Liner Note 39. Attack Theory for Education

Bodrum Castle, Türkiye Sept 12, 2025   

 

 

At our friend Andrea’s birthday in Hampshire last weekend, the Man in the Lime Suit said to me above the din, “they’ve taken the spark out of everyone. Taken what’s inside people that belongs to them and makes them act.”  I nodded. The spark never does go out, but I knew exactly what he meant.

 

The spark to make one’s own things is the origin and outcome of teaching and research. It leads to a set of powers in art to show what’s not seen and to diverge from what exists. 

 

In politics, it’s to break with a nightmare of the present, and build an alternative to it, brick by brick, where you have to make most of the bricks yourself. 

 

In management, the spark enables the creation of the positive narrative of your institution’s destiny and the coordination your people into a powerful movement towards it. (I wrote about these linked elements last time.)

 

In practice, these capabilities mean divergence, conflict, confrontation and pitched battling.

 

This spark is what the right organizes to stamp out.  They got Disney CEO Bob Iger to agree with Trump to cancel the First Amendment via the Jimmy Kimmel suspension. That happened as the Regents of the University of California started the school year by loading up on ammo to use on its students.  (See Javeed Kaleem’s “Pepper-balls, rifle rounds, drones: UC police get green light for more weapons.”)

 

Later there was Jimmy Kimmel’s uncancellation. It marked less the return of the First Amendment than the continuation of the regime’s underlying power to cancel speech rights by proxy. What shortly followed was the indictment of former FBI director James Comey on phony charges, which promises a new round of persecutions of perceived enemies, to be intensified by Trump’s National Security Presidential Memoradum (NSPM-7) on domestic terrorism. (See Jeff Sharlett's “Rubber-Glue Fascism” and Hasan Abi's explication,"This is Straightforward Facism.")

 

There’s a systematic strategy behind this, and Will Saletan has a very clear explanation of the overall Trumpist crusade against dissenting speech and basic debate.  I’m going to going through it in a moment.

 

This isn’t because I think you don’t already grasp the situation. It’s because I’m not feeling the wider spark required for resistance and full counterhegemonic narratives.

 

Here’s an example. The Trump regime is expanding its unlawful probes to the California State University System. As LA Times reporters Clara Harter and Jaweed Kaleem point out,

The new CSU probes leave almost no public universities in California untouched by antisemitism investigations under the Trump administration. The EEOC is also working with the Department of Justice to investigate allegations of antisemitism on all 10 University of California campuses, where officials have complied with federal orders to turn over hundreds of employees’ contact information to the government.

 

Harter and Kaleem spoke to faculty at Cal State LA.

 

Jeffrey Santner, a Jewish faculty member at Cal State L.A., said he is not worried about antisemitism on campus and did not feel like it was a problem during the 2024 protests.

 

He said he assumes the probe is related to the Cal State L.A. pro-Palestinian encampment, and feels the investigation is an example of the government equating anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism.

 

“I think most of us probably disagree with [that] and don’t think that the government is the same as a religion,” he said.

 

Santner said he wasn’t surprised by the chancellor’s response, given the Trump administration’s funding threats to universities that don’t comply with its demands.

 

“It would be nice if we fought back ... if our leader tried to take some leadership, since we have so many universities,” he said. “But the government is the government; it’s big and powerful.”

 

All good here until the last paragraph.  Santner does not equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, doesn’t think pro-Palestinian protests are anti-Semitic, seems fine with encampments as First Amendment expression of political viewpoints, opposes theocracy, and has, with experience, lowered his expectations for administrative speech.

 

But he’s wrong to say, “it would be nice if we fought back … if our leader tried to take some leadership.”  Fighting back is not optional but essential.  Putting fighting the “would be nice” category is the lack of spark. 

 

This is not about Prof. Santner as an individual, who sounds like a smart, reasonable colleague. This is about our professional-managerial class in which the professionals have mostly given up the struggle with managers, except in extreme cases that provoke the one-off intervention.

 

Professional submission is most easily induced by managerial  budget discourse. It’s especially effective because managers display their own submission to budget forces and so convince professors et al. that they’re not putting one over on them.  In my next post, I’ll get to the latest example, from the September UC Regents budget committee meeting.

 

But worse now is the submission to relentless federal government cancellations of basic academic freedom. My point here isn’t only that the view, “fighting would be nice to have,” will always fail against a serious threat. My point is that “fighting would be nice to have” is tailor- made to lose to Trumpian strategy. It’s the exact political affect Trumpism most wants in its enemy.

Will Saletan on September 27, 2025

SO: The Bulwark is a never-Trumper Republican operation, run by constitutionalist moderates and conservatives with William Kristol as a key figure. They do know how to fight (a good intro to their position is Tim Miller’s confrontation with the editor of The Daily Caller). Saletan’s Bulwark episode starts like this. 

 

 

 

We've been telling you for some time that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, and now there's a new threat, which is we might not be allowed to tell you that anymore.

 

Mentioning Trump’s defiance of court orders, sending troops into cities against the will of local officials, overriding due process with summary deportation, he says,

 

This is authoritarian government. And by corrupting law enforcement and using the military to seize more power, it is a fascist government.

 

What I want to talk to you about today is the next stage of their seizure of power. They are trying to criminalize anyone who points out that they are authoritarian.

 

Saletan focuses on Trump’s right-hand ideologue and U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance.

 

Here he is on Wednesday after a shooter attacked an immigration enforcement building in Dallas and killed a detainee. Vance didn't just blame the shooter who acted alone. He used the shooting to go after Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California.

 

[Vance]: “When Democrats like Gavin Newsom did say that these people are part of an authoritarian government, when the left-wing media lies about what they're doing, when they lie about who they're arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they're doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence.”

 

That is a clear warning from the vice president. If you use the A word, if you say, this is an authoritarian government, you are inciting violence. And that's not the only forbidden word.

 

If you use the F word, fascism, you are also guilty of inciting violence. Here's what Vance said on Thursday in an interview with Laura Ingraham.

 

[Vance:] “A reasonable response to fascism, to Nazism would be violence, right? So what they're saying effectively is that you should engage in violence because the regime, using Jasmine Crockett's words, are so bad.”

 

And never mind the A word or the F word. If you so much as suggest that people on the right are responsible for political violence, you, just by saying that, are, according to Vance, inciting violence on the left.

 

 After a couple of examples, Salaten gets to universities.

 

ABC, NBC, CBS, who's next? And they're not just going to take people off the air. They're going to use the power of federal funding to pressure universities to crack down on free speech that Vance considers incitement.

 

[Vance]: “If you are using federal dollars to incite violence against conservatives, you're not going to get those federal dollars anymore, and we're looking at that right now. So Georgetown needs to make sure that it's actually making it safe for everybody, whether they're liberal or conservative, to express their views.”

 

And then they're going to dismantle the network of people who, according to Vance, celebrate violence or apologize for violence. They're going to treat these people as accessories to crime.

 

We’ve been seeing this process of pre-convicting universities of incitement via the research funding extortion racket. The strategy is moving forward so that any isolated protect or unapproved speech act by one student will be treated as the university’s consent to incitement.

 

This is telling university administrators to take pro-Palestinian speech to zero on the grounds that any advocacy on campus makes university officialdom a collective accessory to the crime of incitement. This claim has been made about critique of Charlie Kirk’s white nationalist speech, which takes a big step away from the anti-Semitism cover. It can be extended to apply to rallies for DEI programs or affirmative action or a human rights student club, any of which could be interpreted as “inciting” anger at the right and potential violence gains them.

 

For the skeptics among you who think liberal officials won’t cave to obviously unconstitutional arguments, Saletan has this reminder:

 

Now, you might think that the Constitution of this country protects you from being prosecuted for speech. But Vance is making it clear that they're going to use the term incitement to void that protection and go after you.

 

[Vance]: “But the First Amendment does not protect imminent incitements to violence. If you are actively promoting your fellow man to kill other people, that is not protected by the First Amendment. And we have to be clear about that. We have to go after that stuff.”

 

[Saletan:] Look, this is complete bullshit. Vance and the rest of these goons in the Trump administration are stretching the definition of incitement to criminalize dissent. And on the other side, they are totally blowing off incendiary language on the right.

 

And yet that is exactly the framework universities will need to defy. Right now, as Sean Malloy pointed out, they are collaborating or lying low, which is basically the same thing.

 

Around 100% of the official higher ed defiance is coming from one university, Harvard, which is singlehandedly succeeding in court.  Other university administrators are not rushing in to be on Harvard’s winning side.

 

This is a ridiculous situation. Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (of all people) clearly states what should be happening.

The idea that each university has to fight this battle by themselves, that’s truly crazy to me. . . . And I know it’s hard. I know it’s scary. But any time a university is attacked, there should be 500 university presidents standing up together, or 1,000 boards of trustees standing up together and saying, ‘We’re in solidarity.’ And that would send such a different message.”

 

Higher ed officialdom’s current message is, “we aren’t people who fight.”  This is easy read as, “Universities don’t offer anything worth fighting for.” This is the worst possible message at a very bad time.

 

The defiance has come from alliances of employees unions, faculty groups like Save Our Science, and other organizations, particularly the American Association of University Professors.

 

·      Attempts to reveal the extent of (and to stop) the disclosure of personal identifying information to the Department of Education by UC campuses have come from the Council of UC Faculty Associations (like the San Diego Faculty Association) and from individual faculty members like Judith Butler.

 

·      UC unions, not the UC Regents, have sued the Trump administration on the grounds that Trump “is illegally forcing ‘ideological dominance’ over a UC education, has violated the constitution and endangered jobs by suspending research grants and seeking a $1.2-billion fine against UCLA,” while violating “employee free speech and due process rights” (AAUP et al. v Trump).The headline for the Kaleem article got at the issue: “UC employees, not waiting on leaders, sue Trump for ‘financial coercion’ over UCLA cuts.”

 

·      Earlier, a group of faculty researchers, not the UC Regents,  sued and have won restoration of over $500 million of UCLA grants suspended by the Trump administration.  This was an interesting and important filing by six UC researchers “on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated.” It assembled a pattern of unlawful suspensions across multiple government agencies (including the NEH) and has generated a series of temporary injunctions from Judge Rita F. Lin.  (See the information page set up for Thakur v. Trump, No. 25-cv-04737-RFL, 2025 WL 1734471, filed N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025.)  Effects are ongoing, and they include the restoration of UCLA’s $500 million that the Trump Administration has suspended

 

These are wonderful and effective initiatives that make a real difference. They have a couple of limitations.

 

First, they express the fracturing of the higher education sector between its senior managers--governing boards on the one hand and the mass profession on the other, including its staff and students.  “Colleges are Torn” is the right headline since university heads are sending journalists and the society a bunch of mixed messages that will prevent people from rushing to higher ed’s defense. Universities need to unite around action, starting with lawsuits, rather than demobilizing everyone with this waiting-and-seeing from their boards and presidents.

 

The second problem is that these actions aren’t generating a daily unending stream of commentary that intervenes in the discourse.  An alliance of unions needs to have a media wing, not for a press release but for nonstop daily broadcasting of the same positive, powerful realities of higher education over and over and over again, sending podcasting and constant writing and social-media-ing counternarratives all over the place. 

 

I am not sure why this seems so hard to do.  Charlie Kirk did it, for god’s sake.  There are models (high-volume like The Bulwark, weekly like Behind the News etc.)  There are 4000 colleges and universities.  There are 19 million students.  There are so many professional associations. We can actually build a much better velocity and coordination of counternarratives as a national practice.

 

Finally, attack theory is already in place. There’s the tireless Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. I’ve discussed his foundational insight about Trump from August 2015, when he correctly asked “how a doofus and blowhard, awash in derp, can nonetheless have a tactical genius that allows him to defeat all enemies again and again.” The answer is speed in the operations loop: “whoever controls the tempo controls the fight” (see Highlights 12).  Higher ed isn’t in the loop and has no tempo.

 

Marshall recently wrote on this again.

 

my perennial axiom: We are in a contest of spectacles of power. The first and most important thing is not to react or complain or bewail but to attack. To this end, where I would start, especially if I were a Democratic elected official, is by taunting every journalist I came into contact with from ABC, CBS and every other news and media organization that is now owned by the White House — which is a rapidly growing list. It may soon include CNN if Paramount/Skydance succeeds in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery. “Yes, I will happily answer your question, but first, how can we trust your company, since it is owned by Donald Trump? You have to do whatever he demands.”

 

Every time. Attack and attack and attack. Don’t complain. Attack. People are bewildered by what they’re seeing. They don’t like it. Everything that raises the salience of this issue is a win. They want to see someone talk back. There is a rich history which correctly views the tyrant not as a symbol of strength but as a weak and contemptible figure, vain and fragile, addicted to fawning and praise, murdered in his heart by the most innocuous of criticism. The whole system of autocracy is one built on individual degeneracy, the strongman and the toadies together.

 

The general point is very true.  It’s true in higher education, where people need to see universities talking back.  Are they seeing this?

 

So basic attack theory: attack is the prerequisite for respect from the opposition. Attack is the prerequisite for respect from your own people.   Attack is a prerequisite for converting opponents to your side.  Attack is the mode in which one’s movement story is written while one’s base is being organized. 

 

Higher ed as a body must try it. The specific examples above are a really good start.