2024 that his alma mater was “a national embarrassment” over its handling of “criminal antisemitic conduct.” Dhillon and Terrell didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In early February, just two weeks after Trump took office, his new attorney general, Pam Bondi, issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring “zealous advocacy” for Trump’s executive orders, attacks on all forms of “illegal DEI” and aggressive steps to combat antisemitism. Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination, historically the civil rights division’s chief focus, were largely abandoned.
On Feb. 28, Terrell’s task force announced plans to visit 10 U.S. campuses, including UCLA and UC Berkeley, that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members, to assess “whether remedial action is warranted.”
But by then, the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty.
In early March, Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in “the entire UC system” were “being harassed because of antisemitism.” The administration planned to “sue,” “bankrupt,” and “take away every single federal dollar” from such schools, he said, and the DOJ would file hate crime charges.
A team of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the allegations of antisemitism against UC employees. Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act, the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn’t, by itself, enough to merit federal intervention. The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a “pattern or practice” of tolerating antisemitism.
Before Trump took office, the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe, according to DOJ veterans. Investigators would conduct interviews on campus, review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment. Once a complaint was authorized, the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions, not punish colleges.
In this case, the Justice Department’s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time — initially, a single month.
Career supervisors say they told their new bosses that they couldn’t, in one month, produce a case that could stand up in court. Still, “North” and “South” teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officials at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and UCLA.
“We were told what the outcome will be: ‘You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system,’” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the investigation before leaving the Justice Department in May.
“The incredibly short timing of this investigation is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough, unbiased investigation,” Jen Swedish, who was the deputy chief of Justice’s employment litigation section until May, said in an interview. “The end goal was to file a damn complaint — or have something to threaten the university.”
Trump’s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates, formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach, California, who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help “win this country back.” “You guys have found a hostile work environment, right?” lawyers on the UC team recall him asking, just three weeks into the investigation.
“He seemed upset we were spending so much time investigating,” Dena Robinson, a senior trial attorney, told us. “He didn’t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued.” In an email about six weeks in, Gates suggested there was easily enough in the public record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses — a notion that horrified the career lawyers. “Why did we even go out there if you’d already made up your mind?” another member of the UC team recalled thinking. Gates, who left the DOJ in November after just 11 months, declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle.
Lawyers on the team say it soon became apparent that there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination case against UC Davis, UC Berkeley or UCSF, much less the entire UC system. Fearful for their jobs, they agreed on a strategy to “feed the beast,” as one attorney put it: to focus on UCLA, which had experienced the most troubling, and publicly explosive, episodes of antisemitism.
Like many colleges across the country, UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel’s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents, including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading “Free Palestine, Fuck Jews.” Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic.
Starting in late April 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus. Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement, UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week, disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings. Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism.
On the night of April 30, masked counterprotesters, armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks, stormed the encampment, triggering a three-hour melee before police were finally brought in. Dozens of people were injured. It took until 6 a.m. May 2 for Los Angeles police and sheriff’s deputies to empty the site.
Before Trump even took office, however, UCLA — and the federal government — had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school.
Most significantly, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement with the Department of Education resolving investigations into student complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA and on four other campuses.
The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus’ handling of discrimination complaints. Government monitoring was to continue until UC “demonstrated compliance” with “all the terms of this agreement.”
The Trump administration disregarded all that. Even as the employee investigation was underway, it launched a new investigation of the same student complaints in early May.
On May 27 on Fox News, Terrell, the head of the antisemitism task force, once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ’s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded. “Expect massive lawsuits against the UC system,” he declared. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. …We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially.”
At the time, the lawyers working on the UC employment investigation were still racing to complete their recommendation. They were focused solely on UCLA, having determined there wasn’t adequate evidence to pursue cases at other campuses. Many had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that case. “This was not something we would usually litigate,” one lawyer on the team said in an interview. “But everyone understood the front office was demanding this.”
By then, most of the remaining members of the UC team, amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division, were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration’s deferred-resignation offer. “It was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint,” the lawyer said.
In the 47-page recommendation memo the UC team sent on May 29 to Dhillon, the assistant AG for civil rights, the lawyers spelled out their concerns. “We simply do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring 2024 are ongoing” — typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint, the memo acknowledged. Some of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech. And because, “as has been frequently noted,” the investigation had been “truncated” to three months, there hadn’t even been time to review some of the documents UC produced, the memo said.
To shore up potential weaknesses in the case, the memo suggested an unusual “hybrid complaint” strategy that would rest partly on new allegations about the ineffectiveness of the university’s complaint process (which was ongoing) and partly on three older faculty grievances.
One of the grievances cited was that of Astor, the professor of social welfare, who describes himself as both a Zionist and a “pro-peace researcher.” His academic work, much of which takes place in Israel, involves studying ways to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist. But after he signed an open letter from Jewish faculty criticizing some pro-Palestinian protesters’ calls for violence, they accused him, in a widely circulated letter of their own, of supporting genocide. When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students, he told us, a masked protester asked whether he was a Zionist. After he said he believed in Israel’s right to exist, he was blocked from entering or crossing through the central campus.
Astor was targeted again last November, he said, when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he’d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class. “A bunch of students got up and showed pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn’t let us talk,” he recalled. Later heckled on his way to his car, he said he felt threatened and depressed. He lost more than 60 pounds and was granted permission to work from home, but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere.
Astor’s complaints, the employment-section attorneys believed, would support their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA. Even so, they warned that their case might not hold up in court. In the memo, they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint.
With that message delivered, most of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department.
On the morning of July 29, two days before Milliken’s interrupted golf game, the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the 2024 encampment debacle: It announced a $6.45 million settlement of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who said protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings, creating a “Jew exclusion zone,” and that the university did nothing to help them. UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions, and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and support the UCLA Jewish community. The steps the university had taken, a joint statement declared, “demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism.”
The Trump administration had a different view. That afternoon, it announced that it had sent UC a notice letter saying the Justice Department had found UCLA’s response to the encampment had been “deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Bondi warned in a press release that UCLA would “pay a heavy price” for “this disgusting breach of civil rights.” The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the investigation had begun.
The letter, which acknowledged that it relied significantly on “publicly available reports and information,” ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of 2024 to rest.
“The violations they described all predate the December agreement,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department under the Obama and Biden administrations. “They’ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward.”
The July 29 letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no “reasonable certainty” of reaching an agreement.
Instead, the next day, the Trump administration began freezing UCLA’s research money from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Defense Department. The agencies cited the campus’ handling of antisemitism as well as “illegal affirmative action” and allowing transgender women in women’s sports and bathrooms.
UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions, but the first public institution.
David Shackelford, whose medical school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer, said his phone “blew up” when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders. Three NIH grants, totaling $8 million over five years, had supported the lab’s work. “These are experiments and animal models that take years to develop,” Shackelford said. “It’s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away.” He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running “on fumes,” vowing “to go down swinging.”
Elle Rathbun is not sure she’s up for the fight. A 29-year-old sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience, Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to study how brains recover from strokes when she got the news: Her $160,000 award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants.
She found substitute funding for some of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress. Like hundreds of her colleagues, she’d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant, only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream, a move she called “incredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful.”
A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them. But even after those victories, the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle. In a July 30 email later introduced in court, the National Science Foundation’s acting chief science officer wrote that, in addition to freezing existing grants, he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA.
In nearly 500 pages of personal statements to the court, some faculty members said they’re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university. Amander Clark, a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center, no longer talks about the ways her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people. “I am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight, 20 years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen,” she wrote.
In selecting Milliken as their new system president, the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large public university systems with vastly different political climates, ranging from the City University of New York, which he ran from 2014 to early 2018, to the University of Texas system, which he led from late 2018 until May 2025.
At UT, Milliken had championed some progressive steps, including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure, but he had also quickly shut down the system’s 21 offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law. “He knows what is a winning hand and what is not,” said Richard Benson, who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas.
On Aug. 1, his first day on the job at UC’s system office in Oakland, Milliken issued a measured public statement that addressed the “deeply troubling” UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC’s “life-saving and life-changing research.”
That same week, the Justice Department, days after Bondi’s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students, delivered a second notice letter, declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the “hybrid” lawsuit that the DOJ’s UC team had recommended in May.
Eager to turn up the pressure on UC, political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings, according to former agency officials. But Kacie Candela, a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration’s UC investigations, warned that under federal law, it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit. After a heated dispute, her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced. She was terminated days later. (Candela, who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing, declined to discuss the matter for this story. DOJ officials didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode.)
After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters, Milliken quickly affirmed UC’s willingness to “engage in dialogue” with the administration. But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later: the Justice Department’s $1.2 billion settlement demand, which also asked for policy changes in areas where there’d been no findings of wrongdoing, including admissions practices, screening of foreign students and transgender students’ access to bathrooms. Within hours of UC’s receipt of the 27-page demand letter on Aug. 8 — which the DOJ had marked “confidential” — CNN, The New York Times and Politico had all posted stories saying they’d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources. (A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter, which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private.)
All this was without precedent, due process or clear legal justification, civil rights experts noted. Agreeing to the DOJ’s demands, the Aug. 8 letter said, would release UC from claims that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students, employees and women, and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud. “They were trying to overwhelm,” said Swedish, the former civil rights deputy section chief. “They were spraying the fire hose at the university.”
Strangely, Justice demanded another $172 million for employees who’d complained of antisemitism discrimination, even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at $300,000.
Former U.S. Attorney Zachary A. Cunha said a possible rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that, under Trump, the DOJ is experimenting with using the False Claims Act in civil rights cases. This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers, who would share in any financial recovery. “It’s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from,” Cunha said of the administration’s settlement demands. But “if there’s a pattern that’s emerged thus far, it’s that every tool in the toolbox is on the table.”
Kenneth L. Marcus, an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights under Trump, acknowledged that the government has pursued “eye-catching” penalties “with a speed that suggested” normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures “have not been utilized.” But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the “national crisis” of antisemitism. “When a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented,” he said, “the response needs to be as well.”
In media interviews, officials in the Trump administration acknowledge that its “whole-of-government” attacks on universities seek to bypass normal, slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the government is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing, seemingly arbitrary fines. “Having that dollar figure, it actually brings attention to the deals in ways people might not otherwise pay attention,” former White House deputy May Mailman, a key architect of the administration’s higher education strategy, told The New York Times.
This approach is “flagrantly unlawful” and “incredibly dangerous,” said Lhamon, the former assistant education secretary, who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school. “There’s a long set of steps that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated.”
Lhamon said the Trump administration was operating “like a mob boss.”
“That is not the federal government doing civil rights work,” she said.
Milliken has found himself caught between the Trump administration’s demands and those of his new constituency in California, which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation.
Newsom, who serves on the UC Board of Regents, has threatened to sue the federal government, calling its demands “extortion” and vowing to “fight like hell” against any deal.
The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley’s law school. “The university should have immediately gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,” he told ProPublica and the Chronicle. “I wanted the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit. I didn’t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating.”
But Milliken, backed by the UC regents, resisted calls for confrontation, wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under investigation. The damage to date at UCLA is “minor in comparison to the threat that looms,” Milliken noted in a mid-September statement. “We are in uncharted waters.”
So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the government. According to a person familiar with the matter, it has retained William Levi, who served in Trump’s first administration as a special assistant to the president, counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department, to lead the talks.
If UC’s leaders have preached restraint, its faculty has opted for open defiance. In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge, Lin, to restore UCLA’s frozen research grants, a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration’s entire assault on UC. At a hearing on Nov. 6, the government’s lawyer acknowledged that the administration’s “hodgepodge” of actions against the system hadn’t followed established civil rights procedures but said the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration’s “policy priorities.”
Lin didn’t buy it. A week later, in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction, she barred all of the Trump administration’s actual and threatened moves to punish UC, including the $1.2 billion payment demand. The Trump administration’s “playbook,” she wrote, citing comments by Terrell and others, illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”
Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC, approvals were slow to resume. In public remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov. 19, Milliken said that more than 400 grants across the system remained suspended or terminated, representing “more than $230 million in research activity on hold.” He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system’s pathway to new grants will be blocked.
In our interview, Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration, saying the university has held its ground on its governance, mission and academic freedom.
“We recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal government,” he said. “Our efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans.”
Ryan Walters is no longer the Superintendent of the State of Oklahoma, but he’s still at work doing his nonsensical performative shtick. After vacating his government position in the middle of his mandates for schools to carry copies of the Trump Bible and requiring transplant teachers to take a Prager U developed woke-test to get certified, Walters has since moved on to try to “destroy” teacher unions.
“The teachers’ unions descended and brought chaos to our state. They fought every reform. They fought parents’ rights. They pushed the most radical ideology the country has ever seen. They’re Marxist. They have to be destroyed,” said Walters.
“What we’re doing is we’re getting teachers out of the teachers’ union first, but then we’re creating an army of America First teachers that actually want to go back to teaching math, reading, history, science,” said Walters. “When I say history, I mean actually American values, actual history. You know, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, which forever changed the course of human events. Not Thomas Jefferson’s an evil slave owner, which is what you’re seeing in so many of our classrooms today.”
Except, of course, that Jefferson was a slave owner. Whether that made him “evil” or not is, I suppose, a matter of debate, but it is not debatable that slavery itself is evil. Beyond that, I’ll leave it to everyone else to decide the pros and cons of teacher unions. My wife is an educator, I’ve seen both the good and bad.
My point in all of this is that Walters is exactly where he should be: completely out of government and in an advocacy group where he can shout all about the woke communist lizard-people on the anti-white racist left who want to feed your children to illegal immigrants (I admit, this is an imprecise approximation of his positions).
Conversely, the new Oklahoma Superintendent, Lindel Fields, is doing exactly what he should be doing thus far, which mostly amounts to unwinding all the bullshit that Walters pulled while he was in office.
In the letter, Superintendent Fields stated schools would no longer be required to have bibles in classrooms.
Fields said Bibles are available to students as they always have, in “media centers, used as curricular materials when appropriate, carried by students and staff alike, and accessible on school-issued devices like Chromebooks.” He also said districts can include biblical education wherever deemed appropriate by individual school boards.
Fields said the America First Teacher Test designed by PragerU is not a certification requirement for teaching in Oklahoma. He stressed the America First test is not the same as the US Naturalization test, which is separate requirement for teacher certification.
The letter went on to note that some of the standards put in place for state testing and what is taught in social studies classes, potentially a reference to Walters’ demands that students be taught all about election and COVID conspiracy theories in classrooms, will be reviewed.
Oklahoma always deserved better than to have someone doing a one-man MAGA performance piece on the backs of school children running education in the state. It appears to now have that. Walters’ actions, it would seem, were all for naught.
Back in May we noted how Trump illegally declared he was unilaterally destroying the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act, lying repeatedly that the law was “racist” and “unconstitutional.” The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools, education, and training to Americans (of all kinds).
The bill helped everybody (including Trump-supporting rural veterans and rural residents), but because Trump’s team seemed to assume that the word equity meant “help minorities,” the program was the brutal victim of our mad, incoherent, con man king and his army of mindless earlobe nibblers.
Back in June, a coalition of 20 states sued the Trump administration, correctly stating that it’s illegal for the administration to unilaterally dismantle an act of Congress and freeze and repurpose funding that had already been allotted. That case is winding through the court system, but the damage has already been done to countless traditionally underfunded programs and organizations that had been told they were getting the money.
This week the National Digital Inclusivity Alliance (NDIA) filed another lawsuit against the government, again (correctly) noting that the freezing of the funds is illegal and violates the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches as outlined in the Constitution.
The NDIA was poised to receive one of the biggest chunks of Act funding; a $25.7 million grant it was going to use to help connect people to the Internet via 13 programs across 11 states. Not only via direct access to affordable physical equipment, but digital literacy training for seniors and vets to gain access to online education, health care, and other essential services:
“NDIA is taking the extraordinary step of suing the federal government for the 30,000 people who were counting on our Digital Navigator + program to help guide them through submitting job applications, accessing telehealth, attending classes, and staying safe online. Thousands more across the country stood to benefit from Digital Equity Act grants through other trusted community organizations. Let’s be very clear, the Digital Equity Act is not unconstitutional nor racist, it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support to ensure the United States can compete in today’s modern economy.”
There’s a long list of groups that were also planning to use this funding to help their communities navigate things like the rising number of online scams that tend to disproportionately target the elderly. They’re all now shit out of luck because of a bunch of weird racist zealots (who like to pretend they’re saving taxpayer money with one hand, while setting it on fire with the other).
A driving motivation behind these attacks on online equity isn’t “saving money,” it’s dismantling government efforts to do anything about the problems created by consolidated corporate power. That means lobotomizing the FCC. It means killing programs that gave school kids free Wi-Fi. It means undermining efforts to protect U.S. citizens (in red or blue states alike) from fraud and robocall hell.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist his random-ass butchery of government is only “impacting Democrats”:
After bragging about permanently cutting "Democrat programs," Trump says "we're not closing up Republican programs."
I was not previously aware that the President of the United States could unilaterally destroy an act of Congress, freeze funding for beneficial bipartisan programs, lie about the impact repeatedly, and face absolutely zero repercussions whatsoever. Consider me properly informed.
As we discussed last week, Ryan Walters resigned from his position as the state Superintendent of Oklahoma and the mood across the state was sad and sour as a result.
Okay, while it’s very funny that Oklahoma businesses hosted celebration parties for Walters’ resignation while I can’t even hazard a guess at who my own state’s Superintendent is, the question for some of us is what would happen to all of Walters’ edicts and mandates he was issuing right up until the moment he resigned.
The answer, according to one Republican state senator is, essentially: don’t worry about it, because Walters’ mandates were just performative bullshit anyway. State Senator Adam Pugh, as you probably guess, put this in more polite terms.
State Sen. Adam Pugh, R-Edmond, said such mandates had no statutory authority anyway, so they wouldn’t be in effect even if Walters, his fellow Republican, remained as Oklahoma’s top education administrator.
Dozens of districts – including most of the state’s larger ones – have routinely ignored those mandates, saying they will obey state law. While Walters has threatened districts that don’t follow his mandates, saying he’ll downgrade district accreditation or subject them to special audits, he has no unilateral authority to do that. That authority falls to the state Board of Education, of which he is the chair but only one of seven members.
“Nothing happens, because nothing was going to happen, because there wasn’t statutory authority to do it,” Pugh said. “I’ve always maintained that position, because we have to be able to say, ‘What is the administrative authority to do something?’ It’s only what you’re given by law to do.
Which didn’t stop Walters from trying to bully school districts into doing what he wanted anyway, of course. But the point is that he had no real authority to follow through on his threats. While the state legislature can codify some of his mandates into state law, and in fact some GOP senators have said they may do so with some of them, Walters had no real authority to back up his bullying at the time.
So, what was he doing? Auditioning for a new job, almost certainly. This is speculation, but I really do think he wanted to join the Trump administration and the federal government, but that fell through when the administration wanted nothing to do with him. And so he likely pivoted to lobbying for his new role as CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, which is absolutely everything you already are assuming it is.
It is a partner organization created by the Freedom Foundation designed to offer educators an alternative to union membership. According to the Freedom Foundation’s website, the Teacher Freedom Alliance was created to address “the growing frustration teachers have with the direction public education is rapidly heading in no small part due to the radical agenda of the teachers unions.”
“The Teacher Freedom Alliance supports educators in their mission to develop free, moral, and responsible citizens,” A news release from March stated. “As an alternative to traditional unions, TFA offers pro-America educators a place to find support and comradery in an organization dedicated to restoring the broken education system—without any additional cost to those who choose to join.”
He stays on brand, I’ll give him that. So, I imagine this isn’t the last we’ll be hearing from Walters, though now he can shout about liberal tears and conspiracy theories from outside the government, which is a far better place for him.
Some background: last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring free Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses and libraries, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny extra. It was a popular, no brainer, bipartisan effort to make internet access easier for the most disadvantaged, many of them living in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the belief he’d make their lives better.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Brendan Carr joined forces to try and destroy that effort. Big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the precedent of government offering free broadband when poor people might otherwise be forced to overpay for expensive cellular. AT&T also doesn’t want government Wi-Fi initiatives to imperil the company’s longstanding practice of defrauding school subsidy programs.
Killing this program is about protecting the interests of giant, shitty telecom monopolies. But Cruz and Carr couldn’t openly say that, so they lied and claimed the program was illegal (false), that they were looking to save taxpayers money (false), and the program “censored Conservative viewpoints” (insane and false, we debunked and explained this claim way back in January).
Carr’s facing some moderate blowback from a few Senators like Ed Markey, who fired off a polite letter. Carr’s also facing light pushback from advocacy groups including the American Library Association (ALA) and the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB). All of them say Carr’s dumb policy choices are making it harder for schoolkids (Republican and Democrat alike) to connect to the internet:
“Rolling back the E-Rate hotspot and school bus decisions would undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity and would reverse progress in closing the ‘Homework Gap.’ For millions of students, especially those from low-income households, internet access outside of school walls is not a luxury but a prerequisite for academic success.”
Spoiler: Carr doesn’t care. Polite letters aren’t going to be enough to deter him from his plan to effectively butcher every last part of the FCC that doesn’t serve AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon’s quarterly revenue goals (his inevitable future employers). The press barely finds this stuff worth covering.
Again, this particular program was built with broad, bipartisan support. It helped children do their fucking homework. It wasn’t controversial. Carr and Cruz targeted not just because it imperiled incumbent telecom monopolies revenues, but because they’re inherently shameless; gleefully engaged in a scorched-Earth war against the very people they pretend to represent.
I think there’s a lot of “Libertarian free market” think tank guys, companies, and extraction-class folks who would very much like it if the focus remained exclusively on the aspects of Carr they don’t support (primarily free speech), but the harm he’s causing to issues like consumer protection, public safety, and affordable connectivity simply can’t be overstated.
It’s unlikely his rollback of a popular plan to help rural schoolkids do their homework will see much press coverage. And what coverage there is will likely either downplay the harm or parrot Carr’s false claims unskeptically. But it’s important to not let Carr’s terribleness on free speech overshadow his other, equally terrible, policies that will reverberate for decades to come.
Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny.
Enter Ted Cruz, who recently tried to kill the program based on a bunch of lies and gibberish about how the program was somehow “censoring Conservative viewpoints.” Cruz’s proposal didn’t make it through the House of Representatives, but Trump’s extremist lackey at the FCC, Brendan Carr, is now picking up the campaign:
“Today, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr asked his commission colleagues to vote on two items that would reverse the agency’s unlawful, Biden-era decisions to expand COVID spending programs,” Carr’s announcement said. “Those FCC decisions spent scarce taxpayer dollars on funding unsupervised screen time for kids without accounting for the significant attendant risks.”
Again, this program helped kids in poor, rural communities do their homework via portable hotspots doled out at the school library to folks out of range of traditional broadband access. There are no “significant, attendant risks.” It was not “illegal.” These are completely fabricated lies to feebly justify the pointless destruction of a useful program that didn’t cost taxpayers an additional cent.
Cruz’s effort would have leveraged the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to not only eliminate the program, but to also ban the FCC from ever creating something similar ever again (Republicans used similar tactics in 2017 to kill new FCC rules that would have held telecom giants accountable for repeated privacy violations).
Carr’s proposal, in turn, would eliminate the program now, but wouldn’t forbid the FCC from restoring it under future administrations. In a statement, Cruz applauded Carr’s pointless destruction, but urged Congress to make it permanent:
“Kudos to Chairman Carr for moving to undo the Biden hotspot program and protect children, but now it’s time for Congress to step up and codify this change,” Cruz said in the FCC press release. “In May, the Senate passed my Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution overturning the illegal Biden hotspot rule. I urge the House to act on the resolution and prevent this or similar harmful rules in the future.”
Again, there is no money being saved here. No U.S. citizens were asking for this helpful program to be destroyed. This is just wanton destruction by terrible assholes, who know that because “the left” (read: people across political ideologies who actually care about kids being able to do their homework in a country with shitty and expensive broadband access) supported it.
The other underlying motivation is the fact AT&T didn’t like rural kids getting free access to the Internet (instead of overpaying AT&T for cellular access). These terrible assholes can’t just come out and admit any of this, so you get this weird performative bullshit about “Biden illegality” and “protecting the children” as flimsy cover.
The Ryan Walters saga of stupid continues. Walters is the Superintendent of Oklahoma, where he oversees a state education system that ranks near the bottom among states, while also carving out time to lick Donald Trump’s boots as thoroughly as possible. Between naked attempts to sell the Trump bible in state schools and attempting to make Trump’s favorite election conspiracy theories part of the state’s curriculum, you would think that he would be in MAGA’s good graces. Unfortunately, due to his own verbal missteps and a strange occurrence of mild porn showing up on a TV screen in a school board meeting, the administration has been giving him the cold shoulder as of late.
Perhaps as part of a plan to get back in MAGA’s good graces, Walters also announced that transplant teachers from “woke” states like New York and California would be forced to take an “anti-woke” teaching exam before being granted a teacher’s license. This supposed exam was to be developed by Prager U, itself a propaganda outfit run by Dennis Prager.
Here’s how Walters described the test back when we first wrote about it.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday. The superintendent’s office notified CNN on Friday that it had not yet been released as of noon, but that it was coming soon.
So, if you don’t pass the test, you don’t get a teacher’s license. I asked at the time what was to keep so-called nefarious, woke-minded, uber-communists from the Soviet states of New York and California from simply, you know, lying on the tests?
Well, it turns out I was overthinking it even by wondering that out loud. It turns out that the test is one in which failure is impossible.
First reported by Quorum Call’s Shawn Ashley, the 34-question test is available on the state department’s website. StateImpact took the test and confirmed it is impossible to fail. If test-takers respond incorrectly, they’re prompted to try again until they land on the correct answer. The test includes several questions on biological sex and transgender rights, as well as others on civics and U.S. history.
At the end, test-takers are presented with a certificate affirming the “demonstrated understanding of foundational civic knowledge and commitment to traditional American values, in alignment with the educational principles upheld by the State of Oklahoma.”
And so the open question is that what is the point of this test, other than more performative ego-fondling of the Trump administration? A test you can’t fail certainly isn’t “weeding out” all of these woke transplants looking to move to Oklahoma from the coasts. A test that let’s you keep answering the question until you get it “right” is less about withholding teacher’s licenses and more about the compulsory affirmation of Walters’ personal beliefs before the license is granted. So what are we even doing here?
Asked if a test that’s impossible to fail is effective at achieving this goal, Walters’ office did not respond.
“Sorry, that is not right. Try again.” This isn’t WarGames. Not playing is not an answer.
When the BestNetTech community has had to hear so much about a single state’s education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma schools, which rank near the bottom of states in the country, he seems far more interested in inserting Christianity anywhere he can into public schools, teaching children his favorite pet election conspiracy theories, and presiding over board meetings where tame but very strange erotic videos sometimes appear on screens.
Much of this runs afoul of the Constitution and the First Amendment, of course. And I very much wonder if the same might be true of Walters’ latest plan, which is to give transplants from certain states who want to become teachers in Oklahoma a “woke test” that will determine if they get a teaching license.
Teachers from “liberal” states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment, to be given for the first time today, that “keeps away woke indoctrinators,” according to Oklahoma’s top education official.
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday. The superintendent’s office notified CNN on Friday that it had not yet been released as of noon, but that it was coming soon.
Now, I’m no constitutional law professor, but this sure sounds like the state government would be setting different requirements for different citizens purely based on the place in America from which they are emigrating. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I, and others, can certainly argue that these selective tests run afoul of that text. And I imagine someone will try to make that argument or another one, such as First Amendment violations, because this entire plan is buckets of stupid. At the very least, this well-publicized plan to root out the nefarious Marxist teachers from “liberal” states, whatever the fuck that means, apparently hinges on the idea that those same nefarious Marxist teachers won’t simply lie on the test.
A test that was created by Prager U of all organizations, mind you. Not the government. Not some scholastic body. Just a fake educational organization that pushes evangelical right-wing propaganda to anyone that will listen. Prager U has its own tortured history of trying to violate the First Amendment on top of its other nonsense.
What’s in the test? Simple civics stuff, for starters, with just a sprinkle of bigotry on top.
One proposed question deals with gender – asking teachers to select from a series of multiple-choice answers which chromosome pairs determine biological sex. Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, told CNN there are several questions on the test related to “undoing the damage of gender ideology that is forced and taught through some of these other tests like the PRISM test,” referring to a training for teachers in California that aims to “provide resources to bolster support for LGBTQ+ youth in California.”
Another question asks why freedom of religion is important to America’s identity. Other questions include asking for the first three words of the Constitution, naming the two chambers of the US Congress, and identifying the number of US Senators. Streit said the Oklahoma superintendent had asked for a test “that is more wholesome and in line with the Oklahoma parent body.”
Expect lawsuits. Probably several of them. And if the Oklahoma courts are just, this facade of patriotism will be nixed out of existence.
But that it is even being tried is a sign of trouble for the Union.
