Deepest gratitude to Henry Giroux for his decades long strong voice of courage, integrity, and truth — a deep gift to us all. What Henry shares here is horrifyingly true. May more and more of us be shaken awake and aware and inspired to stand up with everything we have to this madness!! — Molly
The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing. First government institutions that both protect American democracy and work in the interest of social responsibility are being dismantled. Second, we are witnessing a mass form of ideological cleansing with attacks on public and higher education, the banning of books and critical ideas along with academic fields subject to government supervision; the arts are being defunded, social media, newspapers, and other cultural apparatuses that have the power to hold power accountable are being attacked with threats and loss of funding. Third, we are witnessing savage and cruel form of racial cleansing that focuses Immigrants, Muslims and all those who don't fit into white Christian nationalist notion of citizenship. The most powerful economic, religious, political, and ideological fundamentalisms are the cornerstone of the new fascism. The cleansing attack on every democratic principle is now in full force. See below for the unimaginable that now dominates American society.
Venezuelan migrants are being disappeared into prisons run by dictators, punished not for crimes, but for the ink on their skin. A legendary British punk band, the UK Subs, was barred from entry for daring to voice dissent. A French scientist, silenced at the border for criticizing a man who now shreds the Constitution like tissue paper. Trump flouts court rulings with impunity. Student visas are revoked without warning—young people snatched, detained in Louisiana detention, and potentially deported under cover malignant legalities. Prestigious law firms fall in line in ways that are beyond shameful. Elite universities, once bastions of inquiry, are being transformed into armed encampments, surveillance laboratories, and ideological training grounds—Columbia among the worst, turning its campus into a police precinct. Only now, as the full forces of politics becomes more visible are some journalists and left-leaning commentators waking to the authoritarian siege of higher education—a crisis many of us have been warning about for decades.
This is not the slow erosion of democracy—it is its dismemberment in broad daylight. We are living the fascist seizure of American society. Unfortunately, too many have resorted to whispers when they should be shouting and mobilizing in the streets.
The compassionate voice and soulful heartfelt wisdom
of Parker Palmer is a gift to us all. — Molly
💜
Wisdom Quotes from Parker Palmer
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks — we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.
Self-care is never a selfish act — it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.
Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. I learned about these qualities during my bouts with depression. In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always depended on collapsed. My intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent; my ego was shattered. But from time to time, deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul.
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.
* * * * *
Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the integrity that comes from being what you are.
I now know myself to be a person of weakness and strength, liability and giftedness, darkness and light. I now know that to be whole means to reject none of it but to embrace all of it.
Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one's self. It is not about the absence of other people — it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others. Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people — it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.
I like to say that before we can create an external space in which to receive people, we have to create an internal space in which to receive them.
The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.
* * * * *
Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling."
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions…..Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live — but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.
At its deepest level, I think teaching is about bringing people into communion with each other, with yourself as the teacher, and with the subject you are teaching.
Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge — and knowing myself is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.
By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.
If we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
I will always have fears, but I need not be my fears, for I have other places within myself from which to speak and act.
Humility is the only lens though which great things can be seen — and once we have seen them, humility is the only posture possible.
For me, teaching is about weaving a web of connectedness between myself, my students, the subject I'm teaching, and the larger world.
* * * * *
Eventually, I developed my own image of the "befriending" impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I — fearful of what I might hear or arrogantly trying to live without help or simply too busy with my ideas and ego and ethics to bother — ignored the shouts and walked away.
So this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer and shouted more loudly, but AI kept walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder, but I walked on. Frustrated by my unresponsiveness, the figure threw stones at my back, then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my attention. But despite the pain, I kept walking away.
Over the years, the befriending intent of this figure never disappeared but became obscured by the frustration caused by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, "What do you want?" When I was finally able to make the turn — and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me — I began to get well.
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God's own image — the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.
* * * * *
Wholeness does not mean perfection; it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.
How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential — in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth — when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.
As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots.
Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
The more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to see that person as your enemy.
Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.
I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation. They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live "divided no more," the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one's truth to be on the inside.
Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.
Let’s not forget that American democracy started with ‘We the People’ agreeing to work hard to create ‘a more perfect union.’ We’ve lost the idea that politics begins at home with what happens in families, in neighborhoods, in classrooms, in congregations. We called this democracy into being — and if we want to call this democracy back to its highest values, it’s got to be the us doing that calling. That’s not going to happen if ‘We the People’ don’t know how to talk to one another with civility and hold our differences in a creative, life-giving way.
Community doesn't just create abundance — community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.
* * * * *
Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts.
Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out — a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.
Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.
The power for authentic leadership is found not in external arrangements, but in the human heart.
* * * * *
Community cannot take root in a divided life. Long before community assumes external shape and form, it must be present as seed in the undivided self: only as we are in communion with ourselves can we find community with others. Community is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, the flowing of personal identity and integrity into the world of relationships.
By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act — it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.
The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.
We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.
Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.
Not the zombie one (though, to be fair, many of us are walking around like the emotionally undead).
Not the one with the fire and brimstone (unless you count your Twitter feed).
But the one unfolding silently, devastatingly:
The collapse of empathy.
From an animist perspective, where all things are alive, ensouled, connected, it is empathy that holds the weave of existence together. The wind listens. The trees remember. The rivers feel grief when poisoned. The soil sings lullabies to seeds. In this way, the entire Earth is one trembling, tender body of care.
But we humans, oh, gods help us, we are forgetting.
Empathy isn’t trending. Rage is. Numbness is.
Hot takes are in. Heartache? Not so much.
Empathy requires presence.
It asks that we pause in our urgency.
That we dare to feel not just our own pain, but another's.
It requires a nervous system that isn’t constantly in survival mode, swiping left on suffering.
And that’s hard to come by when you're drowning in capitalism's to-do list, colonized in your own bones, and told that caring too much is “unprofessional.”
How do you grow empathy in a world where we’re rewarded for disassociating?
Where our food is grown by people we never see, under conditions we’d rather not know.
Where we consume trauma on the news like popcorn but never sit long enough to digest it.
Where our education teaches us to conquer knowledge but not to listen to wisdom.
Where people cry in public and we say, “Yikes,” and scroll on by.
This isn’t entirely our fault. We’ve been systemically trained to not feel.
Empathy is dangerous to empires.
Empathy disrupts business as usual.
Empathy makes soldiers lay down their weapons and start planting herbs.
Empathy gets in the way of profit margins.
Colonialism didn’t just steal land.
It stole relationship.
It replaced reverence with resource extraction.
It told us to name the plants but never talk to them.
To claim the land but never thank her.
To dominate each other in the name of "progress."
And somewhere in all of that, we lost our capacity to weep with a stranger, to wail with the whales, to sing for the salmon who never made it home.
But it’s not gone.
No matter how many layers of concrete we lay over our hearts, the mycelium of empathy waits underground.
And yes, it’s complicated.
Empathy asks us to feel pain that isn’t “ours,”
when we barely know how to hold our own.
It’s inconvenient.
It’s not scalable.
It’s not sexy.
(Unless you’re into people who cry during trees’ dying seasons and whisper prayers to compost.)
But I swear to you, it’s necessary.
Because no amount of intellectual wokeness, activism, spiritual bypassing, or performative allyship will save us if we don’t care deeply, heartbreakingly, hilariously care for one another and for all beings.
So maybe, today, just start small.
Cry with the wind.
Apologize to the spider you almost squished.
Ask your friend how they really are, and mean it.
Feel the pain of a people not your own, and let it crack your shell.
This is sacred work.
It’s messy.
It’s slow.
It’s deeply inconvenient to systems of control.
But it might just be the medicine that reanimates the soul of humanity.
It is my belief that it is vital for us to listen to voices such as those of Jason Stanley and Chris Hedges. This is the way that we become empowered to know the truth, to claim agency, to shed layers of indoctrination, and that we are no longer vulnerable to believing and spreading authoritarian narratives. There is an imperative that we are able to discern truth from disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies. As Emma Goldman once said, "Ignorance is the most violent element in society." May we all be passionate seekers of deeper and deeper truths. — Molly
Ever since the first Donald Trump administration, the word “fascism” has dominated discussion around Trump’s policies and ambitions to the extent of semantic satiation. Liberals and leftists often use fascism as a blanket term for anything right-wing politicians represent and Republicans equally use “communism” to denote Democratic or left-wing politics. Jason Stanley, author, American philosopher and Yale professor, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to give proper context to what fascism means and how the Trump administration’s second term could really mean the completion of the American fascist state.
One key element in the spread of fascism is the attack on a central pillar of democracy: education. Stanley explores the recent assault on crucial parts of the American education system, including critical race theory, Black history and now the sanctity of free speech. Legislation pushing for the suppression of these segments is expected, Stanley explains, since “it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you’re the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It’s exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be.”
Stanley also illustrates the various ways in which fascist regimes attempt to psychologically manipulate the public into being subservient and by eliminating any reference to historic self-determination. “An education system should give people the sense that they have agency to change history,” Stanley tells Hedges. “And if you want to impose patriotic education, you want to impose the kind of education that fits into an authoritarian system, you want to remove agency from people.”
The bleakness of the near future is hard to avoid, Stanley warns. He likens the deportation and hunting down of pro-Palestinian student protestors to the stripping of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson’s passports:
“That’s what happened with Du Bois and Robeson. Like if they can take down those people, they can take down anyone. And so that is clearly the next phase. Clearly the next phase is stripping the passports of people they don’t like. You know, every authoritarian country does that. We’ve done it and I expect that to come, unfortunately.”
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Totalitarian regimes seek absolute control over the institutions that reproduce ideas, especially the media and education. Narratives that challenge the myths used to legitimize absolute power—in our case historical facts that blemish the sanctity of white male supremacy, capitalism and Christian fundamentalism—are erased. There is to be no shared reality. There are to be no other legitimate perspectives. History is to be static. It is not to be open to reinterpretation or investigation. It is to be calcified into myth to buttress a ruling ideology and the reigning political and social hierarchy. Any other paradigm of power and social interaction is tantamount to treason.
The political philosophy that feels this threat most acutely—and that unites hostility toward public education with support for class hierarchy—is a certain form of rightwing libertarianism, an ideology that sees free markets as the wellspring of human freedom. These kinds of libertarians oppose government regulation and virtually all forms of public goods, including public education. The political goal of this version of libertarian ideology is to dismantle public goods. The dismantling of public education is backed by oligarchs and business elites alike, who see in democracy a threat to their power, and in the taxes required for public goods a threat to their wealth. Public schools are the foundational democratic public good. It is therefore perfectly logical that those who are opposed to democracy, including fascist and fascist-leaning movements, would join forces with right-wing libertarians in undermining the institution of public education.
The right-wing attacks on programs such as critical race theory or DEI, as Stanley points out in his book, “intentionally distort these programs to create the impression that those whose perspectives are finally included—like Black Americans, for instance—are receiving some sort of illicit benefit or unfair advantage. And so they target Black Americans who have risen to positions of power and influence and seek to delegitimize them as undeserving. The ultimate goal is to justify a takeover of the institutions, transforming them into weapons in the war against the very idea of multi-racial democracy.”
Joining me to discuss his books Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them is Professor Jason Stanley. Professor Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Let’s begin with the piece you had in The Guardian, where you quite specifically talk about, like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin and how all of these things, well that’s already pretty much been dismantled by the Supreme Court, how all of these things are being dismantled and why.
Jason Stanley
So first of all, Title VI isn’t being dismantled, it’s being weaponized, it’s being reversed and weaponized. And the way it’s being weaponized is it’s being directed to fight supposed anti-white discrimination. So this regime is following Viktor Orbán and focused on Christians, saying Christians were the most persecuted group in the world. Now this regime is saying whites are the most persecuted group in the world. Of course, Trump signed an executive order giving special status to Afrikaners who supposedly were under threat when actually Afrikaners own, whites own much of the land in South Africa.
So this idea that white people are under threat, they’re using Title VI to push this and basically what they’re going to do is they’re gonna say any, you know, Black people in positions of power that came at the cost of supposedly more competent white Americans, which leans into racist stereotypes baked in to the American past. And then most concerningly for me as a Jewish American is they are using us, Jewish Americans, they’re like nakedly using us as an excuse to take down the most Jewish institution in American life, the university.
Chris Hedges
Well, they’ve also, while you’re right, they’ve weaponized it, but they’ve also stripped the protections that it once gave to vulnerable and marginalized people.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, conceptually, so Title VI is intended to help traditionally marginalized, traditionally oppressed people. But the idea now, what this group wants to say is there are no power differentials anymore. And so the really oppressed people are the majority group, the dominant group. This gets to my book, How Fascism Works, where I have a chapter called “Victimhood”. Fascism always relies on portraying the dominant group as victims.
The idea that white Americans are somehow being victimized in the university by sort of critical race theorists. I mean, my department of philosophy at Yale hired our first Black tenured professor last year. He started in fall 2024. So, I mean, the level of absurdity, factual absurdity, beggars belief. But that’s the idea is to make white people feel like they’re victimized. And so you erase the history.
So you erase the fact that black people were marginalized in America. You make it illegal to talk about the continuing marginalization by the after effects of housing segregation, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, et cetera, the current effects, make it illegal to talk about those things. And then you say, okay, look at how white people and Asians are discriminated against. So it all comes, but I think there’s also an element of retribution here.
Title VI was used against segregated Southern schools and racism in the school districts in the South, and now they’re flipping it and they’re saying, to the glee of many of their supporters, they’re saying, no, the real racism is directed against whites and it’s done by these universities.
Chris Hedges
We’ll go into your book, but when I covered the war in Yugoslavia, I watched Slobodan Milošević use exactly that tactic of telling the Serbs who controlled what was left of Yugoslavia that they were the victims in a famous speech in Kosovo, “I will not let them beat you, I will not let them beat you.” But it’s exactly the same phenomena.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, victimhood is, what you do is, and this is sort of a mixture of the books now, is you say in the past, we were the great ones, we created the culture, and we’re now being punished for that. We’re being punished for our greatness. And we’re an existential threat. So it goes together with the great replacement theory narratives.
And then what they’re gonna do is they’re saying the schools and universities by representing accurate history are a challenge to this myth. And in fact, the history itself, if you read what the Department of Education is saying, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that just teaching Black history accurately would be a Title VI violation.
In other words, just teaching, say, redlining and mortgage, the history of our mortgage laws that resulted in segregated cities today, it looks like that would be the same as a white professor continuously calling all of their Black students with the worst racial slur.
Chris Hedges
So let’s open with your book, Erasing History. I mean, I think the book does a very good job of explaining why they’re making war on the universities. You say,
“Authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. At every opportunity these regimes find ways of erasing or concealing history in order to consolidate their power. Why is this? Why does history do that? What does history do that is so disruptive of authoritarian goals? Perhaps most importantly, it provides multiple perspectives of the past.”
This is really the underlying, you would argue, the underlying goal of what’s happened. It has nothing to do with antisemitism. It has nothing to do with DEI or critical race theory or anything else. These become the tactics for something far more nefarious.
Jason Stanley
Yeah, I mean, the department, Linda McMahon in her letter about the final mission of the Department of Education says it’s gonna be to impose patriotic education. Patriotic education being a kind of, you know, flat, one-dimensional story of the greatness of the nation. It’s just, of course, just picture in your mind an authoritarian country and the education system in an authoritarian country. It’s just telling students to love their country.
Chris Hedges
Well, it’s mythic. It’s not true.
Jason Stanley
Right, it creates a fake version of the past and it tells students that you’re the greatest country in history and your leaders are the greatest people in history. It’s exactly what Hitler in Mein Kampf said the education system of the Third Reich should be. I talk about that at length. Hitler talks a lot about education in Mein Kampf.
So the fuel for fascist movements is this feeling of resentment by the dominant group. And so what you wanna do is you wanna create fear and resentment among the dominant group. So they keep supporting you and they think you’re going to protect them. So you represent another perspective, the perspective of marginalized groups as, somehow an attack on the identity of the dominant group.
You say, like, AfD [Alternative for Germany] in Germany, you know, they wanna say, one of their platforms, Björn Höcke’s platform, one of the leaders, is to remove the monument to the murdered Jews of Europe from Berlin. Because the idea is all that history is there to make the dominant group feel shame. Which it’s not, it’s there just to remind people, let’s not do this again.
But it is powerful for a non-Jewish German to see the Stolperstein, to see the monuments that very recently have been placed on German streets. And it does generate powerful feelings. And what they’re trying to do is leverage those powerful feelings into fear and resentment. When Musk said to the AfD, the most extreme far-right party in Europe, that other far-right parties won’t work with, when Musk said the German tribes were great, he didn’t mean German Jews.
He meant he was feeding into a myth of Aryanism, of Aryan supremacy, and he was feeding into the AfD line that German soldiers in World War I and World War II were in fact heroes. So this idea that, so what you try to do is you erase the history and then you represent the dominant group as great. And then you represent history itself, the actual history as a threat, as some sort of nefarious threat to destroy the nation.
Chris Hedges
And that is fundamental to what’s happening in places like Columbia [University], because you’re pushing out all sorts of people who challenge the dominant narrative. Of course, the primary group that’s targeted now are people who challenge the Zionist narrative. But that’s not exclusive. They’re hardly interested in stopping with Zionism.
Jason Stanley
No, I think this attack on the universities is antisemitic because the universities, first of all, it’s placing us American Jews at the center of things. So the American university system is the greatest university system in the world. And they’re using American Jews as the excuse to dismantle. So it’s never good to be used politically like that and it’s billions and billions of dollars in federal funding.
So, of course, who are the leftist protesters and critical intellectuals among the students and faculty? Well, one group of them are obviously Jews. They’re using antisemitic stereotypes of the university as filled with these dangerous leftist radicals. Those are antisemitic stereotypes and they’re using those to say we have to protect the Jews against it. Antisemitism just means leftism for them. They’re just saying the left is antisemitic.
But what this does is it sets Jewish people up. It sets Jewish people up. It feeds into the antisemitic stereotypes that Jews control the institutions. So it’s hard for me not to see this, ironically and paradoxically, as an attack on American Jews.
I was not surprised when Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong caved to the demands of the Trump administration. She agreed to ban face masks or face coverings, prohibit protests in academic buildings and create an internal security force of 36 New York City Police officers empowered to “remove individuals from campus and/or arrest them when appropriate.” She has also surrendered the autonomy of academic departments, as demanded by the Trump administration, by appointing a new senior vice provost to “review” the university’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Center for Palestine Studies.
Elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Columbia or Yale, were created to train and perpetuate the plutocracy. They are not and never have been centers of cutting-edge intellectual thought or hospitable to dissidents and radicals. They cloak themselves in the veneer of moral probity and intellectualism but cravenly serve political and economic power. This is their nature. Don’t expect it to change, even as we fall headlong into authoritarianism.
Armstrong, like most of the heads of our universities, is fruitlessly humiliating herself. She would, I expect, happily make space on her office wall to hang an oversized portrait of the president. But what she does not know, and what history has taught us, is that no appeasement is sufficient with autocrats. She, and the rest of the liberal elites, groveling abjectly in an attempt to accommodate their new masters, will be steadily replaced or dominated by buffoonish goons such as those seeded throughout the Trump administration.
The Department of Education has warned 60 colleges and universities that they could face “potential enforcement actions,” if they do not comply with federal civil rights law that protects students from discrimination based on race or nationality, which includes antisemitism. Columbia, stripped of $400 million in federal grants, is desperately trying to restore the funding. I doubt it will work. Those mounting these assaults against universities intend to turn them into indoctrination machines. The so-called campaign against antisemitism is simply a cynical tool being used to achieve that end.
The warning follows an open letter signed by 200 faculty members on Feb. 3 urging Columbia University to implement measures to “protect Jewish students.” Amongst their demands are the removal of Professor Joseph Massad who teaches Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at the university and beginning a Title VI investigation against him, that the university adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews, and the university hire tenured pro-Israel faculty.
These institutions of privilege — I attended Harvard and have taught at Columbia and Princeton — have always been complicit in the crimes of their times. They did not, until the world around them changed, speak out against the slaughter of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, the crushing of labor and socialist organizations at the turn of the twentieth century and the purging of institutions, including the academy, during the Red Scare in the 1920s and 1930s, and later the witch hunts under McCarthyism. They turned on their students protesting the war in Vietnam in the 1960s as viciously as they are turning on them now.
Many of the dregs of the Trump administration are products of these elite academic institutions. I can assure you their children will also attend these schools despite their public denunciations. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who humiliated in congressional hearings the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, graduated from Harvard. Vice President JD Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth went to Princeton University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has ordered a review of grants to universities from his agency over allegations of antisemitism — graduated from Harvard.
Professor Katherine Franke, who taught at Columbia Law School for 25 years, recently lost her position at the university for defending Columbia students’ right to protest in favor of a ceasefire of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and for Columbia University to divest from Israel. She also condemned the spraying of pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus with a toxic chemical that left students hospitalized.
“Part of why I think Colombia was such an easy target — and it’s not just Columbia, I think this is true for Harvard, for Yale, for the elite universities — is that the boards of trustees are no longer made up of people who are involved in education — committed to the educational mission, in some way professionally or otherwise — see themselves as custodians of the special role that the academy plays in a democracy,” she told me.
“Instead, they are hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, corporate lawyers and in our case, arms manufacturers as well.” She went on:
And they see that responsibility is to protect only the endowment. I often describe Columbia — which is the largest residential landlord in New York City — as a real estate holding operation that has a side hustle of teaching classes. It has evolved over time into just a business that enjoys nonprofit status. And so when the pressure started here, there were no voices on the boards of trustees to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we have to be the front line of resistance.’ Or at a minimum, we have to defend our academic mission.’ When I was sitting in my living room watching [former] president Minouche Shafik testify before that House committee…I was upset because they mentioned me, but more importantly, the fact that president Shafik did not even begin to defend Columbia, its faculty, its students, our project, our history of being one of the premier universities in the world. Instead, she groveled before a bully. And we all know that when you grovel before a bully, it encourages the bully. And that’s exactly what’s happened here up until today, where they’re still negotiating with the Trump administration on terms that the administration has set. And this university, I think, will never be the same if it survives at all.
You can see my interview with Professor Franke here.
Universities and colleges across the country have shut down free speech and squandered their academic integrity. They have brutalized, arrested, suspended and expelled faculty, administrators and students that decry the genocide. They have calledpolice to their campuses — in the case of Columbia three times — to arrest students, often charging them with trespassing. Following the lead of their authoritarian masters they subjected students to internal surveillance. Columbia University, out front on the repression of its students, banned Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace a month after Israel’s genocide in Gaza had begun in November 2023, when both organizations called for a ceasefire, long beforethe protests and encampments began.
Columbia’s violent suppression of protests and decision to lock down its campus, which is now surrounded by security checkpoints, paved the way for the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the School of International Public Affairs. He is a legal permanent resident. He did not commit a crime. But the university administration had already demonized and criminalized Khalil and the other students, many of whom are Jewish, who dared to protest the mass slaughter in Gaza.
The video — shot by his wife on March 8 — of Khalil being taken away by plainclothes federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who did not identify themselves, is a chilling reminder of the secret police abductions I witnessed on the streets of Santiago during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The law in authoritarian states protects the criminality of the powerful. It revokes due process, basic freedoms and the rights of citizenship. It is an instrument of repression. It is a very small step from the stripping of rights from a legal resident holding a green card to the stripping of rights of any citizen. This is what is coming.
Khalil was ostensibly arrested under the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It gives the Secretary of State the power to deport foreign nationals if he has “reasonable ground[s] to believe” their presence or activities in the U.S. “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It was used to deny entry to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and the British author Doris Lessing. It was also used to deport the poet and essayist Margaret Randall and civil rights activist and journalist Claudia Jones. Senator Patrick McCarran, an open admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a rabid antisemite, formulated the act to target not only dissidents and communists, but also Jews. When the law was enacted, it was used to ban Eastern European Jewish Holocaust survivors from entering the U.S. due to their alleged sympathies with the Soviet Union.
“The irony of that is not lost on any of us, that these are laws that are at their core, deeply antisemitic, that are now being deployed in the name of protecting Jewish citizens or our foreign policy goals with the state of Israel,” Franke said. “And that’s the cynicism of this administration. They don’t give a darn that there’s that history. They’re looking for every piece of power that they can get, every law, no matter how ugly that law may be. Even the laws that interned Japanese people during World War Two. I’m sure they would be more than happy to use those at some point.”
James Luther Adams, my mentor at Harvard Divinity School, was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 until he was arrested and deported by the Gestapo. He worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by dissident clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams saw how swiftly and cravenly German universities, which like ours were considered some of the best in the world, surrendered to the dictates of fascism and self-destructed.
The theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich, a close friend of Adams, was fired from his teaching post and blacklisted ten weeks afterthe Nazis came to power in January 1933. Tillich’s book “The Socialist Decision” was immediately banned by the Nazis. Tillich, a Lutheran pastor, along withthe sociologist Karl Mannheim and the philosopher Max Horkheimer, who wrote “Eclipse of Reason” which examines the rise of authoritarianism, were branded as “enemies of the Reich,” blacklisted and forced into exile. The 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” saw all Jewish professors dismissed. The vast majority of academics cowered in fear or, as with the case of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party, which saw him appointed as the Rector of Freiburg University.
Adams saw in the Christian Right disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He was the first person I heard refer to the Christian Right as “Christian fascists.” He also warned us about universities and academics which, if the country fell into authoritarianism, would debase themselves to protect their status and privileges. Few would speak out or defy authority.
“If the Nazis took over America, 60 percent of the Harvard faculty would happily begin their lectures with the Nazi salute,” he quipped.
And this is where we are. None of the liberal institutions, including the universities, the commercial media and the Democratic Party, will defend us. They will remain supine, hypocritically betray their supposed principles and commitment to democracy or willingly transform themselves into apologists for the regime. The purges and silencing of our most courageous and accomplished intellectuals, writers, artists and journalists — begun before Trump’s return to the White House — is being expedited.
Resistance will be left to us. Enemies of the state.
