Sign in

William M. Cavert

@williamcavert.bsky.social
2.2K followers 1.7K following 1.3K posts

Historian of Britain, its animals, pollution, energy, climate, nature, and people. Author of The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City. Living in St Paul, MN.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Here’s Chris Rufo and his podcast co-host addressing “the Indian question,” a reference to “the Jewish question.” That question was whether Jews could be incorporated into European society, and the Nazis were the ones who claimed to have developed the “final solution” to that “problem.”
561177317
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
One of the absurdities of this is how many mission statements there are, at the level of institution, college, and department. Such statements get painstakingly crafted and then routinely ignored by the people in who are most entrusted with following them.
020
Reposted by William M. Cavert
🌬Breeze @cool-summer-breeze.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is the Stolen Neighbors Quilt. Each of the 11,000 squares represents a person taken by ICE in Minnesota.
121121635151
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
This is kind of amazing, it's like the least funny a person can be while telling a joke.
021
Reposted by William M. Cavert
autumn coded @hoovybaby.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
“The humanities are useless / don’t matter” and yet rightwing billionaires are plowing massive resources into these programs
14712
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Austin City Council Member Mike Siegel said he has been briefed with preliminary information and that ICE appears to have shot a man in the back.
881292817
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Hiking in wild nature became popular after industrialization with people who found industry to be damaging, ugly, unhealthy, alienating, or scary. So the word "because" is up to some strange tricks here.
141
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
"People are really mad and however mad you are, it’s not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They’re traitors to creation.” www.theguardian.com/books/2026/s...
theguardian.com
Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’
She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursui...
6539011326
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Liberal coastal elites, leave your ivory silos and get out there and understand these people. They are concerned about the decline of the white working class.
032
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Please read my first book, "Yes, It Is!" Also, please read my second book, "But Sometimes, No It Isn't."
000
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 10/09/2026
Our refugee program, created under law by our Congress, no longer exists. The Administration is illegally using it as a visa for exclusively white people from a single country (South Africa), which has zero relation to Congress's intent and design. Congress could end this perversion tomorrow.
08741
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Thank god someone finally writes about Oberlin. For too long we've ignored the school attended by over .01% of America's college students. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
newyorker.com
How an Op-Ed in Support of Football Divided Oberlin’s Campus
The liberal-arts college Oberlin has barely won any football games in the past few years. Still, one senior argued, the school and its students should support the team.
020
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I also went to the MN State Fair today and we also noticed the sparse attendance at the Republican booths, plus the ways that they had zero reference to the leader of their party. No Trump flags, no slogans, just local nonsense cultural politics like revising the (very racist) former MN state flag.
1104
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Spoiler alert! Lord of the Rings is about some hobbits who live peacefully because the hard men of Gondor successfully maintain law and order.
030
Reposted by William M. Cavert
David Veevers @davidveevers.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Police arrest climate change activists BEFORE they protest, but apparently they take their time to get to the scene when hundreds of masked thugs pour out of vans after months of very publicly organising their campaign of terror.
53917
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
There are multiple ways the conversation can go when a scholar is asked how their discipline teaches skills needed for the job market. Leaning towards:
150
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Gillian Brockell @gillianbrockell.com · 02/09/2026
Every. day. Everyday one of these ICE charter planes has to abort takeoff, or do an emergency return, or has a decompression, or gets stuck somewhere for 20+ hours with shackled immigrant passengers trapped onboard. And we never find out why. There is no transparency.
9722325
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The director of the shuttered "Center for Advanced Hindsight," who is in the Epstein files hundreds of times, appears to have fabricated data.
011
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Jim Swift @jimswift.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The cruelty is the point. Shame on this administration and shame on the people who voted for this. www.springfieldnewssun.com/local/spring...
springfieldnewssun.com
Springfield Haitian student takes his own life after being fitted with ICE ankle monitor, advocates say
A 20-year-old Wright State student took his own life on Interstate 70 out of anguish over a required ICE ankle monitor, according to local community advocates.
431277512
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Looking forward to Dem leadership examining what kinds of tax deductions to grant for end-times related expenses: "When the sun becomes black as sackcloth made of goat hair and the moon becomes as blood, hardworking family farmers deserve a little help."
020
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
static.klipy.com
Ya Gotta Do Better Than That - Home Alone
ALT: Ya Gotta Do Better Than That - Home Alone
020
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I'm not saying I support everything he did, but that Iago had some interesting ideas and I think if we really, really took the time to . . .
000
Reposted by William M. Cavert
flyingrodent @flyingrodent.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
It feels like there’s a particular theme developing in the academics this magazine is targeting, but I can’t quite put my finger on it
Andrew Gilligan
@mragilligan
X.com
Simon Woolley is not fit to lead a Cambridge college. Me for the Spectator.
25758178
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Good stuff at the MN State Fair.
040
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The Onion has gone too far, it's not cool to invade people's homes like this:
140
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Reminds me of that Key and Peele sketch about the black Republicans, all sitting around wearing the same khakis and having the same mustaches and mmm-hmming together about how they aren't all the same.
020
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Richard II returns from victory in the crusades to a war-ravaged homeland, where cruel Prince John raises taxes, murders Becket, beheads wives, burns witches, and outlaws Druids. The sexy jouster Robin Hood is arrested and tortured. Freedom! he cries with his dying breath, inspiring a nation.
110
Reposted by William M. Cavert
History News Network @myhnn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Primary sources are the necessary building blocks of history — unless you ask a chatbot to write it. www.hnn.us/article/ai-i...
hnn.us
AI Is an Anti-Primary Source Machine
Real voices from the past are threatened by chatbots designed to amplify — and ultimately become — the loudest voices in the room.
03711
Reposted by William M. Cavert
James Talarico @jamestalarico.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
BREAKING: Liam Tadeo was just deported by ICE.
69492365070
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Hang it in the Louvre. And hang the perpetrators anywhe... actually never mind just any accountability whatsoever would be great.
0122
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Reporting on Trump and his administration shares something important with reporting on climate change: in both cases there are bad changes happening before our eyes that get framed as possible-or-maybe-not harbingers of the future. It's not a portent of the future, it's the current present.
022
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
35 years ago today Pearl Jam released Ten, which is why this morning the iconic grunge album found itself in a dark wood, full of sleep, the right way having been lost.
000
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Jennifer Nelson’s entry to this year’s Minnesota State Fair crop art
A localized version of Guernica with a loon at the center and a person holding an ICE OUT sign 

“My piece was inspired by Picasso's Guernica, a work that was his response to the Nazi's bombing of the Basque town. I thought there was a fitting parallel between these incidents about the high price paid by ordinary people when aggressive regimes try out new tactics of war, as well as a fitting juxtaposition of the darkness of living such an experience and the light we shone through it in our own resistance and care for one another. The patterns near Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s mouths are actually their last words in Morse code: ‘I’m not mad at you,’ and ‘Are you okay?’” 

Jennifer Nelson
6342611314
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
If the relationship between girlhood and dolls were really so important then there would be a hugely popular movie about it, duh.
1243
Reposted by William M. Cavert
madi mcvan @madisonmcvan.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
At the state Capitol for the first meeting of the Minnesota Truth Council, where we’ll be hearing testimony from people impacted by Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS, which targeted refugees.
Several people sit around a semicircular desk in a room at the state Capitol.
15918
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 25/08/2026
Viewpoint diversity is the opposite of peer review. You should not be leading a university if you don’t believe in peer review asheeshksi.substack.com/p/producing-...
The fact that conservative scholarship is underrepresented in our institutions ultimately means that the left gets flabbier because it’s not being tested and challenged in the way it ought to be. At the same time, the right, to the extent that it moves outside the university and finds itself in think tanks and is not subject to challenges or critiques from the center and the left, becomes more radicalized. This is not just a problem for our institutions. It’s a problem for America. So I do feel urgency in trying to remedy this issue. It was my colleague Steve Teles, who wrote in The Chronicle about this, who said he was hard pressed to identify a single tenured conservative scholar in the social sciences and humanities at Hopkins. I took that as a very serious critique
1023435
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
See for example the recent Democratic primary in Minnesota for US senate, which finished Flanagan 59, Craig 39. Angie Craig used the phrase "reach across the aisle" all the time and she was accordingly trounced.
030
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Thread explaining why the NYT op-ed is pretending that a default is a debt holiday. For actual historical examples of defaults and whether they made their states stronger or weaker, see the financial history of Spain under Philip II and III or England's the Stop of the Exchequer in 1672.
020
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
U K2
060
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Tottenham have paid six trillion dollars on offensive players over the past few transfer windows and they are starting a winger named Mikey Moore who specializes in passing gently to the goalkeeper from 8 yards.
100
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
This is great because usually you have to spend all of Saturday morning in the ballroom of the Comfort Inn out by the interstate in order to get this level of training.
0205
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Job Alert! Johns Hopkins is hiring a new CEO for its Institute of Helping Conservative and/or Fascist Students Get Resources and Feel Happy: networks.h-net.org/jobs/70242/j...
networks.h-net.org
Johns Hopkins University - Executive Director | H-Net
030
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
She was a minor just 18 short years ago and is powerless except for constant private access to the president of the United States. Her voice is silenced except for when she posts racist lies to millions of followers. She has no protectors except for the American federal government.
192
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
This is absolutely right. Prestigious "star" scholars are only possible in an ecosystem of many non-prestigious institutions that teach, but don't produce, such research. That doesn't exist because a) much top research is done by non-stars, and b) so much teaching is general surveys or basic skills.
081
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Greg Sargent @gregsargent.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Everything is explicit here. ICE has been openly designated as Trump's paramilitary army in his war on blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment glorifies military-style operations in urban strongholds. 5/ (h/t @lioneltrolling.bsky.social)
8879294
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Excellent news and an important step.
040
William M. Cavert @williamcavert.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
3rd-grader-I-didn't-do-it-voice: After attending church on Friday I was calmly preparing to dine at a local restaurant, yes I was standing unsteadily in a McDonald's drivethru at 11 pm with slurring speech thank you for asking, when an officer began to arrest me for reasons unbeknownst to myself.
010
Reposted by William M. Cavert
elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
I’m at the vigil for Jason Arday in London (Trafalgar). Very big turnout, easily thousands of us here
Thousands of people
11566351
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Statement from Black Leaders in Higher Education: 'We will ask the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) to consider the nature and extent of reporting concerning Professor Arday’s private life and whether relevant editorial standards were upheld.'
linkedin.com
Professor Jason Arday Black Leaders in Higher Education extend our deepest condolences to Professor Jason Arday’s family, friends, colleagues and all those who knew and loved him. We are deeply… | Bl...
Professor Jason Arday Black Leaders in Higher Education extend our deepest condolences to Professor Jason Arday’s family, friends, colleagues and all those who knew and loved him. We are deeply sadde...
08528
Reposted by William M. Cavert
Ben Goldfarb @bengoldfarb.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
“It’s just devastating. They’re bulldozing a brand new road through the most beloved stretch of the park.” www.publicdomain.media/p/bulldozers...
publicdomain.media
Bulldozers Plow Through Big Bend National Park As Trump’s Border Work Surges Ahead
Video footage shows heavy machinery operating in the famous Santa Elena Canyon amid outcry over new border infrastructure in Texas's most beloved park.
06835