Curtis Yarvin is the guru for a number of major political figures on the right, including Vice President Vance and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He is hostile to democracy and holds racist views. Yarvin’s anti-democratic views demonstrate how extremist key members of the Republican Party have become.
Yale is demonstrating its commitment to free speech.
A far-right political blogger who has espoused anti-democratic views is set to debate at Yale on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Curtis Yarvin — who has sparked controversy for advocating for a form of American monarchy and for his writings on race, slavery and apartheid — is set to participate in two debates this week, one hosted by the Yale Political Union and the other by the Yale Federalist Society.
“A smart critic like Yarvin can force people to sharpen the case for their views, especially when those views have gotten sloppy over time,” Garett Jones, a professor at George Mason University who will debate Yarvin Wednesday on “for-profit governance” at the Federalist Society’s event, wrote to the News. “And the case for democracy has certainly gotten sloppy over time. Democracy’s defenders, which I count myself among, need to do a better job.”
At the YPU debate Tuesday evening, Yarvin will argue for the resolution “end the democratic experiment” against Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at Yale Law School.
Jones wrote that he believes the debate will be a helpful way to draw out distinctions between his position, which he describes as “10% less democracy” in reference to the title of his published book, and Yarvin’s, which he calls “100% less democracy.”
Neither Rubenfeld nor YPU President Brennan Columbia-Walsh ’26 responded to the News’ request for comment.
Both debate topics land on familiar turf for Yarvin, who has consistently expressed anti-democratic beliefs. Yarvin, who is also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, has written about his distrust of the federal bureaucracy and his desire to institute a program called RAGE — retire all government employees.
Ilani Nurick LAW ’27 and Elizabeth Bailey LAW ’27, co-presidents of the Yale Law Democrats, criticized the Yale Federalist Society for sponsoring the event. Yarvin could not be reached for comment.
“We all believe strongly in free speech, but what is the Federalist Society hoping to learn from someone who thinks white people are genetically predisposed to be smarter than other races?” Nurick and Bailey wrote in a joint statement to the News. “Yale Law students are smart enough to know that for-profit governance is not the solution to the problems facing our country without hearing from Curtis Yarvin on the subject.”
Yarvin asserts that American democracy is a failed experiment and that America should instead run like a company with a chief executive officer, which The New York Times characterized as “his friendlier term for a dictator.”
In Yarvin’s view, the U.S. government should be run by a CEO-esque figure. In his 2008 articletitled “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Yarvin proposed the “liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power” to that CEO-esque figure.
Yarvin’s 2008 article furthered that this process would end the press, dismantle universities and transform the nation’s capital into a “heavily armed” version of a “corporation.”
Additionally, Yarvin has sought to downplay the outcome of the American Civil War. The Times noted that he has previously written, “It is very difficult to argue that the War of Succession made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.”
The new conditions for federal funding the Trump administrationoffered to MIT put the school in a no-win situation, people on the Cambridge campus and throughout academia said Friday: Agree to the federal government’s terms and surrender some academic freedom, or refuse and risk further punishment.
The White House’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — sent to MIT and eight other top-tier universitiesthis week — ties access to federal moneyto a string of conditions that, if agreed to,would effectuate the most substantial changes MIT has seen to dateand fundamentally transform an economic powerhouse of Greater Boston.
The 10-point document asks the list of schools — which also includes Brown and Dartmouth — to cap international student enrollment, freeze domestic tuition rates for five years, and commit to strict definitions of gender.Some of those requests, such as reducing tuition and the number of international students, are popular with many Americans. But others, including one to limit the speech of university employees, strike at the heart of freedom and independence that universities have long prized.
While MIT declined to comment, on campus and in academia, there doesn’t appear to be much inclination to make a deal with the White House.
The offer amounts to “a loyalty oath to the federal government,” said Catherine D’Ignazio, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning.
“They’re asking us to sacrifice science. They’re asking us to sacrifice international students. They’re asking us to sacrifice our trans students. They’re asking us to sacrifice our whole idea of shared governance,” D’Ignazio said. “No amount of money is worth that great long list.”
The mandate also says that universities should transform or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” That’s troubling, said Tyler Coward lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, because it conflates allowing speech with condoning violence.
“This mandate basically forces these institutions to remain silent in order to secure some government benefit,” Coward said. “I think that is a problem, a First Amendment problem.”
MIT is the birthplace for countless startup companies, forms the backbone of Kendall Square, and serves as a first landing place for many students — roughly 30 percent of whom come from abroad — who stay and build careers in Massachusetts.
Federal money plays a key role in seeding all that. Last year, MIT collected $648 million in government funding for sponsored activities, including research, which federal agenciescould simply choose to award elsewhere.
The provisions in the compact, said Sandy Baum, a higher education finance expert with the think tank The Urban Institute, amount to “dramatic requests” of MIT from a dollars-and-cents perspective.
MIT is already bracing for a $300 million reduction in its central budget from the newfound 8 percent tax on its endowment and potential losses of federal science funding that powers much of its massive research arm, university administrators said in a September staff forum. (A recording of the meeting was reviewed by the Globe.)
In the spring, MIT saved roughly $100 million by freezing hiring and instituting a 5 percent cut to department budgets. It plans to close the remaining $200 million gap by terminating some real estate leases and seeking outside private funding for some academic priorities, including climate change, life sciences, and artificial intelligence, according to details shared at the staff forum. Administrators said that they may also withhold merit raises for employees next year.
“We do need to treat the $300 million amount as a permanent burden on the central budget that requires a permanent budgetary solution,” Glen Shor, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer said at the September meeting. “Even if power at some point changes hands in Washington, we can’t count on these policies being reversed.”
Meanwhile, signing onto the compact could impact the number of international students at MIT, who make up around 10 percent of its undergraduate population — less than the limit set in the agreement. (Around 40 percent of MIT graduate students are from abroad.) Many international students pay full price to attend MIT, which can cost nearly $90,000 between tuition, housing, and other expenses. MIT would also pledge to cover the cost of attendance for all students studying hard sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology.
“If [MIT] had to freeze tuition and limit [the] number of international students, that would be a huge hit,” said Baum, the university finance expert.
Multiple MIT student organizations signed a letter Friday asking MIT to “firmly refuse” to sign the document, claiming that “accepting such a compact would effectively destroy the institutional culture of MIT as we know it.”
Nadia Zaragova, a material sciences PhD student and vice president of the graduate student union, said it would give the federal government “undue oversight over what we do here at the university, including our classrooms, what we study, what we research.”
And Governor Maura Healey, who has proposed $400 million in state funding to help make up for lost federal funds to Massachusetts universities, urged MIT to stand strong, describing the White House offer as “yet another attempt by President Trump to silence speech.”
MIT supporters note the university has already taken up some measures pushed by the Trump administration, including winding down its Institute Community and Equity Office and taking disciplinary actions against students — including a commencement speaker — who participate in pro-Palestinian protests.
Indeed, MIT was chosen among the schools who received the compact because they are seen as “good actors,” according to May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House.
“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” she said to The Wall Street Journal.
But Ian Hutchinson, an MIT emeritus professor and co-president of its Council of Academic Freedom, said that even those in favor of those moves have sour feelings about the new offer from the administration.
“Many of us on the council think that the modern academy needs to reform and [is] beginning to do so and that the compact has the risk of alienating a large fraction of the faculty,” he said.
Others fear that some professors could leave entirely, should the school sign onto the compact.
A better approach, Hutchinson added, would be if “the government makes clear what it is interested in funding in the way of research and what it is not interested in funding.”
The compact also frames preserving “single-sex spaces” such as bathrooms and locker rooms as necessary for “women’s equality” and stipulates institutions must commit to defining gender “according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
Mila Halgren, an MIT postdoctoral associate, said including such language is an affront to what the values of American higher education should be.
“In a personal capacity, every moment MIT even considers this compact is a betrayal of every marginalized group on campus,” she said. “That MIT did not immediately reject a proposal which defines trans people out of existence is shameful.”
In the post at 9 a.m. today, two scholars of racism and equity explained that Trump’s scrubbing of museums, national parks, and other federal facilities is an attempt to capture control of the culture and erase the place of Blacks, women, and anyone else who is not a straight white male.
But, as scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig writes here, Trump and his commissariat cannot control the popular culture. In time, we can hope, his mean-spirited efforts to revise history will become a bad joke, a cruel joke, a stupid joke. He and all those who carry out his orders will become a public laughing stock.
Vasquez Heilig writes on his blog Cloaking Inequity:
The Super Bowl has always been more than football. It is a ritual, a spectacle, a national performance. It’s where America tells the world who it thinks it is, and who it wants to be. Which is why the announcement that Bad Bunny will host the halftime show is far more significant than a musical lineup change. It’s a cultural earthquake.
I remember the first time I heard Bad Bunny. It was December 6, 2019, at La Concha Hotel in San Juan. In the downstairs lounge, the beat of reggaetón was shaking the walls, and I pulled out Shazam to figure out what it was. The song was Vete. The room was electric, filled with Puerto Ricans singing every word in Spanish, unapologetically themselves. That night, it hit me: Bad Bunny was not just making music in San Juan, he was celebrating culture. He wasn’t crossing over into the mainstream by adapting; he was dragging the mainstream toward him. He refused to translate, refused to dilute, and now he is everywhere—on playlists, on charts, SNL, in crowded places from San Juan to New York to Madrid.
That’s why his Super Bowl moment matters so much. It is not just a performance, it is the culmination of a global movement that began in places like that basement lounge in Puerto Rico. What felt local then is now universal. Bad Bunny’s rise shows how culture flows upward, from the margins to the center, from overlooked communities to the biggest stage in the world. For millions of us, this is affirmation. For the right wing, it is destabilization. Because when the halftime show belongs to Bad Bunny, it proves that America is no longer just what they imagine it to be. It is bigger, louder, and more diverse than great again nostalgia can contain.
Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and the New Halftime Era
The NFL’s halftime choices haven’t shifted by accident. When the league came under fire for its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and broader criticisms about racial injustice, it needed credibility. Enter Jay-Z and Roc Nation. The NFL tapped him to advise and help curate halftime shows.
The results have been undeniable. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance last year was a watershed moment—unapologetically Black, politically charged, and culturally defining. That performance sparked widespread discussion, and even a blog post I wrote about it entitled “TV Off”: What Kendrick Lamar Was Really Saying at the Super Bowl drew more than 100,000 readers in just a few days. Clearly, the hunger to talk about representation and ownership of the halftime stage is real.
Now with Bad Bunny taking the baton, the NFL is making another cultural statement, whether it fully realizes it or not (I think it does). The league’s biggest platform is no longer reserved for the safe, predictable acts of yesterday. It’s becoming a stage where hip hop, reggaeton, and the voices of communities once marginalized are front and center.
Bad Bunny and the Right’s Panic
For decades, the halftime show was dominated by choices that reinforced a narrow image of America: classic rock icons, country stars, or pop acts who wouldn’t ruffle feathers but had wardrobe malfunctions. Bad Bunny shatters that mold. His performance won’t be a side act, it is the show. Spanish won’t be a novelty; it will be central.
This is exactly why the right wing panics. To them, football Sundays and Super Bowls have long been “their” cultural territory. They’ve wrapped the game in patriotic rituals, military flyovers, and moments of silence for conservative heroes. When someone like Bad Bunny steps into the spotlight, it disrupts their monopoly. It forces a new definition of America—one that is multilingual, multicultural, and undeniably Latino. That’s what makes his halftime role so radical: after focusing on the Black experience with Kendrick, this year signals that Latino identity is no longer peripheral. It’s woven into the fabric of America’s biggest stage.
Why ICE Wants to Loom Over the Moment
It might sound absurd that ICE wants to connect itself to the Super Bowl halftime show, but immigration enforcement has always thrived in the shadows of visibility. When Latino joy and success are celebrated so publicly, ICE apparently feels the need to remind America of its terrorizing power.
Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl is a triumph of belonging. But ICE’s assaults, raids, arrests, kangaroo courts, and deportations are constant reminders that belonging is conditional on politics. While millions watch a Puerto Rican superstar, ICE agents are throwing mothers and journalists to the ground, spraying pepper liquid into the eyes of Americans who dare to ask questions, arresting elected politicians at the behest of Washington politicians after turning off their body cameras, and authorized by the Supreme Court to detain people simply for looking Latino and poor.
The contradiction is sharp: on the world’s stage, Latino identity is being widely celebrated; on America’s streets, it’s criminalized. ICE doesn’t need to show up at the stadium—it already shows up in our daily life. Its existence ensures that even at moments of cultural triumph, there’s a purposeful shadow of fear and terroristic threats.
Danica Patrick’s Tone-Deaf Criticism
And then, inevitably, a silly critic emerges from the sidelines. This time it’s Danica Patrick, who dismissed Bad Bunny’s hosting role. Her comments were more than unhelpful, they were stupid.
Patrick should know better. She carved her own career by getting along in a male-dominated sport, where every step forward was a battle for representation. She knows the symbolic weight of breaking barriers. For her to turn around and mock or diminish Bad Bunny’s presence is hypocritical at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
Bad Bunny isn’t there to tick a diversity box, he’s there because he is one of the most influential artists alive— maybe THE most. The incredible success of his shows that he did for his most recent album this past summer ONLY in Puerto Rico is proof that the center of American culture is shifting. Criticizing that isn’t just a matter of taste. It’s a refusal to accept reality.
The Lions, Charlie Kirk, and Who Gets Tribute
The battle over cultural ownership in America doesn’t stop at the Super Bowl. It plays out every Sunday on the NFL field. When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the league encouraged teams to hold moments of silence in his honor. Most complied. But the Detroit Lions, along with a few other teams, did not.
That decision matters. It was a quiet but deliberate act of boundary-setting, a refusal to let every NFL broadcast become a political ritual sanctifying right-wing political ideology. By declining the tribute, the Lions reminded us that not every form of patriotism must come prepackaged with conservative allegiance. It wasn’t loud or defiant. It was subtle and deeply symbolic. Sometimes resistance isn’t what you do, it’s what you decline to perform and participate.
The Lions’ restraint connects to the same cultural realignment symbolized by Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Both moments reject the idea that American culture belongs to a single tribe. They push back against the notion that sports, music, or patriotism must orbit one political pole. They insist, instead, that culture belongs to everyone, not just the loudest or the angriest voices claiming to defend it.
The Double Standard of Protest
Of course, this tension between culture, power, and dissent has long been visible in the NFL. When Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, he was branded a traitor by many of the same voices now demanding “respect” for Charlie Kirk. His silent, dignified act of conscience was recast as an attack on America itself.
The outrage was never really about the flag. It was about control. It was about who is allowed to define what counts as “patriotic.” Kaepernick’s kneeling was an act of moral courage, but it exposed how fragile America’s cultural gatekeepers truly are when confronted with truth. They could not tolerate a protest that revealed their own comfort with injustice and brutality.
Meanwhile, state violence continues daily without the same moral outrage from the right-wing. ICE officers violently throw mothers and journalists to the ground without cause. They pepper-spray citizens in their eyeballs for daring to ask questions in a conversation. They arrest and detain American citizens in raids not for crimes but for looking poor, brown, or foreign. These acts have not provoked right-wing primetime outrage or public boycotts. Their hypocrisy is staggering.
A man kneeling quietly for justice was vilified. Agents brutalizing families are ignored. The problem has never been the method of protest, it has always been their morality. Silence in the face of injustice is acceptable; silence against injustice is not. The Lions’ quiet refusal and Kaepernick’s quiet protest share something profound: both disrupted the script of cultural obedience. Both reminded us that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the refusal to play along.
The Supreme Court’s Enabling Role
And looming behind all of this is the judiciary. Recent Supreme Court rulings have expanded law enforcement’s power, narrowing protections under the Fourth Amendment and giving politicians more leeway to persecute immigrants using federal data. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been the lead in the right-wing judicial majorities that have handed law enforcement broad authority to stop, question, and detain anyone with minimal cause. Its new rulings have created the legal cover that now makes racial profiling essentially legal.
Racial profiling has happen illegally before and the new legal result empowered by the Supreme Court is the same: citizens living under suspicion, families living in fear, communities targeted not for what they’ve done but for how they look. The Supreme Court has enabled ICE brutality in the same way NFL owners enabled the blackballing of dissent, by creating structures that justify exclusion and violence while insisting neutrality.
The Bigger Picture: Who Owns the Stage?
So what do Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Danica Patrick, ICE, the Lions, Charlie Kirk, and Brett Kavanaugh all have in common? They are all part of the “fight, fight, fight” (see new Trump $1 coin) over who gets to define American culture.
The right wing has long claimed the NFL as its territory: its rituals, its tributes, its symbols of patriotism. But culture evolves. It cannot be contained. From Detroit to San Juan to Los Angeles, new voices are shaping the narrative. Bad Bunny’s halftime show, Kendrick’s explosive performance, and even the Lions’ silent refusal all tell the same story: football does not belong exclusively to one political ideology. Neither does America.
The real question is whether we are willing to see that America’s identity is bigger than its old rituals. Are we willing to admit that inclusion is not a threat but a fact? Because culture doesn’t wait for permission. It claims the stage. And this year, that stage will belong to Bad Bunny.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor, writer, and a legit lifelong Detroit Lions fan since 1981. He attended the NFC Championship in San Jose two years ago to support his Cardiac Cats and last year’s playoff loss to the Washington Commanders at Ford Field. He was also at the official Lions partners party during the NFL Draft in Detroit, where he met Robert Porcher and Jason Hanson. Over the years he’s spotted Billy Sims in Times Square, endured the heartbreak of the Lions’ 0–16 season, and treasures his personally autographed Barry Sanders helmet. Beyond education and equity, Julian dabbles in writing about sports, culture, and society.
Two scholars–Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley–explain why Trump is censoring exhibits at the Smithsonian. He has also imposed censorship of signage and exhibits at other federal sites, including national parks. He has enlisted the U.S. Department of Educatuon to organize rightwing groups to create a “patriotic” civics course.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues
Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
Trump and his far-right cabal are l trying to revise history and memory. Unless he abolishes or rigs future elections, all this tinhorn fascist censorship will be swept away by his successors. He will rightly be judged, when that day comes, as the closest thing this country has ever seen to having a dictator. He will be portrayed in the Smithsonian and the textbooks as a buffoon and a tyrant.
In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.
The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.
Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.
From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.
The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.
It is no coincidence that this ‘proper’ ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism
It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.
The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?
The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.
Someday, somehow, there will be another President of the United States, and his name won’t be Trump. That future President might well be a Democrat. That President might be in a position to exercise unchecked power, thanks to the acquiescence of the current Congress and Supreme Court, which are allowing Trump to exercise the powers of a dictator. The second and third branches of our government have willingly wiped out the separation of powers and ceded their authority to the President.
Congress has voted to give its power of the purse to King Donald. The Supreme Court (the Supine Court) has stood aside and approved of whatever the King wants, regardless of precedent. Justice Thomas said recently that precedent was irrelevant; he is no longer an originalist.
Now comes what might be considered the most important question. May the President send in troops–either the state’s National Guard, the National Guard of other states, or even the regular military–to cities that he believes need to be suppressed?
A Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that he could not. Justice Karin Immergut, appointed by Trump, ruled that Trump could not send troops to Portland, because it is not “war-ravaged,” as he claimed, or in a state of rebellion. In other words, you can’t just make sh-t up to do whatever you want, even if you are the President.
Constitutional lawyer Steve Vladeck, a scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, noted that Trump’s advisors are claiming that the President doesn’t need approval of the courts before using the troops on American soil. He explains here why the President can’t ignore the judiciary.
Welcome back to “One First,” an (increasingly frequent) newsletter that aims to make the U.S. Supreme Court more accessible to all of us. If you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider becoming one (and, if you already are, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription if your circumstances permit):
I wanted to put out a quick issue this morning in light of Judge Karin Immergut’s remarkable ruling yesterday, granting a temporary restraining order against President Trump’s federalization of members of the Oregon National Guard to quell the “violence” in “war-ravaged Portland.” That ruling has prompted a slew of claims this morning from the President’s advisers and outside supporters that federal courts, in general, lack the power to halt domestic deployments of the military.
Before this claim makes it too far, it seems worth helping to educate folks about a key early precedent that, in my view, cuts entirely in the other direction—and that provides powerful evidence, to those who care about such things, that the Founding-era understanding not only tolerated a robust judicial role in such cases, but, for a time, actually required one. That’s not to say Judge Immergut’s specific analysis in this case is correct (although I’m sympathetic); it’s to say that there is nothing categorically inappropriate about federal courts reviewing—and, where necessary, halting—domestic uses of the military while they are ongoing. Indeed, it would be striking if it were otherwise.
***
The modern-day Insurrection Act traces its lineage all the way back to a statute Congress enacted on May 2, 1792—which has often been referred to as the Calling Forth Act or First Militia Act. That statute was designed to carry into effect the Constitution’s grant of power to Congress, in Article I, Section 8, Clause 15, “[t]o provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
The idea was that Congress would identify the circumstances in which military power could be used domestically—and would thence delegate that power to the President. As Justice (Robert) Jackson would remind us in his concurring opinion in Youngstown, the Clause’s “limitation on the command power, written at a time when the militia rather than a standing army was contemplated as the military weapon of the Republic, underscores the Constitution’s policy that Congress, not the Executive, should control utilization of the war power as an instrument of domestic policy.”
But how, exactly, should that delegation work? This question was the subject of a rich debate in the Second Congress—one that culminated with the 1792 statute. I’ve summarized that debate elsewhere; for present purposes, the key point is that Congress’s principal concern was not with the last two circumstances in which it was to delegate power to the President (“to suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”), but with the first circumstance (“to execute the Laws of the Union”). And the way Congress addressed its concerns was to delegate the authority to use the military, but with meaningful procedural checks.
Here’s the full text of section 2 of the act, image first; block quote second, with the key provisions highlighted:
[W]henever the laws of the United States shall be opposed, or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by this act, the same being notified to the President of the United States, by an associate justice or the district judge, it shall be lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia of such state to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. And if the militia of a state, where such combinations may happen, shall refuse, or be insufficient to suppress the same, it shall be lawful for the President, if the legislature of the United States be not in session, to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto, as may be necessary, and the use of militia, so to be called forth, may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the ensuing session.
In other words, unlike section 1 (which dealt with insurrections and invasions), section 2 imposed two procedural requirements on domestic use of the military to carry out the laws of the union: a district judge or Supreme Court justice had to make the requisite factual findings before the President could do anything;¹ and, if out-of-state militia were used, there was a baked-in sunset.
The 1792 act was written as a temporary experiment. Congress decided to delegate comparable authority on a permanent basis in 1795—and, alas, removed the ex ante judicial review requirement. But there was no suggestion at the time, and I’m unaware of any since, that the provision was eliminated for constitutional reasons—as opposed to Congress’s broader (if, alas, myopic) view that the checks weren’t needed in light of how responsibly President Washington had behaved during the Whiskey Rebellion.
Thus, although there are later examples of courts issuing injunctions against domestic uses of the military (Youngstown itself stands out as a fairly prominent example), the relevant point for present purposes is that there was no Founding-era aversion to a robust judicial role in these cases. The first statute Congress ever enacted on the subject required such a role, and there was no contemporaneous suggestion that the Constitution forbade it.
I am, as regular readers of this newsletter likely know, no great fan of “originalism” as a conclusive methodological approach to constitutional interpretation. Thus, the way that I tend to think about these things, the existence of the judicial review provision in the Calling Forth Act of 1792 is useful evidence of how the Constitution was understood at the time, but nothing more. Rather, the argument for judicial review being available to halt, where necessary, unlawful domestic uses of the military rests on a lot more, in my view, than what some folks believed more than 230 years ago.
But for those who ascribe to the view that we are, today, bound by how the Constitution was understood then, I do not see how one can reconcile the 1792 precedent with any claim that prospective judicial review is categorically precluded when it comes to domestic use of the military. And given current and recent events, such review, if anything, seems more important than ever—whatever its outcome.
The official publication date is October 20, but books are now in print and available.
My first appearance to talk about the book will be in my home town: Brooklyn, New York, on October 21 at 6 pm at the Brooklyn Heights branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.
I will have a conversation with the brilliant Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters.
I’m not traveling to promote the book, but I am doing Zooms. I will be speaking to educators in North Carolina on October 22. To learn more about it, contact Yevonne Brannon of Public Schools First NC at ybrannon@gmail.com.
Wearing beards is a core religious tenet of some faiths, which has prompted the military to grant religious accommodations to Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and Norse Pagan service members for over a decade.
But those days may be ending.
This week’s overhaul of military grooming standards has raised fears of a coming crackdown on religious waivers for growing beards.
Shaving and beards were central topics in a speech Hegseth gave to hundreds of generals and admirals at Quantico, Virginia on Tuesday. Along with amplifying an earlier directive that troops with medical waivers for shaving could face separation, Hegseth indicated that he may be skeptical about at least some religious waivers that service members have received to wear beards.
Military.com noted this exceptional event authorized by Hegseth.
In a move that pushes the boundaries of Constitutional prohibition against a state religion, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an evangelical prayer service in the middle of the day at the Pentagon in which a pastor praised President Donald Trump as “sovereignly appointed.”
A program for the event called it the “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service.” It was held at the Pentagon’s auditorium and was broadcast throughout the building on its internal cable network.
The Constitution contains several phrases prohibiting state entanglement with religion but it says nothing about facial hair in the military. U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant had a large beard, as did Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Now if only Secretary of Education would follow Hegseth’s lead and bar public funding of all religious schools.
Since almost the whole bunch of them are religious fanatics, that’s too much to hope for. Trump is an exception. He pretends to be a religious fanatic. He is merely transactional.
Nikole Hannah-Jones has had her share of controversy. Born in Iowa to a mixed-race couple, she attended desegregated public schools, graduated from Notre Dame and received a masters in journalism from the University of North Carolina. In her career as an investigative journalist, she covered education, civil rights, and healthcare. She worked at newspapers in North Carolina and Oregon, then for ProPublica. In 2015, she joined the staff of The New York Times.
In 2019, The Times published The 1619 Project, a group of essays that Hannah-Jones assembled, to commemorate the arrival of the first Blacks to the land that would later become the USA. In the lead essay, which Hannah-Jones wrote, she maintained that the arrival of that ship bringing enslaved Blacks marked the true origin of the nation. She recast the history of the U.S. from a Black perspective. Some historians criticized aspects of her thesis, others defended it.
The 1619 Project was widely celebrated and widely condemned, even banned. Trump responded by creating a 1776 Commission, whose purpose was to celebrate US history patriotically (that is, to leave out the shameful parts).
Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for The 1619 Project in 2020.
In 2021, the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media announced that Hannah-Jones would join the Hussman faculty as Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. The faculty and administration urged the UNC Board to give her tenure, as was customary with previous holders of the chair. However, the Board of the university refused to take action on this tenure recommendation. After a public uproar, the board of trustees offered her tenure, but Hannah-Jones rejected the offer, choosing instead to accept the offer of a chair at Howard University.
She wrote in the New York Times about the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk’s bigoted views after his tragic assassination. This is an except from her excellent commentary.
Last year, The Washington Examiner, a conservative news outlet, published a column calling the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, “one of the most destructive forces in Republican politics.” It said that “a healthy conservative movement cannot tolerate conspiracy theorists being presented as serious political figures” and called the organization’s leadership “toxic.” But the period since Kirk’s death has revealed a deeply unsettling cultural shift. Eight months into President Trump’s second term, it is clear that Kirk’s ideas are no longer considered on the extremist periphery but are embraced by Republican leadership.
The mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse.
When Representative Jasmine Crockett, Democrat of Texas, bemoaned that only two of the 58 Democrats who refused to sign the resolution honoring Kirk were white, Laura Loomer responded on X by railing against “ghetto Black bitches who hate America serving in Congress.” Loomer is not merely some right-wing provocateur. She has the ear of the president of the United States and understood that such an explicitly racist comment in 2025 America would bring no political consequence.
And while Trump has surrounded himself with people who have said racist things and maintained ties to white and Christian nationalists, the number of Democrats and esteemed American institutions that have engaged in the mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse, a phenomenon we have not witnessed since the civil rights era.
In some parts of polite society, it now holds that if many of Kirk’s views were repugnant, his willingness to calmly argue about them and his insistence that people hash out their disagreements through discourse at a time of such division made him a free-speech advocate, and an exemplar of how we should engage politically across difference. But for those who were directly targeted by Kirk’s rhetoric, this thinking seems to place the civility of Kirk’s style of argument over the incivility of what he argued. Through gossamer tributes, Kirk’s cruel condemnation of transgender people and his racist throwback views about Black Americans were no longer anathema but instead are being treated as just another political view to be respectfully debated — like a position on tax rates or health care policy.
Using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous.
As the Trump administration wages the broadest attack on civil rights in a century, and the shared societal values of multiculturalism and tolerance recede, using Kirk’s knack for vigorous argument to excuse the re-emergence of unabashed bigotry in mainstream politics feels both frightening and perilous. Kirk certainly produced viral moments by showing up on college campuses and inviting students a decade his junior to “prove” him wrong about a range of controversial topics such as Black crime rates and the pitfalls of feminism. But his rise to fame was predicated on the organization for which he served as executive director, Turning Point USA, and its Professor Watchlist. The website invited college students not to engage in robust discussions with others with different ideologies, but to report professors who “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The site includes photos of professors, along with often highly misleading summaries of the thought crimes that landed them on the list. It provides the telephone numbers of the universities that employ them for students and parents to register their complaints. While the site claims the organization supports free speech, many professors have recounted enduring campaigns of harassment after being put on the list. (I was placed on it in 2021 because of my work on the 1619 Project, after it was announced that I would be a professor at Howard University.)
A couple of years ago, Angel Jones, now a professor at a university in Maryland whose work focuses on educational inequality, joined the hundreds of professors across the country who found themselves on the list.
Jones landed on it under the tag “racial ideology” when she published an article citing research about how distressing it is for Black people to go to work after witnessing news coverage of police killings. She told me someone had sent her a picture of a house thought to be hers, but it turned out to belong to another Angel Jones. Someone else had threatened to hang her from a tree and burn her alive. The scholar changed her classroom and removed her name plate from her office door. The university where she was working at the time installed a safety alarm button under her desk.
“I would cry. I was very fearful. I was anxious,” Jones told me. “I was afraid to go to class sometimes. I was just scared all of the time.
“I love teaching — it makes my heart go pitter patter — so to be in a space where I am afraid of my students, like that rocks me in a way I can’t even articulate,” she added.
When Jones learned of Kirk’s killing, she remembers that there was a sense of disbelief shared by many Americans who were shocked by the gruesome video. But soon, that disbelief was replaced by another feeling. In the immediate hours after his death, she watched as pundits and politicians eulogized Kirk as that rare example of someone who practiced a willingness to hear opposing ideas because he saw it as thesalve for political violence. After all she’d gone through, and the stories she’d heard of other professors similarly harassed, the tributes pouring in for Kirk both infuriated and saddened her.
The next day, Jones went to the class she taught on misinformation and disinformation and showed her students a short Instagram video she had made in response. In the video, she says that while she does not celebrate Kirk’s death, she also refuses to mourn him. “I cannot have empathy for him losing his life when he put mine at risk and the lives of so many other educators just because we dared to advocate for social justice,” she says in the video, “because we dared to do our jobs.”
After she showed the video, a white male student in her class asked Jones if she thought her lack of empathy for Kirk might radicalize students. After a short, tense exchange, the student took his backpack and left. Jones said it had made her nervous. There’s a Turning Point USA chapter on her campus, and Kirk’s followers and even some politicians had been posting about revenge on social media. Jones switched her classes to virtual for the week.
The past few weeks have filled Ash Lazarus Orr with a similar sense of foreboding. Orr has been at the forefront of resisting efforts to target transgender Americans, including as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit brought by the A.C.L.U. against a Trump administration policy that would prevent transgender people from having their chosen gender on their passports.
While Orr was never named by Kirk, they say Kirk’s rhetoric helped fuel an environment that makes transgender Americans vulnerable to violence and that has paved the way for the removal of their civil rights; in February, Iowa became the first state in the country to take away legal civil rights protections for transgender residents.
“I firmly believe that no one should be killed for their beliefs, no matter how harmful those beliefs might be,” Orr told me. “But we are watching our rights being stripped away. We are having our friends’ lives cut short, and then we are told to stay quiet while those responsible are celebrated.”
In just a few short years, Orr has watched as the momentum toward recognizing the full humanity and rights of transgender people has collapsed. Orr recently left their home state of West Virginia, finding it no longer safe after being threatened and assaulted.
Kirk’s rhetoric of “Christian white nationalism, anti-transgender, quote anti-woke culture-war framing, this isn’t on the edge anymore,” Orr told me. “It has moved into what many consider the center of Republican identity.” They said they were deeply concerned about how few people seemed willing to point out the consequences of this shift: “Who is actually fighting for us?”
Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian at U.C.L.A. whose scholarship on racial injustice also landed him on the Professor Watchlist, is struck by how rapidly our society has changed since Trump took office a second time.
Kelley pointed to the fact that Trump was widely condemned during his first term when he called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people.” Now, Democrats and political centrists were lining up to honor a man who promoted the same Great Replacement Theory that served as the rallying cry for that march. At a time when the president of the United States is using his power to go after diversity efforts and engaging in a mass deportation project, some progressives are arguing that people of color, immigrants and members of other marginalized groups who felt dehumanized by Kirk’s commentary, podcasts and debates have to find a way to locate common ground with his followers.
“There has been an extreme shift,” Kelley told me. “This treatment is authorizing the idea that white supremacy and racism is not just a conservative idea, but a legitimate one.”
Olivia Troye describes the inspiration we all should draw from the life of Jane Goodall. Olivia worked in former Vice President Pence’s office as the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism advisor and also was Vice President Pence’s lead staffer on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. She resigned in August 2020 and became an outspoken critic of Trump.
She posted today:
We are under stress right now in the middle of a government shutdown. I have friends and loved ones being impacted by it, and I know how hard it is to live with that uncertainty. At first, I thought about writing to you about the shutdown, in a sea of what will be countless takes on how people view it and their opinions. But today, I want to sit in the moment and think about Jane. My hope is that, regardless of your politics, as you read this, something in her story inspires you.
The summer after my freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, I went back home to El Paso. I enrolled in a course at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). It was an anthropology class, and that’s where I was first introduced to Jane Goodall. I saw in her a path: a woman who looked beyond boundaries, who gave us permission to ask better questions about who we are. Her story lit a spark in me, showing me that science could be about curiosity, compassion, and courage.
When she arrived at Gombe Stream National Park in 1960, she had no formal scientific training. That, in fact, was part of her gift: she observed without the rigid assumptions of academia. She named the chimpanzees she studied—David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi—at a time when science insisted on using numbers, not names. She insisted that they were individuals, not objects of study. Her findings were revolutionary: chimpanzees were observed making and using tools, a behavior once thought to be uniquely human. She uncovered their hidden lives, hunting, eating meat, forging bonds, grieving, fighting, and reconciling. They had culture, learned traditions passed from one generation to the next. Those discoveries didn’t just change primatology. They changed how we think about ourselves. The line we had drawn between “human” and “animal” blurred.
From Scientist to Advocate
Jane could have stayed in Gombe forever, her pen and notebooks filling with discoveries. But she chose a more challenging path, the path of turning science into action.
In 1977, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, now a global leader in wildlife protection, community-led conservation, and education. In 1991, she launched Roots & Shoots, a youth-led program that today spans more than 60 countries.
Her vision was holistic: you can’t protect chimpanzees without protecting forests, and you can’t protect forests without working with the people who live there. Through initiatives like the Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation and Education (TACARE) program, she connected reforestation, sustainable agriculture, girls’ education, and microcredit for women.
Looking back, Jane Goodall’s legacy is less about any single discovery and more about the principles that animated her work:
Compassion across species. By naming the chimps, she forced us to see them as beings with personality and agency.
Science as resistance. She challenged orthodoxy, first by documenting tool use, then by refusing to separate science from advocacy.
These were not abstract ideals. They were lessons for a fractured world, lessons that matter urgently now. We need Jane Goodall’s example to guide us.
Today, politicians play shutdown games that harm federal workers and erode agencies while boasting about fiscal responsibility. Science, institutions, and truth have become bargaining chips in the hands of those insulated from the consequences. Even Jane Goodall’s Institute felt this: earlier this year, its Hope Through Action project faced funding cuts from the U.S. government under Donald Trump, despite a $29.5 million pledge over five years.
Goodall’s life reminds us that science isn’t abstract. It is human. It is moral. It is about survival. When we gut research budgets, when we dismiss climate science, when we silence federal experts, we are not saving money; we are burning the future.
“Change happens by listening, then starting a dialogue with the people doing something you don’t believe is right.”
And she forces us to confront a deeper question: Is an animal more our best friend than our neighbor?
In Gombe, she saw chimps grieve, nurture, and protect. They were not “other.” They were kin. In a society that struggles even to see our human neighbors with compassion, her work unsettles us. What does it mean if we can empathize with animals but not with each other? Or perhaps the reverse: if we learn to extend compassion across species, might we relearn it across human divides as well?
When Jane Goodall died at 91 this week, tributes poured in from around the globe. They called her a scientist, a conservationist, a visionary. But her most important title was witness.
She bore witness to the lives of chimpanzees, the destruction of forests, the resilience of communities, and the hope of young people.
So yes, I do worry about government shutdowns. I worry about the erosion of science and the hollowing out of public goods. I worry about the traps laid by political operatives who thrive on chaos. The farther I step from the government, the more clearly I see this reality.
But in dark times, we can choose to be witnesses. We can choose action, compassion, and resistance. And if we do, we honor Jane Goodall’s greatest gift: the reminder that what we do matters. That choice, that courage, is her gift and her legacy to all of us.
Diane Ravitch's blog 