Just when I hoped I could take a break from drawing cartoons criticizing the Trump regime, they pull me back in...
In the spirit of March Madness, the Trump Maladministration has been doing a full-court press against academia, arresting and deporting students and faculty.
Of particular interest to LGBTQ+ collegians (and perhaps my readers at Philadelphia Gay News), the Trumpsters also successfully pressured the University of Pennsylvania to reverse its policy allowing a transgender athlete to compete as her true self.
WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the participation of a transgender athlete in its swimming program, the White House said Wednesday. [17.5% of UPenn's total federal funding]
The Ivy League school has been facing an Education Department investigation focusing on in its swimming program. That inquiry was announced last month immediately after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports.
But the federal money was suspended in a separate review of discretionary federal money going to universities, the White House said. The money that was paused came from the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Education Department, or what little is left of it, has also opened reviews of San Jose State University volleyball and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.
UPenn is the alma mater of swimmer Lia Thomas, who won a Division I title for the school in 2022. Having begun the process of gender reassignment after the onset of puberty, she has since been barred from further athletic competition by World Aquatics, and has been ineligible to compete in trials for next year's Olympic games. Trump maladministration diktat will, of course, force all transgender youth to wait until adulthood to align their outer gender with their inner one.
Another Trumpster offer UPenn couldn't refuse resulted in the firing of Lecturer Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de toon Mr. Fish. Booth has incurred right-wing ire for publishing cartoons critical of the Netanyahu government's wholesale slaughter of Palestinians — especially the one in this blog post. (Nota bene: If one is going to draw Israeli government officials drinking wine, it had better be Chablis or Pinot Grigio.)
The above is only a hint of the authoritarian police state that the U.S. has now become under Trump. His ICE is now disappearing legal residents of this country who have deigned to speak up on behalf of the Palestinian people: Khalil Mahmoud at Columbia, Badar Khan Suri at Georgetown, and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts for just three examples (Mahmoud for organizing campus protests; Suri because of his father-in-law's former association with Hamas; Ozturk merely for co-authoring an op-ed).
The Trumpsters promise more such extra-judicial arrests, and want universities to ban the wearing of masks in order for police surveillance to identify anyone else attempting to exercise their right of free speech. Only the arresting agents from Homeland Security are entitled to keep their faces hidden.
For now, they have been disappearing foreign-born protesters and op-editorialists who mistook the United States for a free country. But at some point, the shadowy, masked government goons jumping out of black vans will be abducting native-born citizens for daring to voice thoughtcrime, too.
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