I’m a bit late to this thread, but regarding the upthread discussion around the combatting antisemitism fig leaf:
I’ve commented before that I sometimes lurk in the Breitbart comments section (there really is some excellent trolling by liberals there, by the way) and the amount of open and unabashed antisemitism among the MAGA crowd is fairly astonishing.
The fundie “support Israel so it’s still around to get nuked in the End Times” sort, or the Nazi “The Jews are inferior and all-powerful and so we must eliminate them” kind, or both?
Plenty of both, actually.
It’s one of the few things they’ll actually argue about among themselves.
I think this is an important article everyone should read:
Its emergence as a bulwark of the opposition to Trump was summed up by this year’s Class Day speaker at Harvard, the former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “After seeing so many cowering billionaires, media moguls, law firms, politicians and other universities bend their knee to an administration that is systematically strip-mining the US constitution, it is inspiring to me to see Harvard University take a stand for freedom.”
Harvard’s response is important, yes. But there are a whole lot of such doors going on right now, and the universities are only part of it; and will not be able to stand on their own.
They’re right about this part:
It is just one front [in an escalating battle]
You (general “you”) fight the battles you can. Harvard is one front. And they seem to be doing a good job of it which can cover many more (including universities that wimped out and bent the knee…they know who they are). The video below is a great guide to how Harvard is fighting this in court (and, so far, winning…wonder what the SCOTUS will do?):
Oh yeah, I agree with that. I was just objecting to the article’s phrasing which I quoted, which sounded as if this one door were the single issue that could keep democracy from fading or allow it to do so.
Time to be ashamed again. It looks like Harvard is getting ready to bow down and pay Trump $500 million .
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/us/politics/trump-harvard-payment.html
In case that is paywalled
I sure hope this was a leak from an administrator who wants to embarrass the university leadership into rejecting it. Any appeasement now will do serious long term damage to a university’s reputation. Already Columbia is seeing it’s reputation go down the toilet.
Eek. I want my recent donation back, if they cave! 
It depends on the settlement, imho. If they give up some money, don’t admit wrongdoing, and don’t give up academic freedom to publish and hire, it could be okay.
It could, except that this particular recipient of Danegeld doesn’t, once bought, always stay bought.
Sadly, it just reinforces once again to Trump that he can punish any university for any reason he phonies up and force a shit-ton of money out of them. Nobody believes that he cares about anti-semitism. He just wants to show them who’s boss. Kneel down to the King!
Trump opens a new front in his war with Harvard, threatening its hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of patents.