We can see things moving faster than light

I keep hearing people repeat this claim, that objects can be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light "because space is expanding", but this sounds like nonsense to me.  I was taught that space is not a medium - there is no ether; space is just nothingness with occasional bits of matter in it.  In fact, although I don't recall the exact argument, I was taught that the reason the ether theory was abandoned was the Michelson-Morley experiment, showing that there was no difference in the speed of light, no matter which way it was going.  That is, trying to measure your absolute speed based on the difference in the speed of light in different directions did not work, so therefore there was not a medium that we were moving through.

So just exactly what are you saying when you say that "space is expanding"?

And then, when you've got light turning around and going the other way, I KNOW you are not making sense.  And then, that the speed of light is changing over time.  Yeah, right. So what I would like to know is, is this the general consensus among physicists, or is this just one notion that would explain observations that don't otherwise make sense.  That is, are there competent physicists that are disagree with this explanation?  I ask this because everybody who tells this story (and there are many of them on YouTube) tells it as if it was absolute truth, and this is something that has only recently been appearing.

I really want to know, because this tells me that everything I was taught in my physics courses in college is no longer correct.