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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

Which is why this method cannot work.

If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.

this method

is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.

Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.

Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.

"This method" refers to:

Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.

My claim is that this will not work. University ideologues will just lie, and it will not be possible to punish them for it.

Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.

Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.

I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.

I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".

Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:

Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office.

That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?

Fine, I'll show you where the bodies are buried.

The Obama administration was shaking down companies, and structuring the settlements to fund left wing NGOs So for example, Eric Holder as Attorney General sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and others, and funneled the settlements through a structure that allowed these companies to pay less if instead of paying the government, they paid leftwing NGOs like ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, etc.

Picking on the National Urban League, they took this money (or some of this money, money is fungible) and used it to fight Trump in court repeatedly. Here they are in 2020 suing Trump, again in 2025. Oh, and here they were in 2020 suing the administration over how the census was being conducted, resulting in immigration status being excluded from the census. That was pretty significant. Really changes the electoral map.

So you see, by shaking down big banks during the Obama administration, through a structured settlement program, Democrats were able to use federal resources to launder their policy goals beyond the mere 8 years of their administration. I want Republicans to do exactly this. Only instead of big banks, I want them to sue Universities, force them to settle exactly the same way Eric Holder did with malicious prosecution, and then structure those settlements such that they are forced to fund right wing NGOs that will continue to fight for those policy goals after Trump is out of office. Just the same way the National Urban League did for Obama even after he was out of office.

And if you still think this is all too vague, too wishy washy, not even the concepts of a plan, with all these specific, cited, historical examples, I don't know what to tell you.

Thank you for providing something, though that link is a trainwreck in terms of having basically no real information to go off of. Thankfully, Cato and FedSoc have significantly better articles, with at least some traceable cites to see some real info. Still not super great. Near impossible to follow the cites to actual numbers, and when you do find actual numbers, they're pretty piddly.

Nevertheless, there shouldn't have been a single dollar done that way. Trump should have supported a statutory ban, and those settlements should have been thrown out on Constitutional grounds, as well. Frankly, if Trump started doing it, I would say that they should be thrown out on Constitutional grounds, too.

In my defense, your original comment went through quite the journey, talking about fabricating criminal conspiracies and just general government spending. I see that you're now focused solely on being upset about one specific thing that was done by Obama/Biden and want to use that specific thing.

Now, some thoughts. The context for all this was (your comment and mine):

Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.

If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.

This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities, AFAICT. ISTM that the purpose of the goal is purely extractive, as you viewed prior acts as extractive. You certainly haven't given a way that it should be done that is oriented toward fixing anything instead of being primarily extractive. As I wrote, there's nothing specific about universities. No reason why they should be the target for extractive suits rather than anyone else (except, I guess, you don't like them). Not really any grounds on which to go after them that could produce settlements that could conceivably be funneled to Elon. But whatever. Finally, it does nothing to alleviate your concern that the government is sometimes held by your opponents. In fact, as I responded, I think some on the right are worried about the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic, rather than actually contributing to a solution. But fair enough on your preferences. Perhaps you have a concept of a plan, but it clashes with your originally-stated goals, and it still has significant work to get to something real.

One final note is that connection to being able to continue suing is weak. Yes, money is fungible, but it was particularly ill-motivated in the original comment. Like, the thing that Elon lacks for being able to sue a future government is money? Lol wut? It sure sounded like there was something legal going on, rather than just money. Honestly, left wing NGOs probably get significantly more money through regular appropriations (and bullshit appropriations when they were, indeed, shoveling money out the front door during COVID/IRA/whatever). It took me a bit to realize that you were mostly just pissed about one terrible thing they did, didn't really have any specifics of how it could work the other way, didn't really have any sense of how it could actually fix the problems identified, didn't really have the qualities that one would naturally expect from a reading of your comment, and also worked against your originally-stated goal. Yeah, I was kinda dumb for not figuring it out for a while.

This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities,

Except it does. Look at my example. The Obama administration was able to launder federal resources into NGO's that could continue to pursue their policy goals long after a Democrat was out of the White House. That's how you do it. Instead of having the Trump administration sue Universities for being racist against white people, you fund right wing NGOs by any means nessecary, and then they can pursue your policy goals long after the government has changed hands back to the opposition. That way when Pete Buttigeig takes office in 2028, he can't just have the Attorney General drop all the cases the Trump administration had ongoing. It's no longer in his hands. It's being done by (for example) Turning Point USA with a 100B warchest funded by structured settlements Pam Bondi forced on universities.

I don't understand how you say this doesn't work. It obviously has worked in the recent past!

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