I happened to get a glance at the Post’s cover and it is devoted to smearing Columbia, replete with full page color photo.
Columbia’s trustees must resign for condoning the university’s submission to Trump’s anti-education agenda. It has performed an extraordinary act of cowardice and self-sabotage, refusing to defend academic independence in the face of fascist harassment.
Karp went out of his way to humiliate himself and his firm to propitiate Trump. Why would anyone entrust their legal affairs to a firm chaired by someone like this?
Huge Lowell in the Guardian granulates Karp’s deplorable, completely unnecessary betrayal. A judge had already ruled that Trump’s similar persecution of the Perkins Coie firm was probably unconstitutional.
“The deal with Paul, Weiss materialized in recent days over the course of several stunning moves that neither a major law firm of its ilk nor a president has perhaps ever countenanced,” Lowell’s sources said.
Did Karp really think it was necessary to voluntarily curtail DEI initiatives at Paul,Weiss? Does he have any idea how he has besmirched his firm?
Again, we see how problematic intellectual intelligence can be when uninformed by ethics or emotional intelligence.
Karp is so unprincipled that he penned a statement accusing the firm’s alum David Pomerantz of “wrongdoing” because Pomerantz attempted to hold Trump responsible for his crimes.
“I engaged in no wrongdoing by working as a prosecutor to uphold the rule of law,” Pomerantz said in a statement.
Paul, Weiss has now positioned itself at the cutting edge of Trump’s campaign to eradicate law and order in this country, to put himself above the law.
Paul, Weiss clients should move to Perkins Coie.
in his war on law and order in this country. C.f. the memo that Trump issued Friday night on the heels of the Karp-engineered capitulation by Paul,Weiss, the law firm he is supposed to protect, not betray.Who the hell would now want to patronize a law firm that has agreed to practice discrimination?
Trump’s memo enjoins AG Bondi–who has already violated her oath of office with her attacks on our judicial system–to prosecute law firms on the pretext of ethical abuse, which in his twisted fascistically upside-down parlance, actually means any law firm that has been retained to hold him accountable for his crimes.
Do you still think, Sen. Schumer, that we’re some time away from an existential crisis?
People like the Musks are so tone deaf and detached from societal realities that they can’t help but put their foot in their mouths every time they open them.
Trump’s blitz against America has been a true test of which institutions have the integrity necessary to maintain themselves going forward. Columbia University does not. The law firm Paul, Weiss does not.
Trump launched a completely frivolous Executive Order against Paul,Weiss which they were in the process of efficaciously combatting when chairman Brad Karp decided to fold. They have now committed themselves to Trump’s hate and intolerance agenda and will drop any DEI programs. They will also now be contributing $40 million of pro bono work for any cause that Trump sees fit to assign them, and you can be sure he will assign them the most vile cases and causes.
Truckling to Trump is an indelible stain on Columbia, on Paul, Weiss, on ABC News, on any institution that allows itself to be extorted by a felonious president and his lawless regime.
“Paul Weiss used to be a law firm to be admired and respected,” Norman Ornstein tweets. “No more. It is a stain on the legal profession.”
Karp has disgraced and defiled his law firm. His tail-between-his-legs statement of surrender is revolting. Hopefully Paul Weiss’s clients will dwindle and Karp will be forced to resign. Hopefully Columbia students will rebel and demand that the Acting President and the Board of Trustees resign.
Defending America deserves no less.
In an absolutely shocking capitulation, the university decides to fall on its sword for Trump. It comes out swinging against public health, banning masks on the campus; it allows Trump and his ignorance brigade a measure of control over university departments and curriculum. Columbia has abandoned its commitment to academic freedom.
The New York Times (and they should know how ungrateful Trump is when you kow tow to him) reported yesterday that “Several historians and veteran professors said that the move by the federal government to intervene in an academic department at a private university would be unparalleled in the modern history of U.S. higher education.”
Acting president Katrina A. Armstrong issued a statement two days ago that is now revealed as pure bullshit: “We will never compromise our values of pedagogical independence, our commitment to academic freedom or our obligation to follow the law.”
Her decision, or whomever’s it was, makes a mockery of this pledge. It will cost Columbia immensely in diminished admissions and prestige. Columbia is now a protectorate of Trump and his anti-education, anti-civil rights juggernaut.
And remember, Trump doesn’t give a flying fig about anti-Semitism. Musk is a Nazi. Vance went to Germany to advocate for the neo-Nazis. Trump says that Schumer isn’t really a Jew. Trump and his followers routinely make remarks that incite anti-Semitism. All Trump and his gauleiters are doing is exploiting anti-Semitism to install their fascist agenda and deflect from their own complicity.
The sheer foolishness of whomever it was that engineered this surrender displays again how lacking in strategic insight the most intellectually accomplished people can be. As PEN writes in a statement today, Columbia’s cave (in return for which they have no guarantee of getting their US funding back), “opens the door for even greater interference and retaliation from the Trump administration, threatening academic freedom, vital research, and students’ education.”
“Mr. Bezos, when I think about ‘free markets and personal liberties’ I don’t think about the Post editorial page. I think about this vending machine in an Amazon Fulfillment Center, which is stocked not with chips but with painkillers.”
[with accompanying photo!]
Bezos tortures his workers; the only personal liberties he cares about are his own.
and still she is silent.
Unless something shifts in the political DNA of establishment Democrats, they are going to find themselves totally irrelevant.
As Biden’s achievements are levelled by Trump, has Harris, for one, not learned a lesson about what Biden’s refual to respond to MAGA defamation cost him?
Rep. Ivey is the first to call for Sen. Schumer to step down.
Schumer is walking around either in a fog of denial or in a deliberate attempt to buffalo America into believing we’re not at the crunch point.
As the Democratic establishment is mute and inglorious or engaged in performative resistance only, Schlossberg addresses Trump’s betrayal of the arts (as well as so much else.) Comparing Trump to his grandfather: “JFK celebrated the arts and culture. [OK, at Jackie’s urging.] Trump attacks artist’s identities, took over the Kennedy center just to empty it out and pave it gold.”
