Joey Fishkin

@fishkin.bsky.social

9292 Followers 773 Following

Law prof @ UCLA. I study equality and oligarchy. Most recent book @ https://anti-oligarchy.com

On the other hand, you don’t want the voters and the nonvoters to be close but antagonistic. Suppose there is a population of farmworkers, all of whom are noncitizens, and then in the same district, a population of landowners, all of whom are citizens who vote. This is not going to go well

he won’t be the last immigration restrictionist in our nation’s highest office.

The supply of would-be migrants will shrink as more countries run out of young people

The Census Bureau assumes the United States will have an annual net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) of about one million immigrants through the end of the century. The United Nations and Social Security trustees assume about 1.2 million immigrants a year throughout the 21st century. None of these forecasts are plausible.

These colleges use the tests as one factor among many and, appropriately, do not tend to expect students from less advantaged backgrounds to score as highly as others.

Whether the Democratic party, the
Republican party, or other parties, all political parties and
candidates going forward can compete equally under the
same rules regarding coordinated expenditures and can
structure their fundraising, spending, and political speech
on a level playing field as they see fit within the law.

An 18" (eighteen inch) prop Stonehenge descends during a key scene from This is Spinal Tap

Mr. Zamir, the Tel Aviv deputy mayor, said, “I’m waking up and hearing that we’re ‘genocidal’ and ‘apartheid.’”
“I’m a left wing, two-state, pro-peace Israeli, but I’m not blind or crazy,” he added. “I know what the situation in Israel is, and we’re not those things we’re being called. And yet, more and more Americans are buying into and voting on those grounds. That troubles me.”

There is still time to do this right. The first step is looking at whom the system is failing. We spend roughly $1.5 trillion a year on Social Security and still leave millions of seniors in poverty, despite the fact that, by my calculations, about 3 percent of the program’s budget, properly applied, could lift all older adults out of poverty. Any plan that protects benefits across the board while leaving the poorest seniors where they are has its priorities backward.

The rest of the options are well known: Index the retirement age so that as people live longer they have to wait longer for full benefits; further tweak the benefits formula to reduce payments to higher-income beneficiaries; or expand taxes by either raising the payroll tax rate or broadening the base to cover all forms of compensation, at all levels.

Let me make this point concrete. In California, in the most recent congressional midterm election in 2022, the aforementioned representative Kevin Kiley won the highest-turnout district in the state (CA-3 in the Sacramento exurbs) by winning 181,000 votes out of 338,000 total cast, while his fellow Republican David Valadao won the lowest-turnout district (CA-22 in the agricultural Central Valley) by winning 53,000 votes out of 103,000 total cast. In a statewide proportional representation election with ranked-choice voting or some similar voting system, California would certainly elect many Republicans. But a whole lot more of them would be representatives chosen by the people living in places like Kiley’s district than by the people living in places like Valadao’s district. (To see this, consider that even the losing candidate in Kiley’s district won far more votes—157,000—than the total votes cast for all candidates in

they must show that voters engage in racial bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation

neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States

highlighted text (subhead): Our simulations debunk the notion that the act created artificial minority districts that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Parents describe their children breaking down in tears and saying they hate school. Teachers say it takes up valuable class time -- often UP TO 90 MINUTES PER WEEK -- when they can do nothing more than watch students tap on screens. "If you've been anywhere near

7. Politics and Intellectual Pluralism
While concerns about free speech and self-censorship are widely shared, conservatives have long
offered a more particular critique of higher education: that the nation’s leading universities,
including Yale, tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions. Some point to the partisan
composition of the faculty, noting that professors overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic
party. Others focus on the curriculum, or on the suggestion that liberal professors indoctrinate
their students. Taken together, these critiques frame universities as intellectual and ideological
echo chambers, out of touch with the American nation and out of step with its political currents.

Throughout this history, higher education encountered many critics. As the historian Richard
Hofstadter noted, anti-intellectualism and suspicion of expertise have a long lineage in the
United States.13 The early 20th century also saw growing tensions over the relationship between
elite universities and the egalitarian impulses of a modern democracy. Events at home and abroad
fueled these tensions. During the 1920s, amid a wave of nativist and antisemitic sentiment, Yale,
like other Ivy League institutions, sought to exclude the growing numbers of qualified Jewish
applicants. The result was an admissions review that included assessments of an applicant’s
“personality and character”—subjective criteria through which the number of Jewish students
10 Colony of Connecticut General Court, “Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School (1701),” in The Yale
Corporation: Charter and Legislation. Printed for the President and Fellows (Yale University, 1976).
11 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom
and Academic Tenure,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 1, no. 1 (December 31, 1915): 32.
12 AAUP, “General report,” 34.
13 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf Doubleday, 1963).

The Augustinian community has fewer than 3,000 friars and nuns worldwide. The most prominent Augustinian before Leo was Martin Luther, who was later expelled from the order and the church for leading the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

But the basic reality remains this. Our new political world in the U.S. and around much of the globe is no longer simply right vs. left but authoritarian vs. civic democratic. And those two poles involved not just different policy positions but different ideational systems, different ways of thinking about research, facts, power and more. Journalism as most of us understand it, the way most journalists understand it, is inextricably located in the civic democratic space, though it isn’t inherently liberal in the old sense of the word. Without knowing that basic fact, you can’t understand much of anything about contemporary politics and journalism and the big fights about our future that we are all, intentionally or not, involved in today.

This goes to part of the broader crisis of journalism at the moment. There is a pervasive billionaire assumption that mainstream legacy journalism is “liberal,” and there’s a big market for news that gets outside of the liberal bubble, has views from both sides of the spectrum, is as welcoming to the MAGA right as to the Democratic left. As my friend Eric Alterman wrote in his book about liberal bias and the media wars, there was a time when something kind of like this was somewhat true. (Basically in the 1960s when a certain kind of Cold War liberalism did broadly inform the values of news media at the national level.) But that hasn’t been the case for decades. That billionaire view is simply wrong, inasmuch as most of what you get in legacy media is a huge effort to inoculate against charges of “media bias.” What there is though is a basic commitment to that empirical/civic mindset and set of values. And the nature of our current political moment is that the American right today is anti-empirical and anti-civic. That’s why when the Post or now CBS News goes searching for these underserved viewers hungering for journalism outside the liberal bubble, they fail. Because in a basic sense the current American right simply isn’t interested in news or journalism as most of us conceive it. Look at Fox or OANN or any of the other TV news clones and you can see that. When the Post or CBS try to do this, they don’t find any new viewers and lose a lot of their existing ones who feel insulted.

These insinuations and lies do nothing to protect Jewish faculty, staff, or students at UCLA. Quite the opposite. Mischaracterizing pro-Palestinian speech and protest as antisemitic makes it more difficult to identify and respond to the serious problem of actual antisemitism, especially antisemitic incidents that do not conform to the DOJ’s preferred narrative. That is, conflating pro-Palestinian and antisemitic speech endangers Jewish community members whose critical views about Israel the university disfavors. The Jewish UCLA students who were physically attacked and beaten by a mob where one man reportedly yelled “we’re here to finish what Hitler started” were the Jewish students in the pro-Palestinian encampment. Ironically, the DOJ cannot even recognize antisemitism when it occurs through a white nationalist attack on Jews, Muslims and students of color, because the DOJ is so obsessed with conflating pro-Palestinian and antisemitic speech.[3] Mischaracterizing pro-Palestinian speech and protest as antisemitic also unjustly scapegoats our protesting students and colleagues who are disproportionately Muslim and/or people of color, creating an excuse for violating their civil rights.

The complain paints a picture of our campus that we do not recognize.

The legal basis for this lawsuit is exceptionally thin. A “hostile work environment” under Title VII is one where we are being harassed so severely or pervasively as to alter our conditions of employment. It would be legally unprecedented for a court to rule that any category of faculty and staff faces such a hostile work environment primarily on the basis of student speech. Moreover, the lawsuit must prove under Title VII that UCLA negligently failed to take corrective action against this harassment. But much of the complained-of “harassment” consists of students expressing their First Amendment-protected viewpoints, which the university is required by federal and state law to protect rather than punish.[4]

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

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.

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.

228. In or around January or February 2025, Professor Shamsa also observed
300 to 400 individuals protesting outside of his workplace, the Medical Center, for approximately three hours. The protest involved banging and loud noise and patients could hear the noise in their exam rooms. The protesters also blocked the entrance to the medical plaza and hospital parking lot. Because of this, several of Professor Shamsa's patients notified him that it would sometimes take them more than an hour to enter the Medical Center.
229. Professor Shamsa estimates that similar protests have occurred outside of his workplace at least 15 to 20 times since October 7, and that protesters have repeatedly blocked access to his building.
230. Upon information and belief, protesters were chanting and displaying the same antisemitic messages common during other protests on UCLA's campus.

Protesters at the encampment chanted, displayed posters, and chalked graffiti on buldings iwth slogans such as "Jews are baby killers," comparisons of Jews to Hitler, and displays of Nazi swastikas.

1 That language is as follows: “At stage one, a Task Force Agency announces investigations or plannedenforcement actions related to alleged civil rights violations at a school. At stage two, Funding Agenciescancel the school’s federal grants en masse without following Title VI and IX procedural requirementsor limiting the scope of the terminations to non-compliant programs. At stage three, DOJ demands thepayment of millions or billions of dollars—a penalty that Title VI and IX do not authorize—and requiresa wide range of policy changes as a condition for restoring funding and avoiding further fundingdisruptions.”

$1. Defendants are ENJOINED and/or STAYED from refusing to grant, non-renewing,withholding, freezing, suspending, terminating, conditioning, or otherwise restricting use of federalfunds, or threatening to do so, to the University of California (“UC”), defined to include any of itscampuses, laboratories, and affiliated medical centers, based on alleged discrimination on the basis ofrace, color, national origin, or sex, until after full compliance with all of the required steps, consistentwith all procedural and substantive requirements governing the termination of federal financialassistance under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. §2000d et seq., and Title IX of theEducation Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §1681 et seq., and all procedural and substantiverequirements governing the termination of federal financial assistance under the applicable Title VI andTitle IX implementing regulations, and all procedural and substantive requirements under theAdministrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. §§551-559, 701-706 (“APA”), including but not limited to thefollowing:$