The quotes seem to be from the famous book "1984" by George Orwell. We had it in English literature class in high school.

There are some other famous quotes from that book or one of his other famous books, "Animal Farm".

Writing from memory and googling, so may be wrong:

"Some people are more equal than others."

The society that Winston finds himself in puts forth the slogan, "War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." The meaning of this phrase is to force confusion upon the members of the Party. It is a form of propaganda, or misleading information typically given by a political party.

According to the article, the original version with "2 + 2 = 5" suggests complete submission to the oppressive regime, with the protagonist's mind being irreversibly altered.

Technically part of the Ministry of Love, Room 101 is the most feared place in all of Oceania and Winston learns far too well that it is here that the …

What is the final message of 1984? … a warning about the dangers of totalitarianism and the ability of a repressive regime to manipulate and control individuals to the point where they betray ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm

Animal Farm is even more creepy than 1984, going by my memory, which may be wrong, since it is quite some years since I read both those books.

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Sadly America was founded on principles that too 200 years to try and undo. And given the last year alone, they are still stripping rights as we speak. I don't know which fork we turned on that made us so reliable on racism and sexism to function and band together as a country that much of the EU seems to have navigated better. Maybe reconstruction should have had an actual Nuremburg trial instead of "forgiveness" (aka pushing the can down the street until someone could assassinate the one trying to compromise).

Hello, 55 day old account that's definitely not a troll

This comment and the parent’s are the best retorts I’ve seen yet to the “these people are just stupid” idea we hear all the time. These “rules” are not calculated and brilliant, and that’s the point. They’re controlling at any angle they want.

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.

Is there any political tool to prevent rampant rule breaking and making the disliked rulebreaker specially vulnerable? Rule breaking is common and apocrypal form of strike involve following the rules to the letter and paralyzing the business. The prevailing principle is "you cant defend yourself by pointing to other rulebreakers" while reality is "its legal if a hundred businessmen do it".

An important part about targeting DEI and trans communities is that these two groups stand for immutable properties: I can’t change my race. I can’t stop being my gender identity.

When you “other” people based on immutable properties, it becomes very dangerous. If you can’t force someone to be white and straight, what do you do with them? The government stops funding programs to help these groups, they spread lies and fear about them, and then they sit back. When the people in power tell their supporters that the “other” are the enemy, what recourse is left for one’s safety other than violence. Authoritarian regimes always trend towards genocide, and they always target groups with immutable traits.

Also called freedom from consequences. Free speech makes sense in a free society, freedom from consequences does not. Yet that's what they're calling for.

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I'm not sure what "agree with the Palestinians" would mean. Like they are not happy with being genocided? I think that would be most people's feeling in that situation, though that doesn't show any proximity in belief, value or principle.

> Diversity is bad when it involves Whites, men, straight people or research involving these groups.

If you think that's what the "other side" is saying, then you've completely misunderstood what the diversity idea is about. You can't compare one idea with the misrepresentation of the opposing idea. That's just making things up.

The problem is- they are not anti-racist honest. You are either nurture or nature, but if its all nurture, they refuse to discuss that part, compare those parts, work out the problematic parts and compose better societal models. They just idealise, bigott stay quiet and adverse engage only with those who respond civilized. Its all lies and damned lies and statistics.

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If you don't measure you can just assume all valies are 0.

First I think people who recognize there are problems is what is needed now. You leaving makes things worse.

Then again, it is understandable not everybody has the luxury to be in circumstances that allow adequate forms of resistance.

If you ask about which country, I'd say it depends. It depends on who youaare, what your skills are, which climate zones and cultures you prefer, whether you're willing to learn a new language and so on.

Canada.

On that point they mean anyone who isn't white, male, cis, straight, and currently able-bodied.

Zero? I’m a visa holder in the US and I’m aware that supporting terrorists and celebrating violence against Jewish people is probably not going to make the country keep me here.

No, I have no hesitation. How are you not finding it obvious that the government are trying to end racially based admittance programs?

I’m not sure the government is funding many conservative institutions.

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If the university was founded by the government, it should represent Americans. All of them. Half of Americans are conservative. Approx. half of academia should be conservative.

Harvard is older than both parties. There is no good reason why it should cater to only one half of Americans.

Conservatives have started their own Universities. No one likes going to those schools, and they end up bankrupt, with students who are functionally uneducated.

So the existing ones don't need government money, then, right?

Stanford for example.

> Conservatives should start their own universities

They did. Remember Trump University? It got shut down for fraud.

But I don't understand why 14%? It should be the same as you, 20%.

Same goes for religious organizations, but it would be extremely hard to enforce, as they might say "government is interfering us practicing our religion", as practicing religions helps to not pay taxes and protected by the Constitution.

if your argument is "but they're not getting screwed equally" then its a completely flawed argument benefiting the government

you should be questioning why you are getting screwed at all. it doesn't solve the government's revenue problems or even make a dent.

People already paid their taxes on all of the principal before they donated it to fund education. You and I are not chartered as an educational endowment; things like Roth IRAs exist for us.

holy shit dog, you make over $533,000???

"funded by my already taxed earnings"

Why did you even try that? Blew your whole argument.

This is genius. Next up, Apple could easily convert into a church with its many disciples.

If they become a church they will have to buy private jets for the faculty.

They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves.

It's about punishing their enemies.

> Feels like they’re ghost riding the economy for the lulz

Yes. The abstract of "the economy" doesn't matter. The priorities are "owning the libs" on Twitter and other media, and their own personal bank accounts which can benefit from insider trading the tariffs, state-sponsored memecoins and so on.

Easy, Harvard is essentially a training center for their ideological enemies on top of providing an actual education. They're just putting the boot down and saying stick to teaching instead of implementing and advancing a specific ideology. If taxes are the tools, so be it.

The current admin is openly anti-intellectual.

Edit:

"We need to attack the universities in this country"

"The professors are the enemy"

Specific clip https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ichg58/ya...

If you want the full speech it's on YT so if you reply with "context" you should back that up

if you hate universities it makes obvious sense

I’m not half the country, but I can explain it to you. Billionaires already pay tax on investment income. Universities are exempt but now the proposal is that they pay as well, just like individuals (including billionaires) and other profit-making groups.

… or churches

Politics of resentment where elite colleges and universities are unjust scams and billionaires are just the pinnacle of self actualization.

Doesn't this tax only apply to "net investment income"/realized gains? Billionaires technically already have to pay it at a higher rate. And well they generally do? I mean when they personally actually sell stock and or receive dividends and interest.

Why do you expect a billionaire to steal from billionaires? a portion of non-essential stealing comes from respct, and of course these billionaires are all a part of the same club.

The other lens is simple as well: big fish don't go after the other big fish. That just ends in two hurt fish and no food. Trump thought he was going after a small fry and underestimated the response. just because Columbia folded doesn't mean all universities will.

lens #3: this clip explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU

He's a bully but if everyone realizes they outnumber (and outmatch him) he loses his power).

Billionaires do pay income tax on investment income.

Billionaires do not get a tax exemption

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>> College endowments are typically tax-exempt, but a 2017 law imposed a 1.4% tax on investment income for a small group of wealthy private universities.

> LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.

Because they already do it for billionaires: unlike university endowments, billionaire investment income is not tax-exempt by default, it's already subject to income tax [1].

[1] At least theoretically, ignoring the loopholes and tax-dodges billionaires can take advantage of with literal armies of accountants.

Billionaires pay 37% or 20% on their investment gains, can't really explain it to a 5 year old because congress and the IRS make it complex.

Stopping those research programs is a choice. They could also choose to pay for them out of the endowment.

I guess Harvard saw the decision at Columbia made the situation worse [1], so they decided to make a different one.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-all-rese...

Some universities should make sacrifices for academic freedom, yes. That's what they are there for!

Much of the endowment is earmarked towards specific ends. It is not a slush fund for discretionary spending.

That’s a very odd perspective.

Could you explain how government research funding constitutes forced speech?

If an individual who receives a government tax credit (say EITC) speaks out contrary to your politics, is the government allowed to withhold that credit too?

1st Amendment is more important than you not liking a specific spending of government funds.

Somehow I doubt you would apply these same principles to someone who doesn't believe in police and objects to their taxes being used to fund them.

I posted this deep in another part of this discussion - but the majority of the money being discussed here isn’t really for Harvard or educating its students - the largest portion are for NIH grants funding to Boston area hospitals, most of which have affiliations with Harvard Medical School.

> The Crimson analyzed the proposed Trump administration funding cuts and estimated that the five hospitals’ multi-year commitment from the NIH is over $6.2 billion and the University’s multi-year federal research funding exceeds $2.7 billion.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/4/funding-review-h...

I’m sure that you have legitimate issues with politics at Harvard, but penalizing a number of independent non-profits that serve the community because they associate with a University that the administration disagrees with also seems to be forcing speech.

Just watch what happens when they exercise their Constiutional right to "say whatever it wants."

Stephen Miller made it clear this morning: "Under this country, under this administration, under President Trump, people who hate America, who threaten our citizens, who rape, who murder, and who support those who rape and murder are going to be ejected from this country."

If the government decides you "hate America" or your business supports some hypothetical rapist/murderer they imagined, you're going to end up ejected from this country without due process.

That's just how government works, buddy. I disagree with my tax dollars being spent to shoot wild horses and fund Lockheed-Martin, but here we are. It's not forced speech, because you have representatives who (in a working system) you could ask to fight against tax dollars being spent on something you dislike. You have a voice, you just don't get to have the only voice.

i disagree with you but i still think you should be allowed to drive on public roads and access publicly-funded health care that are funded by my tax dollars.

Okay, disband all of CBP and then we can talk.

People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.

The point is, it's eating your seed corn.

Spending a billion of it is not just spending a billion. It's spending the many billions it was meant to provide, in interest, over the next decades.

It's extraordinarily expensive to spend it directly, as opposed to spending the income it generates.

You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.

To some degree it already has been. After the economic genius Larry Summers paid for the Allston campus expansion with some dodgy loans that blew up in their faces during the 2008-9 financial crisis, there was some attempt to reform the endowment, back off some risky investments, and build up more of a free-cash emergency fund. This actually paid off during the Covid lockdowns, which the university was able to weather without too much disruption.

The other oddity of Harvard's endowment is that each school at the university basically has it's own fund--so that for instance, the Business school and the Law school don't have to worry about money the same way that FAS (the main undergraduate school) does.

Not to mention all those legal covenants have another party to them - they're not written in stone. I'm sure a good number of them would be willing to considering loosening legal restrictions if it would really help.

They made a big fuss a few years ago about what I read imo as over investing in foreign farm land, esp south America and Africa. Which seems to have completely flopped, if not yet realized.

At this point, you really do have to question whether each university hire was merit based or not, including the fund managers.

It's reserved because the donation was earmarked for a specific purpose (eg. a business program or whatever), not because they reserved 30% on tax owing.

>Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?

It's probably safe to assume donors are competent enough that such glaring loopholes don't exist. After all, the concept of endowments being used as long term savings, rather than spent immediately, isn't exactly a new concept. Failing to take this into account would mean any earmarks are void after a few decades.

He may issue an EO against them similar to the ones he's successfully used to bring major law firms he doesn't like to heel: ban consideration of former Harvard employees (... maybe also graduates?) for Federal jobs, revoke clearances held by anyone employed by Harvard, and ban them from Federal property. Maybe with some other creative terms thrown in to mess with universities in particular.

> he could potentially pull a completely illegal fast one and freeze their accounts

Harvard (and most institutions and powerful individuals) would be smart to maintain liquid assets and a bank account outside America’s control.

I mean, it turns out the fed has the power to pull any money from any account they wish, at any time, like they recently did with NYC.

According to NYT, “ of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.”

If I give a school 20 million yearly to research a specific form of cancer, and I find out that they instead used that money to upgrade the plumbing in their dormitories and spent nothing on cancer research, I would not give them 20 million ever again.

Sure, due to funding cuts students will suffer with slowly degrading infrastructure and will need to do plumbing fixes at some point. But that doesn't mean people who give them money for one purpose are happy with it being used for another purpose.

This is absolutely par for the course for university endowments. They're not big pots of money, they're thousands of small pots of money with various restrictions on their investment, disbursement, etc.

Seems like this could also be explained by short memories. Most westerners, me included, have never lived through true tyranny, we don't know the signs and probably are just too comfortable coasting along, thinking what we have now won't suddenly disappear [1].

We can read history, but it's nothing compared to actually living through it. And I think most American voters don't know their history, and don't bother to inform themselves either, which makes things much worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect

Autocracy, or some form of it, has been the dominant form of governance throughout the history of human civilization. That's not gonna change just because we got Apple watches. Democracy was a really nice experiment, but it's over now.

Let's be realistic: how many doctors have ever been held accountable for performing abortions to avoid complications? How do you even imagine a trial against such a doctor? Women are bleeding out in Texas parking lots because doctors wants them to bleed out to make a political stunt.

I mean...the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is really clear, and the Democrats have weaponized it to help the constituencies they're pursuing. Whether that's morally correct or not is beside the point, because that's not why the party machine is doing it. They've institutionalized racism and sexism at a scale we haven't seen since the civil rights movement brought merit ("...by the content of their character.") to the fore.

Probably not, they'll just pump up international student numbers to recoup and basically gut the domestic student experience. There's near infinite demand for American universities overseas even now.

I think conservative Harvard graduates are among the most eager to impose their will on Harvard. Look at Harvard grad Elise Stefanik, for example.

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Believing that something is inevitable is the first step towards it becoming inevitable. But there feels like there is a momentum in people, and in society as a whole that only ends one way, and we need to release and explore. I don't know if once society gets the "bug" to tear it all down there's any going back.

I feel like we're destroying our societies and getting into wars out of curiosity, and because we've forgotten how it hurts more than anything else.

Or you could find illegal conduct for congress people, have them sued in criminal courts, and then hold elections to elect people (republican or democrat) who will make congress function as it is meant to.

Perhaps someone can provide security services to republican congress people who are threatened with violence if they dont toe the line, so that they are safe enough to stand up to trump. (This is an actual reason given for their cowardice)

Perhaps. The Courts and the Legislature have yet to defend their powers, but the crunch point to do so is approaching. When we get past the stage that they have fully capitulated to Trump then it'll get truly ugly.

From a geographic standpoint, the conflict isn’t state vs. state this time around, though, it’s rural vs. urban. Blue cities in red states. Red counties in blue states. Not very conducive to conventional military conflict.

Yes a black man can only (politically) get away with something less risque like smoking crack cocaine on video during an FBI sting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/local/fbi-video-of-unde...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry

> "woke" is just from AAVE, meaning to be awake to the racial prejudices and social injustices of the world.

Yes, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democracy that serves the people of Korea.

Sometimes expressions have meaning beyond what advocates for the related concepts claim. For example, as I’m sure you are aware, ‘woke’ viewpoints repeatedly advocate for racial discrimination in American universities.

Frankly no. I don't think they actually care in the way that equal outcomes was baked into what it meant to be Blue Team for a while, and the bureaucracy ("deep state") is against them, especially in Massachusetts, and I don't think they're competent enough.

We're talking about going from 2.3% to maybe 13%. And this isn't a reflection of attitudes among people who are potentially employed there, it's a reflection of overt, rigid filtering on the basis of political beliefs.

"Most American academia" !== "most educated people" (much less so if taken globally).

Many Americans would be seriously surprised by the balance of left and right at continental European universities. It is nowhere near as one-sided. And Asian universities are a completely different world.

Generalizing from the extremely lopsided ratios in academia of the Anglosphere to the global educated class is somewhat unreliable.

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> Now one side wants to control what types of thought the universities allow, demanding they monitor, snitch, report, and police the on ideas the conservative base don't like. That's directly opposed to how Universities operate.

Seriously?

Do they ask for your political ideology on the Harvard application?

I misremembered - it was in the source for a sentence in the Texas Tribune article six days ago: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/educatio...

Those are just the ones where they think they have an answer about why. ICE just refused to respond to requests for specifics otherwise.

The article: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/09/texas-universities-i...

Academic success isn’t what Harvard cares about. They want leaders, not kids who are great at “school”.

Put it this way they’d much rather have Roberts or Obama as alumni than your typical 1600 SAT quant.

Whats the best metric to find the people they are looking to educate?

> Standardized test reliably predict academic success. IQ tests similarly.

So do home addresses. And skin colour. And parent's money. There are issues with all of those for different reasons. People saying IQ is problematic don't mean there's no correlation at all. Just that they can be culture / approach / etc. specific and we shouldn't treat them as an objective measure.

If you think that Ivy League cares about academic success, you're out of touch of how US universities work.

Y'all have a lot of inner city neighborhoods that have been systematically destroyed over decades due to redlining, Jim Crow laws, lynching their inhabitants or just outright burning them to the ground, or is “but we do it in Europe” maybe frequently as stupid a comment as “but we do it in America” and is best kept to one’s self, if one doesn’t actually understand how it might be applicable?

Also, bullshit on IQ tests. They do reliably predict a number of socioeconomic factors, so I suppose they’re a great way to keep the poors out. How very “enlightened” of you.

It’s also not what they’re doing. Seems like you’re arguing against a strawman.

> Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies

Do you have data to back this up?

> Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies

[Citation needed]

I guess the nice thing is, the bad guys picked a fight against Harvard Fucking Law.

I think.... you're agreeing with me?

And exactly how were they "screw[ing] over poor, hard-working Asian students

Bruh, have you been sleeping under the rock throughout the whole Trump-defunding-NIH saga.

Asians are not a uniform block. They forget, often, just like every other ethnicity. Or they convince themselves that the values are actually still being held.

What organised group of leftists has attacked a group of people based on their ethnicity? Do you have a link you could share?

Source or don’t post assertions like this. Come on.

Unless you're Stephen Miller, who insists that no mistake was made: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmrobxubic23

And, more recently, Bukele and Trump insisted that they would not return a "terrorist" to the United States: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmrwrrkbnf2e

It's clear that the administration does not consider collateral damage a bug, but a feature; it confirms that as long as they insist that they will not do anything, then nothing will be done.

He didn't get caught doing anything; he said it, openly, during an interview: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lmrx6b2gxy2f

> Although the president was caught on mic musing about deporting American citizens

The canaries in our coal mine are permanent residents. Anything that can legally be done to a permanent resident can basically be done to a "bad" citizen. Trump is trying to run roughshod over permanent residents' habeus corpus rights. Courts are currently pushing back; I expect he will defy them. That, for me, will be the line at which I'll start helping with civil disruption.

Not caught, he held a press conference and announced that he was going to try to do it.

The more fundamental corollary is that the US government does not grant any rights. We have them by default and cede limited power for the benefit of an orderly society. Within such a framework, it should be impossible to disenfranchise people by denying them due process.

> The rubicon has already been crossed

So when would you consider the US crossed this threshold? Guantanamo Bay? The internment of ethnic Japanese in WW2? The Trail of Tears? Or is there something about the excesses of this particular administration that makes this an unprecedented and irreversible step, if I understand your metaphor correctly?

> The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away

Unless, of course, the government considers you to be 2/3 of a person

the judge you are quoting literally worked in FDR's admin when they were deporting millions of Mexicans, regardless of whether they were born in the US. They didn't get due process

Perhaps but "the framers of the US constitution" are almost always over idealized. It was the very early stages of democracy (even if you can call it that). When elected to office they regularly used they official powers to supress political opponents, partisan enmity was endemic and the levels of corruption were pretty extreme (of course there was only so much money to go around due to very low taxes). Trump is unhinged of course but some of the founders or early US politicians weren't too far off...

The constitution was more of an aspirational ideal than a binding document back then since there were very limited ways too enforce it (e.g. the only way to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts was by electing a new president/congress). The First Amendment was also interpreted and viewed extremely different that it is now before the 1900s...

What's your take on the government drone striking American citizens without any sort of trial?

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Uh yeah, why wouldn't I?

I mean I don't know that it's their policy but it sure looks that way.

A long list of extremely large, well-heeled law firms

They will once the administration revokes the visas of half their grad students and shit-can all the international undergrad tuition income.

Every law firm.

It could have been water under the bridge if we simply did not re-elect him. But now we have a second term emboldened by de facto total immunity.

> Once Americans pardoned an attempt by the sitting president to overthrow US democracy it's over already

By this logic it was “over already” at the end of the Civil War. Suspending habeus corpus, ignoring the courts and then meeting with public indifference will be the point of no return. Trump’s third term would just be the canary passing out.

there's no need to defend any good things the nazis did to germany

> At least the Nazi party created a strong economy in Germany

This is a myth. Wages of Destruction [1] details the Nazis’ autarkic economic incompetence.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

It didn't even do that. The Nazi economy was a debt fuelled spending spree that needed war in an attempt to sustain itself.

Nope, it didn't. The Nazis started a war economy almost immediately and yes, they hiked employment, but the Nazi economy was boom or bust. They couldn't sustain it long term without the war.

The nazis just robbed minorities and used slave Labour to prop up their economy and rich certain people/ethnicities

Which, again, is a parallel to Trump. If the peoll,e he deports to El Salavdor start to have their assets taken by the state/their neighbours/the people that dobbed them in, good luck.

There is no evidence Trump has dementia. That is something his detracted unfairly say as if it is true, but there is no reason to think it is.

I don't like him either, but that doesn't mean I will say unfair things about him.

The opening passage of the Wikipedia article:

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right [checks box], authoritarian [ignoring courts decisions, sending people to prisons without any due process; check], and ultranationalist [MAGA, american exceptionalism, etc; check] political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader [do I really need to explain; check], centralized autocracy [feckless GOP congress, EOs left and right; check], militarism, forcible suppression of opposition [J6, anyone? also see Maine and TFA and the law firms being blacklisted and more; check], belief in a natural social hierarchy [pro-life, shrouded in "traditional family values", anti-gay, anti-trans, etc; check], subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race [tariffs, massive deportations without due process, etc; check], and strong regimentation of society and the economy [bathroom bills, tariff policies with exceptions for those who bribe him with million dollar dinner purchases, etc; check].

Tell me how this doesn't fit?

I feel like most people that are using the term deliberately, are doing so based on reasoning close to Umberto Eco's "Ur-fascism" essay: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...

If you want something more modern, someone made a tracker: https://www.realtimefascism.com/

The tracker uses "the 14 characteristics of fascism identified by Dr. Lawrence Britt" (which is slightly different): https://osbcontent.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/PC-00466.pdf

I get what you mean, and I understand the frustration. We should be more careful with words for exactly the reason you say at the end.

Having said that, the reason I chose to use it here was because I felt it was time, i.e. it has finally become earned. I could defend the usage with anyone who brought that up (and someone's done a thorough job in one of the replies).

> historical fascism

I mean.. Mussolini's Italy or 30s Austria weren't exactly Nazi Germany. So while there still might be some way to go the comparison is not that extreme.

Equating Trump with Hitler is of course a stretch. Mussolini however? Well..

How did that work the last 10 times we said the things trump wants to do aren't gonna happen. He's saying he will so we should believe him

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-t...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-going-run-third-term-ste...

None of the rest of the stuff happening was going to happen either, I’m sure.

Legal residents are being kidnapped and disappeared into foreign gulags but let’s turn down the temperature, right?

People keep saying this about everything the admin does before they do it. Pretending it won't happen won't stop it happening.

The real question is, who is left to stop it? The man is saying he's not joking about it. It's in line with his previous actions. They have actively refused to comply with court orders. They actively tried to reject the results of an election.

Why is it alarmist to say they may do the thing they want to do, and can do?

The number of times I've read people say "That's alarmist and will never happen", just to see that exact thing happen, is a lot.

If there was no track record of Trump doing things off the rails, we could turn down the temps. However, he very much does not, and quite the opposite. Him admitting they are "looking into it" on how to achieve a third term is quite unsettling. Especially with congress acquiescing to any whim he has as well as SCOTUS giving him permission to do whatevs. None of this instills confidence that there will be any push back.

The same people that came up with Project 2025 are the very people that would come up with plans for giving a third term. Those plans might seem ridiculous to some, but so did the alternate electors and the other things Trump has already tried before. The fact that no negative outcome came from any of those previous attempts just emboldens even further attempts.

It will definitely happen if everyone is as complacent as that. At this point this attitude is extremely hard to take serious: you're either not paying attention or you're not engaging in good faith.

> That's a little alarmist. It's not going to happen.

Serious question, when someone tells you what they want, why don't want you believe them?

It's openly being discussed and you think it's alarmist? No, we need to turn the temperature up and start taking people at their word.

We need to start turning the temperature up or this country will be completely lost

Steve Bannon went on Bill Maher recently saying they are working on finding a way to make it happen. He was not joking. When challenged, Bannon's response was that Trump was already flooding the courts with cases.

> That's a little alarmist. It's not going to happen.

For context, this is exactly what was said of _literally everything_ that has happened in Trump's current term.

Is it alarmist, or is it just alarming? And, if it is alarming, shouldn't we be taking it seriously, instead of hand-waving it away?

This is where I was at, but am believing less and less as the parallels stack up.

I used to tell people to look at Russia if they wanted to see the Nazi script play out, and that this could never happen in the USA. Now I'm reminded of others that weren't taken seriously early enough.

Why do you consider it alarmist? Trump has repeatedly said he would do it, and that he's "not joking" about it.

I have had to listen to people like you for almost 10 years talk about things Trump said that were never going to happen. At what point do you just accept the evidence of your eyes and ears?

Yeah, I must be hallucinating with "bullshit in my head".

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00240-9

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/black-lives-ma...

https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/70845

I agree, each UK citizen is infused with the original sin of being a colonizer and their opinion should be discarded until they purge this sin from their bodies through appropriate cleansing rituals.

Perhaps some form of self-flagelation or bloodletting?

I'm fine with stopping the flow of federal money to people who hate me in particular and who take a salary to convince others to do so too. Those who defend the conduct of universities need to pause and consider that the public has noticed the radicalization of academia, despises it, and will support state action to reverse it.

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Yes it does sound authoritarian. Thank you for answering my question in good faith.

I am noticing a pattern; whenever I ask clarifying questions on hacker news threads regarding politically charged topics, most people assume least-respectful interpretation of my questions and heavily downvote them. As someone who is curious and genuinely trying to understand what's going on (I am here instead of other social media because I am looking for nuance, analysis, details, etc), it's really frustrating and disappointing when I am attacked for asking questions.

So thank you, again, for engaging in my question constructively.

> Can you imagine if Obama had demanded that any university do an ideological purge of its conservative staff and students?

Obama didn't need to demand it, the Universities went ahead and did it on their own.

https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-last-four-years-wer...

This rings true for much of South America at one point or another. Lots of African nations. Several in SE Asia as well.

Heck, just in the last few years we've seen several countries regress by a decade or more because of military coups or similar.

Really, if you look at many countries that haven't been a world power, this has happened once or twice in recent memory.

According to Wikipedia, “in 1929, Argentina was wealthy by world standards, but the prosperity ended after 1929 with the worldwide Great Depression.” It was presumably the collapsing economy which caused the military coup, not the other way around.

Do you have a better example? Or is that it?

And under the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

>They burned their credibility among those with whom they never needed it in the first place.

I think universities should probably be concerned with their credibility among democratically elected political representatives if they are going to be accepting public funds. If the university wants to forgo federal grants, then yes, they don't require any credibility with anyone but academia and their donors, and more power to them.

no, but there would be much more push back against this type of action if Harvard and other universities didn't alienate a large chunk of the population. Why should the taxpayers fund places that openly admit to decades of racial discrimination in admissions

the institutions have already failed their intended purpose, as shown by the research fraud. Propping them up with tax dollars because of nostalgia over the name brand is pointless

given my comment got railroaded instantly, this is clearly what everyone thinks, but let's at least have that conversation rather than blindly pumping money into academia while local schools can't even afford books

Maybe. Not sure. More explicitly the letter demands that tenured professors be given more decision making power than non academic activists.

The outright dismissal of the letter suggests that at least maybe non academic activists are calling the shots, and if that is true Harvard is destined to wither and die.

You forgot the cost of his golf excursions. (there are a surprising number of Trump golf trackers LOL)

https://didtrumpgolftoday.com/

"Est. cost to taxpayers for golf since returning to office: $32,200,000"

nope, just a random stranger trying to add some random noise into these often one sided conversations, I of course support public academic investment and Trump is bad for the country, but I worry we've fully mapped one to one trump and nazis, and it just doesn't resonate with me as much as it seems it does everyone else.

I'm from small town America, I know that the federal government doesn't care about my hometown, so when I hear things like Harvard gets billions while already having tens of billions in endowment, it's hard for me to not think that's crazy and why can't that money go to average americans, meanwhile here I am typing words into a screen connected to the internet so I fully acknowledge I've benefited from the institution

There's definitely a conversation we can have about the cost and accessibility of higher education in this country. I don't think that conversation should include an administration that is unilaterally and arbitrarily canceling international student visas, threatening to withhold research funding that was already allocated by congress, and turning back foreign scientists at the border for things they said in private conversation that the government only knows about after a warrantless search.

By default, research belongs to the researchers. That's an essential part of academic freedom. The main exceptions are research funded by grants and contracts that specify otherwise, and when you start looking for patents and other commercialization opportunities.

In other words, the university may have some property rights to your work if you deal too closely with for-profit businesses or national security interests. But if you are just doing normal research with normal grants, you'll probably never see those exceptions in your career.

If the Palestinians are risking their lives to protest against Hamas in Gaza, why can't the alleged pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate in support of this viewpoint?

> If you can find me a western government or institution they should be protesting for actively collaborating with Hamas

The BBC (which frequently quotes Hamas verbatim without attribution and which has employed many openly racist correspondents), and Associated Press (who rode with Hamas during the Oct 7 massacre). You should already be aware of this.

>If I was to donate 9 (or 10) figures to an institution, I would want to make sure it is used to support what I want it to support (cancer research, scholarships, libraries, etc), rather than be used as a general slush fund.

You can make that restricted donation outside of the endowment. I thought endowments were for the support of students, not research.

There are so many possible scenarios. What if the campus is infested with face-huggers from the award-winning movie Alien? What if there are still Jewish students and faculty members who need to be harassed anonymously?

I'll leave those to people more familiar with the subject. And as for the pneumonia scenario, I reiterate that the only sane course of action is to seek treatment, not to walk around public spaces, masked or not.

> Also, research tells us that it only takes 3.5% to overthrow a government.

You're describing a coup or revolution. Isn't that highly anti-democratic considering this president just won an election? Why should the 50% be under the thumb of the 3.5%?

> I'd guess bad-to-good ratio is at least 10 to 1. Should we fix that?

Should we fix... what? Your unsubstantiated claim? You didn't even bother to do napkin math about it, you just asked a bunch of leading questions and then claimed inaction by the masses.

These are important questions, but your skepticism has no roots in firmer grounds. How are you arriving at a ratio of 10:1? Bad faith actor.

You do seem expert in all research fields. You can do on your own.

Also, isn't a ton of the IP from federally funded research just handed over to US corporations for free or pennies on the dollar?

Something tells me this is more of the current administration threatening to completely wreck US prosperity if they don't get wins on their bigoted social war agenda.

It actually isn’t. Grants, as well as much of endowment funds are restricted. They legally must be accounted for separately and can only be used as specified. If you have a billion dollars in restricted endowment or grants towards scholarships and resources, you cannot use them to keep the lights on.

Research projects require grant funding because the schools do not have a business model to justify doing the research.

Sure, that's the narrative to manufacture consent from the naive, but I don't buy it at all. Perhaps for very small fledgling universities that makes partial sense; even then I am skeptical. For Harvard, definitely not.

At very least, if your endowment is growing on an inflation-adjusted basis, it does not appear to me that you need further subsidies; your primary business is to be an hedge fund and the treasury of an empire, not education for the masses. Gains should be taxed like a hedge fund at that point.

If you want to subsidize education as a society, there are much better ways: fund research directly and cut through the indirect cost crap (which was popular among academics up until the moment the current administration started advocating for it).

> In both cases, those that believe in them try to force them on everyone in law, policy, etc. They've been doing that, too, so it isn't speculative.

I think it is speculative. I haven't seen this happen beyond a small number of isolated cases, that generally are met poorly within the organization where it happens.

To my observation the association between "believing that intersectionality accurately describes the world today" and "attempting to force others to believe similarly", is about as strong as the association between "frequently voting Republican in the US since 2016", and "attempting to carry out a mass shooting".

Could you describe what you believe "intersectionality" to mean, as a philosophy?

It's really not necessary since you had already invoked the notion that separation of Church and State isn't particularly important to your evaluation of what the government should fund. Everything else sort of falls by the wayside.

Arabs never ‘established peace’ - historians largely agree that Islam was spread through conquest. Under Arab colonisation Jewish people either lived as Dhimmis, which are second class citizens, or were subject to outright violence (you can find many incidences of this before 1948), or both.

Its not clear what the effect no Harvard would be on those metrics. And all of those are necessarily in Harvards best interest to maintain too.

This is compared to a direct payment to sustain operations which the government is saying they may not be in favor of. But its not like Harvard would say ”it may not be in our interest to produce successful people anymore.”

Don't confuse the credential factory with the skills and quality of the underlying students. Harvard is little more than a toll booth for students who were already smart and over-achieving. It's not like the teaching is extraordinary.

Most if not all of his cabinet (surprisingly) have an Ivy League background. Not sure if that's an endorsement on them, or an indictment on Ivy League schools

You made several good points. While I am struggling to validate "Student groups must be vetted so that they don't violate orthodoxy", it may be because I am unfamiliar with the actions of the student bodies listed at the end of the section, or maybe subtleties in the wording that I am missing that could be exploited later.

Also I find the mask-ban strange and alarming. That example alone was probably enough of a red flag for me to more carefully scrutinize the good-faith of the rest of the letter.

Thank you for taking the time to actually engage with me constructively. Unfortunately many others decided to just downvote my questions.

I find it so disappointing that on a forum like Hacker News I am being downvoted for asking a question in good faith in an attempt to better understand a complex and nuanced topic.

When I ask ChatGPT to explain Facism to me, two aspects it pointed out were: - Suppression of political opposition, dissent, and individual freedoms. - Use of state power to enforce conformity.

I can see how the letter from the government to Harvard would be considered use of state power to enforce conformity. As someone who is open minded trying to understand the truth, the letter on first pass reads like they are using state power to unwind enforced ideological conformity. This is confusing, because on its surface it seems anti-fascist, so when people label it fascist (with charged emotions), it's hard for me to take them at their word without further explanation.

When the people who are concerned about the current actions of the government attack me for asking questions in an effort to actually understand their concerns rather than just accepting them, it makes me more suspicious of their viewpoints, not less.

Also, ChatGPT's thorough explanation of Fascism indicated to me that both administrations have been showing signs of increasing fascism, almost complimenting each other in their policies as they rock the cultural and institutional trunk of the united states back and forth with ever increasing momentum until it tips over into catastrophe. If such is the case, then maybe the only hope is for people to engage in these thorny issues with curiosity and nuance, to carefully sift out the bad from the good instead of assuming that everything the other side is doing is evil.

I have no control over what other people do, all I have control over is my own actions. I don't see a good way out of this mess that doesn't involve curiosity, empathy, understanding and reconciliation. So I will continue engage in the conversation with these intentions, and if people attack me for that then I suppose to will just have to accept what's inevitable.

Thank you,

Let me start by saying that I am not American and I am not your enemy. Also, I am genuinely trying to understand the truth about these matters, with an open mind to the possibility that it's messy and complicated and I might not be capable of understanding it. I hope that provides context for what follows.

Honestly, I am not sure if it's okay. It reminds me of the anti-racist movement, in that the action almost feels like it's anti-fascist. It's using a fascist action (use of state power to enforce conformity), to undo a fascist policy (suppression of political opposition and dissent). This reminds me of anti-racism, which uses one type of racism to compensate for a different type of past-racism.

What I find interesting is the very last statement in your post. I am not aware of anything Biden did, but it does seem like Obama did something very similar with the DEI policies forced on universities which came with funding implications for non-compliance. It was a different time, everyone was upset about the great financial crisis of 2008, and on their surface I am sure these policies sounded like a good thing. In the end though these policies were very much a form of facism in that it was a state sponsored effort to suppress political opposition. This probably sounds like I am defending the political views of racists, but really I am defending the political views of people who believe leadership roles should be filled based on the merit of the individual and their ability to take care of those in their charge, and not based on the color of their skin, their gender or sexual preferences.

As I have tried to unpack all this, the perspective that is growing for me is that for the last 20 or so years both administrations have been taking steps towards fascism while hiding their fascist actions behind intentions that sound anti-fascist. If this perspective is even partially correct, it would explain why so much of this has been so confusing for me.

What would have been a proportional response? Is it a numbers game? lets do 2x? 5x? 10x? In the gilad shalit deal Palestinians established the proportion of 1 Israeli to 1027 Palestinians. So on Oct 7 - 1,195 were murdered, by your standards Israel should have killed 1,227,265 Palestinians.

> If anything negative you can say about Israel is equated to antisemitism then Israel gets a free pass.

I am not arguing this. Everyone is free to criticize Israel; when it becomes antisemitic is when you hold Jews to a different standard than you hold everyone else.

> but Israel's response was out of proportion

Why do you say this? What would a proportionate response have looked like to an attempt to conquer your country by firing 5,000 rockets while 6,000 people invaded and murdered everyone they could find? Bear in mind, that immediately afterwards, Hamas leaders promised to repeat October 7th again and again until Israel was annihilated.

1. OK, great: this is a legitimate argument against the existence of Israel. So we can then expect Israel to be the focus of 0.5% of anti-nationalist protests, since it is one of ~200 countries.

2. What is the "correct" number of fatalities when fighting a defensive war against an enemy committed to annihilating your country? And besides, even Hamas now admits that 72% of combat-aged fatalities they have recorded were men.

3. I never said carte blanche; I just find it curious that people find so much time in their day to protest against Israel, but when Alawites are massacred in Syria, civilians slaughtered in Sudan, or hundreds of thousands of children starve in Yemen, nobody says "boo". Surely you value the lives of innocent Muslims everywhere the same?

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If you think 'viewpoint diversity' is any level of sane with the current administration then you haven't been keeping up with their actions:

> By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.

This sounds like the federal government is demanding that they adhere to a department of Policing Wrongthink.

> Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.

Insane

> Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.

Insane

> reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship

Is even insane if you think about it for two seconds; nobody wants the government deciding what counts as activism and what counts as "real" scholarship. A good heuristic: do any of the proponents want a Bernie Sanders or AOC wielding this authority?

Or the Supreme Court.

I agree. Congress has allocated funds to Harvard. It’s not up to the executive whether to disburse them, unless that was specifically stated in the law.

> Which was also a law passed by Congress. Congress passes laws.

Indeed, but this was a clear evasion of prior laws. I don't like such workarounds in principle - either Congress should have gone the proper way and go for a constitutional amendment, or it should have buried the fucking bill. This created the nasty precedent that the current admin is using to push through the SAVE Act.

I agree on the matter, but pressuring states with financial strings is not the way to go for it.

All other democracies on this rock just go and modify their constitution, that's the proper way. Y'all just are so completely gridlocked that this is all but impossible...

> The US government has determined that the individual belonged to a gang.

The executive branch has made that allegation. The person didn't have a trial in the judicial branch.

Please look up "habeas corpus", and Article 1 Section 9 Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution.