Non-resistance is futile

They’re gonna fuck you up anyway, may as well fight back.

For a few seconds I felt bad laughing about this:

The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next.

The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty.

Faculty leaders at many of the schools have pushed back strongly against claims that their campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism, noting that while some Jewish students complained that they felt unsafe, the vast majority of protesters were peaceful and many of the protest participants were themselves Jewish.

Do you remember how Columbia not only denounced but also menaced and suspended students who protested Israel’s blitzkrieg against the Palestinians in Gaza, and sent the cops in to beat up and arrest them? And how Columbia president Minouche Shafik appeared before the Republican goobers in Congress to eat shit, despite Jewish faculty members warning her and everyone else that it was a set-up?

And now, despite all the school’s performative compliance, Trump is stripping Columbia’s funding (legally? Who knows and, from his deranged perspective, who cares?), and Columbia reacts by giving up a Palestinian student protest leader to ICE and having its sister school Barnard kick out three student protestors — and having Shafik’s successor take this ludicrous second helping of shit:

But let me be very clear: Columbia is taking the government’s action very seriously. I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns. To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.

This reminded me of the bit on the Firesign Theatre’s How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All in which FDR interrupts the Nick Danger radio broadcast with his Pearl Harbor speech, ending dramatically with a promise that America will “unconditionally surrender” to the Japanese.

I mean, I knew academia was stuffed with gutless careerists but FUCK. Even by the standards of this low, mean time, that’s weak.

Yet people are putting extra effort into not seeing it for what it is. The Times, as usual, pretends the issue isn’t academic freedom, but antisemitism. Like Tubby gives two shits about the Jews, or anyone other than himself! Trump cares about “antisemitism” like he cares about “free speech” and “civil rights” — that is, solely as buzzwords to make his criminal enterprise look legit.

So yeah, I got over feeling sorry for Columbia. But I do sorry for the institution it so poorly represents — free enquiry in higher education. Over the past few years, smaller schools have been getting it in the neck from local fascists like Ron DeSantis who are eager to break them for “wokeness” — that is, for allowing topics and concepts to be taught that don’t conform to their propaganda. Heretofore the big schools have been exempted but, now that Tubby has put the fash pedal to the metal, they’re getting mowed down as well.

Columbia punked out. They didn’t just fail to protect themselves, they failed to protect vital principles they were duty-bound to protect. Now they’ve made it tougher for everyone in their field — every college, every high school, every school library or drama club or LGBTQ group — to stand up to these bastards.

And to the rest of us who are in the line of fire, let that be a lesson.

A lot of non-academic institutions are going to get the same treatment Columbia got. And some of them will react as Columbia did — that is, by crawling like cowards in hopes that they’ll be protected as one of the good ones.

You see how that worked.

This is a clarifying moment — and, I dare say, an encouraging one. I bet a lot of people have been thinking of resistance to Trump as something requiring extraordinary bravery — like holy martyrdom, or Nathan Hale’s regret that he had only one life to give to his country.

But the Columbia thing shows that resistance is really self-interest, because we now know that if you ignominiously surrender everything to Tubby, he will still fuck you up. Because you’re making it easy for him. Resistance is not a romantic gesture; it’s survival.

Cowards lose. If enough people get that straight, we can only win.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the FDR bit as occurring in Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers as an interruption of the Porgy Tirebiter show. h/t Pere Ubu]