If Biden won through vote fraud in 2020 (which I neither assert nor discount), it would appear to have been a disastrously bad move for Dems. The Trump who had four years to reflect, learn, plan and prepare is far more formidable than he would have have been if he'd stayed in office. Losing in 2020 may be one of the best things that ever happened to him. Life can work in very strange ways.
Yeah, not news for anyone who has been paying attention and whose information sources go beyond the "1984" variety. I've never seen anything like the makeup of this administration, and thus far I'm gratified that all of the right people are, for lack of anything like a coherent, much less plausible, opposition, throwing their customary wall-eyed fits at the prospect of having so many of their cozy arrangements undone. Watching.
Watching with glee. Last night my housemate asked me what I thought of RFK Jr.'s confirmation. I answered that the only thing that would make me happier is Fauci going to jail. I wonder if the Democrat campaign would have been conducted differently if they realized how revanchist the national mood is at the moment. A contrite Democrat POTUS candidate who condemned the extremists and promised to unwind the excesses of the Biden administration probably still would have lost, but he would have set the party up for a better future. Now people who were as quiet as stones throughout the CTIL revelations are freaking out about Elon knowing their SSNs.
You're right, they wouldn't have won anyway. One of the array of Achilles heels of the left, arrogance, had them overplaying their hand again. So, the "Biden's just fine" fiasco having blown any remaining credibility, they just kept a game face and played an expendable card. We'll know that they've come out of "The View" mode and gotten their heads back on straight to the extent that they ever do, when we see them begin to fashion the next glittery wrapping paper to hide their beloved Marxism in preparation for 2026. Did you notice that $170,00 of that USAID money was earmarked for a Fauci exhibit at the National Institute of Health Museum? Chutzpah, anyone?
Well, as your friendly neighborhood university professor, I feel the need to offer my two cents, or in keeping with the spirit of the times, round up to the nearest nickel. The FIRE study, and others like it are frankly useless as they fail to define from the outset what precisely entails "confidence". "Americans lose confidence in ___" is garbage. Questioning someone about their "confidence" in an institution without referring to the specific actions/services/experiences the institution is supposed to provide, is like asking how confident Americans are in a color or a brick wall.
Confident to provide a good education? A degree? Life skills, opportunities for economic advancement? Those are actual questions.
As to the reasons why this mysterious level of ill-defined and vaporous "confidence" has dropped? FIRE suggests the negative perceptions were generated in part by the pro-Palestinian encampments across colleges in the US last year. This I don't doubt. There are around 3000 colleges in the US, about equally split between public and private schools, and according to the article, there were manifestations on "more than 100" or nearly, hold on, wait for it, a whopping 4%. At my school, there were zero, and on the flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign, students participating in the feeble protest were outnumbered by militarized police 4 to 1.
What this actually demonstrates is that American attitudes and "confidence" in or about anything is shaped by the media coverage they consume which always, always, always skews toward the sensational and elevates the most extreme examples of anything presenting them as the median rather than the outliers they are. This affects the political right and left equally.
That being said, I am an ardent supporter of FIRE's mission.
So long as "Harvard" is a synecdoche for "higher education," goings-on at the actual school will inform the public imagination more than those at Urbana-Champaign, no disrespect to the latter. And while the remarks about the media are well-taken, this wasn't just a perceptual problem. Particularly on the coasts, Jewish students were assaulted. Progressives who had been lecturing America about the evils of racism since the summer of 2020, and the need for universal and eternal DEI, pivoted on the morning of October 8, 2023 and began calling for the extermination of Jews from the Levant. The UI system may be largely innocent of Judenhass, but it likely has several DEI departments and is connected to millions of dollars of student debt. I'm not saying that the public's reasoning about higher education is entirely rational, but the connections between the various issues are substantive and there could be enough truth in that reasoning to matter. It's not fair for UI to pay for the sins of Claudine Gay, but she's still working for Harvard for $900K a year and she's making the rest of the profession look like idiots. (Deploying four times as many militarized police as protestors at Columbia would have saved good people a lot of trouble.)
As for confidence, I'm no expert in research design - that would be my brother - but if you poll with the same questions year to year, you don't need exact agreement on the definition of the word to get a meaningful sentiment analysis.
It's beyond clear that government is only supposed to be accountable in theory, not practice, and that it has been so unaccountable for so long that what Trump is trying to do is absolutely revolutionary. It is also, obviously, extremely threatening to massive vested interests in maintaining the status quo, who are so, uh, compromised that they are actually publicly defending the indefensible. It is, in a way, deliciously entertaining, but also deeply disgusting and profoundly contemptible.
If Biden won through vote fraud in 2020 (which I neither assert nor discount), it would appear to have been a disastrously bad move for Dems. The Trump who had four years to reflect, learn, plan and prepare is far more formidable than he would have have been if he'd stayed in office. Losing in 2020 may be one of the best things that ever happened to him. Life can work in very strange ways.
Yeah, not news for anyone who has been paying attention and whose information sources go beyond the "1984" variety. I've never seen anything like the makeup of this administration, and thus far I'm gratified that all of the right people are, for lack of anything like a coherent, much less plausible, opposition, throwing their customary wall-eyed fits at the prospect of having so many of their cozy arrangements undone. Watching.
Watching with glee. Last night my housemate asked me what I thought of RFK Jr.'s confirmation. I answered that the only thing that would make me happier is Fauci going to jail. I wonder if the Democrat campaign would have been conducted differently if they realized how revanchist the national mood is at the moment. A contrite Democrat POTUS candidate who condemned the extremists and promised to unwind the excesses of the Biden administration probably still would have lost, but he would have set the party up for a better future. Now people who were as quiet as stones throughout the CTIL revelations are freaking out about Elon knowing their SSNs.
https://reclaimthenet.org/cyber-threat-intelligence-leagues-censorship-empire
They're flailing.
You're right, they wouldn't have won anyway. One of the array of Achilles heels of the left, arrogance, had them overplaying their hand again. So, the "Biden's just fine" fiasco having blown any remaining credibility, they just kept a game face and played an expendable card. We'll know that they've come out of "The View" mode and gotten their heads back on straight to the extent that they ever do, when we see them begin to fashion the next glittery wrapping paper to hide their beloved Marxism in preparation for 2026. Did you notice that $170,00 of that USAID money was earmarked for a Fauci exhibit at the National Institute of Health Museum? Chutzpah, anyone?
I did see that. For those of you just tuning in, DOGE shut down a planned Fauci exhibition at the NIH Museum.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/10/us-news/doge-cancels-anthony-fauci-museum-exhibit-in-federal-cutting-spree/
Well, as your friendly neighborhood university professor, I feel the need to offer my two cents, or in keeping with the spirit of the times, round up to the nearest nickel. The FIRE study, and others like it are frankly useless as they fail to define from the outset what precisely entails "confidence". "Americans lose confidence in ___" is garbage. Questioning someone about their "confidence" in an institution without referring to the specific actions/services/experiences the institution is supposed to provide, is like asking how confident Americans are in a color or a brick wall.
Confident to provide a good education? A degree? Life skills, opportunities for economic advancement? Those are actual questions.
As to the reasons why this mysterious level of ill-defined and vaporous "confidence" has dropped? FIRE suggests the negative perceptions were generated in part by the pro-Palestinian encampments across colleges in the US last year. This I don't doubt. There are around 3000 colleges in the US, about equally split between public and private schools, and according to the article, there were manifestations on "more than 100" or nearly, hold on, wait for it, a whopping 4%. At my school, there were zero, and on the flagship campus in Urbana-Champaign, students participating in the feeble protest were outnumbered by militarized police 4 to 1.
What this actually demonstrates is that American attitudes and "confidence" in or about anything is shaped by the media coverage they consume which always, always, always skews toward the sensational and elevates the most extreme examples of anything presenting them as the median rather than the outliers they are. This affects the political right and left equally.
That being said, I am an ardent supporter of FIRE's mission.
So long as "Harvard" is a synecdoche for "higher education," goings-on at the actual school will inform the public imagination more than those at Urbana-Champaign, no disrespect to the latter. And while the remarks about the media are well-taken, this wasn't just a perceptual problem. Particularly on the coasts, Jewish students were assaulted. Progressives who had been lecturing America about the evils of racism since the summer of 2020, and the need for universal and eternal DEI, pivoted on the morning of October 8, 2023 and began calling for the extermination of Jews from the Levant. The UI system may be largely innocent of Judenhass, but it likely has several DEI departments and is connected to millions of dollars of student debt. I'm not saying that the public's reasoning about higher education is entirely rational, but the connections between the various issues are substantive and there could be enough truth in that reasoning to matter. It's not fair for UI to pay for the sins of Claudine Gay, but she's still working for Harvard for $900K a year and she's making the rest of the profession look like idiots. (Deploying four times as many militarized police as protestors at Columbia would have saved good people a lot of trouble.)
As for confidence, I'm no expert in research design - that would be my brother - but if you poll with the same questions year to year, you don't need exact agreement on the definition of the word to get a meaningful sentiment analysis.
Amazing article, excellent for sharing w someone who thinks Musk really did do the nazi salute. He said "I saw the pictures!" Hahahaha
It's beyond clear that government is only supposed to be accountable in theory, not practice, and that it has been so unaccountable for so long that what Trump is trying to do is absolutely revolutionary. It is also, obviously, extremely threatening to massive vested interests in maintaining the status quo, who are so, uh, compromised that they are actually publicly defending the indefensible. It is, in a way, deliciously entertaining, but also deeply disgusting and profoundly contemptible.