“Sermon on the ’Mount,” the first episode of “South Park’s” 27th season, is quite crass, remarkably crude and pointedly vulgar. Yet, creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker hit the nail on the head about the ethics of cutting deals with the Trump administration. Between the Trump-cuddling-with-Satan gags and AI deepfakes, the episode satirizes parent company Paramount’s recent settlement to resolve Trump’s lawsuit against it.
Trump sued Paramount last October over what he called “deceptive editing” of CBS’s “60 Minutes” interview with his competitor, Kamala Harris. Paramount denied the accusations and maintained that the lawsuit was without merit.
“The message is clear: Get in line, or suffer the consequences.”
However, Paramount’s recent $8 billion merger with Skydance requires approval from a Trump-aligned Federal Communications Commission. Appeasing Trump by forking over $16 million as a symbol of fealty cleared a hurdle for Paramount’s deal to progress. The president took to Truth Social expressing his glee, writing that an additional $20 million in advertising and PSAs would follow from Paramount. The company denied such a deal, but that didn’t stop “South Park” from ripping into the prospect of pro-Trump. If you examine the situation closely with a mega-powerful magnifying glass, you might conclude why Colbert got canceled: It’s a big fat bribe.
Draconian funding cuts and exorbitant lawsuits have become all the leverage Trump needs to compel media companies, universities, tech companies and law firms to bend the knee. The latest target in the president’s crosshairs? The guy who propped him up in the first place. Let us pray that The Wall Street Journal and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch can survive his company being called a “pile of garbage newspaper” and a $10 billion lawsuit for an article about Trump sending Epstein an inappropriate birthday card! Guess the high standards for what’s considered defamation and libel in NYT v. Sullivan 50 years ago might as well be null and void. At this rate, let’s hope The Vanguard doesn’t get sued!
Squabbling with media moguls and megacorporations is partially a billionaire soap opera, but threatening educational institutions spells all kinds of danger for institutional independence. The message is clear: Get in line, or suffer the consequences. However, as the war on higher education intensifies and prestigious universities begin bargaining with the administration, we lose sight of those left behind as collateral damage.
Our conversations as private school students near two of the best universities in the world center around how the president’s
decisions could affect our ability to partake in research or exercise our freedom of speech in college, but we mustn’t forget that small-town community colleges suffer equally — if not more — from these changes. The cancellation of grants supporting female workers hinders the ability of Durham Tech in North Carolina to sponsor classes preparing women and nonbinary individuals to work in construction. Hacking away at the Department of Education’s budget uproots many English-as-a-second-language courses, alienating the nation’s less affluent immigrants as they seek a necessary step toward citizenship.
As all the hubbub about what’s going on in Washington bubbles over, the effects of funding cuts and executive orders are manifesting in Cambridge. The director of Cambridge Public Libraries recently spoke on how funding cuts are restricting the free public libraries’ resources. This means that public school students are losing access to valuable information. When you’re writing your junior history research paper, you’ll realize just how useful digital research databases actually are.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad about going to this school or worry about college, but as you read headlines about the outrageous deals being made and legislation being passed, remember that someone who lives within a 10-mile radius of you will suffer from those decisions. They matter, too.
