Don’t miss this bit. Currently enrolled students are going to need to find a new university.
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
> A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S.
I don't think this decision can force the Department of State to issue new visas for Havard students unfortunately. At least existing students *might* be alright...
This is not the same issue. Judges can be fast, but not that fast. Both the decision and this action against Harvard happened within an hour of eachother.
It is not, but it isn't unrelated; this is about the individual actions for which Harvard's refusal to assist by proactively supplying information is the basis for the action against Harvard.
That's a real issue. If you're on a student visa, and were planning on coming back in the fall, leaving the US for the summer may be a bad move. Entry to the US can be denied arbitrarily. Deporting someone is harder.
They've got a deportation order, so somebody is being put on a plane to El Salvador. Whether the name of the person being deported matches the name on the deportation order is another question, but not one ICE seems bothered by anymore
Sure, I was locked up by DHS/immigration, and I am a US citizen. CBP/ICE/HSI doesn't really need much of anything to lock you up, when they did it to me they told me I wasn't even under arrest.
IANAL but there are different categories like "detained" [reasonable suspicion, for questioning] and "arrested" [probable cause], and that's why the common advice is to just ask "am I free to go", which doesn't get bogged-down on finer-grained distinctions about why you might no be.
And thus it can only be used to pass legislation that impacts the federal budget according to the reconciliation rules. I don't see how the house putting in a provision that doesn't impact the budget but strips judges of a power could fly with the reconciliation rules. But I'm not a lawyer or legislative rules expert
If Republicans believe they will never lose the Senate, they can easily bypass the filibuster without 60 votes. To date, the adults in the room prevented either party from doing this for short term wins, but a) there are no adults in the room and b) it’s arguable the Senate will never again have a non-Republican majority (demographically, not a conspiracy theory).
I remember the same was said when GOP lost horribly in 2008 and Dems rode Obama’s coattails. The GOP was supposed to never recover. Demographically they were in a significant minority. Then they hatched REDMAP…
GOT THIS OUt MY SYSTEM. NOW I CAN SLEEP. SAFELY NOWING YOU BRIGHT PEOLE WILL HAVE FIGURED OUT THE SOLTIONS BEFORE A HALF SUN CYCLE.
READ THIS B(L)OG OF ENTERNAL STENCH AT YOUR OWN PERIL! DONT FALL IN, YOU NEVER BE RID OF THE SMELL. FOREVER!
YET OUR FRIEND SHIP WILL ALWAYS REMAIN INTACT! NOT ALL HEROS RIDE UP INTO SPACE OR DELVE THE DEEP OCEANS, WITH SENSIBLE ENGINERRING REVIEWS. AND YET THEIR HEARTS ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE. REACHING OUT TO EVERYONE. EVEN SALES. (IT TOOK WORK TO VERIFY THAT.) DESPITE all CREEDS, BROWNIAN MOTION CARES FOR EACH AND EVERYONE. (NOT SURE EACH NEEDS SPECIAL MENTION, BUT ITS A GOOD NAME.)
=====
Yes, the rules of Senate and Republican districts has been strongly in Republican's favor, and will be increasingly move further in their favor for many reasons, some simply practical.
The low populations states that tend to vote Republican, get a minimum number of House representatives, and equal Senators (2) per state, despite the greater political power if geaves each of them.
So they are structurally better represented.
That is locked in stone.
Then demographic trends give them a widening lead as Democrats voluntarily migrate into dense democratic zones, usually cities, while Republicans remain more distributed. This results in a very effective "crack and pack" situation between districts, heaily under valuing Democratic votes. It would be a sign of major corruption, except the demographic moves are all voluntary.
Finally, power in the Republican party has become highly centralized, including getting local and state political fights to be based primarily on national issues. Natural difference in state situtations no longer results in states having to negotiate with each other.
It also facilitates to party money efficiently moving around, supporting candidates who need help with resources they never earned in any way. But if they vote in line, they get the funding.
There are many other factors. Not all nefarious, just artifacts of happenstance of ancient Constitutional negotiation.
But the result is the same, Republicans are likely to increase their advantages for the next couple decades at least.
The packed Supreme Court is magnifying, if not repreatedly compounding these problems. Money = free speech? Well we have instutionalized that the rich have more free speech.
And that is before all the Republican states have adopted a new platform , tilting voting rules in the minorities favor, and further packing their judicial districts with extremely overt, and often highly unqualified, Republican partisans, who follow orders or have genuinely bought in to "Conservative" ideology (somehow without awareness of its constant churn), right up to a super majority of Republican leaning partisans in the supreme court.
And general corrupt government practices are getting more common, thanks in large part to a significant figure who claiming any corrupt before him, justifies his the existence of any corruption before him, his constant embrase of it. With his voters on board, because Trump winning must mean they are winning? Even if those stakes, and Trump University diplomas bombed.
My kids are traumatized. They don't care about parties, but they care deeply about climate change, reasonable efforts for equal treatment of trans peeple (better stated as a priority for treating all people equally). All while they struggle with a perverse economy of richer getting richer, using real estate like bitcoin as a place to "park" money, driving up housing costs for financial reasons that having nothing to do with normal supply and demand curves grounded in housing utility.
Taxation of total land and property perversely cuts taxes for owners of unused property, and increases taxes for those that construct valuable assets on property. It is a wealth tax that happens to really hurt the poor and middle class.
This list of problems goes on and on, despite many of them being identifiable and fixable.
First congress abdicated their own check on the president, Now the judicial system is waffling between maximizing presidential power to ignore/repurpose concressial funden problems, aut the judicial system is intermitently handing power over themselves. Supreme Court's can no longer charge a presicent with treason, no matter how corruptly he uses "official acts" to renrich himself, and create barriers for democratic checks, such as the press, and freedom of attorney's to challenge presendents, bu lawfulling repsresentng clients.
Finally, propery clean white people, the back bone of any societies that values tea time, perversely keep making more pople just like themselves. People who claim they are responsible for what other people on another continent did. Intra-race should be abolished. A policy that encourages the concentration of recessive jeans, is unnatural an immoral.
Let's just say, Bach isn't impressed.
Anyone considered the high humor in white supremecists standing up for benefits of a civilization whose first tenet was: "The solarium called, they suggest your delusions may abate if you spend more time soaking in the healing rays of the sum. Pastu white boy. Oh, and while you are resting, do you know any Bach?
Pn to of all that, we have a toxic narcissist who leverages entertaining, and chaos creates a train wreck daily news cycle, all in the servive is snowing anyone who thought lower inflaction meant lower prices.
Thin mans north star is plainly self-enrchment, making enemies, fabricating and declaring wins (See that dank diss Meme someone sent me!) morbidly seek attention, and vilifying anyone with an independent mind. We are alls toy for him to take apart. Deaths and injustice serve his purpose of shocking and dissecting us. Which shell is under?
But to be fair, other interpretations exist. Cue, the "6th dimensional chess" human centapide. Keep eating that crap! Trust the doctor!!
We can only hold onto the hope that nobody will save him from his own self-defeating follies, before natural causes, end his thrashing, and allow his believers his chance was stolen.
With population outgrowing our capped judiciary, making access to courts increasingly pay to play, this means even less accountability for the executive branch.
> Instead of hastening to correct its egregious error, the
Government dismissed it as an “oversight.”
> The
order properly requires the Government to “facilitate”
Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to
ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had
he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
> They sent a Salvadoran who nobody cared about to El Salvador.
They sent a lot of people, mostly not Salvadoran, to El Salvador [0] without due process, the one Salvadoran just gets covered more in the news because, as well as the issues applicable to the others, he had a existing court order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador specifically.
[0] And they've done or attempted to do that to Libya, South Sudan, and other third countries to whom the deported have no connection, as well.
> International students are on the Meng Wanzhou end of things.
The vast majority of them (of which there are over a million) don't have a Wikipedia page, nor are they "Deputy chairwoman and CFO" of a company as big as Huawei.
Rumeysa Ozturk sat in jail for six weeks for writing an op-ed. I assure you, there are plenty of international students you can mistreat without causing a major diplomatic incident.
How does prematurely ending your college degree send one to El Salvador's prisons? Most of those foreign students are from well-off families overseas, and supported by such - or supported by their governments.
I think you've confused this action with mindlessly deporting the under-documented.
There were many recent instances of even long term US permanent residents being sent to immigration detention centers. Maybe El Salvador gulag is an exaggeration, but being sent to a squalid prison is a very real possibility. Here's one from yesterday [1]. What's preventing them from doing the same to a student?
Also, most people affected by this will not be the son/daughter of the president of a foreign country or a billionaire.
They (the current administration) doesn't want to be competitive. They want to be in full control and willing to destroy any institution, organization or person that opposes them, internal or external.
You can't say the word because the moderates are supportive of it - they'll say "people like you are why Trump won!", never taking responsibility for their beliefs. The targets of the regime's ire are always unpopular targets: LGBT people, illegal immigrants, government workers, researchers, etc. The educated middle class and the universities are hated by them for being too leftist and elitist; it's only natural they'll try to destroy such institutions now that they're in power and have no reservations on using their power.
Trump won because those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream. If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power… they view the Democrats as out of touch. It is the equivalent of Let Them Eat Cake or brioche.
And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
> those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They don't care. Why would they?
The worse Republicans act, the more Democrat leaders are happy to present themselves as the only 'sane' alternative.
That 'sanity' now includes arming genocide, campaigning with Dick Cheney, removing being 'anti-torture' from their platforms, etc. Very little media holds them to account on any of this.
The people who fund (read: own) the Democrats and the media are a higher priority to politicians than their actual voter base. That has been made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention: just look at Gaza, healthcare, environmental protection, fracking, or any number of issues where the majority of Americans want progress while <5% of Dem politicians actually fight for them.
Again, Gaza made this wildly clear: Even though 77% of Dem voters wanted an arms embargo, and >30% of 2020 Biden voters in swing states were loudly saying that arming genocide was probably a red line as far as getting their vote, Harris decided that bombing children was more important than winning the election. And the rest of the party leadership supported this, again, against the will of the vast majority of their voters.
Between Trump and Harris, Trump was obviously a much worse choice for Gaza. Anyone equivocating the distinction between them doesn't care about Gaza at all and is functioning entirely within the realm of performative activism.
I do not see Republicans slowing down what is going on in Gaza ... instead it is becoming more violent and unrestricted. Like common ... if democrats said anything against israel politics, they would be called anti-semitic, would be hit by easy campaign and would lose more votes.
There are actual big differences in terms of how those two parties behaves. Saying anything else is just lie.
Supposed economic desperation vote rejected economy that was doing good. They do not want better cheaper healthcare nor functioning economy. They want republican program, they just hoped it will be only other people who will be harmed.
Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant.
Republicans are the ones bringing up gender, trans issues etc into discussion again and again. Not democrats.
> They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream.
No, because vote for Trump and republicans is vote for higher prices, more expensive healthcare and tax cuts for rich. Every single time. This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal. Republicans will lie, fox news will like and media will both side it.
> And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Women are working class and struggling. And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ... and democrats were not running on dei.
Trump won because the moderates wanted to moderate against fascism and so it was either fascists or finger wagging scolds.
Luckily after the midterms the moderates will get elected so they can sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing except punch left
Meanwhile the hard right will go even harder and call the moderates "the radical left" and they'll win the seats back the next election as the moderates punch left again and say that's why they lost.
All these policies will be left exactly in tact. Nothing will be attempted to be rolled back. They'll do effectively nothing at all. Indistinguishable from simply vacating the office for their term.
They have a strong rigorous fundamental belief in doing absolutely positively nothing at all about anything. At all.
I tolerate my normie family saying it, but it grates on me because of how many of the constituencies have switched sides by now. For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party, while nowadays the fascists seem to really loathe that class stratum.
They're afraid of losing to a primary challenger if they break with Trump. It used to be a Trump endorsement would hurt your campaign. Now a Trump critique is believed to be a scarlet letter. He's got a lock on the racist zealots that make up the most consistent voting bloc in the GOP.
I think the problem is that half of the country (has been made to) wants to sabotage itself. Therefore, they elect and keep in power someone that gives them exactly what they want.
Yeah, the way the Democratic Party self-destructed was indeed enlightening and frightening. And they continue to point fingers at each other and present specious arguments why they failed in the last election.
Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
DOGE has destroyed institutions that will likely not recover in the next Democratic majority term. If they sell off the federal lands or damage them with resource extraction, Dems probably wont have the bandwidth to fix that either. Those are just two examples but there are probably many more.
Harvard does not have "the best and brightest" students and that's a meme that needs to die as is discriminatory to literally all the other students in the US and the planet.
You are nitpicking. It is an elite institution that still attracts elite class people or else it wouldn't be worth so much to so many groups. There are hundreds of universities in the US, many of which have no kind recognition of the kind Harvard has.
Harvard doesn't have higher academic standards for foreign students. So I don't think foreign students are any "better or brighter" than their American counterparts.
So if you can find equally qualified American students on the margin shouldn't you do so? I think an American university that benefits greatly from American taxpayers and institutions should primarily benefit American students. If you're picking truly exceptional student, that's one thing. But I don't think that's happening.
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student.
I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.
> But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible
That’s exactly why this consternation about “the best and the brightest” is overblown. Harvard is a nerve center for enabling international elite to rub elbows. E.g. the good-for-nothing son of Bangladesh’s former PM went to Harvard for his MPA.
Slam Harvard? Trump is slamming them because they are a known name that is resisting him.
Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
I didn’t say that was Harvard’s only function. But it’s a major one. And the core science research departments are a small share of Harvard’s overall footprint. I wonder how long those departments are going to let the rest of the university use them as human shields.
I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...
The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...
To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.
China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.
Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
> You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...
just a guess but i'd assume these decisions are being made on an emotional/ideological basis, not long term viability, but maybe i'm missing something obvious...
It doesn’t actually matter if the foreign students are better or not: by having a mixed student body, with lots of cultures and backgrounds, students learn more from each other. They learn skills to work with other cultures, and ways of doing things that may be better.
Of course, in America’s future of autarky and Shogunate-style isolationism, those skills will no longer have any value, even to the elite. There’s no need to learn about other countries if everything we need is produced here and no one could ever threaten us once America is made great again. (/s maybe?)
I don't know. A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students. Goes against the whole we want diversity thing, no?
> A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students.
How do I put this delicately - the Race part is not what is bringing the difference in lived experience.
The university defines diversity broadly, encompassing race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, nationality, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity.
Don't gaslight me and pretend they don't focus a lot on race when figuring out their student body. They report on it and it's a huge distinguishing characteristic when looking at median standardized scores across diff characteristics. There's little difference between socio economic groups, gender, nationality etc. But if you look across just Asian and non Asian students, the scores are dramatically higher with Asians meaning that they have higher standards. Courts found this to be true
But foreign students pay foreign money which helps against the deficit.
On top of that many students stay in the US afterwards means a brain plus for the US and a loss their home country. These kind of braun drain is a big advantage for the US they know destroy.
Which isn’t at all how PhD programs work. This is a supreme dick move to students are going to be forced to leave with an AbD for no other reason than Trumps ego.
This is going to burn the children of the most powerful families across the world. Monarchies, dictators, owners of international conglomerates, etc all send their kids to Harvard. Destroying their children’s education out of a fit of malice is going to haunt him, and America on top of all the other stuff America is doing to the world.
You probably will be able to soon though, and it 'only' costs $5m: "A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms" [0]
I couldn't blame you for not having seen this though. It was quickly flagged and never whitelisted; like so, so many other important stories here this past few months. Check my favorites for more falsely flagged stories.
Or maybe he could care less, but doesn't even bother to care less because caring less would exert effort and he doesn't care enough to exert any effort.
Truly, the essence of the Democratic Party and its most important constituents is (checks notes) monarchies, dictators, international conglomerates, and etc(?).
Trump 2.0's policies have been a bizarre crisscross of strong-arming of titans of industry (traditional far-left), dismantling of the federal government with reckless abandon (libertarian), and obscene military spending (traditional far-right.)
What is the grand strategy here? Creative destruction?
It's not about the percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category, it's about the percentage of students in this category who go to Harvard.
Why are the children of the most powerful families going to Harvard? Harvard is an American institution. Now we’re supposed to support and educate foreign dictators?
I don't get how DHS has control over what universities foreign students can attend. Either than can attend school in the US or not. Saying they have to transfer from Harvard to another American university is total abuse of power. Surely there are lawsuits in the works over this.
The F/J exhange visa is tied to a specific sponsor (ie the University) for a very specific goal. There are a lot of restrictions on what you can and can't do. If your visa sponsor has its privilege revoked then presumably you have a choice to transfer to a different institute, if one will take you, or leave the country.
There is a mechanism for that transfer built into the visa, which could be used for example if your professor moved institutions and wanted to re-hire you to fulfil the original goals of your exchange program.
It's unclear if this affects all foreign academic staff, many of whom who would be on the J, or just the F visa.
i'd guess this kind of thing (per-institutional authorization to allow international students) was intended to provide the government a way to revoke that right from "sham" institutions (wonder if Trump University ever had international students?) or ones that otherwise were obviously trying to facilitate students skirting or abusing immigration law.
not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah) but it's pretty clear we're currently dealing with a regime that's willing to use ambiguous regulations in malicious ways (no comment on previous regimes, they're all bad, don't call me a HN Democrat or whatever).
> not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah)
Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.
That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle
The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years, during which time many of our ancestors came here. The only reason we had any immigration laws to begin with was racism against Chinese people. Now we are making up other excuses for it, based on no evidence whatsoever.
> The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years,
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship by naturalisation to “free white persons” of “good moral character” - yes, it didn’t technically bar immigration from people who didn’t meet that criterion, but it reduced them to an underclass who were denied citizenship - and this was prior to the 14th Amendment, so there was no constitutional right to birthright citizenship even for their children born in the US.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (still on the books but long dormant until recently revived by Trump) gave the federal government the power to deport citizens of countries at war with the US - effectively banning them from immigrating. The Alien Friends Act of 1798 allowed the President to deport any foreigner based on the President’s subjective determination that they were “dangerous”- however, it expired in 1800 and was not renewed.
In the early years of US independence, there were state laws enabling deportation of immigrants - e.g. in 1794 Massachusetts responded to the “problem” of poor Irish immigrants with a state law authorising their deportation back to Ireland, and several were actually deported under this Act. While nowadays, state-level deportation laws would surely be struck down as intruding into an exclusive federal domain, the lack of broad federal deportation statutes for much of the 18th/19th centuries left open a (since closed) constitutional space in which state-level deportation laws could exist
Even prior to US independence, British law gave the colonial authorities the power to deport people they viewed as undesirable - rarely exercised, but it legally existed - and the main reason they rarely exercised it was they didn’t get many “undesirable” immigrants turning up
Note I’m not defending these laws - judged by today’s standards they were racist and deeply unfair - just pointing out that the “first 100 years” of the US wasn’t as “open borders” as you paint it as having been
And while no doubt historically (and even today) many immigration laws have been racist in their terms, motivation, or implementation - I don’t think the idea of having some restrictions on immigration is inherently racist. Almost every country on earth (even non-Western) nowadays has laws saying people convicted of very serious crimes cannot immigrate without special permission - is it “racist” if Botswana says to someone just released from serving a 20 year prison sentence for terrorism “sorry, we don’t want you”?
It seems that the amount of fences is growing up exponentially. To the point that we are all corralled. Not so long time ago people could move from country to country relatively freely. Now it is a fucking tragedy
I wonder what avenues there are for Harvard to challenge this; it looks like the mechanism the Trump Admin used was for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cancel Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification [0] which is managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [1].
Does ICE just have full discretion over SEVP? Can they do this to any school for whatever reason they want?
Under 8 U.S.C. § 1372, the SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) program requires schools to report data on international students including what DHS has been asking for.
Harvard may argue that DHS’s request was overly broad, lacked due process, or sought information beyond what the law permits.
8 CFR § 214.3(g) and § 214.4(b), which require schools to maintain and furnish records “as required by the Service,” including disciplinary actions and other conduct relevant to maintaining status.
8 CFR § 214.3(l)(2)(iii) allows for withdrawal of certification if a school fails to “provide requested documentation” to DHS.
Not to mention other overly broad immigration laws
But given the laws on the books, DHS has broad authority to take this action.
Not arguing one way or the other just laying out the facts. This could have happened under the prior administration if the law was applied
The actual statute provides the categories of information schools must provide about their students. It’s not a “whatever we happen to ask for” list. See 8 U.S.C. § 1372. Needless to say, “protest activity” is not included.
We do not know yet what Harvard did and did not respond to. All we have is their word. If they didn’t provide what was required after DHS demanded what was legally required to be provided then DHS is on solid legal ground. I can’t really defend not providing something that isn’t called out as part of the law though
No, we gave the SEVIS revocation letter demanding a handful of categories of information, one of which is “protest activity.” And they are already required under the statute to provide one category of information requested: “any disciplinary action taken by the institution against the alien as a result of the alien’s being convicted of a crime or, in the case of a participant in a designated exchange visitor program, any change in the alien’s participation as a result of the alien’s being convicted of a crime.”
My main point, though, was this: (1) the information required to maintain SEVIS program is statutorily defined, so the government doesn’t get to arbitrarily expand that and then punish a school for noncompliance; and (2) we know of at least one category requested information that they are not allowed to ask for and that implicates nothing other than the exercise of a student’s First Amendment rights.
My point is we don’t know if they actually provided all the info that is statutorily required and/or the government is saying within those statutory rules you still didn’t provide it so by law it’s revoked (for now). We only have statements from both sides.
Seeing as it’s private most likely won’t see it via FOIA
Nah, this one is going to federal court for sure. It’ll all come out. But part of the rules are also that schools must provide the relevant information within 30 days of the start of an alien’s academic term. There’s a whole system set up to handle this. The system is not, government, go ask for this set of information whenever you feel like it and if the school doesn’t hop to it immediately, you may suspend. It says that if a school does not provide the information within the relevant period before the term starts, it shall be suspended. There is no discretionary wiggle room for the government to be like, well, I don’t think you’re giving me enough, or you’re not being cooperative enough.
Actually, that interpretation isn’t quite correct. The 30-day reporting window you’re referring to applies to initial SEVIS data entry and student registration at the beginning of each term-things like confirming enrollment, course load, address, etc. That’s under 8 CFR § 214.3(g)(2) and (l)(2), which govern routine reporting timelines for active F-1/M-1 students.
But the April 16 DHS request to Harvard wasn't routine. It invoked 8 CFR § 214.3(g)(1), which covers ad hoc or investigative information requests by DHS. That section gives DHS broad power to request any time the records needed to assess a student’s compliance with immigration status.
Yes, I was being sloppy. Nevertheless, they can still only request that particular set of documents. And it’s not to assess a particular student’s status but the school’s compliance with the program requirements. (They can of course check individuals to make sure they’re also complying.) And just from the face of the letter to Harvard you can see they’re going way beyond the enumerated categories of information. Not to mention intermingling other SEVP-unrelated complaints (DEI! Antisemitism!) as to why Harvard is being targeted.
Our immigration system is so profoundly screwed up, and there is no doubt the executive agencies have wide powers to draw on, but they’re not even trying to provide a fig leaf of legality. It’s straight, “Comply or suffer!”
yes, there are clear problems with the scope and political context of the request. But the legal framework does give DHS room to request information tied to student status compliance, even outside of term-start reporting. The question now is how much of that request was actually lawful, and how much was political theater cloaked in regulatory form.
Rights don’t exist if you’re not a citizen. Isn’t that the whole crux of the debate? Glossing over that part, and as a former lawyer you should know better, means everything.
You’re wrong about that. It doesn’t say “Congress shall make no law, unless it targets non-citizens.” The First Amendment is a constraint on what governments may do.
Wish I had a way to privately get your digits. We accidentally seem to be knocking heads, and I bet you’re a great person to grab a coffee with. East coast?
And all we have is DHS' word that Harvard didn't provide what was required. This is simply ridiculous and everything needs to be easier for the public to double-check so we can call bullshit in the right direction.
yep. the laws have been written to be broad... my best guess would be the best legal argument Harvard could claim would be that it construes the existing law as a bill of attainder (a law targetted at an individual or group of individuals called out by person -- versus called out by some category of actions -- that is judged without trial)
Maybe, but I doubt it. Trump is not a mafia boss - time after time he showed that his words cannot be trusted. If Harvard makes a concession, there's no guarantee that Trump will "forgive" it.
Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
I see two risks with your analysis. First, you generally underestimate a person if you try to distill his personality into one negative trait (or, for that matter, if you select a bunch of negative traits but assume no positive.)
Second, he's still the president, so I don't see what pull the Penn degree has vs. that.
> Trump is not a mafia boss - time after time he showed that his words cannot be trusted. If Harvard makes a concession, there's no guarantee that Trump will "forgive" it.
> Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
Doesn't this example make the opposite of your point?
The point I'm trying to make is: if Trump bullies you, and you make a concession, Trump will feel no obligations to pay you back and may bully you further. China played hardball (up to some degree - I'm sure there were backstage talks), and that apparently made Trump "respect" China more.
> The actual letter explains they can regain status by ratting out their students.
Trump's history has shown that if you cave into his demands, he doesn't leave you alone—instead he starts demanding even more, since he knows you'll fold.
If you provide information to an actor when you have a clear indication that said actor will then take disproportionate action against the one on which you provide information, how is that not wrong?
Pretty much a guarantee that Harvard will choose to stay the course. This is the quintessential organization that thinks along the lines of, "100 years from now Harvard will still be Harvard. And Trump will be one of the answers on a middle school history exam".
Ratting out in my mind means informing authorities in a way that something negative might be expected to happen to the subject.
For instance, I don't think smoking weed is wrong, but if I go tell an officer you have weed in your car, I have ratted you out despite nothing 'wrong' happening.
Can someone ELI5 the power networks involved here?
I didn't expect to see Harvard getting smacked around or humiliated like this.
Between Harvard, Yale, and possibly a few other schools, I thought they had influence throughout government. And that key figures in government were interested in maintaining and benefiting from that influence.
And a lot of that influence seemed aligned with national interests. (For example, getting things done with prestige connections, domestically and internationally. And the international diplomatic goodwill, when children of the world's wealthy and powerful go to prestigious schools in the US.)
Is some other faction at work now, or is it the same people as before? Are the power networks changing? If the distribution of power is changing, is it partly due to someone willing to sacrifice national power from which all parties benefited (and everyone else wasn't expecting that, or wasn't ready to defend against that from within)? Better questions?
> For example, getting things done with prestige connections, domestically and internationally. And the international diplomatic goodwill
What you describe is relatively recent development of US foreign policy. In 1959, John F. Kennedy purchased a copy of The Ugly American for all of his fellow US Senators. After Kennedy was elected, many foreign service programs were initiated to leverage soft power. That was JFK's legacy.
Prior to that, the US acted much in the same way as it is today. It came up with Bretton Woods, along with the UK. The people that ran the world were the Averill Harrimans and Prescott Bushes.
In 1956, the US basically told the UK it wasn't going to back the Prime Minister (Anthony Eden) with regards to the Suez Canal. That was probably a sobering indication that the UK was going to be a supplicant in the relationship. The US also returned Vietnam to France (as was policy after WW2), which of course precipitated 20 years of war in southeast asia.
The end of the WW2, and the discovery of the infiltration of Russian agents in the dead Roosevelt administration put Truman in panic mode. The iron curtain and cold war basically turned foreign policy into a huge power grab after the war to position against a perceived threat.
Much thanks for the jfk link. New info. Interesting info to me at least.
I will add a little nuance or my take. Balance as always is key. Toxic feminity or hopes/prayers/empathy holism alone is hardly an answer. Would it kill the dems to get some street smarts? No!
> Between Harvard, Yale, and possibly a few other schools, I thought they had influence throughout government.
The simple answer is that they don't. Alumni are often in powerful positions, but even they are, that is very different from the school itself exerting influence.
I mean that alumni are invested in the prestige of the alma mater, and in the network they have through that. Also, that some people at the universities are very connected, and can get a lot of people on the phone.
But why stick your head out? The people you’re referring to got where they are now by being ruthless, egocentric, power-hungry opportunists; these kinds of people don’t risk their careers over some vague sense of gratitude for their Alma mater.
That would be about as smart as challenging an actual silverback. Trump, and his administration by extension, are just past their power zenith right now. They ignore the judicial branch, send people to gulags without fair trial, accept 400 million dollar bribes on live TV, fuck over allies, suppress the press, force universities and schools to align with propaganda, lie openly about about government affairs, prioritise personal acclaim over national security, trash the global economy due to an elementary school level understanding of trade relations… This list could go on for quite a while and would still miss critically dangerous and unprecedented acts.
The democrats can't find a coherent voice; the republicans have been dismantled and are firmly in MAGA control; the people trust random TikTok influencers more than reputable journalists; judges must fear being imprisoned over doing their job; scientists and activists could get detained, deported, or imprisoned at any time and are fleeing the country.
That is the setting. That is what is happening right now. Even on the highest echelons of power, rebelling against this tsunami of corruption, delusion, and destruction is futile. All you get is a demotion, a muzzle, or a sentence. Just look at Marco Rubio; I seriously doubt he believes even a shred of all the bullshit he has to proclaim with a straight face, but he's as trapped in this as the rest of us, whether he's behind his administration or not.
A friend is a big Harvard alum. He says that most of his classmates are very unhappy with the direction of the university. So in his circle the alumni may be cheering this on. Maybe not the extremism but the general idea of telling Harvard that it needs to get back to truth-seeking.
The fund-raising email the President of Harvard sent us after the gov pulled federal funding begins: "Dear Alumni and Friends,
In recent weeks, thousands of you have sent encouraging messages, asked thoughtful questions, provided candid feedback, and made generous new gifts to the University. Many of you also shared deeply moving stories of how Harvard changed and shaped your lives. Your outpouring of appreciation and support reinforces the importance of our institution and what it represents. Thank you for your commitment to the University and its ideals." It goes in at length, and as the international recipient of a full-ride scholarship you can bet I was happy join in and double my annual gift. Just as trump was able to raise money from his various trials, so to Harvard draws sympathy from this: and while trumps's supporters are many, Harvard's supporters are rich, so it comes out in a wash and is effectively just melodrama to wind us all up with. The Harvard network is wide and varied so while I am sure there are some like your "big Harvard alum" who are cheering attacks on a major source of their own and their country's prestige, but in my circle of conservative alumni friends I have heard exactly the opposite reaction: even those who were still card-carrying Republicans were already apoplectic about the tariff debacle's impact on their net worth so all this petty virtue-signaling against the alma-mater that launched them on their successful careers hasn't done anything to heal the growing rift...
Not a single alum I've talked to is happy about what Trump is doing.
That said, it's not only the Harvard issue that is giving everyone pause, it's the direction of the Administration in general. In fact, for a lot of them, Harvard is the least of the problems the US will be facing the next 20 years due to this Administration. Europe is moving. China is moving. And neither are moving in the direction we thought they were moving prior to Trump coming into office.
My general feel on conservative Harvard/MIT alums is "Buyer's Remorse". A fair sentiment likely shared by most of the nation at this point. I keep hoping that maybe it gets better? At some point, someone, somewhere has to realize the economy, at minimum, has to be brought back in hand. When that happens, maybe we see more movement on these other issues. If it doesn't happen, we'll see movement on new political leadership over the next few election cycles.
Those of you who took the time to flag this completely innocuous comment should take a moment to review the site guidelines as you are abusing the mechanism.
You and others in this thread are using HN for political or ideological battle, which is against the guidelines. It's inevitable in a thread of this nature that people are going to do this, but if you want to herald the guidelines, which we appreciate, we need you to also make a sincere effort to observe them.
> You and others in this thread are using HN for political or ideological battle
You look to be an admin so you can do whatever you want, but I would point out that the only post I made that expressed an opinion is still up [0]. I don’t really have a strong opinion about the issue. I find that I only ever get flagged on HN when I ask clarifying questions on threads like these, presumably because people simply don’t like to be questioned about the claims they are making.
Yes I'm a moderator here. These politics-based threads are the most difficult for us to manage, because, whilst mainstream politics stories are generally considered to be off topic here, if a story contains "significant new information" and the weight of community sentiment supports having a thread about it, we'll yield - which means turning off the flags and flamewar penalties and spending much of the day moderating it. But then too many people treat the presence of a political topic on the front page as an open door to post whatever they want, without any regard for the guidelines at all. Then we have to spend time adjudicating between different people making accusations against other community members about breaking the guidelines, when, really, the entire thread is against the guidelines, so the whole matter is kind of moot.
> I only ever get flagged on HN when I ask clarifying questions on threads like these
We can't know exactly why people flag things, but it may be because it comes across as stirring up controversy with plausible deniability. It looks like you're trying to bait another user into making a comment that is controversial and could be attacked (or considered to be breaking the guidelines), whilst being seen as being a neutral participant yourself.
Of course we can't know your true intention, all we can know is the consequences of this kind of conduct when we see it.
So, given that you seem to care about the guidelines, which we appreciate, we ask you to demonstrate a sincere intent to observe them yourself and also to avoid baiting others into breaking them.
It boggles my mind that anyone with, apparently and allegedly, such a high tier education, would be against the actions Harvard has been taking this year.
They are literally just fighting for basic academic freedoms.
People go to Harvard because they want a prestigious career, not because they have an insatiable palate for knowledge that somehow in 2025 they can't satisfy in any other way.
Visas and academic accreditation shouldn't be leverage against speech the government disagrees with, they should be granted and removed according to a predictable and unbiased process.
Really all government actions should follow a predictable and unbiased process, a.k.a "The Law".
Just, throwing this out there, but it seems a distinct possibility that this Administration doesn't hold the same regard towards "Rule of Law" as did previous Administrations.
I'm not altogether certain I'd rely on "Rule of Law" to save anyone in the current environment.
Kristi Noem doesn't know what Habeas Corpus is; she defined it as "the constitutional right of the president to protect America from terrorists" or some such nonsense,so - ya think?
Possibly after she had it explained to her in front of the millions of viewers watching her demonstrate a frankly unbelievable lack of basic knowledge for someone in her position.
But then such things are expected with the current kakistocracy.
When it's targeted solely at one institute for the purpose of hampering it's academic activities as retribution? You're being deliberately obtuse here.
Harvard really tarnished it's reputation when the president, under oath, said that calls for the genocide of Jews would comply with their code of conduct "depending on the context". The president did end up resigning a year ago, though they have a lot of work to do to come back from that.
While what the Trump admin is doing is wrong, Harvard has given them ample cover for their actions. It would be intellectually lazy to assert, even implicitly, that Harvard has no responsibility over the current state of affairs.
As a person of Jewish descent I am sickened by the way this administration is twisting the definition of antisemitism to mean things that have nothing to do with antisemitism. Antisemitism is real: devaluing it into bullshit is going to lead to the deaths of millions.
Bill Ackman may be the most visible. Billionaire hedge fund manager. He's a Jew who is horrified by the school's tolerance for pro Hamas protests. He was a big Democrat supporter before that, including for Obama, Booker, and Cuomo.
it seems what all of these powerful, big thinkers are actually mad about is a school's tolerance for <anything>, the very thing that graduates of prestigious institutions don't need to like but should understand.
Bill Ackman made his bed with Trump and will now have to deal with the fact that his fate is tied to whatever random whims Trump has over the next 1,340 days.
I suppose there is a possibility that on January 21, 2029 this country won't be viciously angry about the past four years, and everyone associated with it. But I wouldn't want to bet on that.
Yeah this is also my read, people are horrified by the university behavior and generally supportive of the administration on this stuff. The 'elite' schools are becoming a counter signal it'll be embarrassing to have attended.
In my opinion the reason why they are getting smacked is because they are powerful. This is textbook 101 dictatorship power grab in action. Harvard in the US is law. If they can't fight this, probably nobody else can or will.
For every person that went through these elite schools, they must have rejected five or more other people. These schools pride themselves on turning people away. Perhaps, they have far more enemies than friends, explaining their seeming lack of influence in this situation
One explanation might be that the objects of their influence are nested within agencies.
Most presidents let the agencies run mostly unsupervised, it seems like. With the agencies now under heavy fire structurally, they may not be able to do what they would normally do to prevent this kind of thing.
I think the whole agency model gives the president way more power than they are meant to have. I guess this exists to serve as a form of blame laundering from the people without term limits to the guy with term limits? But if the president does not play ball, suddenly they have power over things congress would otherwise have power over. Oops.
1. As the US grew and the workload required to govern it grew, Congress' ability to directly and quickly manage the country was outpaced. Consequently, agencies served as the grease between Congress' high-level actions/funding and the low-level implementation.
2. Due to the ever-adversarial nature of Congress, it was recognized that most Congresses operated slowly, and consequently didn't have the capacity to micromanage at the level required for direct control.
3. Circa 1900, civil service reform by the then-progressive wing of the Republican party pushed for greater isolation of the expertise that drove good government outcomes (in civil service employees) from politicians (administrators).
The flaw Trump revealed was that the President has too much direct power over the civil service, if he chooses to ignore tradition.
This wasn't always the case, and laws that previously restrained the President's ability to fuck with the civil service were substantially relaxed in the 60s - 80s (?).
Conversely, the flaw of the civil servant plan during Trump 1 was that stonewalling the top of your org chart can really bite you if he sticks around too long or, maybe worse, comes back.
In any case, the President will keep having too much power until Congress starts taking theirs back.
This is an explanation from my department chair which I've expanded. In the context of a university, there are four main power groups - the alumni, the faculty, the students, and the board of trustees. (Within each group of course are subfactions.) The actual power balance between these groups is never precisely certain (it's an unobservable "latent variable"). Whenever large events happen that involve the university, we get observations that allow us to estimate the latent variable better.
In the case of Harvard, I think the current observations are most consistent with the following: the Board of Trustees, faculty, and students have currently aligned in their goals - which we might summarize as (1) maintaining independence from the government and (2) the ability to hold/teach specific "controversial" viewpoints (benefits of diversity, anti-colonialism, potentially other "progressive" concepts). I suspect that within the factions the relative importance of these two goals is not balanced. The fact that the coalition has survived much longer than, e.g., Columbia, is somewhat surprising.
My suspicion is that the answer to your question is that the persistent "smacking around" is only in part due to the external factors other replies have mentioned. I think a major piece of the situation can be explained by a change in the power dynamic with the alumni. Under normal circumstances, the faculty presumably hope to maintain long lasting influence over their alumni, which the board of trustees leverage to bring in more money and influence to the university. The current situation suggests that the high-power/high-$$$ portion of the alumni who are in a position to leverage the public conversation about what's going on are not doing it. This implies that the strength of that edge of the power graph is much weaker than it was expected to be. I think it remains to be seen whether this is true. Further observations that would support that would be reduced donations, public complaints, etc. Conversely, increased fundraising and more public support would suggest the opposite.
The key point about the university power network is that USUALLY, the best situation is to avoid situations that actually reveal too much information. Everyone would prefer to believe they have more power than they do. Obviously the alumni are composed of factions, and presumably a large fraction of the potential participants are also members of other organizations with latent power networks and participating in this particular situation would involve expending capital in these other networks with potential reduction in power. Some alumni that have spoken up (i.e., Ackman) are clearly unaligned with the current coalition, and this MAY reflect the fact that the wealthy/powerful group of alumni that have sustained Harvard are really unhappy with the current stances of the university and would like it to shift (return?) to a different set of ideologies. But it's also possible that he represents a minority, and the rest are just nervous about getting involved.
My conclusion from this analysis is that things will persist as they have, with everyone who might be involved hoping that lawsuits will be successful in resolving the situation with the minimum of their involvement. If this approach is unsuccessful, I think we'll end up in a situation where we get a much better observation of the power balance between alumni, faculty, and board (I think the students rarely have as much power as they think they do!).
> This implies that the strength of that edge of the power graph is much weaker than it was expected to be
Funnily, 2 Harvard profs have written the easiest way for me to point out that the media / Information economy in America is broken. (Network Propaganda)
Which would explain why Alumni dont have power, or for that matter any experts. This is fundamentally why Trump is in power, and why decisions that have zero connection to scientific fact or even reality.
Either everyone starts talking in terms of the reality being litigated on Fox and other related networks on the Right, or people find a way to actually engage in a fair debate. Democracy is fundamentally conversation.
It feels like a situation where alumni are holding their breath. It reminds me of that moment in basketball games where the ball bounces around the rim - will it go in or will it bounce out? If I'm on the sidelines of that game, then I'm not going to vocalize until the ball settles.
It's hard for me to see this as anything more than "they resisted Trump, that pissed him off and now he's further retaliating."
Side question I've been wrestling with to whoever feels like commenting:
At what point would you look at our current US situation and say "yep, we're now in a dictatorship"
I would read the constitution and come to terms with the fact that the executive authority is vested in a president. It’s not quite a king, because it’s not passed down by inheritance and they can’t enact laws by fiat… but the president is supremely powerful during their term.
And that’s good. There’s no denying that the executive branch (its agencies, officers, regulators, etc) is supremely powerful. The only question is whether the public have any democratic control over the exercise of that authority.
the usa is seeing the state employ that monopoly right now:
- against opposing members of the legislative branch (lamonica mciver)
- against opposing members of the judicial branch (hannah dugan)
- against opposing members of the executive branch (ras baraka, andrew cuomo)
- against opposing private organizations (harvard, institute for peace)
- against opposing private individuals (chris krebs)
- against defenders of opponents (multiple lawfirms)
- not to mention rewarding private individuals who employed private violence against political enemies -- we saw this during duterte (ashli babbitt, the rest of the insurrectionists)
if there is no monopoly on violence in the usa, who else exactly is the monopolist permitting to use it?
The proletariat has the capacity to violently resist (See: Butler,PA), but the Venn overlap among those with the most firepower and those who actually support the oppressors is two concentric circles.
An election only puts a few people in an office. If those people try to exert their will through force (which, I wouldn’t classify cutting Harvard off as using force, just being a jerk) and there can be severe physical consequences done to the state for that action, then I wouldn’t call it a dictatorship at that point.
There are no consequences. The president has immunity and the courts are about to have the option of criminal contempt prosecutions removed. Cletus and his stockpile of ammunition are going to have little or no impact and he will be hunted down by law enforcement who are very much toeing the line.
The US regulatory system is intertwined with enough of the country that dictatorship can be wrought through its abuse.
E.g. if the US court system were more MAGA, Trump would be ignoring the Constitution today (habeas corpus), instead of toeing around the line
E.g. Trump silencing media speech by abusing FCC spectrum transfer authority
Institutions and the Constitution are what prevent the US from being a dictatorship, and ultimately both of those things rest on elected (indirectly or directly) officials, and therefore free and fair elections.
Agreed, dictatorship is a gross exaggeration. Sliding toward fascism? Sure. Would Tump like to do away with election? He’s said he does, that they won’t be necessary.
In the bill that has recently been passed, the republicans have inserted a clause that means no administration official can be found guilty of criminal contempt by the federal courts.
This will mean that the courts are literally powerless against the administration's malfeasance. The executive will be able to do what they like, and even if this bill doesn't pass the senate, SCOTUS will likely strike down as unconstitutional any appointment by the courts of a private attorney to prosecute criminal contempt because it has been stuffed with useful idiots.
This isn't sliding towards fascism, this is speed running 30's Germany.
> Between Harvard, Yale, and possibly a few other schools, I thought they had influence throughout government.
Harvard and Yale didn't hire the right lobbyists [0][1][2]
The other universities like Dartmouth, MIT, and public university systems did.
One of the side effect of being large endowment private universities meant Harvard and Yale remained extremely insular and concentrated on donor relations over government relations.
For example, MIT across town remained much more integrated with public-private projects compared to Harvard, and ime Harvard would try to leverage their alumni network where possible, but the Harvard alumni network just isn't as strong as it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Also, don't underestimate the Israel-Palestine culture war's impact on campus alumni relationships. Both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli campus orgs have continued to bombard me and other alumni to fight political battles against Harvard leadership for their side. Benefits of signing up to both Islamic orgs and Chabad to broaden my horizons back in the day I guess. Alumni from orgs on both sides are fine targeting the entire university, because fundamentally, Harvard is a very isolated experience where loyalty is to your house, a couple clubs, or your grad program - not Harvard as a whole.
And because Harvard has a lot of HNW alumni, they always try to meddle in some shape or form - Wen Jiabao's best friend funds the Fairbank Center, Kraft funds and hosts events at Chabad, some al Saud branches fund a couple Islamic clubs, a bunch of alt-right leaning Catholic traditionalists fund the Abigail Adams Institute, etc. It's just inter-elite fratricide at this point because no one truly gives a poo about Harvard.
Honestly, Harvard should prevent alumni from funding campus orgs, but they won't do so because donor relations.
Edit: I am extremely pro-academic freedom. This move is a HORRIBLE affront to free speech and campus autonomy. My cynicism and disillusionment may sound like I support the move by the administration, but it is the complete opposite.
Dartmouth is a smaller target without the name recognition of Harvard, and MIT has stronger ties to the MIC without the strong public image of a liberal institution. Harvard is a test case (what can this admin do) and a symbol almost in its own category for Trump's followers.
Harvard (the University, not it's alums) has had a near nil presence on K-Street for a looooong time - and their primary lobbyist with the GOP has been on Trump's bad side for sometime after he pissed off David Sacks.
I'm also an (severely disillusioned) alumni of some of the student orgs that are mutually using Harvard the institution as a punching bag to fight their culture wars.
A lot of this is honestly very childish BS done by some petulant alums who were already dicks on campus.
There is very little campus loyalty at Harvard which makes it easier to use it as a punching bag for your culture war (whichever way you lean).
>Harvard and Yale didn't hire the right lobbyists.
I don't think it's as simple as this. To my knowledge, Dr. Sian Leah Beilock handled the protests of the past 2 years much better than their counterparts.
Oh easily! But the issue is Brian Ballard (their GOP lobbyist) stepped on a lot of feet and pissed people (primarily David Sacks) off, leading him to get metaphorically slapped by the Trump admin.
So they're frozen out from K-Street in the medium term.
On top of that, a couple extremely active and very wealthy alumni have continued to maintain a grudge and have an ear in the admin
And finally, it's an easy anti-establishment win.
Finally, this is specifically a Harvard College thing - the alumni of other schools at Harvard are much less... let's say idealistic.
That is just shockingly cynical. We're facing a situation where a sitting government feels empowered to go to war against an elite university solely over the speech it doesn't like to hear on its campus.
And your response is to dismiss it all as a kerfuffle over "bad lobbying" and "inter-elite fratricide"? Really?
Surely there are existing institutions of some form or another you'd like to see not made enemies of the state. You don't maybe see a principle at work here beyond your personal dislike of academia?
Fighting antisemitism is clearly not the true motive behind this ideological "war", just as denazification was clearly not the motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; it's just a convenient excuse to target institutions such as Harvard that are unwilling to distance themselves from the progressive left.
Exactly this. It's nothing but an attempt to punish them for not kissing the ring. If only we had another arm of government able to hold this clearly corrupt behavior to account....
Instead of the hubris to hold onto the job until death and thereby subsequently undo many of the things she spent her life fighting for.
A bit off-topic, but this seems to be an ongoing problem for the Democratic party. They just lost an important vote on a budget bill in the House by a single vote, because Gerry Connolly wasn't willing to give up his House seat and instead clung on until he (very predictably) died of cancer a few days ago.
But if the Democratic guy had stepped down and they had a non sick person then the story would have been much better: Republican bill fails because one of their members was asleep and missed the vote.
Yeah, that was a pretty bad decision, but the bigger issue is still a population that votes based on misinformation and 'alternative facts'. Until that is resolved, if it even can be at this point, then this tribal and sometimes cultish behavior is only going to become more prevalent, in turn doing more damage to the country.
Personally, I think we've started on a path to self-destruction that can't be reversed.
Pretty bold to blame RBG without spending a breath on Mitch McConnell, who stole an appointment from Obama because he said it was too close to the election to fill the seat; and then rushed to fill the seat vacated by RBG even though it was so close to the election. Treating the court with that kind of partisan contempt is the reason why the court is as partisan as it is.
I expect McConnell to be an advocate for harm. But RBG could have made a decision that made it impossible for the GOP to flip her seat in the way that she did. I expect people that are ostensibly fighting for the same things as me to act in ways that help achieve that.
I'm a severely disillusioned alum of a couple of the campus orgs really driving some of this.
> Surely there are existing institutions of some form or another you'd like to see not made enemies of the state. You don't maybe see a principle at work here beyond your personal dislike of academia
Hold up - I'm massively pro-academic freedom and autonomy. I'm just pointing out that there's a fight happening behind this fight that has been going on in a subset of the Harvard alum community that has snowballed into this fiasco.
> That is just shockingly cynical
You don't understand unless you actually attended Harvard. It's a very isolating and cliquish experience which incentivizes you to exist within your echo chamber.
Even joining god damn clubs on campus required "Comping" (basically the same as rushing in frats)
Major reason I spent most of my time at MIT and BU or the grad schools like HKS and HBS instead - middle class schools tend to have less of a stick up their butt.
Edit: can't reply to you below, but tl;dr I agree with your callout. I edited my initial comment because as you pointed out it did come off as if I had schachenfreude.
> I can say with 100% sincerity that'd I'd feel the same horror if a White House was similarly going after TCU, or Liberty University, or even Yale
I agree. I'm just exasperated by this whole fiasco and that's why my post is so angry in tone
> Hold up - I'm massively pro-academic freedom and autonomy.
Then maybe you'd like to rephrase your upthread comment which seems very comfortable with a clear and obvious attack on academic freedom and autonomy?
> You don't understand unless you actually attended Harvard.
Class of '96. But really I don't see how that's relevant in the face of the current crisis. I can say with 100% sincerity that'd I'd feel the same horror if a White House was similarly going after TCU, or Liberty University, or even Yale.
It's. Awful. And it's not made less so because some of the students are Zionists, or Palestinian Sympathizers, or Vegan, or whatever it is you're upset about.
> Then maybe you'd like to rephrase your upthread comment which seems very comfortable with a clear and obvious attack on academic freedom and autonomy?
On it! I agree with you 100% - it's horrid.
> But really I don't see how that's relevant in the face of the current crisis
There are some interpersonal relations and egos that got mixed into this, along with a very cynical anti-establishment play. It takes a couple bad apples to spoil the batch, and that's what it feels like has happened. I was a Gov secondary during the Obama years so I bumped into a lot of the people who ended up on either side of the political and cultural divide. I feel digging into that helps explain how this has really snowballed. It's been a rolling crisis for a couple years now.
> It's. Awful. And it's not made less so because some of the students are Zionists, or Palestinian Sympathizers, or Vegan, or whatever it is you're upset about
I agree, but ignoring some of the ego and personal clashes that has caused this crisis means you lose the bigger picture.
>And because Harvard has a lot of HNW alumni, they always try to meddle in some shape or form - Wen Jiabao's best friend funds the Fairbank Center, Kraft funds and hosts events at Chabad, some al Saud branches fund a couple Islamic clubs, a bunch of alt-right leaning Catholic traditionalists fund the Abigail Adams Institute, etc. It's just inter-elite fratricide at this point because no one truly gives a poo about Harvard.
When you put it like that... should I make some popcorn?
When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled.
Harvard plays a significant role multiple fields of study (from social science to humanities to hard sciences), and a significant portion of their grad students are affected by the SEVP revocation.
Furthermore, a number of fields just don't have that many domestic graduate students because the domestic pipeline for a number of fields such as Distributed Systems is almost non-existent, and students often get poached with just a bachelors for industry. Not bad for students, but applied research or part-time industrial PhDs don't exist in the US.
If you've been aware of Trump at all since the 1970's he's always been vastly inferior to anyone who takes academic effort seriously. And he knows it, his whole life, a lot better than anyone else, that's way longer than the general public who didn't really become aware of it until the '70's.
Even though he went to a prestigious school himself he's not the kind to make an academic pursuit resembling anything like truly sensible Presidents. The complete opposite of the league of actual accomplished Harvard men like Bush and Obama. What a weenie, Trump is probably just jealous and hates himself and everyone else because he'll never measure up to people having average-to-above-average intellect & integrity. Completely on brand to whine like a child with the most amplified voice he's ever had. So that's what he's going to do instead of something worthwhile for the citizens.
It’s less a shift in power networks and more about Trump using existing presidency tools more aggressively. Harvard didn’t lose influence, it’s being targeted because it's outspoken and symbolic. The immigration authority falls under the executive branch, so the president can act unilaterally, without needing broader support.
I am not entirely sure what you mean but I will disagree with other commenters that there are no factions at war with each other. If you look at the prosecutors who went after Trump in the past few years, they were disproportionately Harvard Law grads. So that is Merrick Garland, Matthew Colangelo, Alvin Bragg, and Jack Smith. I do think that law schools in particular have cultivated a particular political view and are not independent or nonpartisan but I very much disagree with what Trump is doing.
I think there are almost certainly factions here. I personally think Trump is targeting Harvard because of the above reason. Overall I think the situation is quite bad but that isn't what you asked.
> Can someone elucidate the power networks involved here?
Major players, regarding the Gaza/Hamas issue:
- Harvard itself. The administration, not the faculty or students.
- The US Eastern Establishment, the Ivy League and its graduates. They once ran the US, and still run finance, but are less influential politically than a few decades ago.
- The Netanyahu faction in Israel. Understanding this requires more info about Israeli politics than is worth posting here. Wikipedia has a summary.[1] There are a huge number of factions. Netanyahu leads a coalition. The coalition seems to need an enemy to hold it together.
- MAGA. "Project 2025" is the MAGA playbook. Despite some denials, the Trump administration has mostly been following that playbook.
- Israel's lobby in the US, starting with AIPAC. American Jews as a group average left of center, but the Israel lobby is hard-right.
- Major donors to Harvard. Some are closely associated with the Israel lobby and vocal about it. Others aren't.
- The US courts. Anyone can bring a case to court, and courts have to do something about it.
- Trump.
Minor players:
- Fox News. 23 of Trump's appointees came from Fox News. The MAGA base listens to Fox News.
- The United Nations. Provides some aid, but hasn't been able to do more than that.
- US Congress. Has the real power, but is too divided to do anything with it.
- Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. They're the ones most affected, but lack any real power at this point.
It's not even suggested that they be represented in international meetings.
Fox and the rest of the media network is the main player. They spend the energy required to present an alternative reality for their base, and have insulated their viewers from any discussion on a shared common reality.
Furthermore, they are effectively part of the Republican Party. So they create and maintain a political reality which is purpose built to achieve political goals.
The underlying assumption of western liberal democracies is that participants can figure things out together. You cannot figure things out when you have one side intentionally creating alternate narratives to stymie conversation and debate, to shore up negotiating power for the leaders of their bloc.
Harvard is not an old money university anymore, none of those schools really are. Old money in the sense you are thinking of it is a liability for Harvard especially since the SFFA lawsuit. There isn't a record that tracks that sort of thing so I would point to admissions statistics generally. You may find old money there but there is no backdoor to let them in easily and that's not the vast majority of students so I would not refer to those schools that way.
No it's the fact that it's the exact same phenomenon of a rich club getting their way it just happens to be another rich club. There's nothing to celebrate here as you did in your previous comment.
But they aren't, in this case. Trump and his ilk are attacking academia because they think that universities are all woke. There's no other reasoning required. Leaders within his community have said this in public very clearly. The goal is to destroy academia.
And attacking Harvard, specifically, because they won't bend the knee. There's not really anything more to it than that. Trump is a petty, small man who cares only about enriching himself and punishing his perceived enemies.
Superman fought Lex Luthor in Action Comics #NN and on and on
Most people just default to faith in their native political and religious traditions. So yeah “our guy is better than their guy” and fuck your individual self, you’re on the one true team normalization, becomes the default by sure lack of will of enough people to rock the boat even gently through public debate and discussion.
I mean this crowd can circumlocute an endless set of rhetorical perspectives. Ground truth is this group is outnumbered by Trump #1 and all kinds of other tribal group thinks.
I think its a few reasons/things here...(some already noted in some way by others)
* Trump does not care or maybe lacks the understanding of the concept of a network and influence with entities outside the U.s.
* Trump probably figures that he can use this as sort of leverage against negotiations with non-U.s. entities...but using a blunt instrument instead of nuance, or backchannels.
* Trump is foolishly following the guidelines from the architects of project 2025...whether those folks are educated enough to understand value of schools of higher educatioin, or worse, these architects fear having an educated population - regardless if that population are U.S. citizens or folks outside of U.S.
* Trump is behaving like a child having a tantrum, and is demolishing the "swamp" of current political arenas, and re-building it for himself/his party...and Harvard and other entities (that typically might be invited) are not invited in the upcoming new world order.
* Trump has little desire in any/all of this, and this is simply another stab at pushing the envelope of what the U.s. Executive branch can/can not do...much like a child who pushes boundaries to see how far they can get...and if no one pushes back/challenges (at least in meaningful ways), then they will keep pushing until greater power has been obtained.
...of course, it could be a combination of many of the above at the same time as well...and could be other stuff that i didn't note above too. In other words, welcome to the modern U.S. tyranny. ;-)
The problem is that deals made under duress have little lasting value. The bullied party feels little moral compunction to uphold the terms a moment longer than necessary, plus they will naturally be skeptical of the bullying party's commitment to do so in the future.
> project 2025...whether those folks are educated enough to understand value of schools of higher educatioin, or worse, these architects fear having an educated population
They may or may not be educated, but they're openly and actively against an educated populace for a multitude of reasons, from resistance to their ideas, to "get to work and start having babies for Christ". They will openly say that the first preference for a male school leaver/graduate should be to find a job, not further education.
The Project 2025 people and the Yarvinists agree that elite universities like Harvard are spreading the “woke mind virus” and must be destroyed. They consider their movements a revolution, not an iteration on the status quo.
I downloaded the file (must still be somewhere in my "Downloads" folder with many other forever-unread PDFs). I would suggest for anyone living in the US, to find and read that because this is (more or less) what will happen in the/your country in the next 3.5 years.
(if I remember well it's 150-170 pages - and since I don't live in the US the meme "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That" is spot on).
It's around 900 pages. In NYC we have a study group to go over it -- we've covered just a handful of chapters. But most people can get a lot out of just reading the opening section.
You can understand, for example, most of their tactics about immigration by reading the section on Homeland Security, tariffs by reading the Economy section (by Peter Navarro), and so on. They are in fact hewing pretty closely to the plan.
To be fair, they took the two most average Americans and sent them to the future in the movie. We skipped steps and chose someone the most average person could completely understand today. Apparently, the future is now.
The movie also sent Upgrayedd but left that story arc for a sequel.
Many people associated with the University are pretty happy about it getting smacked down.
Shameless, wrong, and overtly illegal discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and creed, suppression of free speech, even the compelling of speech have all been de rigeur for Harvard for the past decade.
I just wish they would use a scalpel rather than a sledge hammer.
It’s a short but sweeping claim without a citation in sight. That’s a recipe for a flame war but it probably won’t lead to a useful discussion since anyone who would respond is simply guessing at what you’re even talking about or whether you actually arrived at that position through research rather than simple partisan loyalty.
Nice. But none of the anti - trump comments bother with evidence. I hate what aboutism but this is too blatant. Everyone who follows the media even a little bit is fully aware of what OP is talking about. Very ugly things are taking place under the guise of DEI and other such dishonest terms.
Disregarding whatever surface-level motivations Trump might have, let's look at some things attacking Harvard accomplishes.
1. Maybe most importantly, attacking academic institutions is part of the fascist coup playbook. [1] That could really be enough motivation on its own - these steps have lead to the desired outcome before, if you follow them closely enough they will probably work again. Just like the seemingly out-of-the-left-field framing of DEI, of all things, as the big Enemy that is corrupting art, science and the American people itself. It seems crazy, but notice how well it's working.
2. It's another vase to throw in the air, forcing you to catch it, cartoon-style. People who care and believe in process will spend time and energy going through the court system to limit the damage done, but the defenders will lag behind, their focus divided, while the attackers can just keep breaking bigger and bigger things, since they not care much what damage they do to people or their country.
3. It lets them target pro-Palestine protesters gradually starting from the most extreme. The genocide in Gaza can go a lot further. It is mutually beneficial for Trump, Netanyahu and Putin to divide both domestic and international outrage between them (see point 2.) By the time the full scale of the atrocities are clear, arresting and prosecuting protesters for "antisemitism" will be routine. And if you're not willing to stand up and protest, and therefore be removed, chances are you won't stick your neck out when they instate "temporary" changes to federal elections - only out of some extreme necessity, of course.
Isn't a lot of the appeal of Trump that he does not owe anything to these power networks? Others in the Republican party may do so, but Trump has the Republican party well under control, and so doesn't have to listen to anyone. Trump has drained the previous swamp and erected a new one, and Harvard never got an invitation.
>>notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds
You are describing the inability for dissent as normal. In fact, it's considered an international human right. Despite it also being in our constitution, the Trump Administration's actions resemble your comment closely.
I see more than a hundred comments in this discussion already but no mention of Israel. Is everybody trying to avoid saying it?
The DHS letter to Harvard specifically says that this is because Harvard's campus has been "hostile to Jews" and "promotes pro-Hamas sympathies".
In other words, this is the Zionist Trump administration attacking Harvard because Harvard allows their students to speak out against the genocide Israel is waging against Palestine. Clearly Trump is Israel First.
The stated reasons are not the real reasons. None of this is above-board. If you pay too much attention to what phony reasons are stated you will just be lead around by your nose.
The part of the real reason that is made very obvious is that Harvard is not rolling over and doing whatever the regime asks of it, and attacks of the administration on Harvard will continue until that capitulation occurs.
>Harvard is not rolling over and doing whatever the regime asks of it
The regime only started asking such things after large Pro-Palestinian protests took place at Harvard. That's absolutely the root cause, especially since Trump took hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from committed Zionists.
I was recently banned from r/worldnews over a comment which I thought was relatively innocuous. Anyway, that made me start investigating and smelling things and suddenly when you see it, it's hard to ignore. r/worldnews is completely, unmistakably compromised. It's the third largest subreddit with about 50 million subscribers. The situation is so vivid and clear that it's unthinkable that owners are unaware that it is compromised, from moderations to the dominant commenting user base. So what in the world is happening and how did it come to be this way? Spez et al were compromised? How?
The most charitable and perhaps the most rational explanation is that the 'propaganda' effort is impressively, surprisingly, exhaustively grassroots [1] and that's why reddit's overlords cannot simply contain it -- after all, it's real people, very committed and very real indeed. Although I would think that even if this were true, were reddit's operators uncompromised, they'd at least feel compelled to investigate the moderators of the subreddit which has a readership of 50 million, because even if the activity is organic, what's going on crosses a certain threshold of what should be permissible, if only for the richness of debate and discussion. I won't approach the complex topic of whether grassroots led propaganda effort constitutes something that is illegitimate and whether it warrants management, moderation, or some sort of penalty.
I'm not extremely educated about the complex history of Israel and jewish people, though I'm trying to learn more these days. Knowing what I know so far: It is a unique group of people for sure, and 2000 years of oppression, I think, has resulted in a special kind of cohesion that even when scattered throughout the world, they partake in strong self-advocacy. In my experience, this kind of self-advocacy doesn't exist with any other group.
I apologize if my comment reads prejudiced or inappropriate, please tell me if it does, certainly and obviously it is not meant to be.
Trump is also an authoritarian and so is committed to strengthening existing regimes he sees as "strong". Presumably on the assumption that they will be "allies" or at least give him something back. Pro-Palestinian protests are very anti-authoritarian (next thing you know, those same protesters will be against mass U.S. deportations) and so a priority target for suppression.
Though I would not have guessed, it seems more about China:
"Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment. Many of these agitators are foreign students. Harvard’s leadership further facilitated, and engaged in coordinated activity with the CCP, including hosting and training members of a CCP paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide."
Precisely. This administration's concern for the Uyghurs is skin-deep; it's essentially just a justification to punish any unauthorized connections to China. The actual details of the conflict (for instance, that the Uyghurs are ethnically Muslim) aren't relevant to them.
I don't think the Trump admin gives a rat's ass about Jews. It's an excuse for legal action, in the same way that "fentanyl" was the excuse for tariffs on Canada.
You're probably right, they seem to care more about Israel and not Jews (or Palestinians), and especially care about "Israel as a concept" and to use it as a means to an end.
You're correct that Christian Zionists only care about Jews to the extent that the right number of them will be in Israel to be killed as part of the End Times prophecies based off of Revelations. But they are fanatical supporters of the state of Israel because they see it as necessary to bring about the rapture.
This is one part of a large pattern of Republicans trying to end-run around the First Ammendment specifically to defend Israel from criticism. For instance, in Texas they make school teachers sign contracts that include terms forbidding criticism of Israel. Republicans have also been extremely reliable supporters of unconstitutional Anti-BDS laws.
Make no mistake, the Republican party (and half the Democratic Party FWIW) is fully captured by the Israel lobby.
> if you replace "Zionist" with "Jew" you're at Goebbels levels of antisemitism
This is a weird statement. It seems to suggest this as a reason not to criticize Zionists but if you replace "fascist" with "Jew" you're in a similar situation and that doesn't mean people shouldn't criticize fascists.
far be it from me to defend harvard but it's on the accuser to provide positive evidence for their claim, not the defendant to provide negative evidence against the claim.
Which conservative ideas do you think aren’t being represented? The current US administration is a criminal enterprise which is actively destroying the nation.
On the contrary, the issue is that Harvard allowed pro-Hamas students to attack and persecute Jewish students. Harvard failed to protect the Jewish students, even rewarded those students who intimidated Jewish students on campus. Pro-Hamas students barged into classrooms with bullhorns. Camped out on campus and prevented Jewish students from reaching their classrooms, forming lines and locking hands outside of classrooms to prevent Jews from attending classes.
Harvard recently released a 311-page report detailing these issues[0].
It's for this reason that the federal government is withholding its funding: we don't want to fund open racism and race-based discrimination on American campuses.
> Harvard recently released a 311-page report detailing these issues[0].
Can you be more specific about what was detailed in the report and where? Because the things you mention aren't in your linked article at all.
There were protests that got way too heated, but calling them "pro-Hamas students" has me, uh, doubting your take on this a bit. The highlights called out in your article are wholly different, focused instead on campus behavior that seems drawing back from embracing diversity and is instead alienating whole cultures.
> It's for this reason that the federal government is withholding its funding
We aren't talking about funding, though? We're talking about denying attendance by any international student.
Sure. One example in the opening paragraphs of the report: a Jewish student was set to give a presentation on how his grandfather survived the Holocaust and found refuge in Israel after the war.
He was told not to give the presentation because it would "justify oppression."
The report also details Jewish students were called out in classrooms, told they were oppressors, that their history is a sham, and that anti-racism norms do not apply to supremacists.
Protests on campus pressured Jews to disavow allegiance to Israel and the right of Jews to return to their historic homeland; Zionism. Those who didn't comply were harassed and deemed complicit in supposed crimes of the world's only Jewish state.
Pro-Hamas groups on campus disseminated cartoons of a hand with a star of David holding nooses around the neck of Blacks and Arabs.
After Hamas invaded Israel on October 7th, 33 Harvard student groups praised Hamas and blamed Israel.
Harvard invited commencement speakers who blamed Israel for the genocide in the Congo.
The Harvard page report contains all this and more, and found that over 60% of Jewish students at Harvard had faced discrimination.
The administration’s letter to Harvard (which they later claimed to have sent in error) made it clear that their intent is to root out what they perceive as liberal ideological bias at Harvard - nothing really to do with Israel, that was just an excuse.
Whether there is a liberal bias is something I will leave others to debate (and if there is, whether that provides grounds for federal action, given the freedoms afforded by the first amendmemt), but I think the Administration’s actions had more to do with throwing red meat to the base than it did with an factual inquiry
Evangelical Christians are a huge voting block in the US and might be even more supportive of the current Israeli regime than the average Israeli. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude that Israel is controlling the American government as directly as you’re suggesting.
> A staggering amount of American Christians support Israel because of their end times prophecy.
I'm a Catholic but I can expand on this.
The evangelicals believe that the Third Temple must be built for the Second Coming of Christ to happen, and are determined to politically and financially support the nation of Israel to make it happen as soon as possible.
They also actively work torwards the destruction of al-Aqsa Mosque and the rebuilding of the 3rd Temple.
This belief comes form 2 Thessalonians:
"Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God."
The Church Fathers were unanimous on agreeing that the "Son of Destruction" was the anti-Christ, and while there was some disagreance over what St. Paul meant (in Galatians 6:15-16) by temple the majority consensus was that it was referring to the eartly Temple. But, as it stands, the Second Temple was shortly destroyed. Which means that in order for the Second Coming to happen again, the Temple will once again need to stand.
Both Catholics and Protestants are Christians but this is a major area of disagreement between us.
Yes I considered this. for the evangelicals who support Israel, they would not necessarily try to crush the critics in anti war protests. Israel’s war on Gaza does not coincide with the evangelical mission to trigger the second coming.
Are suggesting that average Israelis do not support the pressure campaign against universities, even those who generally support Israel’s actions in Gaza? Seems plausible, I haven’t seen any polling about that.
If you are suggesting that Israeli politicians are not involved with American Israel supporters who are advocating a strict crackdown on speech at universities I don’t think that is plausible. We know there is communication between the military and some influential American Israel supporters.
You are attributing too much power to the Israeli. Trump signed a ceasefire with Houthi last week that doesn't protects Israel: that is, the US stops bombing them as long as they don't attack US ships, and attacks against Israel aren't a casus belli for the US anymore.
The Republican party is strongly favorable to Israel, but since Netanyahou pissed Trump, they don't get special treatment anymore, that's what happen when your foreign policy depends on the mood of a single guy. The old alliance and ideological alignment can mean nothing overnight just because the supreme leader said so.
I am not sure why you think overseas policy going against Israel’s wishes directly means Israel doesn’t have influence in the United States.
I find it awkward you think that Israel is not giving special treatment to the US if the US does not do something in favor of Israel in foreign affairs. Awkward.
More awkward is that you think the US is not protecting Israel if it has a ceasefire with Houthis.
> Israelis are upset at the student protests and are influencing the university to crush them.
That's putting it mildly. Jewish students got beaten up, spat upon and verbally abused just for being Jewish after Oct 7th. No matter on which side one is in the I/P conflict, there is no justification at all to attack random Jews because of whatever Bibi is doing - it's not just bullshit because what can a Jew in the US even do to change Israeli government policy, but also chances are high that the Jew in question doesn't like Bibi himself.
Academia should be a safe place for everyone who is not a threat to other students, the facilities and the staff - and wearing a kippah or david's star is not being a threat to anyone.
Trump is a fool, this new policy is even more foolish, not to mention blatantly unconstitutional - but it's unfortunately hard to deny that he has a point here.
> Jewish students got beaten up, spat upon and verbally abused just for being Jewish after Oct 7th
Actually Palestinians have gotten beaten up spat on and verbally abused. This is documented multiple times on YouTube. There has even been false flag attacks by Israeli supporters dressing up as Palestinian supporters and then falsifying abuses. There has been attempts to lure pro Palestinians to attack Jews as well. OTOH journalists have reported no documented incidents of Jews being spat at.
Even if no one likes Bibi, universally they support Bibi’s actions in the current climate.
Protesting against a country does not make a protester a threat.
> Trump is a fool, this new policy is even more foolish, not to mention blatantly unconstitutional - but it's unfortunately hard to deny that he has a point here.
This feels a bit like saying he has a point dooming Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran gulag because MS-13 exists. You do not, in fact, gotta to hand it to ISIS.
Your hatred is clouding your judgement. It is very clear that the issue of the protests is being used by an American government to pursue a much broader agenda. Israel and antisemitism are merely the most convenient instrument. But since you are trapped in (charitably) a prejudicial mind bubble you can only see this as further proof of a tiny group of people somehow controlling everything...
> It is very clear that the issue of the protests is being used by an American government to pursue a much broader agenda. Israel and antisemitism are merely the most convenient instrument.
There's nothing antisemitc about criticizing Netanyahu's government. I was a big supporter of Israel's right to take the fight to Hamas for a while after Oct 7th, but then it just kept going and going until it became inhumane. At some point it becomes about punishing Gazans just for living there. That's incredibly disproportionate.
At any rate, American students should have the right to protest anything. Free speech and what have you.
you make a good point regarding pretexts employed with ulterior aims
also, I can think of some more charitable ways to engage with the message in question than to dismiss it with unsubstantiated claims that the messenger is 'trapped in a prejudicial mind bubble', and I bet you are smart and can, too
WASHINGTON – Today, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered DHS to terminate the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification.
This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.
Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment. Many of these agitators are foreign students. Harvard’s leadership further facilitated, and engaged in coordinated activity with the CCP, including hosting and training members of a CCP paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” said Secretary Noem. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law. Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
On April 16, 2025, Secretary Noem demanded Harvard provide information about the criminality and misconduct of foreign students on its campus. Secretary Noem warned refusal to comply with this lawful order would result in SEVP termination.
This action comes after DHS terminated $2.7 million in DHS grants for Harvard last month.
Harvard University brazenly refused to provide the required information requested and ignored a follow up request from the Department’s Office of General Council. Secretary Noem is following through on her promise to protect students and prohibit terrorist sympathizers from receiving benefits from the U.S. government.
I think a fair answer might be that this immediate action is primarily about Israel, and Harvard's toleration and apparent support of organizations that the US government considers to be terrorists. Harvard has quite consciously taken an antagonistic approach here, and the government feels it is responding in kind.
Secondarily, it's about the way that elite schools have aligned themselves with the progressive politics associated with the Democratic party. Harvard is the target here because they are strongest, not necessarily because they are the most liberal. If the government can humble Harvard, they expect that all the weaker institutions will fold without a fight.
I'll take this opportunity to mention that I don't think the DHS press release should be taken as "authoritative" on anything other than the government's intentions. As you point out, the administration is being wonderfully clear that they intend to make an example of Harvard and punish those who would side with them.
I'm glad that despite being immediately being voted to a negative score and pushed to the bottom, some people like you are reading the link. If the goal is to understand what Harvard is up against, I think it's really useful to read what the government is actually claiming. I wasn't expecting that many people here would be persuaded by it!
Harvard (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the Ivy League) collects a lot of federal money, this comes with certain conditions around treating people fairly without respect to skin color, ethnicity, or religion.
A regular corporation with the same fact pattern of discrimination would be looking at a billion+ dollar fine.
this is just Harvard losing some special privilges and being expected to act reasonably fairly like any other publicly funded institution.
I think it's fine to ask these kinds of questions, in the hope that the HN audience may include individuals with particular insights. A response like this has the same ring to it as posting a link to LMGTFY, which is disallowed here.
It's called a bill of attainder and it's prohibited by the Constitution. Courts have said this also applies to executive orders though it's not as crystal clear.
He's already done this to the Associated Press for ignoring his stupid Gulf of Mexico rename as well as to several law firms for representing democrats.
No; it’s illegal but he controls the justice department and is attempting to silence the courts. He’s singling them out because they refused to bend the knee. This is not okay. And it is not normal.
Ctrl + F "Yarvin" only returns one comment. Kind of surprised, neutering Harvard's power has been one of that guy's main objectives for what feels like, well, forever at this point. He finally has his man.
And when Harvard sues the administration will call on the over 1 billion in pro-bono "fighting antisemitism" legal work they extorted from the nations largest law firms.
Most the universities will do the thing asked in order to re-instate their student visa certification. i.e. provide intel needed to deport any students that they believe have opinions that are not in the interest of national security.
Most likely Harvard will try to fight it in court and then give in if they lose. It's not likely we see the future decertification continue into the academic year.
This is the country of free speech zones away from the main event in the early 2000s and sending WWI dissenters to jail in 1914. You’ve long pretended to have freedoms you’ve never actually been given and this is hardly new.
More like those freedoms get violated on occasion in the name of national security, because administrations are largely able to get away with it during certain crisis.
Great question, right to the heart of the matter. First higher learning, somewhere down the line, ordinary people? In my small world, I'm very clear I'm anti-trump on every issue. As an ordinary person, how long before I get on some Stalin type radar? If trump lobbies for and gets a third term, will there be an awakening to how far the abuse will go?
I expect some government AI will soon be trawling through the databases of every social media network and assembling a political profile of every US resident. (They’re already starting to do this for tourists and visitors: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2479045-us-government-i...)
Seems most universities don't really care as long as the money keeps flowing. They jumped quickly on the DEI bandwagon and they will quickly hop off too.
Can they really do this? You're telling me this is real and not one of those "just for show" things that have no real teeth and will eventually get overturned by a judge?
By that logic, Trump's orders are just words. The Trump administration obeys the courts - they push the envelope way too far, but it is still rule of law.
That's one person. While it's very important, it doesn't at all mean the courts don't exit.
> order from the Supreme Court to return him.
The Supreme Court did not order that.
Edit: If you object to these things, realize you are helping the Trump administration by spreading exaggerated fears about what's happening. They want people to believe they are super-powerful, unstoppable, inevitable; it intimidates people into inaction. Also, without accurate information, people can't make good decisions and act - you are helping a propaganda campaign (unwittingly). And finally, spreading fear is not what good, responsible leaders - or teammates - do.
We have multiple judges beginning contempt proceedings against the administration, so this is open to debate.
And, there's recent action in the budget bill to attempt to defang judges' contempt powers, seemingly in response.
"No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued"
That is happening, but it's a narrow instance. It doesn't mean there aren't serious issues, but the GGP said, "Checks and balances are just words." Obviously that is not true.
Also, Trump is relying on Congress to pass bills, for example. It's not rule by decree.
I mean Harvard will fight back in court. The courts are last bastion. Once the executive branch stops following what the courts order the checks and balances are gone.
Lol Rubio told Xinis on national TV he was intentionally stonewalling any information to her, and she took it like a bitch and just kept rolling with keeping most their 'secrets' under seal (despite earlier talking big game of exposing them to sunlight).
The courts aren't even trying, they could order someone into contempt, but they won't.
We are in a non-constitutional crazy train territory, which will continue unless the right leaning voters do something about it at mid-terms. We're in the beginning of a very dangerous era.
Will the people who had to transfer or leave be made whole? Even if a judge overturns this it will take time that the students impacted by this will have to pay, regardless of outcome.
Absolutely they have explicit powers to do this. Harvard is refusing to comply with the requirements of the visa program that allows them to bring student into the country so the administration is removing Harvard from the program.
There is little to no chance of this getting overturned.
The truly depressing thing is, a lot of people are actually happy about this action. How did things get so bad, so quickly?
People who lived under authoritarian regimes have long said that things move slowly at first, but after an inflection point, get real bad, real fast. It's one thing to understand that intellectually, quite another to witness it first hand.
Hopefully, the judiciary will block this particular madness, but then again, given the concerted effort over the past decade by Republicans to appoint right wing judges, the odds are not that great.
> People who lived under authoritarian regimes have long said that things move slowly at first, but after an inflection point, get real bad, real fast.
If you want an indication why the US could go into dictatorship mode, look no further than to what is happening now. Dictatorship coups are extremely fragile in the initial phase. The very recent example is South Korea. It only takes a few determined people to sabotage the coup. In the same fashion, Trump would immediately stop if enough people were to take it to the street. So far, the silence is extremely loud.
It didn't. Conservatives in this country have explicitly been headed this direction since they decided to never let another Nixon happen. Not that they would prevent another criminal Republican. But they would ensure that Republicans are never punished for behavior like this. It led to Fox News and Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, etc. The writing has been on the wall in plain sight for everyone to see for literally decades. The people who have been pointing it out and stating this is exactly where the country has been headed are called radicals and casually dismissed. The only reason Romney lost is because he didn't lean into the hatred his base was demanding[1]. Trump delivered what they wanted.
I dont, and instead would build on this argument further.
There is no political winning, at any time in the future, unless the structural issue with information and news ecosystems is dealt with. The best evidence I have seen, shows that news consumption on the right in America is sealed, and has no traffic with the center or left.
There is no future for ANY liberal democracy, if there is no fair debate between its citizenry. We aren’t even fighting for the table stakes of informed citizenry, but we are talking about the scraps of not debating fantasy.
This isn’t even about misinformation; the total consumption of misinformation as a portion of total content can only shift so much, given the number of hours in a day. It’s not the production of more misinformation which matters - it is the championing of misinformation by leaders that makes it a ‘fact’.
This then decides the talking points for debates. The side which has to do research that requires interrogating reality - slower, probabilistic, uncertain processes - is inefficient when competing with a party that can create facts.
The reason that the Stanford Internet Observatory and other content moderation arms are being targeted, is because for all their warts and issues, these teams were trying to ensure a fair market place of ideas, and as a result ended up slowing the spread of narratives on the right. Or potential new recruits.
This is quite literally the appeal to tradition or inertia fallacy. Just because they've been around for a while does not mean they are not facing an existential threat. Every structure humans create will one day collapse. This certainly looks difficult for Harvard and could be their end because there is no divine protection, only the decision that will be made by an extremely conservative Supreme Court and the willingness of authoritarian minded government employees in the trump admin to listen to the courts.
Reality is complex and dynamic, and through all of that Harvard's endurance pre-dates the US, therefore I would expect it to endure a 4 year term of Government. Not to say with a 100% certainty, but I would expect it to with a greater degree of confidence than many other things, based on its history.
However I wouldn't extend that line of thinking to stock markets, superannuation etc.
Tsinghua survived the Cultural Revolution. DU survived the Emergency. Cal survived Nixon. Harvard will survive this
That said, I personally believe Harvard's public reputation is significantly overstated - Stanford has become the new Harvard for at least 2 decades now.
I'm glad we're testing the guardrails by making our country unappealing the best talent in the world and wasting government resources on a revenge tour.
Sure, but it’s still couched in legal theory that seeks to legitimize it. That phrasing suggests the rules need to be changed to legitimize it, which tracks with my understanding but not the rhetoric.
Much of my extended family would absolutely join a civil war on side Trump to get him into a permanent position of power if given the opportunity. Some of them are in the military. So it’s not unreasonable by world history standards that he could get a subset of the military on his side in a coup scenario.
I think people in large urban centers or outside of the US don’t realize how much certain parts of the country truly worship him above anything else. I know many people like this, I have to see them at family events, so you can’t tell me it’s an exaggeration. I’m not sure there are enough to do anything substantial, but the seeds are there.
Trump has repeatedly asserted he wants to run for a "third term" and his base worship him.
His electorate's beliefs are whatever he tells them they are. The same is true for the Republican Party. Trump is effectively free to ignore the constitution without consequence.
You do realize that the last time he was voted out an angry crowd literally stormed the capitol to overturn the election? What more can they do with better preparation?
Martial law will be declared, for whatever reason they can come up with. Maybe the "invasion" excuse again, maybe Greenland, maybe Canada, maybe Mexico. But one thing is sure: Trump will be the last president of this democracy iteration.
This. If Trump is suddenly gone for whatever reason, the succeeding President is going to continue with the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda. Trump may be dumb and stupid, but imagine a US President who is young, energetic and speaks coherently that continues with the same agenda. (Hint: look at DeSantis and what happened in Florida.)
> When a University’s SEVP certification is revoked, currently enrolled international students must choose between transferring to a different institution, changing their immigration status, or leaving the country, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.
It's crazy they're punishing tons of students who don't even have anything to do with these protests
This is exactly how division works. Threaten all and they turn on each other. "Why me? I'm not the one you want! Take them!" It's not so much about the Gaza protests, that's just another occassion to normalize division and mistrust within all parts of society.
Private schools can create and enforce their own rules how they wish. The United States government is forbidden from creating or enforcing rules on content of speech.
It's actually only a 1st Amendment question in one case and not the other. Looks like they tricked ya though!
(Technically it's a 1st Amendment question in both cases in that private entities have a 1st Amendment right to create rules for their own campuses)
In regards to protest though, the activity they are interested in, that is a right of 'the people to peaceably assemble' per 1A.
Non-immigrants are not 'the people' per current interpretation of the constitution. If they were people, they would have all the rights ascribed to 'the people' including right to bear arms. Non immigrants do not have a right to bear arms, thus it cannot logically follow they are [the] people.
> immigrants are not 'the people' per current interpretation of the constitution.
Not true. The meaning of "the people" is interpreted differently from Amendment to Amendment. In the 1st and 5th Amendments, it has historically been interpreted to include non-citizens (even illegal ones!) while in the 2nd Amendment it has been interpreted much more narrowly.
And regardless, this in no way authorizes the government to compel Harvard to do anything. Even in the most fascist interpretation you can dream up, it would mean the government itself is allowed to curtail their assembly. Harvard has no obligations (under the 1st Amendment!) to do any such thing.
I'm not sure anyone can take seriously the proposition that 'the people' is Jekyll and Hyded amendment by amendment, especially when the constitution is completely devoid of any suggestion it is interpreted as such.
Whoops! That was meant to be a 4. But yeah, like a 7th grade civics class (in the US) would’ve educated you on the role of case law as it relates to interpreting the Constitution. Presumably your home country didn’t spend much time on it though, which makes sense!
But the 4th amendment doesn't appear to provide 'the people' protection to non-immigrants. A US citizen cannot be compelled to produce their citizenship with out a warrant, whereas a non-immigrant can be compelled to produce their papers on the spot.
Also the recent Bruen ruling was taken by at least one case law in Illinois [] that applied 'the people' the same as the other amendments (as it was in early American history), when they overturned (from memory) a prohibited possessor conviction. They just came to a different conclusion what 'the people' is and held an illegal immigrant (as applied) was part of 'the people'.
And finally, despite the fact the case law isn't as 'unequivocal' as you seem to think, you still have to get around the fact that the very writers of those amendments believed the rights in the bill of rights were god given natural rights, thus case law can at best reflect them and at worst incorrectly apply them but not modify the natural right. In fact this was part of the reason why the 2nd amendment was written, was because the founders needed a check when the case law, legislator, and executive all applied the constitution in contradiction to the acknowledged natural rights.
You can read here, but in short 'the people' are those who are members of the 'political community' according to certain criteria. Generally this doesn't include non-immigrants.
They sure can! You can choose not to attend them. You can go stand on public property and yell at them.
Under the US Constitution, "the consequences" are absolutely not allowed to include weaponization of the State through coercion, punishment, or threat to control what the public thinks.
Fascist goobers skipping out on their "Basics of Being an American" course lmao
They might prefer to start with certain targets, but all international students are target of opportunity [0] the same way they've attacked people with lawful residency.
As far as I can tell, the headlines are not quite accurate. From my reading, a more accurate description would be that one cannot obtain a student visa to go to Harvard.
So presumably, if someone could acquire legal residence in another way, they would be free to attend Harvard.
Foreign students normally enter via a non-immigrant visa (F1), or rather they are eligible to apply for that visa at an embassy, if a registered sponsor supports it. The visa permits a request for entry into the country for the purpose of study (at a port of entry). The most important document that you need day to day is a DS-2019 and you must remain "in F1 status" in the SEVIS system for the duration of your program. If you don't leave the US, you don't need another visa even if your original one expires, the university can issue you a new DS-2019 annually until your end-of-program date. That's up to 5 years dependent on the category. If you leave after your visa expires you have to renew it out of the country, which is normally straightforward (using the dropbox system).
The government has not prevented foreign people from studying or working at Harvard, they have withdrawn their ability to maintain status while at Harvard. Hence why they can transfer to another institution.
Is it is really Trump holding a 'box cutter' to America's throat, or is it a 'controlled demolition' of an "empire" that presents obstacles for a grand plan for the future of global governance ..
[p.s. bravo to the one who downvoted as soon as I hit submit! Wow, that was quick. Bots on HN?]
Dodged a huge bullet coming to Europe instead of the US. Was considering moving there for work/startup but at this point, I'd literally rather go to China
Anyone who thinks they are immune or on the "good side" of this political movement is naive. Harvard has cranked out plenty of powerful conservatives, but it doesn't matter because their "crime" is that they have hurt the current administration's feelings. This is going well beyond one party winning - this is a cult of personality.
History is repeating itself as a farce. It's not wild speculation to guess what might happen if these actions continue unchecked. It's education now, but it will be lawyers and judges next, and after that it will be leaders of tech and business. Anyone who brokers power.
To illustrate your point, three of the current justices on the Supreme Court earned their law degree from Harvard: Jackson, Gorsuch, and (Chief Justice) Roberts.
the core of free speech isn't if you can insult officers or similar in the larger picture irrelevant things, but the freedom of teaching, education, books etc. And freedom doesn't just means "its theoretical possible" but the absence of suppression, retaliatory actions and similar
As a staffer at Cornell and person who lives in the area, I worry most about losing students from mainland China. Whether this is an arbitrary Trumpism or the lid blows off in Taiwan matters little.
I heard University of Illinois bought a policy to protect against losing cash tuitions from Chinese grad students. Perhaps other universities have done the same.
I think it is more undergrads than grads that pay money, but I think that depends on the field.
For a physics PhD for instance at Cornell you usually get paid to teach your first two years and if all goes right do your actual research on a grant. In my case the prof had written a grant for the work I wanted to do which didn't get funded, I spent a summer thinking about the problem which helped us come back with a great grant proposal that got funded.
I know Masters of Engineering students pay their own way, maybe other departments are different. I remember there being a lot of Chinese graduate students 25 years ago but now I see lots of undergrads.
Trump is acting in the manner of all previous authoritarians: What is good for him is what's good for the country and the laws that align with this are proper, and those that do not will be ignored or changed where possible. The rule of law is anathema to authoritarians, and hence why they detest it. As individuals we might even feel the same about some laws. But in totality, the rule of, law and not by law is the foundation of our society, because its benefits are immense and usually taken for granted.
So now the Presidency is punishing institutions that refuse to create and share spy-dossiers on what their adult students are using their free-speech for.
In the last three months, we've collected many data points which are each each further down a slope. I suggest the slope is slippery, and has a very unfortunate end.
__________
[Edit] Predicting a future that might resonate more with YC folks: "Pursuant to Trump Executive Order XYZ, you must submit regular firewall logs and social-media handles for activity by your staff. Failure to comply will result in losing the ability to post H1-B positions."
I do find it kind of absurd that we invite people to come study in the USA, let them work on a visa at our corporations to gain experience, and then send them home.
That's what "conservatives" mean by "law and order". You obey them so they can put you in your place. They want to impose upon the rest of us, not be imposed upon.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
We basically get two chances if you want to follow the normal procedure. Swing congress during the midterms and lock him up for the remainder of his term and or elect a democrat in four years who will tear up the stack of executive orders and make the rounds apologizing to everyone.
I mean both of those options (minus the locking up) were tried last time. Even if Democrats were to win elections as described, another round of apologies and saying nice things about institutionalism is not going to cut. I felt pretty sure Trump had a good chance of being re-elected from 2022 onward, Democrats simply didn't want to believe that a large part of the electorate are assholes or that they would need to change up their policy/electoral/comms game. Some of them still don't want to believe it.
This Harvard thing is just one example. Just saw a report this morning (Aus time) of an Australian detained, stripped, and held overnight in a US federal prison. She was just coming in to visit her husband.
Who the hell will want to come to the US now? You are going to suffer a massive reverse brain drain. You got a 30% tariff tax, kidnapping of random people off the street including US citizens, blatant and overwhelming corruption at the highest levels, weaponizing of government to target people, institutions and private companies.
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
So DHS revoked the visas for all existing students at Harvard? That doesn't seem quite possible?
Doesn't give them a timeline either.
The best and the brightest from around the world will prioritize top universities at other countries, and this will damage one of the US' biggest attractions and advantages.
I am going to get downvoted and flagged because I will bring up a topic that is not to be discussed here:
From a similar CNN article:
"Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered her department to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, making good on a promise made last month when she demanded the university hand over detailed records on its international students’ “illegal and violent activities” before April 30 or face the loss of its certification."
Okay, who could they possibly be talking about? Right. The Gaza protesters.
Miriam Adelson - $150m donated to Trump, second highest
Elon Musk is not the only one that bought the White House. So there is a genocide that if any of us tech people had some courage we could easily make some pretty wild visualizations of the before/after of Gaza maps, and the current full scale ethnic cleansing of it, but we can't bring it up. We're failing as tech people on this, but so is the whole world.
No, it can't be anyone. Please don't do this. This is about the Palestinian situation. They tried to pressure the TikTok purchase so they change their algorithm to show less Gaza deaths. It is simply about that, and there is also a money trail of top donors that corroborate this. They also made a show of arresting the Columbia Palestinian organizer. They are not looking for illegal Mexicans in the Ivy League.
Yes, the Admin is even more pro-Israel (and by that I mean pro-Israeli gov/Netanyahu) than previous ones. But it's also using accusations of anti-Semitism at these universities as a cover to generally bring these "liberal" institutions to heel (as outlined in Project2025).
So it's not really about Gaza, Palestinians, or Jews. It's about control.
Sure, but do you think that if nothing had ever happened in Gaza, the Trump administration wouldn't have found some other pretext to go after higher education, and foreign students in particular? They're defunding research programs all across the board and are sending people to gulags for having tattoos.
DHS said that in addition to barring enrollment of future international students, “existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
damn, Trump is really gunning for Harvard
not sure what rolling over for Trump looks like, but a lot of existing foreign students will be screwed unless something gives
that's underselling it - they're also making it so every single existing interrnational student has to leave the US very soon, and in the meantime can be kidnapped by ICE.
They can (try and) transfer to another college / university.
But, I suspect, if suddenly all international students transferred to MIT, the administration would simply do the same to MIT. So it would become one big game of whack-a-mole, and the smaller players would just bend over to the rules.
International students are cash cows for some institutions. They wouldn't dare to have that cow put down.
The Trump administration is not targeting the students, they're targeting Harvard. The students are collateral damage.
So transferring to another college will be fine as long as they pick one that has already kowtowed to Trump. And have never posted to social media or taken any action that could be construed as opposition to the policies of the Dear Leader.
> The Trump administration is not targeting the students, they're targeting Harvard.
The Trump Administration is targeting Harvard, foreign students (and foreigners, especially non-White foreigners, generally), free speech, due process, limited government, and constraints on executive power, and a whole bunch of other things simultaneously.
"It's this, not that" is the wrong mental model. It is more like, everything, everywhere, all at once.
Trump was elected roughly on 3 issues - economy, immigration and culture war.
So he has to deliver at least on two to have meaningful legacy. Because of the idiocy around tariffs - the economy at the midterms will be at best slightly above where he got it. So it leaves immigration and culture war. The border crossings are way down - so halfway there, but deporting meaningful numbers will be hard. Which means that he must deliver on the third issue big. So probably he will continue to bash the soft targets and the institutions that are perceived to be left leaning.
I feel US higher education, which brain drains the rest of the world, is easily one of the best strategic advantages it could have for the next 100 years.
Let’s throw that all away because learning is liberal.
The action by itself comes as a punishment which imply that this is indeed great resource but because Harvard was a naughty boy means that can't have it.
I want to note that when Brexit happened EU citizens had about 2 years period to move to UK and just like that get their full rights there and those with enough years of stay had the right to obtain British citizenship. Streamlined process through scanning your id using an app, little to no hassle.
IIRC half of the EU citizens left despite having all those rights and streamlined bureaucracy. My observation was that those desperate or those who ware having their perfect life stayed, those who had other options left UK because it wasn't worth the stress and you future being bargaining chips for politicians.
I bet you, if this continues for some more time USA will no longer receive the best and the brightest. Those have options and their parents will prefer the options where their golden kids don't risk being subject to life changing actions or even abuse.
Oxbridge suffered a lot of collateral damage from Brexit because of EU funding cuts and massive loss of EU staff and EU students, who now have to pay foreign fees (4-5x regular home fees). An increase in fees also made it prohibitively expensive to hire EU PhD students.
The situation is slowly recovering, as the UK has now first-class access to EU funding programs and there is an open negotiation to bring back home fees for EU students. However, visas are becoming more restrictive and the exceptionally high fees associated with them might be again increasing, which is putting off potential new employees.
Besides, I am not sure Oxbridge has sufficient extra spots for overseas students diverted from the US due to its peculiar tutorial system. There are lots of top EU universities that could collectively benefit from this as they are much cheaper and larger: Heidelberg, TUM, KU, DTU, KI, KTH, etc.
Even if it stopped immediately, we'll still get a lot fewer of these people. The US is now a country where anonymous government thugs can snatch foreigners off the street and put them in jail for saying the wrong things. Even if we stop doing that today, what's to say we won't start it up again at any time? Who's going to risk that just to go to an American university? Our universities are good but not that good.
There's certainly an allotment for the rich and connected(Erdoğan's son studied at Harvard and he is a meme for his brains in Turkey, having trouble to understand his father's commands on leaked police surveillance tape. Turks don't say ELI5, they say ELI Bilal - the Harvard boy) but hardy its the majority. Maybe for BS and on some lighter majors, definitely not on the real deal.
Just check papers for ground breaking research, you'll see the names are predominantly foreign. This recent AI breakthrough is heavily done by people from Europe, Israel, Canada and China. That's why the speakers at AI videos have funny accents.
People with options will start avoiding USA unless the have to.
Nope! Harvard and some of the top ivies offer full, need-blind financial aid to all students, especially international. I attended and did not have to spend much at all, coming from a poor country. Many such cases and it is a lifeline for gifted students in developing countries
Be that as it may, look at the names on any random research paper or journal article that originates from any randomly-chosen American university, and see what they tell you.
Yeah, getting the worlds top brainiancs and enticing them with a good education and having some of them build their lives here is one of our greatest imports.
"The worlds top brainiacs" were a huge part of what "Made America Great" in the first place. The MAGA "leadership" is doing the exact literal polar opposite of the stated mission of their slogan (and with far more than just education; wrecking the economy, alienating our allies, destroying freedom of speech, enabling and even encouraging pollution [and trying to even mandate it in California apparently] ... the list goes on).
If Canada wasn't having it's own immigration and post-secondary issues, this would be great. But no, we already shot ourselves in the foot with that...
What is taught matters a lot. Suppose a foreign adversary were able to infiltrate key US higher education institutions and subtly change the curriculum to be pro-communism and avoid STEM subjects.
Suppose a foreign adversary were able to infiltrate the key US institution that determines if higher education institutions have been infiltrated and subtly accuses them of being pro communist?
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the institution that appoints the individuals who run the institution that determines whether a higher education institution has been infiltrated!?
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the… !?!
The beauty of a system where many different and independent institutions compete for students and teachers independently, develop and share ideas and technologies, cross examine each other, and collectively build knowledge, is that they don’t have some single point in the system that can be infiltrated, and all have to compete in the arena of ideas.
The closest thing to a single point that can be infiltrated is the federal government, which can be used to put pressure on the whole system from a point of higher power.
Competition is a beautiful system so let those independent institutions compete without the government playing favorites by funding some and not others.
If you are a Republican and didn’t sign up for this, can you please write your representatives about impeachment? This is getting ridiculous. We’d be much better off with a president Vance.
Vance literally defended the eating cats and dogs lie during the debate. The entire fucking point of this platform is to fuck the immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Or is this actually a surprise to anyone with half a brain?
His defense of those lies was incredible. According to him, it is perfectly fine to make up and repeat fabrications because they advanced the narrative they wanted to push, full stop. The truth doesn't matter, no regrets.
Do you think he believes the lie that he said he knows isn't true and then walked back and talked about as if it was true? Are you the smart person whose been told the lie enough?
Donald Trump is genuinely an idiot and deeply and obviously corrupt. I don’t like Vance, I’m still going to be mad at his agenda, but he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground because he doesn’t understand how fixed income securities work or give away national security to fly in an obviously bugged luxury plane for funsies.
At the end of the day, there are different levels of terrible things that can happen to us, and right now we are staring down multi-generational damage to our country.
The Trump administration is a loyalty-based hierarchy. The intelligent advisors know that it is better for there careers do demonstrate loyalty than actual do anything to improve his policies. This is not rationalists paradigm, it’s a survivalist paradigm.
In fact the reason why it’s so bad now is that he blames his (more intelligent) advisers in his previous administration for his problems.
Lots of people are "intelligent", yet you would never want to be under their rule.
Vance is a useful stooge handpicked by Peter Thiel. If push comes to shove, do you think his Yale degree is going to give him any backbone if he's ordered to do something that violates the Constitution? Did Yale provide John Yoo with one when he wrote legal memos justifying the torture of detainees held without charge in Guantanamo 20 years ago? Yoo was ready to ignore the Geneva Conventions then, and Vance is ready to deport US citizens now.
> he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground
I think you're having a hard time grasping the concept of people who care more about rolling back social and cultural change than they care about the United States being a strong and prosperous country. The tension between those priorities in the Republican party has been resolved. The current leaders in the party, including Vance, rose because they understood that their voters are ready to let go of world leadership, including technological leadership and economic competitiveness, in order to roll back social progress.
If you ask them directly, they'll invoke some magical thinking about how this is going to unleash a golden age of prosperity and technology, but they don't care if they believe it or if anyone believes it, because they don't actually care anymore. That's why they don't blink when Trump talks about backwards, impoverished countries with admiration. There's no contradiction for them. They really do look at a country like Russia and think, yes, I want the U.S. to be an American-flavored version of that.
I grew up in a wildly religious family, and was in wildly conservative areas for part of that time. There are a lot of people who want to roll back social and cultural change for good-faith religious reasons. I think are wrong for thinking these things. However, they still also want to have a strong and prosperous nation. My point is not to say that I want the future they want. It's to say I also don't want the future they don't want. We can meet in the middle, where the world is less shitty, even though it's still shitty.
> There are a lot of people who want to roll back social and cultural change for good-faith religious reasons.
What makes you believe that they are engaging with their religious views in good faith?
I know a great many friends and acquaintances that take their religious studies seriously. I also have met a great many more whose approach is far more cavalier, simply using their beliefs to justify their existing biases and gut feelings, as well as justifying and excusing their own anti-social behavior.
> 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[i] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
+-------
I'm not thinking that Religion is the problem here.
I think you're describing a part of the Republican Party that is now almost irrelevant, one that kept expecting the voters to turn against Donald Trump. They're the ones who thought, what the hell is Trump doing sucking up to Putin? Our voters are patriots who have no hesitation about calling the United States the greatest nation on earth. Surely they're going to be shocked at Trump fawning over a sad sack country like Russia. Surely patriotic voters are going to be offended at the president of their precious eagle scream U! S! A! showing open admiration for an ex-superpower with a ruined economy, zero cultural capital, a laughingstock of a democratic system, and a crumbling military with zero global reach.
That point of view still exists in the Republican Party, but it has been eclipsed by something sadder and smaller-minded. Liberal progressives have long used national greatness as a lever on patriotic conservatives, telling them, look, our "national greatness" comes from our embrace of education, cultural change, new people, new ideas. If conservatives love our supposed national greatness, they should embrace the progressive liberal ideals that built it. Now, it's like the Republican Party has been taken over by conservatives who... decided the liberals were right? It's like they gave up and said, y'all are right, national greatness requires education, continual learning and self-criticism, openness to new ideas and new people, and acceptance of creative destruction, both economic and cultural. They accepted that, grieved, faced the choice with clear eyes, and decided that national greatness isn't worth the cost. They look at Russia and see a country that is marinating in its own chauvinism, and they want that instead.
The Republican party is, in fact, a coalition. When parts of that coalition become alienated enough, and that is very much happening right now, then we have a chance to coordinate with our coalition.
You sound like you don't know any decent Republicans who are really upset at what's happening. I do. They ought to be encouraged to speak up.
It really isn't anymore. I agree that there are many decent "old-time" Republicans, but they've been neutered and/or they've "self-deported" themselves from politics.
Romney might've been able to run and split the vote.
Bush the younger could've put his thumb on the scale, too.
Murkowski says "we are all afraid" [of MAGA].
Many traditional Republican congressmen have simply bowed out and not sought re-election.
McCain is dead.
The only one that I can think of that actually stood up is Liz Cheney.
To use a programming phrase, the country is in an "error state" and has been since 2017.
A lot of the "alienated" Republicans already split from the party. They're no longer in the coalition. The fundamental demographics of the party are different than they were 10-20 years ago. And this is a continuous process.
The fact of the matter is that "the party" is MAGA now, there is effectively no internal resistance, and mounting one is basically intractable. Trump won the primary with 80% of the vote despite "strong" opposition.
My point is, this was the advertisement. If you thought it looked great, you signed up for it. And if you didn't vote for this, but you voted for something ridiculous like banning around dozen people from playing sports, well, I have the same amount of sympathy for you too.
Yes and no. It seems obvious it was the advertisement but I know people who voted for Trump that are otherwise fairly liberal. They were either grossly uninformed, misinformed, or simply _didn't believe_ the reporting about various issues.
The last is the most frustrating to me because there is a hint of the truth there - the stuff reported about Trump _is_ insane. They're doing things so openly and brazenly that there are kneejerk reactions to either ask "is it really so bad if they're doing it in the open" or "surely the reporting must be a lie because no one would be that shameless".
Shouldn’t voters at least try in good faith to inform themselves? How else can we expect democracy to work?
For example - The day after Brexit - so many people regretted voting to leave. They could’ve thought about it 24 hours earlier, no? “I was misinformed, uninformed” sounds lazy and shallow, isn’t it? How hard can it be to spend an hour less on Netflix and an hour more learning about what’s on the ballot?
I'm not buying it. The guy was president for 4 years, tried to steal an election, and before all of that, challenged Obamas eligibility based entirely on his name and the color of his skin.
But you're not allowed to call them low-informed, uneducated, or any slightly negative/offensive qualifier. Otherwise you get the "this is why Trump won" lecture.
> I would much rather that they be knocked down a peg or three, which if it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students.
When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income [0], there's often three main choices on what can be done next [1]
* reduce the quality / variety of services provided -- i.e. cut services, keep prices the same, don't admit more students
* increase prices for remaining "customers" -- i.e. increase prices, don't cut services, don't admit more students
* increase income by getting more paying "customers" -- i.e. don't cut services, don't increase prices, get more domestic students [2]
I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for US domestic students for the same quality of education as before... unless your point is to degrade the standing of the educational institution/quality of the education provided so it becomes cheaper...? if that's true, why would you want that?
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[0]: close to a third of annual income in this case "Over 6,700 international students were enrolled at the institution last academic year, university data shows, making up 27% of its student body."
-- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05768jmm11o
[1]: based on my random experiences and stuff i've read, this is not an exhaustive cite-able statement
[2]: could also take out a loan, but that's basically short-term increasing income
>When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income
It might be wrong to think of the university's main source of revenue as tuition or tuition-adjacent fees.
>I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for
Because we live in a supply-and-demand world.
>for the same quality of education as before.
No one going to university goes there for the quality of education. They do so for the prestigious credentials. If somehow having fewer foreign students would actually result in a lower quality of education at, say, Harvard Law School or some such, then things are fucked up far beyond my ability to care about the outcome or Trump's meddling causing that.
What does tearing down Harvard achieve again? What does punishing visitors to our country who are law abiding achieve again? Clearly it mentions these students can transfer, so all of the little benefits you dreamt up inside your head are dead on arrival. Your perpetual victimhood has a shelf life, hurting everyone you don't like because they're not from here when this country is founded on the ideas of immigrations... you never understood the plot.
> it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students
International students pay full price so they wind up subsidizing domestic students. Many universities were already predicting strained budgets from fewer international students.
> With fewer students applying, there will be more room there for Americans.
The US has benefitted enormously from being able to brain-drain other countries for their best and brightest. As a country, you are much better off offering the limited amount of spots in higher education to smart and driven students from abroad, than to average Americans.
> suppressors are likely to become legalized here in the coming months.
The fallout of reversing the brain-drain is going to take decades to have an impact, but you don't care, because you're getting your toy now now now.
> Higher education is one of the biggest grifts out there.
Look at the man-made objects around you. Every single one of them has been improved or made less expensive by research at institutes of higher education, including the device that you're using to read this comment, the electrical system used to power that device, the vehicles used to transport the people and goods to construct that electrical system...
Maybe, according to your values, higher education isn’t worth that - but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
>Look at the man-made objects around you. Every single one of them has been improved or made less expensive by research at institutes of higher education, including the device that you're using to read this comment, the electrical system used to power that device, the vehicles used to transport the people and goods to construct that electrical system...
Yes, and I fail to see how cockblocking the foreign students could impact that. Education is their side hustle, as is commonly said, and foreign students are some fraction of that side hustle... so how will that affect research? Will the professors and doctors at Harvard who are always scribbling out grant proposals stop doing so in protest?
>but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
I'd call it worse, but I don't know anything more slanderous than "grift".
I'm sorry, but the priorities you've got here are so completely fucked I don't even know how to respond respectfully.
Systematic dismantling of education? No big deal. Shoot guns with less noise? Awesome! WTF? I loose more faith in my countrymen day by day with this shit.
Why do you need a real suppressor to cosplay a pretend political stance? If you haven't already gotten the right size oil filter, just go buy a spray painted soda can from that guy at the flea market that sells decorative airplanes made from soda cans. Heck of a lot lighter, too.
The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties (and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin), and yet it's basically crickets from the otherwise-loud 2A fundamentalists - just like how the first round of Dear Leader had them dropping "from my cold, dead hands" and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
>Why do you need a real suppressor to cosplay a pretend political stance?
Because I'd like to not become deaf.
>The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties
Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?
>and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin)
The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over so much you don't even much bother with it. It's not just you doing that, basically everyone towards the left does this.
>and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
Couldn't care less about cops if I tried. Again, just more failure. We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are. But, looks like my faction has the votes. Going to be an interesting few years... and maybe unpleasant for you.
Higher education is what made America rich and powerful and influential. Many immigrants who come to these schools stay there. Many others form positive links between their counties and the US. International students pay more and therefore subsidize American students. Kicking them out would likely increase the price, which is not a huge deal with Harvard but would be incredibly damaging if say he did this to all universities including state ones
Besides this is just Trump abusing and violating the law to go after his enemies. It could be anyone next including you. Impartial rule of law is one of the core aspects of a liberal democracy. It's one of the reasons we are better then corrupt Dictatorships.
It's like Nixon but worse and more open. What we need is Trump and maga to be knocked down many pegs before they destroy our country (please remember you live here in the place Trump is destroying)
Lots and lots of people accurately predicted this multiple years out at this point. They were continually dismissed as alarmists by supposedly “serious people”.
I've been like fuckin' Nostradamus since early in the Dubya admin just because I skim GAO and CBO reports on big legislation sometimes, can read graphs, take the things Republicans say they want to do seriously, and have a half-decent grasp on 20th century history, including the latter half of it.
There is something I think that a lot of people find very self soothing by just refusing to see what is actually in front of them so that they don’t have to actually do anything about it. There is a certain satisfaction that people get by telling others they are overreacting.
I used to think that the Republican officials just put on a mask and perform kabuki for their Dear Leader. But the signalgate texts proved otherwise. This kind of thinking has penetrated deep into the party. It's not going away. Not with Vance.
The influence and dominance of conservative media is striking. They have sane-washed and explained away things that would have ended 10 other politicians careers. Trump is Asimovs "mule". His appeal to large groups of people is inexplicable. Vance is certainly NOT that. It's open question how much success the Mule's successor would have. Surely momentum and conservative media will carry him far (should that come to pass).
A curious thing about the very article you linked to is how it proved to be so wrong about this:
"Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. "
Now that he's in a second term whose winding course to fruition just about nobody could have easily predicted in early 2016, and totally dominates the Republican party, its base and most of its thinking, the above seems laughable.
Trump looks less like "The Mule" than ever today and even if he can't be replaced by anyone quite like him, he's put into motion normalizations of deviance that will reverberate through US politics for many years after he's out, either legally or through natural causes.
If you've ever waded into ragebaity online discussions, for example Europeans taunting Americans about the lack of public healthcare or basic worker rights, there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk.
Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency.
But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer.
I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China.
All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.
>there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
The entire second part of your comment shores up exactly this notion that everyone else has the US to thank for its standard of living and that the country is exceptional.
Underlying all the things you list: the post-WWII order, the Pax Americana, the military hegemony, the position of the dollar as the World's reserve currency and so forth all underscore exactly the fact that the US is or at least has been exceptional and that the rest of the world has been heavily benefited by it.
That some of these people then took this and spun it into idiocy about cutting off "freeloaders" without being aware that this means having to take a hit to the country's exceptional position doesn't change the truth of the U.S being exceptional and many countries having many indirect benefits to thank it for
Sure, but there are "get your kid to eat veggies" levels of "effectively impossible", and then there's "quantum teleport into the bank vault" levels of it.
This is more like the latter. There aren't many signs of us hitting the bottom thus far.
The ONLY time a sitting POTUS has been politically removed from power by the mechanism of impeachment, or even seriously handicapped by it, was after the GOP constituency began howling at their congresspeople about the egregious behavior of the POTUS. They resisted caring up until that moment, and that was 50 years ago.
The current GOP doesn't flinch when their candidate is found guilty of SA, with a long history of fraud and embezzlement. If Trump approved a simple burglary of a Democrat's office, it would barely make the news at this point.
Not all infinitessimals are equal, just as not all infinities are equal.
Even if it were possible for Dems to get control of the house and impeach the prez, there is no way that Senate will convict unless the GOP Senate goes back to becoming the GOP instead of the MAGA-GOP, which seems extremely unlikely.
Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders but you also don't have 3 republicans willing to break to impeach for doing stuff they don't want (otherwise they'd pass it as law).
> Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders
No, the decision to use executive fiat to normalize dictatorship is not undertaken because of the absence of support for the policy, but because of presence of support for normalizing dictatorship and avoiding the public in-advance debate of the legislative process.
a) You need 2/3 of senators to vote to convict, so you would need ~20 Republicans to get on board.
b) Impeachment is a political action; plenty of politicians can disagree with portions of their party's legislature enough to vote against it without saying "I'd like to burn down my party's control of the government (and thereby my career) over this".
Impeachment (in the senate its conviction, technically) requires 2/3 majority. So a few republicans breaking ranks isn't going to cut it. This is why impeachment over the Jan 6 coup attempt failed even though 7 "old guard" Republicans (i.e., Cheney) voted in favor.
It’s zero if nobody actually says anything. The legislature has the power to reign in the president. They only have to threaten a bipartisan impeachment.
Unfortunately I don't see a route where Republicans vote for impeachment, ever. They're already refusing to listen to constituents, hiding from their elected duties and letting Trump freely crash the economy on a whim.
Even if impeachment is off the cards, is it impossible to imagine that there could be any sort of impact from Republican lawmakers hearing Republican voters that, or other things are not what they voted for or want?
Not at this time, and I don't see it changing enough in 3 years to make any difference. The fear of being attacked by MAGA is still very high, I think the (older) republican leadership has decided to just wait this out.
Impeachment is the wrong tactic at this moment. Eroding support of the less hardline members of the party is key. Call your reps and say I didn’t sign up for this: [specific list of things]
The politicians that matter most are the marginally elected representatives for their party, and they care about the marginal voter in their district. The median Republican does not matter when it comes to impeachment and removal. What matters is about one standard deviation in views left of the median.
Harvard is a systematically racist institution. They even went to the Supreme Court to fight for the right to discriminate against white and Asian students.
Republicans and Trump-voting independents signed up for this. They want to see Harvard treated the same way it treats others.
People need to write their representatives. Volume of responses is what Congresscritters respond to.
Party doesn't matter. Ds need to inform their R Congresscritters every bit as much as any other combination.
For what it's worth, Republican constituents overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the R primary. Any number of candidates would have provided boilerplate Republican policies, but that wasn't what they wanted.
What Trump is doing is what these voters want.
And there's no limit. It's become an illiberal pro-authoritarian movement. It's in-progress.
Pick something you care about and defend it. It can't be everything all at once at all times, no one can do that.
What is the better path forward? Republican voters led by their representative Trump were unhappy about certain policies and events at Ivy league institutions. Voters have the right to feel this way and elect representatives to carry out their views even if this is not how you feel as a feature of democracy. Proxies of the representatives of the voters reached out to a few institutions requesting changes to be made or else face consequences. The institutions said "we are unwilling to make all of the changes that you would like to see because we think they are not reasonable". The administration's response is now to try and hurt these institutions (Harvard for now) by going after their pocketbook.
As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.
Btw, I am a University employee who serves (among other things) children affected by parents who abuse drugs.
My organization employs hundreds of people working on everything from low income nutrition education to researching Medicaid expenditure.
We belong to the University, but we don’t have anything to do with undergraduate education.
This is the problem with looking at higher-Ed ratios like that…there are a lot of good things happening at a University which don’t reduce to “teacher in classroom.”
I don't have first hand experience with your situation and I would imagine that you believe you are doing a great thing for society and I don't want to disparage thats so I don't intend my comments to speak to your specific institution or situation. I apologize if you see my comments this way.
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Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.
I think where we agree is that we need to reduce the social costs of college, one way or another.
But we don’t agree on how that should happen.
The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.
We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.
US College enrollment peaked in 2012 and has been declining every since. It is projected based on demographics to continue declining. I'm not buying that a shortage of slots is responsible for the increased cost. This could be true at select institutions (e.g. Harvard like you mention) but I don't agree that the data supports the overall trend across the board.
Replace "Harvard" with "Trump University" in this conversation, and I believe many HN types would have a different opinion of the policies. The argument is, if educational institutions can't be ideologically neutral, why should they get the benefit from grants, tax free endowments, and a tax funded international customer acquisition pipeline? Especially as they become outrageously expensive debt traps, with worse ROIs.
I don't agree with this international student, and other policies, or implementations, and you can't run government like you run a "move fast and break things" startup, which seems to be how the administration is operating.
But, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and try to separate Trump's execution from the underlying ideological sentiment.
Please. They don’t care about higher education. These aren’t old-school white shoe Republicans. These are the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools. If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power.
I am one of "them" and I care deeply about higher education which is why I am very sad that we could not achieve reform without resorting to measures such as threatening the international student admission process. I don't know anything about the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools but if this is happening I agree with you it is very wrong.
"If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power."
I completely 100% disagree with this statement. My partner is an education at a University and remote learning had a huge negative impact on our schools and student outcomes. US academic achievement has been flat for decades despite spending and pupil rations going way up https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. Public schools in certain areas of the country are a complete failure for every student enrolled https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltim... (I choose an example of a left leaning area but obviously there are right leaning examples as well!)
Let me propose what I see as a couple of common sense reforms. Mandate the availability of pre-k nationwide starting at 4. Increase the school year from 180 days to 195 days by reducing the length of summer. If needed make this optional at first. Allow professors to fail students who have not learned the course material and make it illegal for the department to pressure professors to offer the students a way to pass the course.
In what way does this or anything else Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education towards the goals of the reform you are talking about?
I also don't think I claimed that "Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education". His administration has addressed grievances that I agree with but they have not introduced the positive reforms that I would support.
The problems at Harvard and other high ed organizations are real. They've become pretty unhinged and concentrated, they really need to work on getting back to "open forum for discussing all ideas" rather than the "Open forum for discussing all correct ideas" that they have drifted into. I can see it first hand through my mother, who works at a major school.
That being said, republicans decided to chose an M1 Abrams tank to kill the pesky mice in the system.
In the hiring process for these institutions, until recently you had to write a "Diversity Statement" which was evaluated as part of the hiring process. This was an attempt to keep people with the "wrong ideas" out of the hiring pool. Similarly the H1B process asks you a long list of questions that you are required to answer "correctly" in order to be admitted. If you fail, you are kicked out.
I think the question is which set of ideas are not ok (e.g. clearly "I want to commit violence" is not an ok idea) which set of ideas are a grey area ("I have attended a major event of a US designated terror organization such as a funeral of a leader from a a terror organization") and which set of ideas are ok ("I want to advocate for peacefully advocate for more bike lanes"). There are very strong party affiliations for what ideas are considered ok vs forbidden (e.g. trans rights in the sports world).
I think it’s also reasonable to want to see some assurance that Harvard has reckoned with the frankly racist and discriminatory admissions policy that was well-documented in the filings for Students for Fair Admissions @ SCOTUS.
The point of a diversity statement for the candidate to ruminate on their teaching practices with respect to a diverse classroom, which is a fact of the job rather than a political or ideological matter.
Most people in the course of their job do not closely work with people of diverse backgrounds. People who work at universities will work with people of all backgrounds and abilities. It’s not just about race or gender, but language, mobility, mental disabilities, and so forth. People in roles that deal with so many diverse people need to be able to articulate how in a statement. That’s not unreasonable or political, but just a reality of the job.
To a gun advocate the point of a concealed carry would be self defense which is a reality of living in certain areas rather than a political or ideological matter. Nevertheless it is ok for a political parties to have opinions about whether concealed carry is right or wrong and some would say that "civilized" countries have made gun ownership very difficult because the pros may outweigh the cons.
Likewise the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process and if your response is going to be "this is not up for discussion because it is not a political or ideological matter" well... they are going to disagree with you and if they are in charge might respond by cutting funding and support for your institution. That's just a reality of living in a democracy.
> the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process
Most of these people haven't read a single "diversity statement" and cannot articulate what exactly the hiring process at a university is, and what actual role these statements play in the process. It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them. I'm not saying this isn't up for discussion, but the discussion better be around what the facts are and not the boogey man "the right" created.
At the end of the day the people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students need to articulate and demonstrate that they can do this task. There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers than an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"? They don't have an answer, all they know is they don't like the current process, even though they can't explain what it is.
> It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them.
I think it's fair to be frustrated that a lot of political discourse is driven by appealing to fear rather than discussing facts in goodwill but I'm not sure that's isolated to only one particular party. I do think we tend to notice when people we don't like are not operating in good faith and tend to look the other way when people we do like are not operating in good faith so to someone firmly on one side of the spectrum it can definitely look like the opposition is particularly slimy.
> people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students
I don't remotely understand how this is relevant to whether a particular instructor should be hired or not. If I need to learn math, then I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with. We can take a look at example diversity statements online https://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/_files/examples-submitted-... and we will notice people feel empowered to talk about their sexuality, race, gender etc but they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US" but if you swap words to a new value in the relevant categories i.e. "I am a Latinx queer woman from Mexico" this suddenly becomes relevant to the exercise. If changing the color, sexuality, gender, or place of origin for an applicant is relevant to the outcome then this seems like a discriminatory process (https://www.justice.gov/crt/nondiscrimination-basis-race-col...).
I do think it's perfectly ok for people to disagree with me here and I expect that if their representatives get in power we will see funding and priorities shift back towards more required diversity statements while also shifting to allow admissions processes to take into account things like race, sexuality, and gender etc which is just the reality of living in a democracy.
> I'm not sure that's isolated to only one particular party.
Of course, but I haven't brought up parties, you did. I'm taking an apolitical position from the perspective of an educator looking to just do their job free from interference of political parties. I'm not sure what you do, but I don't suppose you'd enjoy "the left" or "the right" barging in and micromanaging your hiring committee, thinking they know how to do your job better than you.
> I don't remotely understand how this is relevant
Exactly, and that's kind of my point. You are very eager to quote the law at me, but you aren't first willing to spend the time to actually understand the reason for the diversity statements, how they are used, and why they might be necessary at all.
I think that has to do with this:
> I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with.
You are looking at this from the perspective of a student, who view the job of the instructor as to teach. But the job is not to just teach, it is actually to be a member of the faculty, which comes with may other. One of our primary directives is to build a community that is conducive to learning. And how we do this is by selecting top students for admittance based on scholastic achievement, regardless of background.
Turns out when you do this, and you cast a wide net, a lot of different people end up in your classroom. Get past the culture war nonsense and put yourself in the shoes of an instructor of a math class of 100 students...
85 are from the US, 15 are immigrants and speak English as a second language. For some of them it's the first time in another country.
3 of them have ADHD. 1 is autistic. 8 have a learning disability. 5 have a motor disability. 1 is undergoing treatment for a major medical issue. 20 of them are neurodivergent in some way. 30 of them are suffering symptoms of depression. 1 of them is a psychopath. 30 are first generation students. 35 are low income. 1 is trans.
Your job is to help all those people succeed at math. How might this affect a math instructor? Here are some ways:
- Have you chosen your course materials to take into account low income individuals that can't afford a $200 textbook? Are they accessible by people with disabilities, for example are they available in electronic form?
- Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?
- What are your course policies for students with learning disabilities? How do you handle the fact that some students need 2x time than others? How do you structure your exams so that students who can't take them during the test time are able to? How do you handle students who have permission to miss instruction to deal with medical treatments?
The classroom is where the culture war meets reality. Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations they will never find themselves in. But in the classroom, things get real. For example, when a trans student asks you to call them by their preferred pronoun, what do you do in that situation? For most professors it's not a hypothetical, it's just something that happens on the job. So you need to have a real answer for these things, and not a political answer or a talking point.
The diversity statement is a really good way to open up a dialogue about these topics. So let's look at the diversity statements you brought up, and what you had to say about them:
> they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US"
Because the purpose here isn't to recite some sort of identity credentials, but to articulate how one approaches diversity. Many people take the route of talking about how their experience as some sort of minority has given them a unique perspective. If a white male feels they have something similar to say, at least I know I would be happy to read that. Today men are a minority on many campuses and this is becoming an issue. Many faculty I know would love to hear more about that.
But I fail to see anything egregious in these examples. From these letters we learn that people have experience running programs for underserved youth, running a lab that people from all backgrounds join, starting programs that build community, etc. These are all good things that are articulated, and reading these statements makes me want to meet them and ask them more questions!
Anyway, you dodged this question:
There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers that an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"?
If diversity statements are wrongthink, then how do you vet candidates?
>Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?
As someone who has twice had to completely switch their life from one country to another, entirely different one, I'd say that for one, you should give people more credit for being able to adapt and still get the gist of what's being communicated even if it's done through local cultural color, and secondly, that adapting is exactly what these people should have to do if they came to this new country and its schools.
One can appreciate and respect the foreign cultural roots of immigrant students (in this example) without having to bend over backwards to change one's own to suit their notions of the world.
Asking otherwise is no less absurd than having an American attend a school in China and expect local teachers to communicate with him in English, using humor and anecdotes of an expressly American sort.
I think we could nitpick each other's position but at the end of the day we just have philosophical differences so I won't dive into every detail before making my broader point.
> I'm taking an apolitical position
We've been over this already.
Just because you do not wish that your position is political doesn't make it so.
> Your job is to help all those people succeed at math.
Yes. Well our job is at least to help some of them succeed at math because they won't all succeed statistically https://umbc.edu/stories/math-awareness-needed-to-raise-math... "For instance, in 2022, only 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math – down from 39% in 2019.". We disagree on how best to accomplish this but metrics (e.g. PISA, NAEP or any way we have come up to evaluate this) indicate we have not achieved any incremental progress in decades even though cost per pupil has dramatically increased (e.g. student teacher ratio has declined dramatically). So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
> Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations
Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
> There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers that an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"?
It's likely that many of your goals regarding language, cultural, and "disability" (I put this in quotes because some are real and other times people pretend to have a "disability" in order to turn in their homework late) cannot be met in a way that is acceptable to the right so you need to either drop these goals or accept that you are going to lose funding in support if you attempt to accomplish these goals.
"We" are asking you to drop things that "we" consider harmful. Initially "we" attempted to negotiate (https://president.columbia.edu/news/our-next-steps, https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...) but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples of what will happen if "your" side is unwilling to budge on "your" position regarding things like diversity letters in the hiring process in the hopes that the next tier of institutions has a change of heart or at least pretend to for a few years. You and I have a difference of opinion much like I might have a difference of opinion with a fundamentalist christian who wants to use taxpayer money to teach about creationism. I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements. Now that "we" are in power the onus is on educators to decide if this is the hill they want to die on. I still find it very sad that we couldn't reach a compromise that left American institutions in a strong position to be scientific leaders in their space but unfortunately the levers available to political leadership are crude and time is short (I would also argue that "my" leadership is headed up by a geriatric unintelligent narcissist who does a lot of damage when he lashes out but I guess that can't be helped right now).
I hope you have a great rest of your day - I'm done here but I do wish you all the best!
I get flak for hating Republican voters with the general feeling of most people being that voters are not responsible for the officials THEY elected to represent them.
I still haven't found a valid argument for why a voter isn't held responsible for the actions of representatives. Especially if the actions would be likely to occur.
In what way would you like to hold them responsible? If there are reprisals for voting, do we live in a liberal democracy?
Edit: If by "hold responsible" you mean "be mad at them" then yes, of course you can, I can't read a comment section that isn't mostly that, and you knew that before making this comment.
You make it sound simplistic. I mean calling them out, demanding an explanation. You have friends who support this then let them know you think they are wrong.
All these horrific regimes throughout history, how did it happen? The majority of people agreed with it or was a vocal minority left alone because most people just wanted to avoid conflict?
I call this selfish. It's like hoping the problem gets solved later that way you get to maintain your relationships.
Why would you feel the need to state this? Obviously it would and it should. If Trump was a Democrat and the same situation was occurring then Democrat voters should be called out
What Republican voter is facing consequences for this specific situation?
I do appreciate this notion as I read articles of government workers fired who supported Trump (why a person working for the government would vote Republican is beyond me).
Many of Trumps actions attack those that would either likely never vote Republican or can't vote (illegals, groups on special visas that lost them, foreign students, etc)
Most people don't think hard or carefully about politics, and their political views are a very tiny fraction of what they give to the world (this is true even for most people who do think hard and carefully about politics, by the way). Their vote is never pivotal, and their views do not shape any major institutions.
Why would you want a valid argument for holding a voter responsible for the actions of representatives? Arguments have nothing to do with it. Just hold them responsible, or not, for any reason. It makes no difference.
Voters don't really choose a representative. They are given choices. Two choices, of which, let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side". Those choices are created by outside forces. And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want. There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want. So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with. You're as likely to get what you want by praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as by voting. The "choices" are just gonna do whatever the hell they want anyway. Whether you get what you want or not is incidental.
But let's assume you do hold somebody responsible for choosing something they have no control over. What does that mean to "hold them responsible" ? You gonna actually do something? Throw them in jail? Kill them? Probably not. You're probably just gonna say nasty things about them on Facebook. Which you could do at any time, for any reason. So who gives a shit what the argument is? It makes no difference to anything at all. You might as well ask for a valid argument for why the sky is blue. Ain't gonna change the sky.
I want them to think about it because...
"let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side"."
>And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want
What does this mean? It's not even close to being random or unpredictable.
>There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want.
Elections
>So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, do you mean an elected person has full control of their position's power? Then yes, obviously but you can predict what they will do, you are giving them power.
Yes, the options are two choices externally picked. And?
There are consequences that can follow in response to protected actions that don't rise to the level of prohibited retribution.
For example I can give a speech in a public square where I advocate some completely stupid conspiracy theory and I do it in the most offensive language possible pissing off everyone who hears, and be protected by the First Amendment.
That doesn't stop you from inferring from that speech that (1) I'm an idiot and (2) I'm a very unpleasant person to be around and then based on those inferences declining to hire me if I apply to you for a job. Neither idiots nor assholes are protected classes so you are free to discriminate against me. That you learned that I'm an idiot and asshole through my First Amendment protected speech shouldn't be relevant.
If someone lets it be known who they voted for and their reasons something similar could happen.
It's more of an ethical question. Were the people who voted for Hitler bad people because they voted for a bad person? I'd argue that they were. You can't just vote for a horrible person and then say you had nothing to do with the consequences. I'm not the one you replied to, but I assume this is something family related, a la "just because grandpa voted for Trump doesn't mean he's a bad person".
>Were the people who voted for Hitler bad people because they voted for a bad person?
Depends on what they know or heard. The situation is very different today. The internet gives each person access to all the information. I'm sure time can be a factor but in Germany you have more an excuse.
Also, with Germany, the economic situation was used by Hitler and worked to his advantage.
There's also the more controversial take but I've only read bits and pieces and many disagree with this as it implies a multigeneration swaying and ingrained cultural change
Well, it’s not the popular vote but the electoral college. There may be plenty of people in blue states who voted for Trump because they were fed up with democrats having foisted an unelected candidate on them. They would for the most part know that the vote kinda doesn’t count - e.g. if you live in CA or IL. In this case you’re mostly voting to make a point.
So with the current system, that varies. If it’s a popular vote, then I’d say you have a point.
People voting for Hitler wasn't a problem either way.. Enough of them never voted for him under the German electoral system of the time that he never won enough of a majority to become president of his country.
Instead he then used backroom deals with useful idiots and cynics who thought they could use him in favor of their careers, to get himself appointed to a position (chancellor) from which he could become dictator.
The more valid criticism based on the above comparison isn't quite so much against American voters as it is against the cynics, spineless opponents and useful idiots inside the federal political system, who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different reasons of their own.
I particularly note the other republicans in his party here, who could actually stop Trump's more deranged nonsense but are letting centuries of restrained, relatively democratic and lawful political tradition go to shit for the sake of their own short-sighted ambitious idiocies.
People didn't have good choices. There was plenty to not like about the Democrats as well. You can argue who is worse, or even if the concerns are valid, but there are plenty of things many people don't like about how the democrats use their power. As such what was a voter to do?
There are a long list of things, and most people are not willing accept that "their side" does anything someone else might not like. Doesn't matter what side. Most people are not even willing to honestly listen to "the other side's" concerns.
Waters of the US. All the various "woke" issues which harms someone who isn't a minority who sees someone less competent getting business (and then calling them racist when the feel cheated). Immigration or China taking all their jobs. The above is what I can think of just off the top of my head that many people feel democrats have messed up on. (I don't not agree with this entire list, but I'm sure people will shoot the messenger anyway...)
This is not a "both sides are bad" issue. Literally one side was openly advertising a culture revolution and remaking the US into a fascist state and the other side was using policies to improve minority participation in institutions. Even if you were completely opposed to "woke" issues, the alternative was voting for a dictator.
>if you cannot understand your ophonents you are no better than them?
Literally no. I don't understand serial killers but I'm better than them and to use a more relevant example, I have limited understanding of some racists but I'm better than them (in that specific case).
Understanding is only useful for engagement but if a person is being manipulated by lies or exaggerations then what am I to do?
Solve a non-existent or exaggerated problem? Tell them their information is wrong?
People may not have had a good choice, but they had an obvious choice. The status quo of a Harris term - even considering the likely negatives, her pandering to the right and pro-Zionist stance - would have been objectively preferable to Trump. What is a voter to do? Not vote for the greater evil because they aren't in love with the lesser evil.
They strongly disagree. This is not a debate here - I didn't vote for Trump for a number of reasons. However I make an effort toiundertand because that is the first step to try to figure out how to win. When you just name call you ensure you lose
The Democrats didn't "just name call," though. They had a platform and everything. Meanwhile no one name calls more than Trump. His party is the party of "fuck your feelings" and "empathy is a sin" after all.
What you're telling me is people were willing to let this happen, and some even welcomed it simply because they got their feelings hurt. So they're petty, cruel and willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. But we already knew all of that.
What about the Dems who primaried Hillary and Biden, ruining the 2016 and 2024 elections? All they had to do was pick someone at least mildly likable and not so old that they'd bomb a 2nd election.
> I still haven't found a valid argument for why a voter isn't held responsible for the actions of representatives. Especially if the actions would be likely to occur.
Does that apply to Gaza as well? Or is it just when people you don't like vote?
There is a reason we don't do this, why we didn't punish everyone who voted for Hitler etc.
That does sound a bit iffy. Not to mention that the ability to vote for who you want without repercussions is rather important to a democracy.
Of course if someone loudly states who they voted for they should not be surprised someone else calls them out on it. After all what is voluntarily giving up anonymity, if not an act of support?
Curtis Yarvin really needs to become a household name in a know-thy-enemy sort of way.
That should've happened back when J.D. Vance was even announced as Trump's VP pick. That should've happened even more back when Yarvin attended Trump's inaugural gala as a guest of honour.
No work of fiction prepared me for the most influential "intellectual" to be a dude with a Substack blog that acts as a how-to guide on how to overturn a democracy, which is then followed by the most powerful country in the world a full election cycle after it started being written.
Lol no. White Americans are upset that theyre being held responsible for our racist and bigoted past.
Trump is a result of white Americans having to deal with our racist past and the reaction.
Unfortunately nobody likes to be told their success is built on slavery and theft, so we wind up with this wild backlash.
This is a tantrum from white Americans who don't want to be called racist, transphobic, even though they are.
A month or two ago a podcast, I believe Radiolab, straight up asked the woman who was responsible for many of the book bans in the US. Her reply was seriously that she didn't want her kids to feel bad for what their ancestors did.
It's seriously just a tantrum from white Americans who want to deny our history. That's the most American thing I can possibly imagine.
I wish I was kidding but that's really what it is. White Americans get suuuuper upset if you bring up these things.
Remember when Hilldog called trump supporters "deplorables" and his ratings shot up?
They chose transphobia and xenophobia over intellectualism. Eggs were just an excuse to nudge them in the way their amygdalae wanted to go. See: Trump telling his base to suck it up on egg prices, and suddenly no one cares anymore.
Americans can afford food. We are nowhere close to 19th century french peasant levels of problems.
Imagine throwing 300 years of democracy and tradition out the window because food prices went up 30%. It went up all over the world but America is the only place that is actively throwing bricks through our own windows.
reads more like a childish temper tantrum than any coherent political move.
Newt Gingrich dropped the famous "feels over reals" line on CNN.
"You have your facts on the left and we have our facts on the right" is basically what he said. Along with "If people feel one way then that's real." He isn't wrong, but he openly admitted to manipulating people to get them to feel certain ways.
The name is as dumb as the movement. Do they not realize that the word “enlightenment” has the word “light” right there inside it? It’s like asking for cold hot water.
I find Trump's behavior to be incoherent. In some quarters he's virtually an anarcho-capitalist. In others, like this, he's anti-capitalist, intensely regulating a private business for no actual benefit.
Because he's not either of those things. He's a self serving tyrant. He has no philosophy of governing the state because he doesn't care about governing the state.
There is no coherent ideology. Only what he thinks is good for him at the present moment, which may in some cases be influenced by the most recent person he spoke with.
He doesn't conform to a political ideology, everything he does is for personal benefit/gratification and punishing his enemies. In this case Harvard didn't capitulate to his oversight demands.
The HN crowd here? A mixture of 'I told you so' posts, some fascists posting with glee that their perceived enemies are getting kicked in the knees and probably a few centrists desperately still trying to find a way to spin it in a positive manner.
The people running Y Combinator? They'll donate a few million to the Trump fund, maybe donate a jet or two and hope that gets him to stop for a little bit while claiming this 'isn't what we stand for' and 'i can't believe this happened (to us)'.
Make no mistake, they have no problem with these decisions until it has direct and material impact on them. That's why they invite the people directly responsible for this to their AI Startup school and give them privileged speaking opportunities. They don't care nor do they think that far into the future. Hell, you can go to the AI startup school page now and see them sharing the AI Ghibli shit [1]
Careful what you wish for, the last change to the US flag appears to have been accomplished through an executive order. If isn't a red field with a gold T in the middle come July, I'll be moderately surprised.
As always, a reminder that this administration has Silicon Valley money and people up and down its roster. The founders should refuse to take money from the VCs that support this regime, and the engineers should refuse to work for portfolio companies. Things will change quite rapidly if that becomes the norm.
can't wait to hear what all those earnest "Worried About Free Speech In Universities" right wingers will have to say about this, now it's just not getting heckled for being an arsehole
> student records that can be used to determine if a student visa holder has violated their visa
What do they need from Harvard to determine if an individual has violated their visa? Does the administration not have a list of students on a visa? (Surely they do, given that's their job.) Do they not have evidence of a crime? (Surely they do, otherwise there's no problem. But also apparently not, because they'd just use that.) What's missing?
"What do they need from Harvard to determine if an individual has violated their visa?"
Because the administration has chosen to include define a range of activity which is not obvious from other sources as incompatible with visa status, including membership in certain student organizations.
> Do they not have evidence of a crime?
"Crime" is not the issue, and, no, they don't, that's the problem -- they want information from Harvard with no basis other than the fact that students are on a visa, so that they can use it for fishing expeditions for excuses to deny visa status.
> What do they need from Harvard to determine if an individual has violated their visa? Does the administration not have a list of students on a visa? (Surely they do, given that's their job.) Do they not have evidence of a crime? (Surely they do, otherwise there's no problem. But also apparently not, because they'd just use that.) What's missing?
None of that really matter Harvard is required to report this data to maintain good standing in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Failure to do so can result to removal from the program and as such the ability to bring people in on student visas. That is the path they are attacking. Harvard has also been very public about it's refusable to comply with the legal requirements of the program so it's a pretty slam dunk case.
I think Harvard just didn't think the administration would actually follow through.
If laws were broken the DOJ can get a warrant for the evidence, if they believe it exists. Blanket requests for all information about students is unconstitutional and should be resisted.
> The issue here seems to be that Harvard is not turning over student records that can be used to determine if a student visa holder has violated their visa.
That's a falsehood. There are no visa conditions for "nver attend a meeting of a club the President doesn't like."
Even if there were, that would be blatantly unconstitutional.
Can't DHS just look at local court records for this sort of thing? I imagine Harvard turns over evidence to the police and the courts when there's suspicion of a crime.
Well if it was a decision made by Harvard after serious deliberation and years of prep one could try to argue in good faith about the possible positive effects. Since this seems to be retaliation by the current admin due to Harvard's resistance to turning over vast amounts of records on intl. students... I think people are being less optimistic. I am curious, what do you think is beneficial about this? Please feel free to offer your perspective as well.
Maybe they think Harvard will replace international students with american ones? Poor foreign workers are taking away our jobs, and rich foreign students are taking away our education argument??
I almost preempted this argument in my comment! You are raising what I believe will be the spin for a lot of people. Ultimately I'll just say that intl. students enrich the intellectual experience and breadth within Harvard, for all students. But somehow I think that argument will fall flat for the people who are already trying to find justifications for this move.
Harvard has been extraordinarily badly-behaved for decades. The state is applying what pressure it can to force the Harvard administrators to reconsider such behavior. I fail to see what’s so revolting about such a strategy.
Off the top of my head: Harvard has been ranked last in FIRE’s freedom of speech rankings; has allowed an authoritarian intellectual monoculture to calcify over the past 2 decades; has allowed its administration to balloon in cost, headcount, and power relative to its students and faculty; has repeatedly allowed (and even supported) violent and disruptive protests on its campus; has elected an unqualified plagiarist to its office of president due to her group affiliations rather than her merit and qualifications; has allowed that same (thankfully now ex-)president to clandestinely attempt to destroy the career of a faculty member whose research findings she disliked; has discriminated against students of a particular group in terms of admissions; etc.
I don’t particularly want to be funding an institution which behaves like that, so I’m glad this administration is pressuring it to do better in order to enjoy the public’s largesse.
My two cents, is that people who have been paying close attention to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict know that this stuff has been going on for decades and nobody cared about it until CCP owned TikTok magnified its impact among the young to epic proportions. I think this is a deliberate ploy to take control over leftist politics by building popular support to do a mass purge of jews and replace them with CCP promoted proxies.
Trump: I’m dumb and want to make everyone else dumb too so I can be the smartest among the dumb dumbs. I know! I’ll prevent the best and brightest from abroad who pay full tuition to attend the best American universities because I’m a xenophobe. I’m so smart!
If that was the case, this would be applied to every university. You can't be that naive to believe Trump wants to focus on our own people given how he's ravaged social safety nets.
Honestly I'm just mad at Harvard, they're playing chicken with their students future to try and one-up Trump. They should just end their DEI programs and comply with federal law, it's literally that simple.
For my entire life Republicans have been too scared to do anything that may hurt the economy, and so while Democrats took over major institutions by banning their competition, Republicans just rolled over. It's good to see they're actually standing up for themselves this time around
Academia let itself get too political these last 10 years and deserved some kind of reckoning for it, yet somehow this manages to be so shameless that it makes academia look like the good guys standing up to an oppressive regime.
Which means Harvard leadership actually has more reputation to gain by fighting this than by backing down, very similar to all those tariffed countries.
