Highlights 14: Authoritarian America

Haley Street, Santa Barbara on April 5, 2014   

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION BEGINS INTERVIEWING UC FACULTY AS PART OF ANTISEMITISM PROBE

‘Federal officials have begun contacting University of California faculty members for an antisemitism probe after the school complied with a subpoena from the Trump administration seeking the personal information of around 900 faculty members, two UC employees with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO.

 

‘The employees, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, said federal officials have begun reaching out and speaking with faculty members last week, raising concern from faculty that the federal government is trying to pit them against each other as President Donald Trump continues to cut funding from top universities around the country.

 

‘The university sent information the administration requested for all faculty who signed open letters about the school’s response following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission following a subpoena from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to a letter sent March 27 by Charles Robinson, the UC’s chief legal officer. That information includes the employee’s position, date of hire, personal phone number and email address and whether the person is a current or former employee.

 

…

 

‘The first [letter], signed by more than 380 faculty members at UC Berkeley and sent shortly after the attack, expressed “deepest sympathies to Israelis and to Jews worldwide in this hour of terror and brutal devastation” as well as “deep sympathy and concern for the people of Gaza as they face a major military onslaught whose impact will indeed be brutal.”

 

‘The second letter, sent last May, called for university leadership to do more to protect Jewish students and faculty and had more than 500 signatures.

Robinson told faculty in the March 27 letter that the EEOC may “reach out to you as part of its investigation regarding your own experiences at the University,” but said they did not have to speak to the agency officials or tell the university if they are cooperating.

 

SOURCE: Eric He, Politico, April 10, 2025. 

 

EXPLOSION OF VISA TERMINATIONS

 

‘On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had revoked 300 or more student visas, claiming these students were “lunatics.” Rubio claims students sought entrance into the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.”’

 

‘Over the past few weeks, more colleges and universities have shared that their students have lost their F-1 or J-1 student visas—some related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, others for minor crimes. Most college officials say they’re unsure of why foreign-born students had their legal residency status terminated or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. A majority have yet to receive any communications from immigration authorities.’

SOURCE: Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed April 8, 2025 and ongoing 

THE ECONOMIST OPPOSES TRUMP ON UNIVERSITIES 

 

‘This is an economic revolution and we will win.” Donald Trump’s line on tariffs sounds like something from Robespierre or Engels. And as any revolutionary knows, to sweep away the old order it is not enough just to raise import duties. You also have to seize and refashion the institutions that control the culture. In America that means wresting control of Ivy League universities which play an outsize role in forming the elite (including Mr Trump’s cabinet). The maga plan to remake the Ivies could have terrible consequences for higher education, for innovation, for economic growth and even for what sort of country America is. And it is only just beginning.

 

‘The target has been exquisitely chosen. Over the past decade elite universities have lost the bipartisan support they used to enjoy . . . But the most substantive change has been within the Republican Party. Conservatives considered elite universities to be hostile territory even before William F. Buckley published “God and Man at Yale” in 1951. Yet they also respected the basic compact that exists between universities and the federal government: that taxpayers fund scientific research and provide grants for students from poor families, and in return, universities do world-changing research.

'Some of the researchers may have views that irk the White House of the day. Many are foreigners. But their work ends up benefiting America. That is why, in 1962, the government funded a particle accelerator, even though some people who would use it had long hair and hated American foreign policy. And why, later that decade, researchers at American universities invented the internet, with military funding.

'This deal has been the source of military as well as economic power. It has contributed to almost every technological leap that has boosted output, from the internet to mrna vaccines and glp-1 agonists to artificial intelligence. It has made America a magnet for talented, ambitious people from around the world. It is this compact—not bringing car factories back to the rust belt—that is the key to America’s prosperity. And now the Trump administration wants to tear it up.

…

‘What [Trump] wants in return varies. Sometimes it is to eradicate the woke-mind virus. Sometimes it is to eradicate antisemitism. It always involves a double standard on free speech, according to which you can complain about cancel culture and then cheer on the deportation of a foreign student for publishing an op-ed in a college newspaper. This suggests that, as with any revolution, it is about who has power and control.

 

‘So far, universities have tried to lie flat and hope Mr Trump leaves them alone, just like many of the big law firms that the president has targeted. The Ivy presidents meet every month or so, but have yet to come up with a common approach. Meanwhile, Harvard is changing the leadership of its Middle East studies department and Columbia is on its third president in a year. This strategy is unlikely to work. The maga vanguard cannot believe how quickly the Ivies have capitulated. The Ivies also underestimate the fervour of the revolutionaries they are up against. Some of them don’t just want to tax Harvard—they want to burn it down.'

 

SOURCE: “The Campus Counterrevolution,” The Economist April 10, 2025

 

TRUMP CHAOS IS ALIENATING REPUBLICANS

 

‘The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda are stunning. Last week, just before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

 

‘All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25 per cent of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.

 

‘Notably, these sharp deteriorations are being felt across the aisle. Even before “liberation day”, a third of Republicans disapproved of Trump’s actions on the economy, a remarkable feat given levels of partisan polarisation in America. A lot of people who thought they were an “us” have discovered they are a “them”.’

...

 

‘[T]he narrow subset of voters who identify as Maga Republicans continue to approve of the president at astronomically high levels, even after the tangible turmoil of the past 10 weeks.

 

‘But the larger group of other voters who backed Trump last November is rapidly souring on his economic policies and overall record. (Interestingly, the same does not yet appear to be true of Trump’s performatively hostile immigration policy, where arrests and deportations have done little to turn off those who backed the president in November.)

 

 

‘Trump, his vice-president JD Vance, Elon Musk and the other senior figures around him operate largely in their own closed media ecosystem, populated by vocal members of the deeply ideological Maga community. As such they tend to be detached from both wider public opinion and dissenting voices.

 

‘This may give the president and his team the sense that their actions have been much better received than they have. But the data suggests that while the Maga echo chamber may be impervious, it is far from all-pervasive.’

…

 

‘There are two clear lessons from Trump’s second term thus far. The first is that he’s not ushering in a new era of American prosperity. The second is that as more people realise this, the political situation could start to change quite quickly.’

SOURCE: Burn-Murdoch, John. “Trump Chaos Is Alienating Republicans.” FT, April 4, 2025 

 

THE ONGOING FAILURE OF LIBERAL ELITES

 

‘My view of US history is not just janus-faced, but developmental. To locate Trump we need to offer a historical account of how we got here, an account that is path-dependent and means that Trump is not just a shock but indicative of a deeper and longer-term trend. You don’t have to start your story-telling “at the beginning”. We all think and speak in “medias res”. But if you don’t see that the coalition that supported US globalism in its liberal variant has collapsed and that that didn’t start in 2024 or in 2016, you are missing the point.

 

‘Of course, [Joseph] Nye’s argument is also historical. Indeed, as a policy intellectual, he is truly a figure of the American century. But the mode of his historical narration and the way he situates the current Trump moment is different. It might be described as episodic or seasonal. In rather strong terms one might call it cyclical rather than developmental.

 

‘Characteristic moments where the episodic and seasonal view of history in Nye’s article reveals itself, include the following:

 

• American soft power has good moments and bad - as opposed to a series of interconnected and mutually conditioning phases in a path-dependent development towards illegitimacy.
• After Trump 1.0 came Biden and global confidence rebounded - de facto Trump is the exception and Biden-style globalism the norm.
• Whatever the antics of the White House, there are checks and balances - glossing over the possibility that those might be systematically and progressively subverted not just by MAGA but by trends in US politics more generally, including on the liberal side. Nye acknowledges that all is not well with US democracy, but immediately passes on to the question of “solutions”.
• American civil society is the ultimately decisive force and it is attractive and positive - as opposed to riven by profound tensions and contradictions of which the ugly state of US democracy is a fair reflection.
• Musk is simply a “billionaire” - as opposed to the most extreme instance of a new type of oligarchy that disrupts familiar patterns of elite lobbying and political economy.

 

‘This kind of episodic view of history relieves its exponents of the need to actually consider current historical trends and what they signify. You can simply shrug and remark that American soft power has ups and downs and it is currently going through a bleak phase.

 

‘In the seasonal variant, the episodic view of history promises that winter will be followed by spring. The GOP sweep in 2024 will be followed by a Democratic Party comeback in the midterms in 2026.

 

‘Thinking about Nye’s piece I realize that since the start of the year I have encountered this mode of historical thinking two times “in the flesh” in interaction with Democratic Party elites and also in reading interviews with prominent figures like Jake Sullivan.

 

‘The lite version of this quiescent logic was on display at a meeting of the American Academy with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Froman and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

 

‘Rather than facing the dramatic, irreversible and historic implications of the second Trump Presidency, my co-panelists shuffled comfortably back and forth between the present and the past, exchanging lessons learned in the Obama administration. The prevailing mood was one of accommodating oneself to the “turn-taking” in Washington - “so the wheel of history turns”.

..

 

‘[In a second event], What prevailed amongst the veterans of the Biden administration was that same mixture of regret and self-congratulation. The two were resolved in the celebration of “legacy”, “lesson learning” and locker room backslapping. There was no sign, at all, of a clear-eyed assessment of the historic defeat in 2024. Instead, my American co-panelists peddled lessons for their European audience, as if nothing had happened in November 2024. Indeed, they professed themselves particularly proud of documents (“work products”) published in the lame duck period following their defeat. Like Sullivan, the Bidenaughts seemed oblivious to the significance of their own failure.

...

‘If Trump 2.0 takes the politics of the imaginary to a new level, is this a rupture with the supposedly more grounded Biden administration? Or, in light of the exit interviews with team-Biden, do we have to face the fact that both sides are trapped in their own mythologies? In which case, what we living in now is not so much a descent into madness, as a new season of West Wing, this time “West Wing for deplorables”.'

 

SOURCE: Adam Tooze, Chartbook 359, March 9, 2025

 

FASCISM SCHOLAR JASON STANLEY KNOWS IT WHEN HE SEES IT, LEAVES AMERICA

 

‘Martínez: If Yale had told you maybe off the record that they were going to try and work behind the scenes maybe to protect academic freedom, but that it would be much more difficult to do without the federal funds. How would you have responded to that?

 

‘Stanley: I would respond by saying that's the wrong tack. You need a very loud defense of democratic institutions. That response would not take seriously the point that this is a war.

 

‘If universities think they can work behind the scenes and make friends, they're simply confused about the nature of the conflict. Yale University, like other leading universities, needs to take the lead, take a leadership role with and collectively work with other universities loudly to protect democracy.

 

‘Martínez: But what war can be won without funding?

 

‘Stanley: You might lose anyway. But you can't win a war unless you recognize it's a war. This way they're going to pick us off one by one. And history is watching here. Our institutions will be written about. They're being attacked for this entirely fake reason that's furthermore fomenting antisemitism in the United States. It's going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people.

 

‘So, if universities want to fight anti-Semitism, they need to stand up and say, “No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.”’

 

SOURCE: A. Martínez, “Why This Yale Professor Is Fleeing America.” NPR, April 1, 2025.

 CAMPUS POLICE ARE USING ISRAELI SPY TECH TO CRACK DOWN ON STUDENT PROTEST

 

‘Police militarization has been further accelerated by more than two decades of “training expeditions” in which thousands of U.S. police have traveled to learn from Israeli police and military who enforce an occupation of Palestinians with the aid of high-tech surveillance technology. Such trips are also an opportunity for Israeli-based companies to sell their surveillance products. These include the ironically named Nice Systems, which provides camera networks; SuperCom, which deals in electronic monitoring; and Cellebrite, which specializes in phone-hacking technology and has sold its products to agencies in at least 20 states. This influence is detailed by author Antony Loewenstein in his influential text The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World. He writes that Israel engages in the surveillance of all Palestinians en masse, “regardless of age, location, or intent.”

 

‘A report from Deadly Exchange, a campaign launched by Jewish Voice for Peace, details how such exchanges “expose US law enforcement to the comprehensive monitoring and infiltration tactics and technologies in the Israeli arsenal, modeling the apparatus of a sweeping surveillance state.”

 

‘Some universities in the U.S. are also complicit in these trainings, such as the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program based at Georgia State University, where Israeli police are invited to train U.S. law enforcement from major U.S. cities. Activists have called for ending the GILEE program, sponsored in part by the Atlanta Police Foundation, the nonprofit behind the large police training facilitysouth of the city known as “Cop City.”

In 2019, Wayne State University’s chief of police traveled to Israel “to share law enforcement strategies” as part of a “delegation” of other police officers visiting from Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. He noted the importance of the university police’s jurisdiction, “not only [on] campus, but also [in] the greater Midtown Detroit area — all neighbors and members of our community.”

‘As police try to legitimize their growing repression, communities continue to resist. In 2020, Tufts University students voted in a referendum to prohibit campus police from attending future retreats in Israel. Amnesty Internationalnoted that funds spent “to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us,” explaining that many domestic police abuses documented parallel “violations by Israeli military, security and police officials.”

 

‘Spying From the Ivory Tower

 

‘During the wave of pro-Palestine encampments that swept the country last spring, campus police took the opportunity to amplify traditional strong-arm behaviors (which included numerous violent assaults against professors and students alike) with newly acquired surveillance technology. This dangerous combination led to more than 3,200 arrests nationwide.

 

‘Universities supported these efforts by quickly suspending First Amendment rights to peaceable assembly, with some even enforcing archaic anti-mask laws against student protesters (originally enacted in response to the Ku Klux Klan) to aid police use of facial recognition software.

 

‘The student newspaper Columbia Spectator exposed in September how the administration at Columbia University and Barnard College spied on student activists before and after the encampments. Following a “Resistance 101” workshop held by a campus divestment group earlier in the spring, campus police started collecting information on demonstrators, gathering footage from campus surveillance cameras and tracking student IDs swiped at building entrances. They also sent private investigators to interrogate students at home, Columbia Spectator reports. The administration then began to suspend students, expel them from housing and call them before disciplinary hearings. New York City Police Department (NYPD) conducted multiple sweeps of student spaces.

 

‘In a press conference on May 1, during the height of the campus protests, New York City Mayor Eric Adams thanked Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who joined him onstage, for “monitoring the situation” when protests first began across the city. Professor Weiner, who conveniently moonlights as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, serves as the liaison between NYPD’s Tel Aviv branch (built in 2012 on the rubble of the destroyed Palestinian village Kfar Saba) and NYPD stateside. Weiner boasted that her office in New York had received “hourly updates” from the NYPD’s Tel Aviv precinct since October 7, ensuring that the militarized army terrorizing Palestinians was aligned with those harming U.S. students.

 

‘At Yale University, the 93-officer private police department kept an eye on campus protests with help from the FBI. As journalist Theia Chatelle reported in Jewish Currents, documents obtained from the settlement in a lawsuit for public records revealed that Jennifer Wagner, the head of the FBI’s New Haven office, reached out to Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell to offer assistance: “The FBI has been monitoring the widespread protests related to the Israel/Hamas conflict at several colleges and universities.” After an alleged assault in April, the FBI got a search warrant for the home of a pro-Palestine student and performed what Yale Public Safety referred to as a “dump” of information from their cell phone, a serious invasion of their personal property. The Yale Police Department “installed cameras on campus, tracked students’ social media accounts and monitored students using aerial drones,” according to Chatelle.'

 

SOURCE: Tara Goodarzi  and Brian Dolinar, “Campus Police Are Using Israeli Spy Tech to Crack Down on Student Protest.” Truthout, February 24, 2025. 

 

 

TRUMP MANIPULATES AMERICAN JEWS WHILE BANNING BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS

 

‘In the aftermath of the excessive use of force, the university created a Task Force on Antisemitism, which actually came up with a sensible definition:

 

‘Antisemitism is prejudice, discrimination, hate, or violence directed at Jews, including Jewish Israelis. Antisemitism can manifest in a range of ways, including as ethnic slurs, epithets, and caricatures; stereotypes; antisemitic tropes and symbols; Holocaust denial; targeting Jews or Israelis for violence or celebrating violence against them; exclusion or discrimination based on Jewish identity or ancestry or real or perceived ties to Israel; and certain double standards applied to Israel.’

 

‘The task force added: “To be clear, we do not think that a statement should be impermissible just because it qualifies as antisemitic under this definition. Offensive statements generally are protected under the University’s rules, so the University can encourage vibrant debate. The purpose of this definition is to educate, not to ban.”

 

‘However, other universities, including Harvard, have gone further, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Harvard has adopted the much broader International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which considers some anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli criticism to be antisemitism per se. And Trump would arrogate to himself the prerogative to define what is antisemitism and what consequences offending universities, and students, should suffer.

 

‘Meanwhile, some 2,500 Jewish university professors have signed a statement called “Not in Our Name” objecting to the weaponization of antisemitism. The statement reads in part: “We hold various views about Israel and Palestine, politics in the Middle East, and student activism on our campuses. But we are united in denouncing, without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name—and cynical claims of antisemitism—to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities. We specifically reject rhetoric that caricatures our students and colleagues as ‘antisemitic terrorists’ because they advocate for Palestinian human rights and freedom.”

 

‘This week, Netanyahu is hosting a global conference on antisemitism. His featured speakers are Europe’s worst right-wing leaders, who have no love of Jews but opportunistically embrace Israel. The whole idea smelled so bad that several of Europe’s mainstream leaders pulled out. Even the ADL bailed. But this is exactly what Trump is doing at home.

 

‘One bitter irony in Trump’s love-bombing of the Jews has not gotten nearly enough attention. Trump has paired his exaggerated and hypocritical solicitude for the Jews with his escalating punishment of any institution that embraces affirmative action for Black people, otherwise known as DEI.

 

‘Think about it. Trump is singling out Jews to get special consideration and protection, while he bans and punishes any special consideration of Black people and blocks even basic civil rights enforcement. Yes, antisemitism is a blight. But honestly, if you compare the Jewish experience in America—a refugee community that thrived here as nowhere else in the world—with the Black experience—suffering the inhumanity of slavery, persecuted through the ravages of Jim Crow, and never really escaping the scourge of discrimination—which community has more of a right to say, “I don’t feel safe”? Which has more of a claim on the government for extra protection?

 

‘Ideally, civil rights and civil liberties should be protected evenhandedly. But here is Trump, using fake solicitude for Jews to bash liberal universities and abolish civil rights enforcement for Black people.

 

‘This will not end well.’

 

 SOURCE: Kuttner, Robert. The American Prospect, March 25, 2025.