Evelyn Reynolds

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    Barbara Lee, trailblazing former US Congress member, elected Oakland mayor

    Barbara Lee, a trailblazing former member of Congress, has been elected as the next mayor of Oakland, California, after fending off an insurgent challenge from the center at a critical moment for the Bay Area city.Lee defeated former the city council member Loren Taylor after nine rounds of ranked-choice voting gave her more than 52% of the vote to Taylor’s 47%, according to the Alameda county registrar of voters.“This morning, Loren Taylor called me to concede the race,” Lee said in a statement on Saturday. “While I believe strongly in respecting the democratic voting process and ballots will continue to be counted through Tuesday, the results are clear that the people of Oakland have elected me as your next Mayor. Thank you, Oakland!”“I accept your choice with a deep sense of responsibility, humility, and love,” Lee added. “Oakland is a deeply divided City; I answered the call to run to unite our community, so that I can represent every voter, and we can all work together as One Oakland to solve our most pressing problems.”The next mayor must confront a series of acute challenges, including a gaping budget shortfall, widespread public safety concerns and an affordability crisis. The next mayor will serve out the remainder of Sheng Thao’s term, after she was recalled by voters in November amid frustration over crime and homelessness.Earlier this year, Thao was indicted on federal bribery charges; she has denied wrongdoing.Both Lee and Taylor – the leading contenders in a wide field of candidates – prioritized addressing public safety and the city’s financial crisis, but offered different visions.“Right now, we’re in a period of instability and voters are looking for somebody to stabilize the city government,” said Chris Higgenbotham, an Oakland-based political consultant who was not involved with the mayoral race.He added that residents had wanted the city’s next mayor to “move us not in just the right direction for the next two years but to put us on a road map back to where we were at before the pandemic – one of the best cities, highlighted in magazines, and not just in the news for the negative”.The 78-year-old former representative, a hometown hero, promised to move Oakland past the rancor that has clouded city hall over the last few years. Taylor cast himself as a tough-on-crime moderate who would shake up city hall and “fix” a “broken” city.Though Lee entered as the heavy favorite, Taylor’s campaign gained momentum as outside groups working to push the Bay Area’s progressive politics to the center took an interest in his campaign.Lee was backed by most of the city council, the interim mayor, the local Democratic party, labor unions, faith leaders and business leaders. She earned the endorsement of the editorial board of the East Bay Times. Taylor drew support from the business and tech communities and was endorsed by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board. More

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    Protesters fill the streets in cities across the US to denounce Trump agenda

    Protesters poured into the streets of cities and towns across the United States again on Saturday, in the second wave of protests this month, as organizers seek to turn discontent with Donald Trump’s presidency into a mass movement that will eventually translate into action at the ballot box.By early afternoon, large protests were under way in Washington, New York and Chicago, with images of crowds cascading across social networks showing additional demonstrations in Rhode Island, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, California and Pennsylvania, among others. Americans abroad also signaled their opposition to the Trump agenda in Dublin, Ireland, and other cities.More than 400 rallies were planned, most loosely organized by the group 50501, which stands for 50 protests in 50 states, one movement.Opponents of Donald Trump’s administration mobilized from the east coast to the west, including at rallies in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, decrying what they see as threats to the nation’s democratic ideals.The events ranged from a massive march through midtown Manhattan to a rally in front of the White House, and a demonstration at a Massachusetts commemoration marking the start of the American revolutionary war 250 years ago.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIn Massachusetts, 80-year-old retired mason Thomas Bassford told CBS News that he believed US citizens were under attack from their own government, saying: “This is a very perilous time in America for liberty. Sometimes we have to fight for freedom.”Protesters identified a variety of concerns, each unified under a common theme: opposition to the second Trump presidency.“We are losing our country,” demonstrator Sara Harvey told the New York Times in Jacksonville, Florida. “I’m worried for my grandchildren,” she said. “I do it for them.”It is the fourth protest event to be staged by the group since Trump was inaugurated on 20 January. Previous events included a “No Kings Day” on President’s Day, 17 February, a theme adopted before Trump referred to himself as a king in a social media post days later.View image in fullscreenOrganizers have called for 11 million people to participate in the latest rallies, representing 3.5% of the US population.Such a figure would likely surpass the numbers who took part in the “Hands Off” rallies staged on 5 April, when 1,200 demonstrations were staged across the US to register opposition to Trump’s assault on government agencies and institutions, spearheaded by the president’s chief lieutenant, the tech billionaire Elon Musk, and his unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIndivisible, the progressive movement behind the “Hands Off” events, said it was seeking to send a message to opposition politicians and ordinary voters that vocal resistance to Trump’s policies was essential. It also said it was seeking to build momentum that would lead to further and larger protests.Heather Dunn, a spokesperson for 50501, said the goal of Saturday’s protests was “to protect our democracy against the rise of authoritarianism under the Trump administration”.She called the group a “pro-democracy, pro-constitution, anti-executive overreach, nonviolent grassroots movement” that was nonpartisan.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“We have registered Democrats, registered independents and registered Republicans all marching because they all believe in America, because they all believe in a fair government that puts people before profits,” she told the Washington Post.Academics who have tracked the slide of democracy into authoritarianism say protests can be part of a wider of strategy to reverse the trend.“Oppositions to authoritarian governments have to use multiple channels always,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. “They have to use the courts where those are available. They have to use the ballot box when that’s available, and they have to use the streets when necessary – that can shape media framing and media discourse, which is very, very important.”In Washington DC on Saturday, a protest planned by the 50501 movement is scheduled to take place in Franklin Park, and a march will start near the George Washington monument and head towards the White House in support of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian man with US protected status wrongly deported to El Salvador from Maryland. More

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    Outrage as Trump’s coal expansion coupled with health cuts: ‘There won’t be anyone to work in the mines’

    The Trump administration’s efforts to expand coal mining while simultaneously imposing deep cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring miner health and safety has left some advocates “dumbfounded”.Agencies that protect coal miners from serious occupational hazards, including the condition best known as “black lung”, have been among those affected by major government cuts imposed by the White House and the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) run by the billionaire Elon Musk.“The [Mine Workers of America] is thrilled they’re looking at the future of coal,” said Erin Bates, a spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America, about a series of executive orders signed by the president to expand coal mining. “But – if you’re not going to protect the health and safety of the miners, there’s not going to be anyone to work in the mines you are apparently reopening.”Last week, Trump signed a raft of measures he said would expand coal mining in the US in order to feed the energy demands of hungry datacenters that power artificial intelligence software.“All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened if they’re modern enough, or they’ll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built,” Trump told a crowd of lawmakers, workers and executives at the White House while signing the order. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.”The coal industry has shrunk precipitously in recent years, and now represents only about 15% of the power generated for the US electrical grid. Natural gas, wind and solar have proved to have a competitive advantage over coal, contributing to its decline, because plants are cheaper to operate, according to Inside Climate News.Even as coal mining has shrunk, the potential dangers for people who still work in the field remains high. Pneumoconiosis is among the best known occupational hazards faced by coal miners, but is far from the only risk they face – others include roof collapse, hearing loss and lung cancer, to name a few.Trump’s push for coal came less than a week after the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, imposed a 10,000-person cut to the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Cuts overseen by Kennedy, alongside those imposed by Musk’s unofficial Doge, represented the elimination of almost a quarter of HHS’s 82,000-person workforce.Nearly 900 of those workers were dismissed from the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH), including in the agency’s respiratory health division in West Virginia, which specifically oversaw an X-ray screening program for black lung. Doge has also pursued cuts to mine safety by eliminating 34 regional offices of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in 19 states.The deep cuts especially worried those intimately familiar with the suffering caused by pneumoconiosis – such as Greg Wagner, a doctor and former senior adviser at the NIOSH.“My thoughts were, ‘Why NIOSH? Why now?’” said Wagner, whose early work at a community clinic in a small West Virginia coal mining town led him to a career working to prevent the disease at both NIOSH and as assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health.Wagner also worked with the International Labor Organization and multiple countries in an effort to eliminate pneumoconiosis globally. He is now a professor of environmental health at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.The cuts “gutted” NIOSH, said Wagner, even as agency experts were “doing what they were asked to do and doing it extraordinarily well … Over-performing with little recognition. And to see that appear to be going up in smoke – I just – obviously my feelings were profound and complex.”The administration also wants to pause a new rule on silica dust – a kind of pneumoconiosis or “black lung” disease that is increasingly striking younger miners in Appalachia, as workers dig for harder-to-reach veins of coal.“To go into the silica rule – we’re almost dumbfounded,” Bates said. “The number of black lung cases that are showing up in the US is astronomical – it is increasing and not only are the numbers increasing, but it’s happening to younger and younger miners. Every single day this rule is delayed is another day our miners are contracting black lung.”Silicosis is a disease caused by inhaling silica dust, a form of pneumoconiosis that can be even more severe than the black lung of a century ago, and which has long been known to harm the health of coal miners.The government has been aware of the dangers of silica dust for decades, recommending dramatic reductions in exposure levels as early as 1974. In 1993, Wagner’s boss at NIOSH, Dr J Donald Millar, described the persistence of silicosis as “an occupational obscenity because there is no scientific excuse for its persistence”.The MSHA finalized a rule in April 2024 reducing silica dust exposure in mines, which was set to go into effect this year. Last week, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association filed a suit seeking to pause enforcement of the silica dust rule pending a lawsuit. Days later, federal mine regulators told the court they wanted to pause enforcement of the silica dust rule for coal mining operations by four months, delaying any enforcement actions until August 2025.“The sudden shift in litigation position signaled by MSHA’s ‘enforcement pause’, and by its unilateral proposal to hold this case in abeyance for a period of four months is a clarion call to this nation’s miners that the agency charged with the profound responsibility of protecting their health and safety is losing the stomach for the fight to vindicate its own rule,” attorneys for mine and steel unions wrote, seeking to intervene in the case.Wagner said his concerns about delay of the silica rule extended beyond miners into workers in other industries – including people who work sand blasting or carving engineered stone countertops, all known to be environments where workers can be exposed to potentially harmful levels of silica dust.“I don’t have the right words,” said Wagner about the cuts to NIOSH, which was deeply involved in research that showed how silica dust harmed miners. “I feel like it was just done without thought, done without consideration and the consequences of the loss of the agency i think will be felt for years.“We will need to try to rebuild what NIOSH has been doing.” More

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    JD Vance had ‘exchange of opinions’ with senior cardinal, Vatican says

    The US vice-president, JD Vance, had “an exchange of opinions” with the Vatican’s secretary of state over current international conflicts and immigration when they met on Saturday, the Vatican has said.The Vatican issued a statement after Vance, a Catholic convert, met Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. There was no indication he met Pope Francis, who has resumed some official duties during his recovery from pneumonia.The Holy See has responded cautiously to the Trump administration, in keeping with its tradition of diplomatic neutrality.It has expressed alarm over Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration and cuts in international aid, and has called for peaceful resolutions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.Those concerns were reflected in the Vatican statement, which said the talks were cordial and that the Vatican expressed satisfaction with the administration’s commitment to protecting freedom of religion and conscience.“There was an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners,” the statement said.“Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged.”The reference to “serene collaboration” appeared to refer to Vance’s accusation that the US conference of Catholic bishops was resettling “illegal immigrants” in order to obtain federal funding. Top US cardinals have pushed back strongly against the claim.Parolin told La Repubblica on the eve of Vance’s visit: “It is clear that the approach of the current US administration is very different from what we are used to and, especially in the west, from what we have relied on for many years,.”As the US pushes to end the war in Ukraine, Parolin reaffirmed Kyiv’s right to its territorial integrity and insisted that any peace deal must not be “imposed” on Ukraine but “built patiently, day by day, with dialogue and mutual respect”.Vance was spending Easter weekend in Rome with his family and attended Good Friday services in St Peter’s Basilica after meeting Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. On Saturday, after the Vance family’s introduction to Parolin, they had a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.It was not immediately clear where they would celebrate Easter. Pope Francis, for his part, according to official liturgical plans released on Saturday, indicated he hoped to attend Easter mass on Sunday, which usually draws thousands to St Peter’s Square.The pope and Vance have tangled over immigration and the Trump administration’s plans to deport people en masse. Francis has made caring for those who migrate a hallmark of his papacy and his progressive views on social justice issues have often put him at odds with members of the more conservative US Catholic church.The pope also changed church teaching to say that capital punishment was inadmissible in all cases. After a public appeal from Francis just weeks before Trump took office, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row. Trump is an outspoken proponent of expanding capital punishment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, identifies with a small Catholic intellectual movement that is viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings and often described as “post-liberal”.Post-liberals share some longstanding Catholic conservative views, such as opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. They envision a counter-revolution in which they take over government bureaucracy and institutions such as universities from within, replacing entrenched “elites” with their own and acting upon their vision of the “common good”.Just days before the pope was admitted to hospital in February, Francis criticised the Trump administration’s deportation plans, warning that they would deprive people of their inherent dignity. In a letter to US bishops, he also appeared to respond to Vance directly for having claimed that Catholic doctrine justified such policies.Vance had defended the administration’s America-first crackdown by citing a concept from medieval Catholic theology known in Latin as ordo amoris. He said the concept delineated a hierarchy of care – to family first, followed by neighbour, community, fellow citizens and, last, those elsewhere.In his 10 February letter, Francis appeared to correct Vance’s understanding of the concept.“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extends to other persons and groups,” he wrote. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the good Samaritan, that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”Vance has acknowledged Francis’ criticism but has said he will continue to defend his views. During an appearance on 28 February at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, Vance did not address the issue specifically but called himself a “baby Catholic” and acknowledged there are “things about the faith that I don’t know”. More

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    Sci-fi Musk is brainstorming ways to breed his ‘legion’ more efficiently | Arwa Mahdawi

    Elon Musk’s never-ending daddy issuesI regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.You’ll be familiar with some of these details already. By now we all know that Musk seems to think that the only way to save western civilization is if people like him have as many children as possible. And you’ve probably read the New York Times report which alleges that Musk, who likes preaching what he practices in regards to populating the world, has a habit of wandering around offering his sperm to strangers.What you might not know, however, is that Musk is so committed to this idea of himself as a superhero saving the universe that, even in private conversations, he apparently speaks like he is a character in a poorly written sci-fi novel. According to the Journal, Musk reportedly refers to his children as a “legion” and has been brainstorming ways to breed more efficiently.“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly said to Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his children, in a text message seen by the newspaper.Surrogacy can often be a complex ethical issue. Not in this case. Musk appears to view women as nothing more than walking wombs he can use to further his own narcissistic agenda. Ethics aside for a moment, one has to wonder why a man who styles himself as a tech guru can’t figure out a faster way to pop out offspring than surrogacy. At the very least, I’m surprised that Musk hasn’t yet followed the lead of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly had visions of using his ranch in New Mexico as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies. But that may come later I suppose. All the money that Doge, Musk’s pet government project, has cut from libraries and medical research might, at this very moment, be getting funneled into an Official Institute of Accelerated Insemination.While Musk may not have a birthing ranch (yet), he does own a very expensive social network which, according to the Journal, he’s been using to solicit more baby mamas. Musk has apparently been engaging with the cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong on X, sending so many followers her way that she earned $21,000 over a two-week period from the revenue-sharing programs for creators on the platform. Once she was enjoying how lucrative it was to be on his good side, the billionaire asked Fong if she was interested in birthing his child. You know, as you do. Fong politely declined and Musk swiftly unfollowed her, causing her X-related income to drop.We all know that Musk has very thin skin. How has he responded to the Journal’s embarrassing reporting? Honestly, in an unusually restrained fashion. Nobody has been sent to El Salvador (yet), no reporters have been doxed. Musk has just dismissed the piece as scurrilous gossip. On Tuesday he tweeted “TMZ > > WSJ”. And, in normal circumstances, Musk would be correct that, as long as all parties involved are consenting adults, his private life is no one else’s business. But Musk is not your run-of-the-mill rich guy, is he? I don’t think Donald Trump or JD Vance believe in very much other than their own advancement. But Musk is an ideologue: he’s inserted himself into the top levels of government and is busy rearranging the US according to his worldview. Understanding all the ins and outs of this worldview is now very much a matter of public interest.It’s also illuminating, I think, to look at the sort of coverage Musk’s shenanigans get, particularly in the conservative press. While people love gawking at Musk, he’s still widely seen as an eccentric genius. Even the headline of the Wall Street Journal piece: “The tactics Elon Musk uses to manage his ‘Legion’ of babies – and their mothers”, seemed to suggest admiration for his multitasking. I’ve offered up this thought experiment before, but just humor me again and imagine a world where a woman acted like Musk. You can’t, can you? She’d be eviscerated on Fox News. There’d be a million thought pieces about what a terrible mother she was. Absolutely nobody would consider her a genius and she certainly wouldn’t be advising the president. There is perhaps no better embodiment of gendered double standards than Musk. And now he’s set on exporting those double standards to Mars.Give Fatima Hassouna a ‘loud death’Being a journalist in Gaza is a death sentence, with Israel apparently set on ensuring a complete media blackout of the ongoing genocide. On Wednesday, days before her wedding, Fatima Hassouna, a young photojournalist who is the subject of a new documentary, became one of the latest journalists to be killed by Israel. A strike on her home killed her along with 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna had written on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear.”This is what it means to be Palestinian: to have to beg the world to care about you. To have cowards avert your eyes as you are massacred. To have the architects of your annihilation trot around the world being treated as VIPs by countries that once pretended to care about human rights.Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayorI fully endorse this.Young women now binge drink more than young menWhile gen Z may drink less than previous generations, the gender gap in risky drinking has been narrowing. A new study finds that women aged 18-25 are now actually drinking slightly more than men the same age.Sudan: two years of war and shameful international neglect“Last week, Amnesty International released a new investigation finding the Rapid Support Forces committed widespread sexual violence, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery, amounting to possible crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war. “Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the UN Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes.”A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revoltingI chuckled a lot at this headline.Everyone is making fun of Katy Perry for her little space trip, even Wendy’sThe fast-food chain is refusing to apologize to the singer for a tweet suggesting she should be sent back to space. The Blue Origin flight has been widely panned, with the model and actor Emily Ratajkowski saying she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”The week in pawtriarchyRemember when Trump got attacked by an angry bald eagle during a photoshoot in 2015? Unfortunately, the bird kingdom did not properly organize to stop his presidency back then but it seems that some of our feathered friends have decided to fight the Maga powers that be. Last Friday a pigeon landed on Fox News’s Peter Doocy’s head while the White House correspondent was wrapping up a segment on tariffs. Not the first time that a Fox News correspondent has looked bird-brained.

    Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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    The showdown between Harvard and the White House – day by day

    It took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students and alumni and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington.Harvard was one of the first universities to face national scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and the ensuing campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, as critics accused the school and its leaders of failing to adequately combat antisemitism on its campus.And this February, just weeks into Trump’s presidency, the administration’s new Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced that it would be visiting 10 universities, including Harvard, in an effort to “eradicate antisemitic harassment” in schools.Soon after, the White House went after Columbia University, first launching a review of its federal funding, and then revoking $400m in federal funds from the school, citing the college’s failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment amid the campus protests against the war in Gaza.View image in fullscreenIn response, groups of Harvard faculty, alumni and students as well as Cambridge community members began calling on their own university leaders – through protests, letters, op-eds and resolutions – to publicly oppose the administration’s actions and to resist any future demands and pressure from the White House.On 6 March, the day before Columbia’s funding was cut, Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky penned an op-ed in the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, criticizing the university’s silence, and urging Harvard leaders to set an example by making “a firm public defense of democracy”.Days later, immigration authorities arrested Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, and Trump officials warned 60 universities of potential penalties tied to antiseminism investigations.That week, nearly 200 Harvard affiliates gathered on campus and protested Khalil’s detention, and urged the university to condemn the administration’s actions.Enos and Levitsky followed with another op-ed, this time titled: “First they came for Columbia.”“So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education,” they wrote. “That must change. Harvard must stand up, speak out, and lead a public defense of our freedom to speak and study freely.”The piece resonated widely within the Harvard community, Enos said, even reportedly reaching Harvard’s board of overseers (one of the school’s two governing bodies).Enos decided to write to several members of the board of overseers, sharing arguments from his recent op-eds. He had heard that some board members were sympathetic to their view.In mid-March, universities watched Columbia yield to a series of sweeping demands made by the Trump administration in an effort to restore the halted funding. (The funding remains withheld, and reports now suggest that a possible consent decree is on the table.)Enos and others feared that when the time came, Harvard might follow suit. At that point, Enos said, Harvard’s leadership had shown “no indication” that they were willing to put up a public fight in defense of Harvard or public education more generally.In the weeks prior, the university had appeared to be taking pre-emptive steps to get ahead of the administration’s potential crackdown and funding cuts. They announced a university-wide hiring freeze, and made several decisions that critics viewed as aligning with the administration’s priorities.The university adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students, ousted two leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank and a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the Harvard Divinity School amid accusations that it focused “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.These actions caused concern for some who worried that Harvard was compromising academic freedom to appease the government.“Someone might reasonably think that these changes were in order to accommodate, to demonstrate to the federal government, look, we’re closing down programs that have been accused of imbalanced coverage,” said Kirsten Weld, a professor of history at Harvard, who heads Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).On 24 March, Enos and Levitsky, with help from several others, circulated a letter among faculty, urging Harvard’s two governing boards to publicly condemn the attacks on universities, legally contest and resist unlawful demands, and mount a coordinated opposition.More than 800 faculty members signed, though some non-US citizens refrained due to fear, Enos said.The letter was sent to governing board members before their next scheduled meeting, which was to be on 5 and 6 April.Separately, in another letter, more than 1,000 Harvard alumni urged Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, to defend academic freedom and free speech, and to take a stronger stand.“We cannot appease the Trump administration – it always asks for more,” the letter warned.James Stodder, who drafted and circulated that letter, said that he and a group of other alumni were looking for ways they could make their voices heard.Another alumni letter with more than 1,200 signatures called for courage over capitulation.In late March, Harvard’s chapter of the AUP along with the national chapter and other groups, sued the Trump administration, alleging it had violated members’ first amendment rights by targeting pro-Palestinian speech by noncitizens.Around this time, the Crimson was reporting that Garber had been privately discussing the administration’s pressure campaign with other university leaders.Then, on 31 March, the Trump administration put Harvard directly in its crosshairs, announcing a review of Harvard’s $9bn in federal funding, citing alleged failures to address antisemitism on campus.Garber’s response was seen by some as conceding to the administration’s narrative and suggestions.On 3 April, Trump officials sent Harvard a letter, stating that its federal funding would be conditional on changes such as eliminating diversity and inclusion programs, reviewing its programs “to address bias”, cooperating with law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, installing leaders to implement the president’s demands, and more.“We said to ourselves, OK, we’re now in the same position as Columbia,” Weld said. “This is kind of the first shot across the bow.”That same day, Enos and Levitsky published a third op-ed, “Appeasing Trump Damages Harvard and America”, urging the university to resist and take a stand.Enos said he heard from alumni who had begun threatening to withhold donations to the school if Harvard didn’t stand up against Trump.After receiving initial demands from the administration, the Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard leaders were in contact with the administration in pursuit of an agreement. Federal officials reportedly believed that Harvard would eventually concede, as Columbia had. Harvard said that the demands were too vague and requested more details.Harvard’s governing boards met as planned in early April. While no details from those meetings were released, Enos believes their faculty letter was likely discussed, noting that last year he was told that the governing bodies had found a similar letter he organized in support of former Harvard president Claudine Gay to be “very persuasive”.“I would find it shocking if they ignored or at least didn’t consider that kind of outpouring of faculty support,” Enos said.Following the weekend meeting, the Cambridge city council passed a unanimous resolution urging Harvard to reject Trump’s demands, and to “use all measures possible, including the University’s endowment funds, if necessary, to safeguard academic independence, the rule of law, and democracy”.Councilmember Burhan Azeem, who co-sponsored the resolution, said he wanted Harvard to know that they had the support of the city behind them if they chose to stand up to the administration.Azeem said it’s rare for the city council to get involved in internal Harvard affairs, but the stakes were high.“We were trying to convey to Harvard that the city is not the most powerful institution, but we are an institution, we have lawyers and we are willing to take action and we are willing to stand by them,” Azeem said.By this point, despite the Trump administration’s 3 April letter demanding “immediate cooperation”, Harvard had not yet publicly responded.On 11 April, Harvard’s AAUP chapter filed a second lawsuit against the administration, this time challenging the federal review of the university’s federal funding.The next day, hundreds of Harvard affiliates and Cambridge residents rallied in near-freezing temperatures at Cambridge Common, demanding once more that the university resist the federal pressure and also protect its international students and faculty.Unbeknownst to the protesters, behind closed doors that weekend, Harvard leaders were parsing through a new five-page letter from the Trump administration that had been delivered late on Friday.The letter included a list of sweeping demands – the shuttering of all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and initiatives, restrictions on the acceptance of international students who are “hostile to the American values and institutions”, and federal oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff and more.Harvard officials were stunned by the demands in the letter, the Wall Street Journal reported, viewing them as more extreme than those sent to other schools. A Sunday board meeting ended in unanimous agreement on how to respond.Then, on Monday, 14 April, Harvard released its statement publicly rejecting the demands, and released the administration’s Friday letter.“Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism”, the “majority represent direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard”, Harvard’s president wrote.“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”It was then Harvard became the first major US university to openly defy the administration’s demands.Garber’s office did not respond to a request for comment on how the decision came together. But, Enos believes that the pressure from faculty, alumni, students and others mattered.“I think we did manage to put a tremendous amount of pressure on Harvard to do the right thing,” Enos said. “It came from all circles.”Weld said she was “very glad” when she read the announcement, adding that the demands from the Trump administration were “such an egregious overreach”. Accepting them, she said, would have been “disastrous”.Harvard’s announcement drew support from Democrats, as well as Harvard faculty and alumni, and leaders of other universities.View image in fullscreenThe Crimson reported a surge in donations to Harvard after the announcement, with the school receiving an average of 88 online donations per hour. Between Monday, when the announcement was made, and 9am Wednesday, nearly 4,000 gifts totaling $1.14m had been made, according to a giving update from Harvard alumni affairs and development obtained by the Crimson.But the battle has only just begun. The fight this week has already escalated.Following Harvard’s announcement, federal officials froze more than $2bn in grants to the university. Trump also has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status and its ability to enroll international students.On Thursday, the Trump administration accused Harvard – in yet another letter to Garber – of failing to report large foreign donations to the federal government, as is required by law. They demanded that Harvard provide names of foreign donors, including records of communication with all of them from the beginning of 2020, and records pertaining to foreigners who spent time at Harvard; that latter group includes students Harvard expelled or those who had their credentials canceled, going back to 2016.A Harvard spokesperson told the New York Times on Friday: “Harvard has filed Section 117 reports for decades as part of its ongoing compliance with the law.”Layoffs have already been reported at the Harvard School of Public Health, with warnings at Harvard Medical School, too.Though Harvard’s endowment is sure to offer some financial cushion, the New York Times reports that about 80% of it is limited to specific purposes.“It’s going to get more painful before it gets better,” Enos said.Weld said that the AAUP will continue to proceed with their lawsuits against the administration and that concerns remain regarding Harvard’s decisions earlier this year to “shut down spaces of independent critical inquiry related to Palestine on our campus”.Still, she said it was “vitally important” for the whole higher education sector that Harvard was fighting back.“If Harvard had not stood up and rejected the Trump administration’s demands, it would have sent generational chill through higher education in this country,” she said.“If Harvard, the richest university in human history, cannot stand up and fight back to unquestionably illegal demands, then what other institution is going to feel that it’s safe for them to do so?” More

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    ‘The bomber’s words sound mainstream. Like he won!’ Oklahoma City’s tragedy in the time of Trump

    The world’s first reaction to the young military veteran and far-right radical who blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago this month was near-universal revulsion at the carnage he created and at the ideology that inspired it.A crowd yelled “baby killer” – and worse – as 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh was led away in chains from a courthouse in rural Oklahoma where the FBI caught up with him two days after the bombing. He had the same crew cut he’d sported in his army days and stone cold eyes.An hour and a half’s drive to the south, 168 people lay dead, most of them office workers who had been providing government services, along with 19 young children in a day care centre directly above the spot where McVeigh parked his moving truck packed with ammonium nitrate and other explosives.The children were, most likely, his prime target.Bill Clinton, then president, rallied the country by vowing justice that would be “swift, certain and severe”. His attorney general wasted no time announcing she would seek the death penalty. Whatever flirtation the country had been entertaining with rightwing militia movements in the wake of a national assault weapons ban that enraged gun rights activists, and controversies over the heavy-handedness of federal law enforcement, came screeching to a halt.Even elements of the radical right, McVeigh’s fellow travellers, were stunned by the sight of firefighters pulling dead babies out of the wreckage. Before the bombing, they had been full of heady talk of war against the government, but many of them imagined this would involve an attack on federal judges who had displeased the movement, or blowing up a building at night.“Didn’t he case the place?” one acquaintance of McVeigh’s asked incredulously. “The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years,” lamented an erstwhile mentor of McVeigh’s from Arizona.View image in fullscreenFast-forward those 30 years, and the movement is not only very much revived but has moved from the outer fringes of American politics to the very centre.McVeigh wanted to strike at what he saw as a corrupt, secretive cabal running the US government – what Donald Trump and his acolytes refer to as the Deep State and are now busy dismantling.McVeigh believed the US had no business extending its influence around the world or becoming entangled in foreign wars when white working-class Americans from industrial cities such as Buffalo, his home town, were suffering – an early expression of Trump’s America First ideology, which won him tens of millions of blue-collar votes last November.McVeigh’s favourite book, a white supremacist power fantasy called The Turner Diaries, blamed a cabal of Jews, black people and internationalists for perverting America’s true destiny – a sentiment now finding coded expression in Trump’s twin wars on immigration and on diversity, equity and inclusion.McVeigh believed it was up to ordinary citizens like him to take up arms and fight against a tyrannical ruling order, no matter the cost in innocent lives, because that was what the country’s founders had done during the American war of independence. The T-shirt he wore when he was arrested carried a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”View image in fullscreenDuring the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, the QAnon-friendly Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert expressed much the same sentiment as she cheered on the rioters smashing and bloodying their way past uniformed police officers into the halls of Congress. “Today is 1776,” she tweeted.The parallels have not been lost on political veterans of the 1990s. Clinton himself observed in a recent HBO documentary: “The words [McVeigh] used, the arguments he made, literally sound like the mainstream today. Like he won!”The threat the far right poses to the US government is no longer a physical one – not when it comes to the executive branch, anyway – since the radicals intent on cleaning house now have like-minded leaders such as Trump and Elon Musk doing it from the inside. It’s hard to imagine McVeigh, who was executed by lethal injection in 2001, objecting to the administration’s campaign to hollow out the international aid agency, kick career prosecutors and government watchdogs out of the Department of Justice, or vow to refashion “broken” institutions such as the FBI.“Their beliefs and values are allied,” said Janet Napolitano, who in 1995 played an administrative role in the bombing investigation as US attorney for Arizona and went on to run the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama. “It is a far cry to say that there are people in political power in the United States now who want to blow up federal buildings. We have to be very clear about that. But the notion that the country has somehow been stolen from them, that it’s run by elites, that they are trying to take away our guns – that has become a very accepted view among many.”Present and former members of the governing class still have reason to fear threats from the far right, either because they have been tagged as Deep State enemies by groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, or because they have been identified by President Trump as targets for “retribution”.Those threats, in the Trump era, have included a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and a hammer attack on the husband of then House speaker Nancy Pelosi. In concert with the administration, activists sympathetic to Trump have engaged in doxxing and other forms of harassment at people deemed to be political enemies and their families, including whistleblowers, college campus protesters and former associates turned critics of the president. Seasoned national security experts like Napolitano fear it may not stop there, however, and worry particularly about judges who have issued rulings hostile to administration interests. “Those far-right groups – they’ve all been given permission,” she said. “Pardoning all the January 6 defendants sends a terrible message about the rule of law in this country, just like purging from DoJ and the FBI sends a terrible message.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenIt was a very different world when McVeigh washed out of the army in 1991 following his service in the first Gulf war. After bouncing from one dead-end job to another and racking up thousands in sports gambling debts, he hit the road in his Chevy Geo Spectrum to sell army surplus supplies and copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows around the country. This was the very definition of a marginal existence.McVeigh was part of a cohort of so-called “angry young men” who felt the brunt of a downturn in manufacturing and defence contracting jobs at the end of the cold war and found their solace in guns, gun culture, and radical politics verging on the paranoid. Talk at the gun shows – which one violence prevention group memorably nicknamed “Tupperware parties for criminals” – obsessed over black helicopters and jack-booted government thugs. McVeigh himself told people the government had inserted a computer chip in his backside.Some of the movement’s loudest grievances were entirely genuine. McVeigh kept a list of raids that federal law enforcement agencies conducted in the name of the War on Drugs and the innocent people caught up in them through error or inadvertence. He was appalled when the feds besieged a cabin in the Idaho mountains in October 1992, killing both the wife and the 14-year-old son of a survivalist who had refused to act as an informant on the far right. And he was appalled all over again the following spring by a second botched raid at a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, culminating in a deadly fire that killed more than 80 men, women and children.In Washington, these events were not generally viewed as indications of deep structural rot, but rather as operational screw-ups to be addressed through internal after-action reports and congressional review. McVeigh, though, was shocked by the sight of Bradley fighting vehicles moving in to force an end to the Waco siege, because he had driven Bradleys in the Gulf and, as a decorated military gunner, knew just how deadly they could be. Using them against civilians, including children, struck him as an abomination that cried out for revenge.Despite his later protestations to the contrary, compelling evidence suggests that McVeigh targeted the daycare centre as revenge for the children who died at Waco. The centre’s operator, Danielle Hunt, told the FBI she remembered McVeigh visiting four months before the bombing, pretending to be an active member of the military with his own young children. He asked a lot of strange questions about security, she recalled, looked at the windows and said, over and over, “There’s so much glass”.The FBI confirmed that McVeigh was indeed in Oklahoma City at the time, along with his friend and fellow veteran Michael Fortier, who ended up cutting a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh at trial.When agents first showed photographs of the dead children to Fortier, he showed no empathy for them, according to contemporary FBI records. Rather, he jumped out of his seat and exclaimed: “This is about Waco! Those parents did not kill their own children!”“These guys were just evil people,” said Kenneth Williams, one of the first FBI agents to question Fortier. To this day, Williams believes Fortier should have received a far harsher sentence than the 12 years he and the government agreed on.View image in fullscreenLargely because of the children, the radical far right soon abandoned its dream of overthrowing the government by force. Even McVeigh, who had hoped to be seen as a hero and a martyr to the cause, came to wonder if he shouldn’t have opted for targeted killings of federal agents instead of indiscriminate slaughter.Much of the high emotion surrounding the bombing has been lost in the intervening decades. Outside of Oklahoma, few Americans under 30 know much, if anything, about it. In the age of Trump, that looks like a lost opportunity – for the country to understand the nature of the disillusionment and rage building for decades in “rust belt” cities and in farming communities across the heartland.Part of the reason for that lost opportunity is the US government’s failure at trial to tell the full story of who McVeigh was, the subculture he moved in, and the deep ideological wellsprings that led to his act of folly. For reasons largely dictated by courtroom expediency, prosecutors chose to depict McVeigh as a lone mastermind, with significant help from only one person, another fellow army veteran named Terry Nichols, who later confessed to helping McVeigh buy materials for the bomb and assemble it.“Two evil men did this, and two men paid,” the Oklahoma governor at the time of the bombing, Frank Keating, said when the trials were over. Yet few in government or on the prosecution team believed that everyone involved in the plot had been caught, or that those who had been identified necessarily received the punishment they deserved.“Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,” Williams, the former FBI agent, said.The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, and into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that “some kid” was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco.The justice department’s fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. “At some point,” Napolitano acknowledged, “a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.”And so the wider story – of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington – went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead.Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012) More

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    US philanthropists warn against capitulating to Trump: ‘We need to step up’

    John Palfrey will not be obeying in advance.At a moment when leaders of tech companies, law firms, media corporations and academic institutions have bent the knee to Donald Trump, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation insists that charitable organisations choose resistance over capitulation.“We have an opportunity to unite and advance,” Palfrey said last week. “There’s a chance here for us to stand together on a series of very important bedrock principles, and do so with linked arms, and do so in such a way that allows us to serve every community in America in a way that will ensure a strong republic for years to come.”Trump’s return to power has been described as an authoritarian power grab, rewarding compliance and punishing dissent. The Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, ABC News and Columbia University ceded ground or surrendered. Several major law firms offered almost $1bn in pro bono work to curry favour.But this week Harvard, the oldest and wealthiest university in America, pushed back after the Trump administration cut $2bn of its federal grants, earning praise from the former president Barack Obama. Sixty current and former university presidents co-signed an editorial in Fortune offering support.Philanthropic organisations could be next in the firing line. The MacArthur Foundation, founded in 1978, funds work in fields including social justice, climate change, criminal justice reform, journalism and media, community development and international peace and security. It has assets of about $7bn and is known for bestowing annual “genius” grants on artists, actors and other creative people.Palfrey recently authored a joint article with Tonya Allen of the McKnight Foundation and Deepak Bhargava of the Freedom Together Foundation warning that charitable organisations could be the next institutions under attack, and announcing a public solidarity campaign to support philanthropy’s freedom to give. More than 300 organisations have already signed on.The trio wrote: “We’ve seen this before in American history and across the globe. Weaponized oversight. Intimidation dressed up as transparency. It is not new. But our response must be: we in the philanthropic community must not wait like sitting ducks.”Speaking via Zoom from the MacArthur Foundation’s headquarters in Chicago, Palfrey, 52, explained that he felt it important to clearly state the need to preserve freedom of speech, freedom to give and freedom to invest – core to the work of a philanthropic foundation.“It’s important to draw some bright lines at this point and say these are lines that need not to be crossed,” he said. “For me, the first amendment is a very good guide to that. I like to think about American history and 1776. That’s a point in our history when we decided as a country that we didn’t want kings and we decided to fight a revolution on that.“We decided we wanted the rule of law, not the rule of one man, and we decided, as we set up our constitution, that the first thing we would enshrine is the right of free expression. All of those are bedrock principles of what it means to be in the American republic, and I think it’s important for us to state those things clearly and plainly at this moment.”After three months back in office, Trump has invited comparisons with the “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. With bewildering speed, he has cowed Congress, attacked judges and defied their orders, deported immigrants without due process, sought to intimidate the free press and attempted to impose his will on universities and cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center.Palfrey, a student of history, warned: “If where we are headed is on the model of Hungary, we are going to see a repression of civil society that will not be good for communities across America. I don’t think we should go in that direction as a country.“We have the opportunity to adjust our course. I hope very much that our leaders will decide not to repress civil society in a way that constrains freedom of speech, and this is a good time to say that’s not the direction that makes sense for America.”Does he worry that the US is sliding into authoritarianism? “I’d rather not find out.”The country still has a powerful story to tell, he insists. “I very much hope that those of us who have the right to speak freely, as we do in America, will do so. It’s one of those things: you have to use it or lose it. Communicating who we are as a people and continue to be as a people is very important as a message to ourselves and to the rest of the world.”The MacArthur Foundation has supported organisations that work in 117 countries and has offices in India and Nigeria. Meanwhile, Trump’s ally Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has denied food and medicine to the world’s poorest people by gutting the development agency USAID.Palfrey said: “We’re a funder that is predominantly giving money in the United States, but we do have work outside the US. There are, of course, questions about [if] the rest of the world [can] count on the United States as a charitable partner – and that question is up in the air at the moment.”In the meantime, Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” have slashed and burned through federal departments, firing thousands of workers with little rhyme or reason. The pain is being felt in international development, scientific research and struggling communities. It has made charitable foundations’ work all the more urgent.Palfrey describes such work as fundamentally non-partisan, helping people in every district in the country. He said: “There is so much need in communities right now. Some of it does of course have to do with cuts to federal funding.“Let’s imagine for a second that you’re a cancer researcher and you’re saving the lives of small children who are getting cancer and your funding has just been cut. If you are an organisation that funds cancer research, your money is needed more than ever, so we need to step up.”The MacArthur Foundation will increase its giving by more than 20% for 2025 and 2026. “I don’t believe that private philanthropy can make up for all of the cuts that are under way in the United States and around the world, for that matter, but I do feel like we can and should do more, and this is what we’re called upon to do in this moment.”Palfrey’s joint article warns that philanthropy is often slow by design, but time is a luxury it cannot afford. He urges organisations to speak in plain language, not the “philanthropy speak” for which they are notorious, and hold the line. He hopes that other sectors will join in demonstrating that courage is contagious.“I’d love to see the business community say: this is what’s super-important to us, and this is how we’re going to come together around it. I’d love to see universities and colleges do the same and say: this is the essential bedrock that we need to be able to maintain. That is available to every group in America and very much in the spirit of our country. [It] is how we come together around shared ideals.” More