Here’s a detail that I think will actually be useful to many people, because it points toward what I’m 99% sure is a method the fashies are developing. If you think meh, local news who cares?, you’re making a mistake.
One odd detail in DeSantis’s proposed budget is to move the “Ringling” — that is, the John Mable Ringling Museum of Art — from FSU to the New College of Florida. Who GAF, right? But that’s the point. Ringling is (1) the “official” art museum of the state of FL, (2) a serious art museum in its own right, and (3) in Sarasota, i.e., a six-hour drive from Tallahassee, where FSU is based. Why move it? NCF President Richard Corcoran says it’ll be good for FSU (by “advancing its scientific research”) and for NCF, which “is building America’s best liberal arts college.”
On one level it makes sense, because NCF is in Sarasota. But we know about NCF: it’s the progressive state school that DeSantis demolished by appointing that “edu pest” Christopher Rufo to its BoT. But, in practice, taking Ringling away from FSU doesn’t advance scientific research — what it does is weaken arts and letters.
So what’s this got to do with fashy methods? Ringling is an example of a type of academic-adjacent entity with weak constituencies: admins don’t really like these things, students don’t really get them, faculty don’t get really credit for them. If you attack an academic department, the faculty, their colleagues, and its alumni/ae will make a fuss; but move against a museum or a research center and no one will care too much. It’s an opportunity to get rid of a few of those odd mixed-status employees — admin and tech types. In itself, that’s not a big deal, but its repercussions can be: it lures admins into saying layoffs are good (think of the budget!), and it dials up the overall sense of precarity.
I dimly remember seeing something along these lines almost-but-not-quite spelled out as a method in some Project 2025-related stuff. This feels like the kind operational tactic that would become a staple of cynical chaos agents like Miller, Bannon, and Vought. And we’ve definitely seen it on a larger scale as Musk’s shocktwerps and übermunchkins have gone after poorly understood and weakly linked entities like USAID. And — icing on the cake, though I doubt it’s deliberate (yet) — critics will be suckered twice over. First, they’ll assume the target matters intrinsically, when the point is that it doesn’t; and second, they’ll hunt for specific psychological reasons (USAID MADE MUSK SAD!!!) when the point is purely structural.
So: Is Ringling moving a big deal? No. Does it matter that we keep an eye open for potential tactics that rightists might use in attacking “the administrative state”? Yes.