A win for academic freedom.
Being a professor is a tough job because we have a lot of competing pressures, but remember that we have an obligation to govern ourselves.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...
We are governed by idiots, dependent on idiot boxes to function:
"A documentary about Jewish women’s slave labor during the Holocaust? The focus on gender risked “contributing to D.E.I. by amplifying marginalized voices.”"
Even if it is a "mistake," it can still be a war crime. A person who acts recklessly in causing disproportionate civilian deaths can be found to have acted “wilfully” and thus responsible for a war crime.
Read "'Mistakes' in War": papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/w...
Hegseth needs to stand trial after this as a war criminal. Between this attack and the girls' school, there's no ambiguity. He is responsible for mass murder and must be held accountable.
When you goad people into believing that what a college student, without institutional, financial or social capital, writes on poster is bigger threat than what a regime cabinet member says from lectern, you've hacked being anti-semitic & using it as cover to silence valid dissent.
Telling courts that refunds would be "automatic" and "assured" was the government's way of avoiding emergency relief.
If I'm reading this correctly, the CIT judge in this post-Learning Resources claim for a tariff refund just purported to issue universal relief on the ground that he's the only judge who'd adjudicate such claims, ... [1].
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Might be just what the intended audience (of one) is nervous & needs reassurance about. I hope others aiming for the same audience emulate this rhetorical approach. Name your fears!
imo the threat posed by CBS News and CNN getting absorbed by pro-regime billionaires isn't that they're going to produce right-wing slop that convinces people to be right-wing, it's the dismantling of newsrooms capable of doing investigative reporting on the administration. Fewer eyes on the street.
I don't think that the DOJ has successfully bulletproofed their complaint. They've learned from prior efforts and have pulled back from some of the more florid, provably false claims of prior efforts.
I still think this complaint would be unlikely to succeed at trial—_if_ UCLA puts up a defense.
...so shouldn't it have been fairly obvious that the group was not super likely to be excluding anyone with a yarmulke?
(Note again: there were some Jews wearing yarmulkes inside the encampment, participating in the protest.)
It apparently was not obvious. The Jew exclusion zone became "infamous."
Which I mean, hats off to them: it _is_ infamous. Successful efforts to portray this "Jew exclusion zone" as a real thing managed to convince many news reporters beyond Fox News.
Few stopped to think carefully about the fact that this protest was against the war in Gaza—and included many Jews...
Yes that's right: "the now-infamous Jew exclusion zone."
So to recap: The DOJ will not stand behind the false claim that there was a Jew exclusion zone. So they don't allege it. They know it will fall apart at trial.
But they do slip it in anyway, in this backhanded way, calling it "infamous."
91. Bahar Mirhosseni, a lecturer in law, also participated in the illegal encampment. She published a piece in the UCLA Law Review referring to the encampment as “utopia” and characterized the now-infamous Jew exclusion zone as a “liberated zone.”71
But anyway, the DOJ is learning from prior efforts to avoid the most florid and easily-proved-false claims like the "Jew exclusion zone" in favor of more ambiguous and misleading language.
Except, oh wait, what's that in paragraph 91?
Second, nobody ever once asked me about my views on Zionism or Israel, or asked me to "denounce" anything, for a simple reason: I wasn't trying to bust my way into their protest area.
Which I had no reason to do, since I wasn't trying to protest—or to get into a conflict with students who were.
Was I, a random passerby, "impeded" by this protest from accessing "certain parts of campus"? Not by much. This was a big crowd and a complex scene and if you wanted to get quickly from point A to point B, like the library, the last thing you'd do is walk through the middle of the protest!
First, contra the DOJ lawsuit's strong implication otherwise, *EVERYONE*, not just Jewish or Israeli faculty and students or people with specific views on Israel, had to walk around this protest if you weren't participating in it.
So: now the claim is not the prior, explosive claim made all over the Internet (and laundered into news stories) of a Jew exclusion zone. Instead it's just that the protest "impeded" Jewish and Israeli students access to "certain parts of campus."
This is deeply misleading for multiple reasons.
59. The encampment impeded Jewish and Israeli employees’ access to certain parts of campus because the protesters blocked them from going through the encampment. The protesters blocked individuals wearing yarmulkes or Jewish stars and anyone refusing to denounce Zionism.
And here I think the DOJ has learned something.
Yesterday's new DOJ lawsuit does not argue that Jews were blocked from class, or from entering any building (an allegation that would fall apart in court).
Instead it argues:
There was a security fence put up by campus police to try to separate protesters from counter-protesters and reduce the potential for violent confrontations—the kind of thing police often try at any protest + counterprotest worldwide. Anyone not part of the protest (like me) simply walked around it.
This big claim was what led me to write up this blog post last summer, pointing out that this core claim was false, based on my observation: there was no Jew exclusion zone.
I and any other Jewish person or anyone else of any religion could equally walk to all campus buildings during that protest.
Here's a link to the 2nd thread—
That is a blockbuster footnote.
It would be hard to be on the receiving end of that footnote and then look in the mirror and go to work the next morning.
"SLOPPINESS": The Trump administration claimed that a man detained by ICE had a criminal convictions for marijuana possession in 2009.
The judge pointed out that the man was 4 years old at the time.
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
I too have seen the swastikas in that report, and they're disturbing and sad.
What I have yet to see is a single photo (in the report or otherwise) of anyone in that encampment protest holding up a sign with a swastika. Nor did I see any, in person, fwiw.
Thanks. I agree it is possible for members of a group to discriminate against members of that group. Absolutely possible.
My claim is simply that when facts are being disputed, it's *less likely* that a crowd of people was actually chanting antisemitic slogans, when the crowd was heavily Jewish.
As for whether it's improper: If I were to tell you I was targeted for discrimination because people thought I was Chinese, wouldn't my race affect the plausibility of that claim being true?
Or should my race/ethnicity play no role in evaluating the plausibility of the allegation?
Do you have some more photos? I'm genuinely curious about this "non-oral evidence" because I would have thought that if there were some actual photos of students in the protest encampment with signs with swastikas, "kill the jews," anything remotely like that, they would be in the complaint, no?
That story was one of many reasons offered for why some people decided to put out calls on social media for people to show up late at night on the UCLA campus with weapons, to physically attack the students in the encampment, which they did.
6. With the knowledge and acquiescence of UCLA officials, the activists enforced what was effectively a “Jew Exclusion Zone,” segregating Jewish students and preventing them from accessing the heart of campus, including classroom buildings and the main undergraduate library. In many cases, the activists set up barriers and locked arms together, preventing those who refused to disavow Israel from passing through.
That claim was the centerpiece of the Frankel lawsuit which UCLA, unfortunately, settled. Here's the version from that lawsuit, which uses the phrase "Jew exclusion zone" a dozen times:
