Latest news with #Trumpists
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chris Hayes: Trump's attacks on Harvard are part of the administration's wider war on knowledge
This is an adapted excerpt from the May 27 episode of 'All In with Chris Hayes.' The Trump administration is trying to put Harvard University, the nation's oldest college, out of business. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that the White House intends to order all government agencies to cut ties with the school, canceling federal contracts totaling an estimated $100 million. That is in addition to the billions of dollars in research funding that the administration has already frozen at the university. Last week, the White House also halted Harvard's ability to enroll international students, which The New York Times reports could affect more than a quarter of the student body. (A federal judge has since temporarily paused Trump's order.) People desperately want to come to the U.S. to study because we offer the gold standard in terms of higher education. It's one area of genuine American exceptionalism. International students are a huge boon to American universities. According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, during the 2023–2024 academic year, 1.1 million international students at American colleges and universities contributed more than $43 billion to the U.S. economy. For all the complaints about our trade deficit with other countries, one place where we have an enormous trade surplus with the rest of the world is in higher education. But no one in this administration actually cares about that. This is all just punishment for Harvard after it rejected the White House's demands, including an order to install a third party to audit 'programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.' To be clear, antisemitism is a real and pernicious problem in America, but by now, it is painfully obvious that it is just a convenient rhetorical weapon for Donald Trump and his allies to use to gain full control of universities. They want to rewrite the school's curriculum in a way that is favorable and deferential to Trump and his worldview, and the president wants the most powerful and legendary institution in higher education to bend the knee to his whims. It can be difficult to root for an elite institution like Harvard with a $53 billion endowment, but this attack on the university isn't happening in a vacuum. It is the latest escalation in the administration's battle to destroy all independent sources of knowledge and fact-finding in our free and open society. As the writer Adam Serwer put it in his latest piece for The Atlantic, 'By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that.' 'It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed,' Serwer wrote. 'Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.' To that end, we are seeing the administration run this playbook toward any independent source of authority. For example, the White House threatened to pull $400 million in federal grants for Columbia University. The university caved to the pressure, but last week the administration announced new trumped-up charges of civil rights violations against the school stemming from campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza. In a new piece for the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, quotes one expert who taught at both Columbia and Harvard as saying, 'I've studied McCarthyism's impact on higher education for fifty years … What's happening now is worse.' Cobb adds, 'The biggest mistake that some universities have made in responding to the White House has been to presume that it is operating in good faith. It is not.' But it is not just attacks on higher education. Everywhere you look, this administration is targeting independent sources of authority that could challenge Trump. In addition to eviscerating the U.S.' best-in-the-world biomedical research, the administration is also undermining existing knowledge about public health. On Tuesday, without citing any new evidence or studies, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. overrode typical procedure and announced that the government would no longer recommend annual Covid boosters for pregnant women and healthy children. In a podcast released on Tuesday, Kennedy also threatened to block government scientists from publishing their research in top medical journals, such as The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. In addition to the moves against public health and schools, we are also seeing an escalation of Trump's attacks on news media, probably best exemplified by the president's $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News over an interview '60 Minutes' held with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. First Amendment experts have called the lawsuit meritless, but Paramount, which owns CBS, is already appearing to prepare to settle. Earlier this month, the president and CEO of CBS News, Wendy McMahon, resigned, telling staff in a memo that 'it's become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.' The executive producer of '60 Minutes,' Bill Owens, also resigned, citing a loss of independence at the network. During a recent commencement address at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, journalist Scott Pelley, who has been at '60 Minutes' for more than two decades, delivered a warning to graduating students: Why attack universities? Why attack journalism? Because ignorance works for power. First, make the truth-seekers live in fear. Sue the journalists and their companies for nothing. Then send masked agents to abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights, and send her to a prison in Louisiana, charged with nothing. Then, move to destroy law firms that stand up for the rights of others. With that done, power can rewrite history. Not every outlet is capitulating to Trump. On Tuesday, National Public Radio announced it is suing Trump over his attempts to gut funding for the independent outlet through an executive order. We are seeing this type of resistance everywhere. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who was initially elevated to that job by Trump, is fighting the president's pressure campaign to remove him from his position. In a commencement speech at Princeton University on Sunday, Powell called on the next generation to preserve our democratic institutions. The most important thing for everyone to understand about the ongoing existential battle to preserve our American birthright of a free and open society is that all these institutions — and the vast sources of independent knowledge contained within them — are more powerful than one petty, addled man. That's the real silver lining here: Trump's attacks are so reckless and transparent that they've left our independent institutions with no choice but to fight back. This article was originally published on
Business Times
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Business Times
The war on ‘woke' universities will slow US innovation
It is hard not to sympathise with the Trump administration's criticisms of US universities. The ivory tower has been badly corroded in recent years by the twin evils of the 'woke mind virus' and administrative bloat. Some academic disciplines – all those 'studies' – are fixated on the evils of the West. The administrative class has multiplied so fast that some universities have more administrators than professors. The authorities have failed to stand up to mobs who threaten Jewish students or silence visiting speakers. And for all this, some institutions have the gall to charge undergraduates upwards of US$100,000 a year! Yet universities are far more than just incubators of wokery. They are also powerful engines of US prosperity – central nodes in the world's most successful innovation system, magnets for global talent, generators of patents and products, and linchpins of the scientific-industrial complex. The danger is that a prolonged stand-off between the administration and academia – and it looks as if both sides are digging in – will damage these engines even as other countries, particularly China, are building powerful engines of their own. Why does America lead the world in a wide range of foundational technologies from information technology to artificial intelligence to genetics? Why does it boast the lion's share of the world's Big Tech companies? Why does it rejoice in more immigrant entrepreneurs than anywhere else? Why is it awash with patents and new products? The answer to all these questions lies in its universities. Universities are at the heart of the most productive US regions, such as Silicon Valley and Raleigh-Durham. They are umbilically linked to its most successful companies, such as Google. They suck in the cleverest people in the world: More than half of Silicon Valley startups were founded by immigrants, many of whom first arrived on US shores as university students. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up The most hard-headed Trumpists might reply that America has paid too high a price for its success in brain-intensive technologies. University cities have pulled so far ahead of the rest that they almost belong to a different country. Amazon has killed Main Street while Facebook has rotted the American mind. Yet America's universities are as vital to its manufacturing success as to its tech success. The World Management Survey demonstrates conclusively that one reason for America's outstanding productivity is the quality of its management. Harvard Business School continues to lead the world in producing captains of industry; about 20 per cent of US undergraduates study business as either a major or a minor. The commercial triumph of America's universities is deeply rooted. The land-grant universities, founded in the 1860s and 1890s, were designed to focus on agriculture and technology. During the Cold War, the government poured money into Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) research and education to beat the Soviet Union. From the 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans fell in love with startups and science parks. But the triumph also depends on a delicate balance between various players – the government, businesspeople, philanthropists and academics. The state plays an arms-length role in funding – it provides billions in research grants, but distributes them through professional bodies and academic competition. The universities fund themselves through a variety of sources (including gifts and fees), rather than just relying on the government. Professors are left as much as possible to pursue their own ideas, but are provided with grants, facilities and marketing assistance if they want to turn their ideas into products. The Trump administration threatens to destroy this delicate balance by withholding billions of dollars in federal funding, unless the recipients comply with a long and open-ended list of demands – in effect, nationalising America's elite universities. Harvard has rightly refused to comply with this demand, putting US$9 billion worth of funding at risk, and is suing the government. Dozens of other universities show signs of following in its wake. The impasse between government and academia could not have come at a more dangerous time. Every ambitious country has dreamt of creating its own version of Silicon Valley. China in particular has pulled off an extraordinary revolution by pouring money into higher education, particularly in Stem, and sending their own scholars to study in the US. Competition has already eroded America's lead in innovation. The number of US universities in the top 20 in the Times Higher Education university ranking is declining. China accounts for a higher proportion of the world's patent applications than the US (25 per cent versus 21 per cent in 2021) and a higher proportion of publications in scientific journals (27 per cent versus 13 per cent). China is catching up with the US in terms of world-class economic clusters, with three in the world's top 10 compared with America's four. Chinese researchers are at the forefront in a growing number of areas, including additive manufacturing, blockchain, computer vision, genome editing, hydrogen storage, self-driving vehicles and hypersonic missiles. Other countries see Donald Trump's clodhopping ways as a chance to weaken America's innovation leadership still further: France has launched a noisy campaign to attract top US scientists (Aix Marseille University is even contemplating creating a new category of 'refugee scientist') and Britain, with a disproportionate share of the world's best universities, is doing the same thing more subtly. The Trump administration is constantly pulled this way and that between its Jacksonian instincts of railing against the 'liberal' elites and its Hamiltonian desire to achieve national greatness by state activism. Giving into its Jacksonian instincts will no doubt give the Trump base a thrill. Before becoming vice-president, Senator JD Vance's introduction of a Bill to raise the tax on large endowments, from 1.4 per cent to 35 per cent for universities with endowments larger than US$10 billion, sent the right side of the social media world into paroxysms of ecstasy. Vance said it would drain funds that would otherwise be used for 'DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and woke insanity'. But it will also seriously damage America's ability to compete both economically and militarily with other economic blocs, particularly China. There are far better ways of dealing with the woke mind virus than reducing funding to scientists and technologists, who probably wished that the virus had never been hatched in the first place. Trump and Vance should eschew the fun and go with Hamilton over Jackson. BLOOMBERG
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Harvard shows resistance is possible. But universities must join forces
Harvard is refusing the plainly illegal demands by the Trump administration. That sends an important signal: resistance is possible. But universities must realize that the government is adopting a divide-and-rule tactic: they should collaborate on a shared litigation strategy, take a common approach in getting the public on their side, and do everything possible to have Congress push back against Trump treating money allocated by the legislature as if it were a private slush fund to be used for political blackmail. Some faculty have already begun to unite. In principle, not just progressives, but self-respecting conservatives – if any remain – should be responsive to such a three-pronged strategy. It has become abundantly clear that Trump 2.0 is using a moral panic about 'woke' and pro-Palestinian protests as pretexts to subjugate institutions posing multiple threats to aspiring autocrats: universities constitute an independent source of information; they encourage critical thinking; they gather in one spot young people easily outraged by injustices. Of course, like all institutions, they have flaws; but, unlike, let's say, businesses, they give wide latitude to criticism and position-taking (if you think colleges are censoring speech, try some political oratory on the factory floor or in the boardroom). Some academic leaders think they might mollify the Trumpists, or at least get a better deal, if they concede points about allegedly widespread antisemitism, as well as supposed indoctrination and discrimination. Self-criticism should of course be part of university life, but trumpeting on page-one op-eds that there are deep structural problems with higher education is naive at best. For one thing, there are no simple generalizations about the roughly 4,000 colleges and universities in the US; even what are usually called 'elite universities' are hardly all the same. Yet far too many academics are uncritically repeating the right's propaganda about a 'free speech crisis' and conservatives feeling marginalized. Is it perhaps relevant that the most popular majors remain business and health sciences – subjects hardly taught by dogmatic lefties hell-bent on silencing dissent? Is it just about possible that some much-cited statistics – that many more professors vote for the Democrats – have more to do with the GOP having turned itself into the anti-science party, rather than professors all wanting to corrupt the youth with socialist nonsense? Even those worried about what the government's letter to Harvard called 'ideological capture' might balk at the proposed remedy: what can only be called totalitarian social engineering in the name of assuring 'viewpoint diversity'. The government seeks to subject an entire university to an ideology audit: both faculty and students would have to be tested for 'viewpoints' – whatever that means exactly. If an imbalance were to be found, departments would have to bring in what the Trumpist education commissars call a 'critical mass' of faculty and students with viewpoints deemed politically correct by the commissars. This is not just an attack on academic freedom; it is a license to investigate individuals' minds and consciences (could a student be hiding a secret interest in Judith Butler? Only extensive interrogations would reveal the truth!). Might students be encouraged to denounce their professors, in ways already popular on rightwing websites? Might professors in turn be encouraged to tell on their charges (he looks preppy, but he once wrote an essay on gender ideology)? Besides the obvious contradiction of violating freedoms in the name of freedom, there is the rank hypocrisy of demanding 'viewpoint diversity' while seeking to outlaw any diversity initiatives not based on political ideology. And the practical enforcement of viewpoint diversity would probably also be a tad uneven: no economics department would be forced to hire Marxists; evangelical colleges are unlikely to be led towards balance by having to bring in a 'critical mass' of faculty promoting atheism. Trumpists are trying hard to frame university leaders as feeling 'entitled' – one small step from calling them welfare queens and kings parasitic to the taxpayer. Education, they insinuate, is a luxury for spoilt kids, research a pretext for faculty to impose loony personal beliefs. If one accepts this framing, an otherwise inexplicable idea starts to make sense: Christopher Rufo, the much-platformed strategist of the attacks on academic freedom, wants to 'reduce the size of the sector itself'. Why would one want to deny opportunities for kids to learn and for research to advance, unless one fears critical thinking? Or unless one has a completely warped view – Musk-style – of how science actually works? Or unless one exhibits willful ignorance of the fact that the government does not just shovel cash to universities so they can organize more pride parades, but that it concludes contracts for research after highly competitive selection processes? Clearly, the Trump administration is in the business of unprecedented national self-harm. Those who think of themselves as 'conserving' must ask whether they really want to be part of an orgy of destruction. Those who say they worship the Founders must wonder whether they can tolerate daily violations of the constitution, as Trump works to impound funds approved by Congress (for research, among other things). Self-declared free speech defenders must question why they would support an administration inspired more by Mao than by Madison. And those who just want to hold on to basic decency must ask whether they can accept a proposition along the lines of: 'We'll prevent cures for cancer, as long as Harvard doesn't hire mediocre conservatives.' As my colleague David Bell has recently put it, if this proposition becomes acceptable, it will be the triumph of malignancy in more than one sense. Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University.
WIRED
16-04-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
Marco Rubio Kills State Department Anti-Propaganda Shop, Promises ‘Twitter Files' Sequel
The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit that called out Russian and Chinese propaganda campaigns and became a MAGA boogeyman, has been shut down. Team Trump is promising that it's just the start of an examination of alleged censorship during the Biden administration—and the first Trump administration, too. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move 'a crucial step toward keeping the president's promise to liberate American speech' in an op-ed for the right-wing site The Federalist. Critics say it's part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to withdraw from a decades-long contest of ideas and information with America's adversaries. In early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the Justice Department task force on covert foreign influence and radically narrowed enforcement of the law that outlawed secretive propaganda for overseas regimes. The Trump administration gutted the parent organization of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which aimed to provide news and demonstrate the value of a free press in regions of the world where both were often in short supply. Together, according to the Washington Post, they reached a weekly audience of 420 million people in 63 languages. 'Most shameful moment at the Department since the purges of the 1950s,' one State Department official, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the press, tells WIRED. To Trumpists, the push to publish American-style news around the world was an outdated waste of taxpayer money, and attempts to combat disinformation abroad, even if their origins were benign, were really attempts to silence right-wing Americans. The Global Engagement Center, or GEC, became a particular fixation. 'The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,' Elon Musk posted in 2023. (MIT Technology Review first reported the news of its closure.) ('The allegations of 'censorship' against the GEC are as fictitious as the conspiracy theories spun by various bad-faith actors around international broadcasting and other long-standing institutions of American soft power now under attack,' said the State Department official.) First established during the war on terror to counter and keep tabs on militant messaging overseas, the GEC expanded over the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations into a $60-million, 120-person shop which also tracked and exposed rival nation-state campaigns to spread propaganda and pollute the information environment. It mapped a multi-billion dollar Chinese influence program that stretched from Pakistan to Latin America. It looked into the social media accounts boosting Germany's far-right AfD party and spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. It revealed a covert Russian effort to undermine public health in Africa. And the Center called out the Kremlin's claims that the 'United States worked with Ukraine to train an army of migratory birds, mosquitos and even bats to carry biological weapons into Russia.'
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trumpworld Makes the Case Against Trump
Last November, Republican Representative Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters that 'if Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.' This expression of faith in the great leader is a precept of MAGA-ism. The pigs in Animal Farm had a similar way of thinking: 'Comrade Napoleon is always right.' Trump's choice to not just claim that tariffs work but actually implement them and cause a market crash has, however, subjected this faith to its greatest test. And so MAGA world is attempting to understand and even argue over Trump's catastrophic decision making, while accepting Trump's infallibility as a given. The most devoted Trump acolytes are dutifully insisting that the dismal stock market does not perturb them in the slightest. ''I don't really care about my 401(k) today. You know why? I believe in this man,' the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro proclaimed on Thursday. 'My own retirement account is down too. Don't care. All-in on the Great Deal. The Golden Age is on the other side,' the One America News Network anchor Jack Posobiec wrote on X. But some Trumpists, especially those whose net worth has plunged, find themselves unable to profess indifference in the face of calamity. A few days after 'Liberation Day,' the MAGA financier Bill Ackman briefly succumbed to despair. 'I don't think this was foreseeable,' he posted on X. 'I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.' [Read: Trump is willing to take the pain] Among the MAGA faithful, this statement amounts to a shocking apostasy. And yet, even so, it was tightly circumscribed. Ackman wrote the entire passage in the passive voice—'this was foreseeable'; 'rationality would be paramount'—omitting the need to identify any protagonist behind these disasters. Like so many Trump supporters, especially among the financial elite, he refused to believe that Trump would do the things he'd promised to do, precisely because they were so irrational, without pausing to ask if the very fact that Trump was promising to do crazy things was itself a reason to keep him out of power. Ackman's little soliloquy ended, fittingly, on a note of personal contrition. The only person he could blame was himself. For those wishing to avoid further disaster, their only recourse is to complain that Trump has been badly served by wicked advisers. Elon Musk provocatively posted a video of Milton Friedman lecturing about the virtues of free trade. This put him in conflict with Peter Navarro, the Trump trade adviser whose fanatical loyalty to the president is exceeded only by his fanatical protectionism. Navarro questioned Musk's good faith by noting the conflicts between his auto business and Trump's trade policy. (Musk, of course, has an almost inexhaustible number of conflicts between his business interests and his government portfolio.) Musk replied by calling Navarro 'truly a moron' and 'dumber than a sack of bricks.' These comments might raise questions about the wisdom of the president himself. What kind of chief executive would hand over domestic policy to an adviser with such a deep vested interest in it, or, alternatively, take advice from a true moron with sub-brick intelligence? But to lay blame on Trump himself would violate the central tenet of the MAGA cult and, more important, forfeit any chance to influence its leader. The Wall Street Journal story reporting on Musk's apostasy was illustrated with him wearing his TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING cap. [Jonathan Chait: The Democrats won't acknowledge the scale of Trump's tariff mess] Ackman, firmly grasping the euphemistic protocols necessary to jockey for influence in MAGA world, tried a number of gambits. He blamed corrupt advisers for manipulating the great leader: 'Just figured out why @howardlutnick is indifferent to the stock market and the economy crashing. He and Cantor are long bonds. He profits when our economy implodes' (a charge he subsequently withdrew). He tried flattery: 'An important characteristic of a great leader is a willingness to change course when the facts change or when the initial strategy is not working. We have seen Trump do this before. Two days in, however, it is much too early to form a view about his tariff strategy.' When even these indirect complaints drew pushback, Ackman reaffirmed his unwavering loyalty: 'Some have misinterpreted my thoughts on tariffs. I am totally supportive of President @realDonaldTrump using tariffs to eliminate tariffs and unfair trading practices of our trading partners, and to induce more investment and manufacturing in our country.' Despite decades of evidence that Trump's tariff policy is a product of his belief in the efficacy of trade barriers, Ackman chooses to believe that the president is 'using tariffs to eliminate tariffs.' This apparently paradoxical feat could be managed only by Trump himself. It raises a question: Could Trump make a trade wall so high that he could not get over it? At a Senate hearing today, Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina asked the U.S. trade representative, 'Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?' The answer, of course, is not Donald Trump's. It could never be Donald Trump's. Article originally published at The Atlantic
