The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote or Work, or Have Opinions, by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

Friends:

What once sounded “too extreme” to take seriously is increasingly entering mainstream political and cultural discourse. The growing masculinist movement documented in this recent piece is not just internet provocation or fringe performance. It reflects a broader backlash against feminism, gender equality, public education, diversity efforts, and democratic pluralism itself.

Readers should resist the temptation to dismiss these developments simply because they sound outlandish or “too far-fetched.” History teaches us that democratic erosion often begins with ideas first framed as jokes, provocations, or hypothetical thought experiments before becoming normalized through repetition, media amplification, and political power. When influential public figures openly discuss repealing women’s voting rights, restricting women’s participation in public life, or dismantling anti-discrimination protections, we should pay attention—not panic, but pay attention.

I do need to say something about Christian debater Andrew Wilson's allegation and twisted logic that women "‘covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies,’ and therefore that ‘all cancellations are feminine.’” 

This is not at all true. Some of the most devastating forms of censorship, silencing, and social ostracism in U.S. history were not carried out by women exercising “soft power,” but by institutions dominated by men: legislatures banning books, universities purging dissidents, states criminalizing Ethnic Studies, overwhelmingly patriarchal churches enforcing orthodoxy, employers blacklisting organizers, and governments surveilling activists. To describe ostracism as “feminine” erases histories of colonial violence, McCarthyism, segregation, patriarchy, and authoritarian governance.

Inasmuch as women are behind this, it would be status quo, patriarchal women behind this within a larger system of patriarchal power.

The question is not whether every extreme proposal will become law. The question is what happens to a democracy when such ideas increasingly shape the moral and political imagination of an increasingly less-fringe movement about which we should all be concerned. 

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Men Who Don't Want Women to Vote or Work, or Have Opinions, by Helen Lewis, The Atlantic

The influential pastor Douglas Wilson has advo­cated for the repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Lindsey Wasson / AP.)

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”

Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.

When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’ ” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”

Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”

This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.

Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal, the conservative writer Karen Swallow Prior told me. Since his elevation by Hegseth, however, “no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.”

Wilson is a prominent voice in what is sometimes called “masculinism”: a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men. His version is religious, influenced by the notion of male “headship” of the family and Saint Paul’s belief that godly women should “be quiet.” There are also plenty of secular masculinists, as well as nominally Muslim ones, such as the streamer Sneako, the self-proclaimed pimp Andrew Tate, and the podcaster Myron Gaines. Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements. You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.

But this isn’t just a movement of grifters exploiting a quirk of the algorithm. In the past decade, one of the New Right’s major challenges has been to retrofit a consistent ideology onto the electoral power of Donald Trump. Masculinism has been a great gift, because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles. Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.

The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds, describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

Wilson’s approach to public life clearly has an element of what professional wrestlers call kayfabe—the winking, performative trollishness that now characterizes the online right. He wants feminists like me to get angry with his most outlandish proposals, making ourselves look like scolds or Chicken Littles in the process. But Wilson and a growing number of powerful allies are sincere in these beliefs, and would want to enact them if given the chance.

One of masculinism’s central claims is that no one is talking about men. So true! Men’s issues are not being discussed in Senator Josh Hawley’s 2023 book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. They aren’t being discussed in Tucker Carlson’s documentary The End of Men. They aren’t being discussed in the panoply of Christian books available on Amazon with titles such as Man for the Job, Masculine Christianity, and It’s Good to Be a Man, or in their secular counterparts, such as Why Women Deserve Less. They aren’t being talked about on social-media feeds (which can be highly segregated by sex) or on some of America’s most popular independent podcasts, such as Modern Wisdom, Huberman Lab, and The Diary of a CEO.

For decades, each feminist advance in American public life has prompted an equally strong backlash. The first wave of women’s-rights activists won suffrage for women, against ferocious and sometimes violent opposition. After the second wave secured Title IX and other legal victories against sex discrimination, Phyllis Schlafly successfully fought back against the full ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. By the identity-obsessed 2010s, the full weight of corporate America had swung behind glib slogans such as “The future is female.” This commercial blitzkrieg inevitably convinced some people that women’s advancement had come at men’s expense. A refrain I kept hearing over the past few years was that boys were being made to feel ashamed of themselves, as if they were stained by some kind of original sin. These years have seen a counterreaction, with the total abandonment of the #MeToo movement, conservative gloating over the fall of Roe v. Wade, and the return of straightforwardly sexist put-downs—“Quiet, piggy”—to public life.

Like most popular movements, masculinism has many entry points, and both defensible and alarming forms. At one end of the spectrum are legitimate concerns about male loneliness, the declining share of men in higher education, stagnant wages for non-college-educated men, and the deadening effects of day-trading, gaming, and porn. At the other end of masculinism are a misogynist vocabulary about AWFULs and the longhouse (terms that we’ll come back to) and a political agenda close to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, whereby women are denied the right to work, vote, and control their own bodies.

On the internet, masculinism is presented as a rebellion—a transgressive middle finger to the liberal establishment, expressed in all the words a corporate HR department would order you not to say. In the past few years, leaked group chats have shown Young Republicans and college conservatives using sexism, infused with racism, as a bonding mechanism. “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word,” read a message in a Telegram thread used by the leaders of Young Republican chapters in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. (Several members of the chat were women.) Richard Hanania, who describes himself as a former white nationalist, calls this kind of in-group signaling “the Based Ritual,” a way for younger MAGA enthusiasts to prove their bona fides to one another.

Nick Fuentes has suggested that women be sent to “breeding gulags.” (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jacquelyn Martin / AP.)

Among Gen Zers, Douglas Wilson’s intellectual heir is Nick Fuentes, who leads a loose collection of trolls known as Groypers. A self-professed Christian nationalist, anti-Semite, and virgin, Fuentes has built a fan base in part by deploying vividly misogynistic language. “Our No. 1 political enemy is women, because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man—everything,” Fuentes said on a livestream earlier this year. He added: “Just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, Communists—all of his political rivals—we have to do the same thing with women.” He suggested that they be sent to “breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.”

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom 

in Texas Higher Education

You may listen to a recording of this here.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 1, 2026

Something remarkable has happened at the University of Texas at Austin—and
throughout Texas higher education. In a state with a long history of suppressing Mexican American Studies, resisting desegregation, and policing the boundaries of public knowledge, we are now told that Women and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies are the true threat to free speech.

Accordingly, the American Association of University Professors (2024) warns that increasing legislative interference in curriculum and governance poses a direct threat to academic freedom by subordinating professional judgment to political authority.

Let all of this sink in.

Fields devoted to studying power, inequality, race, gender, and colonialism are being framed as authoritarian. And yet it is this very scholarship—probing injustice, exposing exploitation, imagining alternatives—that equips us to confront democratic backsliding and planetary crisis.

And the state is intervening—ostensibly to protect liberty.

This narrative did not arise from faculty misconduct findings, accreditation failures, or scholarly scandal. It was constructed. It was amplified. And under SB 17 (2023) and SB 37 (2025), it has now been operationalized into law.

To understand what is happening in Texas higher education, we must call this what it is: a governance transformation justified through crisis discourse.

Wilson and Kamola (2023) show how selective campus incidents are magnified through coordinated media ecosystems and donor networks into "evidence" of systemic institutional failure. What might otherwise remain a local disagreement becomes proof of a national emergency. 

The cycle is predictable: identify controversy, amplify outrage, declare ideological capture, legislate reform.

In Texas, crisis preceded cure.

Before SB 17 dismantled DEI infrastructures, DEI was framed as coercive orthodoxy. Before SB 37 weakened shared governance, faculty senates were portrayed as partisan strongholds. The ground was prepared rhetorically long before it was altered legislatively.

Nancy MacLean (2017) reminds us that institutional transformation rarely occurs through dramatic abolition. It happens through procedural redesign. Authority shifts quietly. Governance structures are recalibrated. The institution remains standing—but its operating logic changes.

That is what SB 37 represents.

I have been at UT Austin for decades. I have seen intense disagreements over public positions faculty have taken. I have watched colleagues disagree sharply about theory, about politics, about pedagogy. That was not dysfunction. That was shared governance in action. 

What I had never seen—until now—was the systematic restructuring of governance itself through state mandate.

The American Association of University Professors has been clear for over eighty years: academic freedom is not merely an individual right. It is a structural condition sustained by shared governance (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). Faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction precisely because disciplinary expertise—not political expediency—should determine academic content.

When faculty senates are weakened or replaced with advisory bodies responsive to political oversight, the architecture changes. Authority moves upward and outward.

And here is the inversion: this restructuring is justified in the name of protecting free speech.

Let us pause.

The disciplines most frequently labeled “propaganda”—Women and Gender Studies, Black Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Indigenous Studies—operate through peer review, accreditation standards, and national scholarly associations. They assign canonical texts. They demand evidence-based argumentation. They expose students to intellectual traditions spanning centuries.

Critique is not cancellation. 

The irony is staggering. It's the powers that be that are doing all the canceling.

In fact, what these disciplines do—systematically—is analyze power. They interrogate racial hierarchy, gender stratification, settler colonialism, capitalism, and state formation. They ask who benefits, who is excluded, and how institutions reproduce inequality.

That analytic posture is not authoritarian.

It is foundational to the liberal arts.

The deeper issue is authority. Who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?

The AAUP has repeatedly warned that legislative interference in curricular matters displaces professional judgment and produces chilling effects even in the absence of explicit speech bans (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). When lawmakers define entire areas of inquiry as suspect, scholars internalize risk. Research agendas narrow. Hiring patterns shift. Students receive the message.

The language of neutrality becomes the mechanism of control.

Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have advanced national reform blueprints targeting DEI, curriculum, and governance structures. These agendas do not typically call for closing universities. They call for recalibrating them—redefining academic freedom as compliance with politically supervised neutrality.

When these reform agendas converge with state legislation like SB 17 and SB 37, the result is not isolated policy disagreement. It is structural realignment.

And here is where Texas history matters.

This state has long wrestled with who controls knowledge production—from textbook battles to bilingual education fights to Mexican American Studies bans in K–12. The current moment is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of a longer struggle over narrative authority.

What is new is the scale of governance redesign.

If shared governance erodes, if faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight, if entire domains of inquiry are stigmatized through law, the university does not collapse. It shifts.

The liberal arts tradition conservatives claim to defend depends on contestation—from Plato’s dialogues to Du Bois’s sociological interventions to contemporary critical theory. A university that cannot sustain rigorous analysis of race and gender is not defending liberal education. It is curating it.

The question before Texas is not whether one agrees with every argument advanced in Women and Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies.

The question is whether academic legitimacy will continue to be determined by scholarly communities within shared governance structures—or by political actors invoking crisis.

Free speech does not erode because students argue.

It erodes when governance systems are redesigned to align inquiry with state-defined boundaries.

SB 17 and SB 37 are not cultural skirmishes. They are governance interventions. And governance is the backbone of academic freedom.

If we allow that backbone to weaken while congratulating ourselves for defending free speech, we should be honest about what is happening.

We are not rescuing the liberal arts. We are redefining them in the image of political oversight.

History teaches us that when authority over knowledge production shifts from scholarly communities to political power, the effects rarely remain confined to a single department. Such shifts tend to expand, normalizing intervention and narrowing the boundaries of acceptable inquiry across the institution. Once the precedent is set—that legislatures may define which fields are suspect, which governance structures are dispensable, and which scholarly frameworks are legitimate—the logic does not easily contain itself.

The question, then, is not whether one program is next. It is whether the university itself—its autonomy, its governing norms, its capacity for independent judgment—can withstand sustained political encroachment.

At moments like this, institutional repair requires more than rhetorical defense. It requires civic action. If governance structures have been weakened through legislation, they must be restored through legislation. If academic freedom has been narrowed by those in power, then the democratic remedy is clear: voters must hold those officials accountable and elect leaders committed to institutional autonomy and the public mission of higher education.

If we are to truly live in a free society, the defense of the university must be understood as inseparable from the defense of democracy itself.

References

American Association of University Professors. (1940/2015). 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Association of University Professors. (1966/2015). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Wilson, J. K., & Kamola, I. (2023). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

The Heritage Foundation Drove Trump’s 2025 Higher-Ed Agenda. What’s Its Plan for 2026? By Rick Seltzer | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Feb. 13, 2026

Friends,

In a revealing interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporter Rick Seltzer probes the next phase of the Heritage Foundation’s higher-education agenda following the rollout of Project 2025. What emerges is not merely a technocratic debate over accreditation but a sweeping ideological project. Heritage fellow Adam Kissel calls for severing the link between accreditors and federal student aid, effectively removing a long-standing buffer between federal funds and institutional quality review. 

In its place: state-level control, market discipline, and—ultimately—the privatization of federal student aid. 

The proposal frames accreditors as politicized enforcers of DEI and positions states as more trustworthy arbiters of “intellectual” and even “moral” development. 

Geez, how pathetic if not deeply cynical to cloak a project of political consolidation in the language of quality, virtue, and reform. The shift would dismantle a national accountability infrastructure and replace it with a fragmented 50-state experiment, where access, standards, and protections vary dramatically by geography and political climate.

Most alarming is the open embrace of reduced college access as a policy goal. Kissel states plainly, “I want college access to drop,” arguing that expanded access in the 20th century “overachieved” and left too many students with debt and no degree. The tradeoff, he suggests, is how many lives we are willing to “ruin” in order to help those deemed deserving. 

This stark calculus reframes higher education not as a public good but as a selective privilege governed by market sorting and state ideology. Combined with calls to privatize student loans, weaken federal oversight, and reshape curricula around contested visions of Western intellectual and moral formation, the agenda signals a profound reordering of higher education’s civic mission. 

If enacted, these reforms would not simply adjust policy levers; they would narrow pathways to opportunity, intensify political control over knowledge, and destabilize the fragile architecture that has long mediated between public investment and institutional autonomy. 

Forewarned is forearmed.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Heritage Foundation Drove Trump’s 2025 Higher-Ed Agenda. What’s Its Plan for 2026?

By Rick Seltzer | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Feb. 13, 2026

Project 2025, the influential policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, set a clear agenda for the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reform higher education in its first year in office. What comes next?

Heritage’s “Themes for Higher Education Reform,” published in January, give an indication. One item high on its list: stripping accreditors of their role as gatekeepers of federal funding. The Trump administration has already sought to shake up accreditation by bringing new agencies into the mix, but the Heritage proposal goes much further.

I dug into that proposal with Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher-education reform at the Heritage Foundation and an author of the report. We started out wonky, but I was surprised to find us veer into deeper questions of moral development and college access. Our conversation shows that higher education and its critics have come to hold far fewer shared assumptions than those on campus might think. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Why do you want to remove accreditors as gatekeepers of federal funding?

The decoupling of Federal Student Aid from accreditation would help accreditors focus on quality improvement, rather than quality assurance — meaning that quality assurance can continue to be done to some degree by the Department of Education, so long as it exists, but also by the states.

In other words, accreditors wouldn’t cease to exist.

Once they are decoupled from Federal Student Aid, there is no reason for them to be registered by the Education Department. They can continue to do whatever they like. I point to low graduation rates and low-ROI programs as evidence that institutional accreditors have dramatically failed to be reliable authorities as to the quality of institutions of higher education.

Without accreditors as gatekeepers, how would you ensure Federal Student Aid goes to institutions providing quality education?

The quality assurance will be certified by the state, either by their own assurance bodies or by third parties that they choose, which might still include accreditors, if that’s their plan.

Why are the states going to be better at this?

Returning education to the states means that we trust the state, and people of different political persuasions may trust certain states more than others, but that’s the 50-state-experiment idea that is integral to federalism.

We trust the states with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars already on a large variety of issues. It’s only Chicken Little scaremongers who would say that we can only trust these institutional accreditors who have demonstrated that they are already not good at it.

Accreditors aren’t just about quality assurance. They’re seen as insulation from politicization of higher education.

Did you read my paper from a year ago, called “The Politicization of Higher Education Accreditation”? [The paper argues that accreditors have used their gatekeeping role to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion on colleges while thwarting conservative reforms.]

I’m familiar with those criticisms. But whether accreditors are upholding the ideal of political insulation is a different question from whether we want direct state control in colleges that include private enterprises. 

Why would a state be better to dictate whether Ave Maria University or the University of Notre Dame can draw federal funding?

States already have a key role. The secretary of state, traditionally, in a state, decides which corporations are allowed to operate and the standards under which they are audited. It’s nothing new for states to decide who can operate in their state.

I’m not asking whether this is a new discussion. I’m trying to get at the inherent tradeoffs.

Ideally organizations would police themselves. They don’t, and that’s why accreditors or other outside parties are needed. And when accreditors also fail to do their jobs, different outsiders will come in, such as state and federal regulators and legislators, and then you’re kind of out of ideas, except to go to the consumer, and then the consumer votes with his or her feet, right?

So ultimately you want the market to police itself, and usually it does a pretty good job over time.

Government feels like it has an important say in the use of those dollars, at least not to discriminate against your own students or your own job applicants, and that’s what colleges do. Have the accreditors ever said “You can stop discriminating” as a matter of being allowed to operate? Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policies violate the First Amendment?

You’re referring to race-conscious admissions, DEI, and that kind of thing?

That was the first part of my comment. But to turn to the second part of the comment: Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policy violates the First Amendment and that matters for accreditation? Maybe never.

Eliminating accreditors from this role is very different than the solution Republicans have been pitching, which is to start new accreditors.

A lot of higher-education reforms have a Plan B. Plan A is politically unfeasible — to privatize student loans, return all money to the states, greatly diminish the amount of money coming from the federal government into education. All that is very challenging today, so instead, use the powers that are available for reform, and that’s Plan B.

I’m surprised we went down this road, because I expected you might talk about protecting the federal investment through accountability measures. The feds are arguably taking on more quality assurance by looking at outcomes measures, which is still a departure from the process review accreditors do. I expected you might talk about states doing the same.

Oh, I think states such as Florida, which have turned dramatically to performance-based funding, have demonstrated success in institutional improvement.

The point is not to have a federal standard for how colleges are assessed, but to have each state have its own assessment plan. I’m not against ROI for most programs, most of the time, but there are other things to do with your college time, such as develop intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Teachers, they barely even understand that there’s such a thing as intellectual development or moral development that they could focus on in college. It would be wonderful if colleges would measure intellectual and moral development, and if some states would figure out how to assess colleges by those standards.

Is it a state’s role to assess the intellectual and moral development of private actors?

Intellectual development, for sure. Moral development can be done in a viewpoint-neutral way, similar to how current accreditors focus on process rather than outcomes.

How much do you trust the state to protect whatever the minority in that state is?

Some will do better at that than others, and that’s part of the 50-state competition that you get.

The 50-state competition is certainly one of the checks that’s built into the country. Another is checks and balances between branches and levels of government. You may disagree with interpretations of the Commerce Clause, but the feds do have some role in governing interstate commerce. And if you’re talking about interstate competition and students crossing state lines, can it get muddy?

The federal government already has a role, separate from the accreditors and states, in assessing financial viability and administrative capacity.

Which it arguably has not done a particularly good job of.

No doubt we can agree on that.

What else would you like to discuss?

Making it much easier for a new accreditor to take its place among existing accreditors has been a priority in the current administration.

Why won’t that become a race to the bottom — to accreditors that offer rubber stamps?

As we get more and more transparency in ROI and syllabi and other areas, it will become more and more valuable for a college to show that it is accredited by an accreditor with standing in terms of high-quality outcomes for graduates. So why wouldn’t it be a race to the top?

Would any reform really change the dynamics that make it difficult to ensure quality instruction?

It wasn’t until a huge amount of money was in the federal system that we had to start working on this problem, and then put Band-Aids on it. The tough love is to rip all the Band-Aids off, privatize student loans and the federal-aid system, and then we wouldn’t have to worry as much about accreditation and accountability for the federal dollars, because there wouldn’t be any.

And then, arguably, college access drops.

I want college access to drop. Why do I want college access to drop? Do you want there to be colleges with a 12-percent graduation rate, 15 percent, after six years? You want federal dollars to go to that school?

We overachieved in terms of access in the 20th century. We took kids who would have had a great career as an electrician or in the military or as an entrepreneur, and we said, “No, go to college.”

They took six years not to graduate. Now they’re in debt, no good degree. They’ve been moved away from their home community for six years. Their life has been ruined because we told them they should go to college and we gave them enough money to do it.

That may apply to some students, but I might hesitate to say it to those who were able to earn a degree of value only because of federal financial aid.

Yep, totally agree with that critique. The tradeoff is how many students’ lives you want to ruin in exchange for helping students who deserve to be helped.

If a state wants to make its public universities merit-based in such a way that the kids who are smart but poor get a full ride, the states could easily do that. A number of state-scholarship programs probably do that.

Then you get into questions about which tier of institution those students should be able to access, which can be a problem in public-heavy states like California.

If you look at the Ivy League core curriculum and then you look at what a student can choose to take to graduate outside of STEM, these are not top-tier institutions. You take Beyoncé, you take Bad Bunny, as your course. I would rather have my niece stay at Florida State than go to Columbia.

Without having taken the classes, I can’t say for sure, but there may be some value to cultural critique.

I don’t think they’re doing cultural critique so much as cultural appreciation. I would rather have them reading the Iliad than listening to a Bad Bunny song.

An interesting thing to me is the idea that there is no space for both.

My critique is about the core curriculum. What are the things that you should expose an 18-year-old to, so by the time they’re 22 they can take their place among educated men and women of America in the West? They already know the Bad Bunny. They don’t need that in college.

A wonderful product of the market, right?

If you’re spending $80,000 a year and you’re saying, “I want to be educated. You all are pretty smart over there. You faculty, can you articulate what I should know and be able to do intellectually and morally?” And they say, “Here’s 400 courses, just choose any of them,” that’s not a very good use of my $80,000.

A shorter version of this interview appeared in Friday’s Daily Briefing newsletter.


We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

Rick Seltzer
Rick is a senior writer at The Chronicle and author of the Daily Briefing newsletter. He has been an editor at Higher Ed Dive and a reporter and projects editor at Inside Higher Ed. Before focusing on higher-education journalism, he covered business beats for local and regional publications.

Subscribe here to receive the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox each day.

 Friends,

You must be hearing the alarm bells by now on Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise, that conservatives want Donald Trump to implement should he become president. These include reforming the FBI, aligning the DOJ’s litigation strategy with the president’s agenda, and significantly reducing the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which enforces federal voting laws such as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Voting Rights Act (VRA). 

Good-by free and fair elections and any smidgen of voting rights that remain. As Rachel Maddow recently said, paraphrasing, it's a political agenda to end all politics. 

This is a very anti-freedom, pro-corporate agenda that folks really need to learn about. I provide some resources in an earlier blog for the college classroom and any other place where it might be discussed (see Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership, the Conservative Promise—PowerPoint for Discussion Groups and the College Classroom). 

There's a litany of other atrocious things. I'll get to these later. Don't want to ruin this morning's breakfast.

-Angela Valenzuela

Unmasking the Anti-Democracy Agenda of Project 2025 By Matt Cohen | July 12, 2024

It’s no secret that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s detailed, sprawling right-wing plan to remake the federal government when the next conservative administration takes over — would fundamentally alter just about every aspect of American life. 

Various civil rights advocacy organizations and policy experts are rightfully ringing the alarm bells about Project 2025, which would — among many other radical proposed changes — ban abortion nationwide, eradicate civil rights protections for millions of people and completely eliminate the Department of Education.

Some of the proposals in the massive plan are so radical even former President Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from it, posting on his TruthSocial platform that he claims to “know nothing” about the details of the conservative mandate, nor has any “idea who is behind it.” 

Clocking in at over 900 pages, there are a lot of ideas in Project 2025. A good portion of it focuses on the actions the next Republican president should take in their first 180 days of office to facilitate the myriad proposals falling into place. Scattered throughout Project 2025 are a number of highly concerning ideas and policy proposals for specific departments and agencies that, should they come to fruition, could seriously alter the state of elections, voting rights and democracy in America. 

The alarming reforms to the Department of Justice

One of the most concerning chapters in Project 2025 focuses on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The chapter was written by Gene Hamilton, a lawyer who served in the DOJ and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Trump and is best known as the chief architect of ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. 

“The DOJ has become a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical liberal agenda and the defeat of perceived political enemies,” Hamilton writes in Project 2025, before outlining a long list of “essential” reforms that the next conservative president should make a priority. 

Among them: reforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), asserting that the DOJ’s litigation strategy must be totally aligned with the next president’s agenda and completely stripping the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing civil provisions of the federal laws that protect the right to vote, like the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). In essence, what Hamilton proposes is a DOJ completely stripped of its independent authority, instead to be used as a tool of the president “as an enforcer of an anti-democracy, anti-freedom, anti-people agenda,” according to Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan legal and public policy research nonprofit Democracy Forward.

Under Project 2025, the FBI would be completely reformed — including a mandate to prohibit the agency from “engaging, in general, in activities related to combating the spread of so-called misinformation and disinformation by Americans who are not tied to any plausible criminal activity.” It’s a frightening mandate, especially at a time when the heightened threat of election-related violence and harassment of election workers is on the rise, thanks to the proliferation of disinformation.

“What the FBI does is investigate and expose corruption, look at political interference and think about holding the wealthy accountable when they break the law,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told Democracy Docket. “And so if this happened, people with enough money or political influence could be placed above the law at the whim of the President.”

Project 2025’s other proposed changes to the DOJ will have “broad, sweeping implications for all kinds of things, including civil rights, but specifically for voting rights and the role the Department of Justice should play and has an obligation to play to defend Americans’ access to the ballot,” Perryman told Democracy Docket. 

She points out that, given what’s known about the legal strategies that dozens of the groups involved with Project 2025 have employed, there’s serious concern that the DOJ “would start fronting fringe and baseless legal theories” like the controversial independent state legislature (ISL) theory. “There is a real risk that you would have the nation’s litigating institution actually seeking to perpetuate and front those theories in courts across the country,” she said. 

Cumulatively, what the DOJ amounts to in Project 2025 is nothing more than a personal litigation and prosecution weapon for Trump, or whoever the next conservative president is. 

“We’ve heard a ton from Trump about his willingness to use the presidency to punish whoever he wants, including political opponents,” Gilbert said. “And so certainly a MAGA-controlled DOJ would be hugely problematic. Coupled with what just happened in the immunity decision, I can’t think of a bigger place where democracy will be undermined if Project 2025 is in place.”

An end to the agency leading the fight against disinformation

Within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there’s an agency that plays a crucial role in protecting federal and state elections from a host of existential threats like foreign-backed disinformation and AI threats. Over the past few election cycles, states across the country have come to depend on — and praised — the resources and guidance the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) devotes to securing elections. Under proposed changes described in Project 2025, not only would CISA immediately cease its “counter-mis/disinformation efforts,” but the agency would be completely dismantled, with its core functions moved entirely from DHS to the Department of Transportation. 

“For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more,” writes Ken Cucinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, who authored the DHS chapter. 

Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights advocacy organization Campaign Legal Center, told Democracy Docket the proposal is “absolutely bonkers” and would have a devastating impact on election security. “It’s located at Homeland Security because the whole premise of the Department of Homeland Security is that it’s supposed to be the central resource for the protection of the nation. And that the important functions shouldn’t be living out in siloed agencies,” he said. “CISA is DHS’s bread and butter, pulling together different strands of these things.”

The idea to remove CISA from DHS is part of the broader trend in Project 2025 to essentially separate the functions of various agencies whose work intersects with one another — especially as they relate to elections. But it’s not a new idea. For years, the GOP has criticized CISA and sought to deprioritize its efforts in election security. 

Should Project 2025’s vision for CISA become reality, “it would be harmful to the efforts to protect elections, to withdraw any significant resources from that effort, because it’s a very difficult struggle,” Noti added. “And it requires significant resources. It’s a troubling idea, but it’s not a new one.”

Money will buy even more elections 

To fully understand the insidious agenda of Project 2025’s proposals for the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Public Citizen’s Gilbert said “it’s worth starting with the understanding that the FEC is currently broken” and that the agency is in dire need of “intense reform for it to function as it was intended.”

Reforming the FEC has long been a priority for Democrats and voting rights advocates — and a key tenet of the comprehensive For the People Act and Freedom to Vote Act that Republicans repeatedly blocked from passing Congress. But the reforms outlined in Project 2025 could make the agency worse than it is now. 

One such way is a proposal to raise campaign contribution limits. “Contribution limits should generally be much higher, as they hamstring candidates and parties while serving no practical anticorruption purpose,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a right-wing lawyer and former FEC commissioner who authored the Project 2025 chapter. Gilbert noted that von Spakovsky’s argument that there’s no anti-corruption rationale for keeping campaign contribution limits where they are is “absurd on its face,” especially given how much fiscal influence Super PACs wield. “If [candidates] could directly raise as much as they want, it would have immediate ramifications for who can influence and how the campaigns are run,” she said.

The FEC is one of the few federal agencies that has its own independent litigating authority, rather than relying on the DOJ to defend its work in court. But not under Project 2025, which advises the next conservative president to “direct the attorney general to defend the FEC in all litigation.” There’s a caveat to this, though, which is that the DOJ should only prosecute campaign finance violations if the FEC signs off on it — a proposal that’s of grave concern to Noti. 

“The whole structure of campaign finance prosecutions is the FEC has civil authority, the Department of Justice has criminal authority. And the bifurcation of those has, in a lot of ways, proven to be valuable,” Noti explained. “So the idea that they would get conflated and you give the three FEC commissioners veto power over criminal enforcement of the law is a troubling suggestion.”

Reviving the right-wing push to add a citizenship question to the census

One of the Trump administration’s biggest legal defeats was a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that blocked the implementation of a citizenship question on the 2020 census. But Project 2025 renews the right-wing fervor that the next census requires that every person answer if they’re a U.S. citizen or not. 

Project 2025 simply states that “any successful conservative Administration must include a citizenship question in the census,” without mentioning the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling. It’s not clear how a citizenship question could end up on the next census but the mere mention of it in Project 2025 could have a devastating effect for voting rights and immigrant communities.

“It would really depress the population counts in those areas, which in turn has a pretty dramatic impact,” said Sophia Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. That impact wouldn’t just affect representation — Congress is apportioned based on the census and a lower response rate could result in redistricting in which some communities lose seats — but it depresses the relative size of areas with a high population of noncitizens, people of color and vulnerable communities. “Not just on representation, but on funding and resource allocation,” Lakin says. “We’re talking about how people live their daily lives.”

Heidi Beirich, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Democracy Docket there’s a “two-fold purpose” of Project 2025’s citizenship question proposal of “demonizing immigrants and undermining the legitimacy of elections.” The effort, Beirich said, is “part and parcel of a bunch of lies about the security of our election that have been going on in the far-right forever.”

Lakin also expressed a deep concern of how a citizenship question on the census could flame anti-immigrant sentiments, which Trump and the GOP have made a priority of their platform. “That has reverberations beyond representation too, in terms of the whole anti-immigrant stances,” Lakin said. “The damage that it will do to our democracy, to our founding principles as a country that welcomes all, it’s really quite damaging in that regard, as well.”

The anti-voting policies of Project 2025 are really just the tip of the iceberg regarding why Democratic politicians, policy experts and government watchdogs are so concerned. The proposed cuts to civil rights protections, labor protections, and dozens of social services have the potential to impact tens of millions of people.

But what’s most disturbing about all the individual proposals in Project 2025 is how they work in tandem with each other: pieced together, Project 2025 is a roadmap for dismantling democracy in favor of an authoritarian government, fueled by a Christian Nationalist agenda. 

This is absolutely Gen Z's and Millennials' opportunity to pick the next president. Together, according to Harvard University pollster, John Della Volpe (2022), they represent close to 40 percent of the electorate. Pretty impressive.

Author Sara Pequeño is on point on the dangers of another Trump presidency. He and his supporters at the state level will enshrine policies that make it unlawful to organize, by curtailing rights to protest and thusly, our First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly. In fact, this is what was exactly at stake last Spring on many college campuses.

If you want to know what's in store should Trump win, do read through conservative extremists' "planned coup" embodied in Project 2025. Use the search terms "abolish" and "eliminate" to get a sense of what is at stake. 

A truly excellent, just-published read is the June 2024 issue of The Nation titled, "The Plot Against America," with commentary from numerous authors on the different sections of Project 2025 as follows:

1) "The Conservative Promise," by Kim Phillips-Fein; 

2) "The Executive," by Chris Lehmann; 

3) "Democracy: The Great Dismantling," by John Nichols;

4) "Justice: A Legal Heist" by Ellie Mystal; 

5) Housing: America's Landlord," by Sasha Abramsky; 

6) "Healthcare: Bad Medicine," by Joan Walsh; 

7) "Climate: License to Drill, Drill, Drill," by Bill McKibben; 

8) "Immigration: Deport, Detain, Deny," by Gaby del Valle; 

9) "China: A New Exclusion Act," by Jake Werner; and 

10) "The Pentagon: Masters of War," by William Hartung.

Among other things, Project 2025 proposes invoking the Insurrection Act, enabling presidents to deploy the military against American citizens protesting their actions—a practice currently illegal. For additional context, refer to the Trump Administration's adoption of Heritage Foundation policy in 2018 recommendations as follows:  Trump Administration Embraces Heritage Foundation Policy Recommendations. 

Moreover, I do concur with Pequeño that a Biden victory means that Gen Z will be in a great position to leverage policies they care for from a Biden administration pursuant to a victory in which they are responsible for those helpful electoral margins.

-Angela Valenzuela

 #2024election

Reference

Della Volpe, J. (2022). Fight: How Gen Z is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America, St. Martin's Press.

Gen Z voters like me should be mad at Biden. But we can't risk another Trump presidency.

Yes, Gen Z is disappointed with President Biden. But I don't see a way we'll let Trump back in the White House.

Sara Pequeño, USA TODAY | June 2, 2024

We have to make a decision as Zoomers. Are we angry enough at Joe Biden to risk a second Donald Trump presidency? Or do we remember who Trump is and what another four years of his presidency would mean?

Now that the former president is a convicted felon, the idea of him winning in November is even scarier and our responsibility even greater.

We have already proven we have a strong generational moral compass. We've been protesting my entire adulthood – protesting the first Trump presidency, protesting sexual abuse, protesting for Black Lives Matter and now, protesting for Palestine. We know what we believe.

Now is the time to put those values into action. Polling has shown that Gen Z is dissatisfied with Biden. Personally, I’m unenthusiastic about him as a candidate. I do not think we are as progressive as we should be as a world leader, and I think we need someone younger in office.

I still plan on voting for him.

Still, if 2020 was the year of voter mobilization, 2024 is looking to be the year of voter apathy. This is especially true amongst my age cohort, the 18- to 27-year-olds who comprise Gen Z.

Trump is leading in polls, despite everything

Trump is currently outperforming Biden in the polls. Yes, Trump, the candidate who evoked Nazi Germany in a recent post about forming a “unified Reich.” The candidate who is in legal trouble. The candidate who we can’t seem to get away from and who motivated a group of people to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Now, we can add being a convicted felon to that list after Trump was found guilty last week of 34 counts of falsifying business records. While this has yet to be factored into polling data, there's still a chance it doesn't affect people's views on the former president.

Much has been said about Gen Z's hesitancy to vote for Biden. I have personally written a lot about this hesitancy. Thankfully, recent polls look more optimistic. Most recent polling from Harvard shows that Biden leads Trump by 19 percentage points among likely voters ages 18 to 29. 

Biden is not it:Why are Gen Z voters souring on Biden? I decided to ask them about that frustration.

This is the same age group that has created a reputation for voter turnout. We have shown up at the polls. More Zoomers voted in 2022 than any other recent generation during its first midterm, leading to the second-highest midterm voter turnout rate since 2000.

So, while I wish progressives gave us a better option than Biden, this is still our chance to decide the election. And it can't be Trump.

The 2016 election was my wake-up call

After 2016, I realized that voting is not the only solution to our problems. In actuality, voting is one step in the long list of things we can do to shape the country we live in. No president can single-handedly fix everything wrong with the country, despite what we are led to believe as children. It's a long-term fix.

I fear what another four years of Trump would look like and how it will set back any gains progressives have made in recent years. I fear returning to an environment where corruption is tolerated, and hateful ideologies are commonplace.

Many people underestimated Trump in 2016. We can’t repeat that mistake and should remember why we voted him out in 2020.

In 2016, I voted for Hillary Clinton in my first presidential election. I was living in North Carolina and wasn’t positive that the state would go for Trump. In the end, he overwhelmingly won my home county.

For four years, I felt horror cede into numbness as Trump’s antics became commonplace and we came to believe that his administration was normal. While every recent Republican president has objected to progress, Trump has come to represent a deep sickness in American culture. A large chunk of voters seem fine with ignoring racism, sexism and other prejudices so long as there was a celebrity businessman saying it.

MAGA still loves Trump:What do Trump supporters think about his conviction? I went to the courthouse to ask.

The last four years of Biden's presidency have put some distance between our society and the policy decisions of the Trump administration. It has made it easy to forget some of the worst parts of his presidency: being impeached multiple times, separating families at the border, "both sidesing" the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, COVID-19 response and countless lies told to the American public.

We can't go back.

Trump is a present danger to what Gen Z cares about

I don’t enjoy having to make this decision every four years; I wish the Democratic Party considered me more than the stereotypes that exist about young people. I want them, in particular, to consider the world we are inheriting: all of the prejudice, the failures of government and the impending climate crisis.

I’m also going to vote. Even though I dislike Biden, I understand that my civic duty is to help America avoid another Trump presidency.

The atmosphere Trump creates poisons the nation. It feeds our worst instincts, guarantees its corruption, and sets us back.

The Republican Party, the supposed party of law and order, is going to surround a candidate who has enough legal problems to keep him busy for the rest of his life. It’s a level of hypocrisy that no longer shocks me but should keep my generation motivated. 

Unfortunately, there are limited options for fixing that and Biden is still the best option for progressives.

Democrats need to prove their commitment to us

Gen Z is at a crossroads. We could allow the country to fall into the hands of a corrupt man and increasingly extreme Republican Party, or we could vote for a man who is disappointingly moderate but still leans toward the goals we have as a generation. Progress is incremental, and having a Democrat in office means that progressives will have more inroads to meeting their goals for the next four years. It also means that younger progressives can become part of the Biden administration and make political progress toward influence.

I also think older generations need to remember the feeling of being 18, 19, 20 or even 27. 

For those of you demanding answers from Gen Z, consider if there are other people in your life, people in your own generation, who are not voting for president. They exist, and they deserve the same scrutiny being placed on Zoomers this year. We don't know how Gen Z will show up to vote – but we could surprise all of you.

We need to turn out and vote, and I’m confident that enough of us will come to this conclusion in November. We can’t forget how bad Trump really was or lose sight of all the damage Republicans have continued to do after Trump lost.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Sara Pequeño on X, formerly Twitter, @sara__pequeno and Facebook facebook.com/PequenoWrites