Yanking the Funds

Plus: Welfare strings, dildo sales, war authorization, and more...

This is not good: The Trump administration is going about federal civil rights investigations rather unusually, per The Washington Post, and appears to be making tip lists of students they seek to deport or otherwise punish.

Generally speaking, federal civil rights probes involve inquiries to the colleges in question as to what type of incidents they encountered, how many, and how they dealt with them. But attorneys with the Department of Education, which handles these civil rights investigations related to antisemitism on campus, have also been collecting the names and nationalities of students accused of harassing Jewish students and faculty or otherwise engaging in antisemitic conduct.

"My first thought was, 'This is a witch hunt,'" one attorney told the Post. 

The federal government does have an awful lot of leverage here. Columbia, under threat of losing $400 million in grants and other types of federal support, agreed last week "that it would overhaul its student disciplinary process, ban protesters from wearing masks, bar demonstrations from academic buildings, adopt a new definition of antisemitism and put its Middle Eastern studies program under the supervision of a vice provost who would have a say over curriculum and hiring," per the Associated Press.

"Columbia is demonstrating appropriate cooperation with the Trump administration's requirements, and we look forward to a lasting resolution," said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a statement that talks about the conditions that must be met for canceled federal grants and contracts to be restored. But, in private, Columbia's interim president Katrina Armstrong is telling faculty that the school actually will not comply, that there will be "no change to masking"; "no change to our admissions procedures"; and that the Middle Eastern Studies department will not be put under the heightened scrutiny the Trump administration is demanding, per Maya Sulkin's reporting at The Free Press. Meanwhile, the faculty are protesting. "What is happening to Columbia now is what the erosion of democracy looks like," Virginia Page Fortna, a political science professor, told The New York Times. Per a Wall Street Journal account of a faculty meeting transcript, one professor said this was "the biggest crisis since the founding of the republic." Well, OK then.

Why can't everyone lose? If you're a little tired of hearing about all the inner machinations of one fancy university, you're not alone. But the Columbia example, unfortunately, matters a bit: It gives us a sense of how far the Trump administration might go to rain down retribution and raises thorny questions of whether it is justified in doing so.

The most libertarian answers, here, may not be politically realistic: Stop federal funding of colleges and universities. Don't create detailed watchlists of students, ostensibly to more easily deport them for their First Amendment–protected protest activity. (Maybe also: Don't do federal civil rights probes?)

But one of these things is worse than the others: Armstrong is being grievously foolish, and the spoiled paraglider-cheerleaders heretofore treated with kid gloves by the admin make me want to ralph, but it sure looks like the federal government is using the power of the state to attempt to punish the school for what it perceives to be a feckless response to the protests. This just isn't the government's job—and veers dangerously close to speech suppression.

Of course, you could argue they've kind of made it their job, since the federal government administers grants to colleges and universities; everyone always ran the risk that those funds could be pulled in an event such as this. The best thing the Trump administration could've done, if it wanted to cut down on federal funding of colleges and universities, is announce early on, and across the board, that it will pursue an actual structural change in the degree to which the federal government supplies funding to these schools. But it's an administration that, thus far, has shown itself to be more focused on retribution than on careful, systematic cuts that will actually be made permanent. This is a shame, because taxpayers funding less Columbia nonsense would be a good thing—and it would come with the added benefit of allowing us to ignore these news cycles.

Trump admin officials denied Signal chat contained classified information: So The Atlantic was basically left with no choice other than to rebut this by publishing the contents.

To back up: Senior officials in the Trump administration used Signal to plan bombing campaigns on the Houthis, a Yemeni terrorist group that has been attacking shipping lanes in the Suez Canal. They seemingly accidentally added the editor in chief of The Atlantic to the group chat, thus resulting in a major scandal: Both the use of Signal to coordinate such top-secret attacks, and the ineptitude of adding someone accidentally, raise questions about competence and security.

Read them for yourself. Members of the Trump administration, including the president himself (who said there "was no classified information as I understand it"), are lying when they claim that "nobody was texting war plans" (as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said) and that "there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group" (as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said). You can read that classified material in The Atlantic!

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Scenes from New York: "Groups representing university professors sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, alleging that its practice of arresting and threatening noncitizen students and faculty members for protesting on campus deprives U.S. citizens of their right to engage with foreign-born peers and to hear their perspectives," reports The New York Times. "The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, takes a broader approach than a flurry of other recent lawsuits challenging the federal government's deportation policies on college campuses. Those suits, including two involving a Columbia student and a recent graduate who are green card holders, aim to stop individual deportation proceedings."

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QUICK HITS

• ICYMI. Also, we're nearing 8,000 subscribers over at Just Asking Questions. You know what to do:

• "The administration is also applying two kinds of conclusions that Trump's team reached in its years in the wilderness," writes Yuval Levin—former Just Asking Questions guest—over at The Free Press. "One is that Trump's circle was not effective enough in working the system to achieve its objectives in the first term. It lacked a worked-out policy agenda and legal strategy, and needed to hone its command of the tools at the president's disposal.…But a second lesson has mostly overshadowed this one.…Simply put: The conclusion he and much of his inner circle drew from his last time around was that Trump needs to be liberated from constraints." (I believe Levin gets some things wrong, like when he calls DOGE "a frantic and haphazard campaign cooked up just before Trump's inauguration, rooted in an unfocused desire to punish the bureaucracy, and farmed out to vainglorious dilettantes who are learning about government on the fly.")
• Very good take:

Never again tell me that this was an emergency that required immediate military action without congressional authorization. pic.twitter.com/G2v43h1X9E

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) March 25, 2025

• Senate Bill 3003, which would require age verification for dildo purchases, was introduced in the Texas Senate by Sen. Angela Paxton (R–Allen), wife of the state's Attorney General Ken Paxton. The future may involve retailers attempting to skirt this law by claiming dildos are medical devices (like how vibrators are sometimes referred to as massagers). "It's similar to how sex toys were marketed in the early 20th century to get around obscenity laws and the Comstock Act (which unfortunately still exists and may be used to prevent access to contraceptives and sex toys nationwide)," writer Hallie Lieberman tells 404 Media. "Butt plugs were sold as cures for asthma and vibrators for sciatica. We are literally going back in time with this law."
• Duke is pissed off at The White Lotus for using their trademark in some difficult scenes.
• A lot of libertarians advocate for attaching fewer strings to welfare. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is starting to take a different tack:

SNAP was designed to fight hunger and improve nutrition—not to subsidize soda & junk food. It makes no sense that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund an epidemic of obesity and diet-related illness. My bill ensures that SNAP actually supports health. https://t.co/v8To2iUrZh

— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) March 25, 2025

• Excited to read this:

I'm so pleased to present a new book with @stripepress: "The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025."

Over the last few years, I interviewed the key people thinking about AI: scientists, CEOs, economists, philosophers. This book curates and organizes the highlights across… pic.twitter.com/UzTQ4fIqar

— Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp) March 25, 2025