Matthew Dean Hindman
matthewhindman.bsky.social
Matthew Dean Hindman
@matthewhindman.bsky.social
Reluctant political scientist living through the golden age of doomscrolling.
*desperately trying to pad my CV in advance of annual review*

Winner, 2025 Department of Political Science Peace Prize
December 5, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
This year, universities are giving $228 million to football coaches who failed at coaching football so that they won't coach football anymore.
December 2, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
Look, y'all know I hate AI as much as the next passionate hater of AI, but ChatGPT has nothing on the University of Oklahoma deciding that based on the first amendment students can literally say anything in their papers as existential threat to the university.
Oklahoma University has placed a grad student instructor on admin leave for failing a psychology paper on gender for citing *the Bible* as a source of empirical evidence.

In response, OU has placed on instructor on admin leave citing, get this, the FIRST AMENDMENT.

Universities are cooked.
December 1, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
*Such* a pit in my stomach about the Georgia case. Such a wasted possibility. It's hard to avoid simultaneously crediting Willis for a strong, convincing, aggressive, and important set of indictments, and blaming her for the catastrophic misjudgment that made it impossible to have a trial in 2024.
November 26, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that?

We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to
November 21, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
Watergate every day
November 14, 2025 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
the thing about this is that a) small states do not have any interests that are inherent to their size (no less than james madison understood this) b) the senate is organized along party lines which makes the small/big distinction almost irrelevant and c) the filibuster has never been used this way
Underrated aspect of killing the filibuster is making pundit hacks at Cook Political p-p-p-piss their pants
November 8, 2025 at 10:13 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
The ease of suppressing votes by getting polling places temporarily closed on election day is a good reason to go to universal vote-by-mail...
November 4, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
The trend is real, but this NYT analysis at the Congressional district level has big ecological bias

Poor *areas* vote Republican, but it's often the richer *individuals* within those poorer areas that are most Republican

And many poor *individuals* rich blue urban *areas* vote Dem
October 24, 2025 at 2:17 PM
I will teach Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" later today. Earlier today, fittingly, I got a couple of vaccinations.
October 23, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Today I showed my class a YouTube video of Judith Butler explaining gender, which was interrupted by an ad that forcefully called upon the viewer to "JOIN ICE." The algorithms have gone haywire.
October 23, 2025 at 12:24 AM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
the president has destroyed the east wing of the white house without so much as a word of input from anyone else to build a royal ballroom paid for with bribes
NEW: After The Washington Post reported Monday on the demolition of the "East Wing facade," a new picture obtained by Law Dork that was taken on Tuesday shows that a substantial portion of the entirety of the East Wing has been demolished.
October 21, 2025 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
“likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970” www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-...
Second "No Kings Day" protests likely the largest single-day political demonstration since 1970, with 4.2-7.6 million participants
Here are the initial results from our crowdsourced crowd-counting estimates
www.gelliottmorris.com
October 19, 2025 at 3:39 AM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
Just having a moment reflecting on what a ridiculous state we're in, where the president is making "deals" with private universities by personally meddling in federally allocated education and research funding and this is being treated as just ordinary politics.
If Harvard bows down to this lawless president, it will cover itself in shame and betray its motto “Veritas.”

Don’t pretend to stand for truth if you’re going to surrender to this bully. Appeasement only feeds the beast and puts us all at greater risk.
Trump Says a Deal With Harvard Is Close
www.nytimes.com
October 1, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
The campus speech wars reflect a lot of misinformation about how higher education works and about how little of it touches on modern partisan debates.
Inviting pundits to give "talks" is just not what professors/departments do. Some schools have "institutes of politics" that do this, like @gupolitics.bsky.social at Georgetown, which invites conservatives regularly. Departments invite scholars for talks, and I rarely know their personal politics.
More than anything, they want to be patted on the head and told they're a good boy by the liberal elites
September 27, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.
The central point is that when fascism came to America it wouldn't call itself that, nor would it be wearing a swastika. It would call itself "patriotic" and "100% American."
September 26, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
I know antifa isn't a real organization because I don't get 40 texts a week from them asking for donations.
September 22, 2025 at 11:21 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
so many dead canaries and we just keep on mining
September 17, 2025 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
at the center of the efforts to destroy civil society in russia, hungary, georgia and elsewhere is the stigmatization, harassment, & criminalization of NGOs. that's what this is about, a full-on assault on democratic debate & freedoms.

this is not hyperbole. it's right here.
Vance: "There's no unity with people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers...Soros' OSF and the Ford Foundation...benefit from generous tax treatment...How do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family."
September 15, 2025 at 7:09 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
Colleagues have backed up the point with data and infographics. The answer is no: political violence in the US is if anything declining, not rising. The far right commits more than the far left, but both are rare, and fewer than 10% of Americans endorse violence for political goals.
September 13, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
This is also a case of systems setting people up to fail. Public university systems often standardize course numbers/names/descriptions, to simplify transfer credits. But the approved descriptions end up being incredibly generic, because otherwise campuses/faculty fight about what to include. 1/
I don’t know why anybody is going along with the course description justification for firing a professor. A class discussion can go anywhere depending on who is in the class and their questions. Everything is political, so what would be off the table for political scientists?
September 10, 2025 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.
Texas A&M University System orders audit of all courses after gender identity lesson goes viral

Details: bit.ly/42jauQZ
September 10, 2025 at 11:59 AM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
Faculty in red states are being punished for failing to signal in their course descriptions that their classes will include content on "gender ideology."

Remind me again which party was appalled by idea of "trigger warnings"?

www.kbtx.com/2025/09/09/a...
A&M Dean removed following student complaints over curriculum
The Department of Justice has also acknowledged the situation and said it would be investigating.
www.kbtx.com
September 9, 2025 at 10:27 AM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
So much flows from this core mistake to not prosecute Trump for insurrection in spring 2021. By the time they changed course it was too late. Media and public attention had moved on from Jan 6. And Trump had begun to reassemble Republican support.
September 7, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Reposted by Matthew Dean Hindman
A 76% point gap between how satisfied Republicans are with the country versus how satisfied Democrats are. The largest partisan gap ever. news.gallup.com/poll/694370/...
September 1, 2025 at 1:52 AM