It’s been one of those weeks where the news cycle feels less like reporting and more like a fever dream. According to Misryoum, Ms. Weiss’ speaking engagement at UCLA was quietly pulled, but not by chance. Staff had been working behind the scenes since February, basically begging leadership to cancel it because they were—well, terrified of the optics. It’s wild that 11,000 people actually signed a petition to stop a speech, turning a campus event into a bizarre, real-life April Fool’s joke that honestly wasn’t even funny.
Then there’s the whole protest circuit. I caught a whiff of old, damp library paper while looking into this, a smell that usually reminds me of order, though the “No Kings” protests on March 28 were anything but. Professors were out there joining in, supposedly satirizing Trump, but the whole thing felt like a script pulled from a dusty file drawer. Actually, it felt almost copy-pasted—like those old election cry-ins or the park demonstrations back in 2026. It’s this weird, knee-jerk repetition where the performance matters more than the point, or maybe it’s just that nobody wants to think past the initial premise anymore.
It’s all very repetitive, isn’t it? The same arguments keep cycling through these campuses like a broken record.
Shifting gears, we have the situation at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Joseph Willette, a music doctoral student, turned in a thesis that was essentially a drag show titled “Mass of Perpetual Indulgence.” He probably figured if he labeled it ‘satire,’ he’d be untouchable. But satire usually requires a point, doesn’t it? Compare that to O’Connor or Dickens, who used the dark stuff to actually say something about the human condition. Here, it just felt like a deliberate attempt to shock.
There was supposed to be a meeting at UNL to talk about the anti-Catholic concerns raised by the performance. But—and this is the kicker—it just never happened. No meeting, no paper trail, nothing. The Plains Sentinel reported that the whole thing vanished into thin air. It’s hard to tell if that was just incompetence or a calculated move to avoid the headache, but either way, it leaves a bad taste.
It makes you wonder who’s actually steering the ship at these universities, if anyone. Or maybe that’s giving them too much credit.