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Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Editor’s Note: Read Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story “Background.”

“Background” is a new story by Elaine Hsieh Chou. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Chou and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “Background,” an estranged father works as an extra in the hopes of encountering his daughter, a renowned director, on one of her sets. It’s a grand forum for reconciliation. What inspired this setting?

Elaine Hsieh Chou: I’ve been doing some background acting since 2019. It started as a way to make ends meet when I was in between jobs, but I grew to really love being on set. I’ve met people from all different walks of life and have had some pretty fun experiences (like transforming into a zombie in the dead of night!).

“Background” was inspired by a two-day set I was on of all-Asian extras. There were over 70 of us. We were all playing one ethnicity (Japanese), and all the scenes were actually “set” in Japan. What I found interesting was how we were such a varied mix, from all different ethnicities and social backgrounds: multi-generation Americans, first-generation immigrants, even hard-core conservatives, like the person who loudly declared on the bus, “Trump has done more for this country than Obama ever did.” But when you watch our scenes in the show, you would never know it. Because the principal actors were from Japan, audiences assume that this entire portion of the show was filmed there. Through what Gene calls “movie magic,” our differences were erased.

Hu: The blank spaces are a fascinating aspect of the story and force us to engage with the text in a unique way. My mind manages to fill some of them in quite easily, but others are more difficult. What is their significance, especially in a story about anti-Asian violence?

Chou: When I was first drafting the story, something about writing out all those scene breakdowns felt jarring. When I tried using blank spaces in certain spots, they clicked into place. And with the use of NDAs on sets, which I had to sign for the aforementioned show, it made sense. The blank spaces also bring to mind erasure poems—what’s not there says as much as what’s there. As this formal choice relates to anti-Asian violence, I think it was a way for me to mitigate writing out those beats because it would be painful to do so, especially because the ending of the shoot is already violent in its own right.

Hu: Athena is estranged from her father by choice, but you’ve decided to tell the story from Gene’s perspective. How did this narrative decision inform the way the story unfolds? Was it always told so closely from Gene’s perspective?

Chou: In my early notes for the story, I considered writing a story about a single father with a daughter who wants to be an actress. Then I jumped to writing from the perspective of a background actor, because I had that firsthand experience. I thought the director could be controversial: an Asian director who writes a satirical film about anti-Asian hate that casts Asian actors to be the victims of anti-Asian hate, but I wasn’t sure who the director’s character really was. Then, in the fall of 2021, I just started writing and new paths opened up. I trusted those instincts and followed where the story led me: The father is estranged from his daughter and she is the director. The film she directs is different from the one I had originally imagined, but some of those early themes stayed.

Hu: The film set is eerily realistic, yet it’s not reality. An extra, for instance, argues that being directed to act as a victim of anti-Asian violence on a fake subway set is still anti-Asian violence. How do you perceive the relationship between reality and our depictions of it? Is it always a challenge to depict a violent act without the risk of perpetuating it?

Chou: This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and in recent years, there’s been more discussion of “trauma porn” and who it really exists for. If you are retraumatizing the very audience a piece of media is supposedly for, can it really be for them? Do any of us, after a hard day’s work of existing in the world, want to unwind by watching or reading something that makes us feel ill? And when this happens, does it automatically make the media in question for “educational purposes,” which is lightly coded for educating a white American public? Where is the line between making an audience feel seen and turning their pain into shock value?

As for violent depictions being violent in and of themselves, several years ago I read that Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) includes a continuous nine-minute rape scene. I fixated on how Monica Bellucci might have felt while filming it. Even though I have never seen the film and do not plan to, that has always stuck with me. I also recently learned that, before the widespread use of body doubles, many child actors had to act in kissing or sex scenes with adults much older than them. Brooke Shields was 12 years old when she played a sex worker in Pretty Baby (1978), opposite a man more than double her age; she also had nude scenes in the film.

Hu: Gene and Athena both have novel ways of simplifying morality—the points system, for instance. Given their difficult relationship, and the trials of their respective lives, are these morality talleys simple attempts at being good? Or is something greater at play?

Chou: Rather than attempts at being good, I think Gene and Athena both struggle with navigating life in a healthy and non-chaotic way—for Gene, because of his alcoholism, and for Athena, because of growing up with an alcoholic father. As Gene’s character came into focus, I realized that the good-day-, bad-day-bagel system is so deeply tied to his own personal recovery program because he has not (yet) been able to regularly attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It’s also low-stakes enough for him to commit to. For Athena, she has had to formulate a very rigid vision of right and wrong from a young age, and took pride in the fact that she could commit to this vision, unlike her parents. That self-righteousness has followed her into adulthood.

Hu: The story ends with Gene volunteering to be the extra who is violently attacked, with Athena watching him from behind the camera. As readers, we’ve been watching Gene closely, and are able to imagine him more directly through her eyes. Will this scene satisfy Athena’s desire for control?

Chou: I don’t know if Athena is focusing on a desire for control here; I think she recognizes that Gene wants to punish himself so he can finally forgive himself and move on from how he treated her as a child. He wants to quite literally right the wrongs of the past—which of course, none of us can do without a time machine. So when this situation presents itself, Gene grabs it as a last-chance opportunity. And Athena lets him. Gene’s IMDb credit is framed as Athena’s gift to him. To withhold the “punishment” he craves would only be further punishment.

Hu: What other projects are you working on?

Chou: I’m working on adapting my debut novel, Disorientation, into a film with my co-writer, the incredible April Shih. There are some other TV projects I’m working on, too, that I’m very excited about. I’m also editing my forthcoming short-story collection, Where Are You Really From, which will feature “Background” and different genres of storytelling: satire, remixed fairy tales and Chinese mythology, soft sci-fi, and horror-inspired stories. I love how short fiction is a space for exploration and play, and I can’t wait to share these stories.

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