There is a planned walkout and protest statewide for 23 January, tomorrow. We want ICE out, and the hope is that a little poke in the pocketbook might send a message. The University of Minnesota sent out the message below to all students and employees.

Dear faculty, staff, and students,

The University is aware of the recently announced call for civic action on Friday, January 23, during which Minnesotans are being encouraged not to attend work, school, or participate in commercial activity in response to federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota.

We fully support the right of faculty, staff, and students to engage in lawful civic expression. We also must ensure continuity of operations and meet our responsibilities to students and the University community.

For all employees
Employees, including students with University jobs, who plan to be away on January 23 must use vacation or personal holiday time with the supervisor’s advance approval. Sick or Earned Sick and Safe Time (ESST) cannot be used for these absences. Unapproved absences, including walking off the job or failing to report to work as scheduled, may result in corrective action in accordance with University policies and collective bargaining agreements.
Course delivery and attendance
As was noted to instructors last week, classes are expected to proceed (UMD-specific policy) as scheduled. Instructors who are considering not holding January 23 class sessions must work with their dean’s office to make appropriate alternate arrangements, including notifying students of these changes.

Regarding excused absences (UMD-specific policy), students must notify instructors of the circumstances causing them to miss a scheduled class meeting in advance or as soon as possible. University policy describes circumstances for excused absences and the opportunity for makeup work. Instructors may grant excused absences for reasons not listed in University policy, but those decisions must be made in a viewpoint-neutral way and in concurrence with your academic unit. Students will not be penalized for excused absences.

We appreciate the professionalism, care, and respect our employees demonstrate during moments of heightened community concern. University leaders and supervisors should offer flexibility where feasible, while also ensuring appropriate arrangements to maintain vital services.

If you have questions about time away, attendance, or supervisory responsibilities, please contact your local HR lead. Please note that we are also tracking potential weather impacts on Friday, January 23. Should there be any operational changes, your campus will communicate. Please connect with your Dean’s office for further guidance on instruction.

In short, they support our right to engage in lawful civic expression, but you better not participate in this one unless you’ve consulted your dean and filled out all the paperwork and you have a good excuse!

Too bad. I’ve emailed all my students and told them to join in the protest. I haven’t consulted my dean or filled out any paperwork, but my excuse is that the entire country has been seized by an incompetent fascist cabal, and a brief work stoppage is the least we can do. We ought to have a nationwide general strike for a period of time sufficient to let the ruling junta know that we mean business.

I wish my university had the conviction and the moral courage to speak out, rather than sending out long weasely excuses for doing nothing.

I do not trust this article about the chaos at the university of Austin, UATX. The author’s premises are unsound.

The inaugural year of the University of Austin, or UATX as it’s known, had been marked by the frenzy and occasional chaos that one might expect from a start-up aimed at disrupting American higher education. The audacious experiment — the construction of a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom — had drawn the interest and participation of a star-studded cast of public intellectuals, academics and tycoons.

It was not ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom. That is a lie. It was populated with a class of disaffected professors who were mad that their right wing views, misogyny, and racism were not getting the love they wanted from existing universities. Free speech was their excuse, but what speech was not allowed? That universities did not like demeaning black students, digging up the graves of Native Americans, harassing women on campus, White Nationalism, hating diversity, or kicking Palestinian students off campus? Those were the issues that motivated the early fans of UATX.

It was built by a couple of billionaires to justify their views, and it was rabidly endorsed by Bari Weiss, who also promoted the Intellectual Dark Web, and is now in the process of destroying the credibility of CBS News. It’s not at all about free speech, and is entirely about propping up a dying authoritarian ideology. Jesus, they’ve even got a bust of Bari Weiss proudly displayed in their library. I can’t take them seriously.

As for their star-studded cast, the author of this article tries to list them, and has to admit that the faculty “lean” right…more like they’re all lying on the floor, clutching their appendix.

The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.

To single out just one of these rogues, Kathleen Stock. She has said that trans women are still males with male genitalia, many are sexually attracted to females, and they should not be in places where females undress or sleep in a completely unrestricted way; she’s a trustee of the LGB Alliance; she has declared that there are only two immutable sexes, man and woman, erasing the existence of people who don’t fall into her binary categorization. Yet she claims she is not transphobic. The author is intentionally ignoring the evidence that UATX was a right wing project all along. His article is full of material that I would use to argue that it was not a credible source from the very beginning.

For instance, here’s an image used in one of their courses (not a science course; I don’t think they have any of those).

OK, we’re done. It’s not possible to defend the intent of the founders of UATX; it’s a house of cards built on a foundation of garbage.

It is true that it seems to be disintegrating, though. There have been prominent defections, included by some actually prominent professors, so it’s collapsing into a dungheap of aggrieved losers. There has lately been a huge conflict at the university.

The night before, the campus had hosted a dinner and conversation between the prominent conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Larry Summers, the former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary. Later, that evening, the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel would deliver the first of a series of lectures on the Antichrist. People at UATX had grown accustomed to fast-paced action.

But in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.

The campus was quiet that Wednesday, the first of the spring term. The college, which operates under a quarter system, doesn’t schedule classes on Wednesdays, and so no students would be around to see the staff coming and going from the conference room in the elegant, former department store where UATX had made its home. Through the window, one could see the huge American flag in the atrium, illuminated by a skylight in the ceiling. It was a warm, pleasant day in Austin, but Lonsdale’s mood didn’t match the weather.

“Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.

“It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”

One attendee described the contents of Lonsdale’s speech as essentially a right-wing version of the Statement of Faith you’ll find at places like Answers in Genesis. You have to subscribe to four principles to work at UATX:

“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);

“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”

Oooh, I guess the identity politics crowd are a threat similar to the Red Scare of the 1950s. To work at UATX you now have to swear on the ghost of Joe McCarthy now, I assume.

Remember, this university that the author claimed was built on a virtuous foundation of Free Speech was actually established with the big money of a billionaire and the propaganda of a Zionist apologist for the Trump administration. That billionaire was…Joe Lonsdale. The mask is off. Many of us could see right through it on the day this lie of an educational institution was announced.

Never trust a billionaire. They all lie.

Typical American Psycho

Sometimes it’s really hard to be living in Minnesota. I’m a Pacific Northwest boy born and bred, I like temperate climates, gentle rains, and an ocean nearby. We woke up this morning to 0°F, 30mph winds, and more and more snow; my wife had to go to work, and I was up at 5 to help her armor up and strap on layers and layers so she can survive the walk to her job (I’m staying home and doing housework and prepping for the next week of classes — I get to stay in the warm).

Sometimes I think we have to be crazy to live here.

But then we see our fellow citizens rise up and do the right thing, and I instead feel like we’re incredibly lucky to live here.

Today, an obnoxious right wing provocateur had scheduled an anti-protest march in Minneapolis. It’s not clear what his goal was, other than to tromp around and declare that he hates Muslims. It was supposed to be a big rally led by this clown, Jake Lang, whose claim to fame is that he was a convicted January 6 rioter who was pardoned by Trump, and has in the past led similar hate rallies in Dearborn, Michigan, as well as Texas and Florida.

His Minnesota rally did not go well for him.

His side was represented by maybe a half-dozen people (also defended by a swarm of city police and a big black war machine with a sonic cannon), while the streets were packed with thousands of people chanting “fuck Nazis” at them.

A group of right-wing anti-Islam protesters arrived at Minneapolis City Hall Saturday morning, facing off against a much larger crowd of counter-protesters.

Jake Lang, a conservative social media influencer, organized the rally downtown. He arrived with several other right-wing protesters, carrying anti-Islam signs and chanting.

The counterprotest was mostly nonconfrontational, but several counter-protesters immediately surged in to meet the far-right group when they arrived.

Some participants yelled back at the far-right protesters, chasing them as they walked around the block in front of City Hall.

The confrontation was brief, with Lang and most of his supporters leaving the scene quickly. Most of the counter-protesters were also dispersing.

That’s right. They ran away. Lang was overwhelmed by Minnesota citizens. He whined a bit while escaping.

You’re being replaced! Do you not understand you’re being replaced! Lang screamed into the microphone, later yelling, We deserve a future for white Americans and send the Somalis back.

For his trouble, he was punched, like a good Nazi, and walked away bleeding.

He was punched in Michigan, too, although they didn’t draw blood. Lang might want to quit before the escalation continues.

He’s a pathetic loser with a lost cause.

I guess it’s not so bad to be a Minnesotan.

As someone who spent many hours reading Richard Scarry books to the kids, this resonates.

Ruben Bolling

I appreciate the local atmosphere, with all the snow and ice on the ground. It’s snowing right now, as a matter of fact.