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Trump calls Tesla boycott ‘illegal’ and says he’s buying one to support Musk
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 18:35
Donald Trump said he intends to buy a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.On Tuesday, several Tesla vehicles were parked in the driveway of the White House for Trump to pick which vehicle to buy, accompanied by Musk and his young son. In August 2024, a podcaster gifted Trump a Cybertruck.“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.Tesla’s shares fell hard on Monday as markets reacted to the threat of a recession and Trump’s tariff plans. Tesla’s slide came amid widespread protests over the billionaire Musk’s influence in the federal government at Tesla dealerships, a boycott campaign, car owners selling their Tesla vehicles, and activists pushing members of the public to sell Tesla shares.“In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”Trump’s claim the boycott is “illegal” is false. The supreme court ruled in 1972 that the first amendment of the US constitution protects Americans’ right to protest against private businesses.View image in fullscreenMusk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out. Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone. He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.Tesla’s board members, including Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, have offloaded millions of dollars worth of shares in recent months. Tesla vehicle sales abroad have also dropped significantly, including by 76.3% in Germany in February 2025 compared with February 2024.The boycott has emerged as Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government in a proclaimed effort to reduce federal spending. The access and actions by Musk and his team have incited concerns over the lack of transparency, false claims about cancelled contracts and grants and the amount of savings made.Polls have shown public support for Doge is mixed to unfavorable, with the vast majority of Democratic voters polling that Musk has too much power. More
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Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment should not happen in a democracy | Moustafa Bayoumi
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 14:30
Forced disappearance, kidnapping, political imprisonment – take your pick. These terms all describe what has happened with the Trump administration’s first arrest for thought crimes, something that should never happen in a democracy.But it has, to Mahmoud Khalil, a recently graduated master’s student from Columbia University’s school of international and public affairs. And for each minute that Khalil is held in detention, every one of us should feel like our own individual rights in this country are being shredded. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is a barefaced attempt by the Trump administration to destroy free thinking while murdering due process and free speech along the way. This is an ominous development.On the evening of Saturday 8 March, Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US (a green card holder), and his US-citizen wife, who is eight months pregnant, were returning home to their Columbia University apartment in upper Manhattan. According to reports, the couple had just unlocked the door to the building when plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security pushed their way in like thugs and demanded Khalil surrender himself for arrest.The lead agent told Khalil’s lawyer, whom Khalil had immediately called, that his student visa was being revoked. But Khalil doesn’t have a student visa for the very simple reason that he is a lawful permanent resident! Apparently confused, the agent next responded that Khalil’s green card was being revoked – which, by US law, cannot be done without a lot of due process. When pressed by Khalil’s lawyer to show a warrant for arrest, the agent simply hung up on the lawyer, shoved Khalil into handcuffs, and carted him away. As of this writing, Khalil is in a detention facility in Louisiana.Let’s be clear. If you grew up in Egypt or Nicaragua or Russia, you would recognize this behavior. If you have read the work of Milan Kundera or Ariel Dorfman or Breyten Breytenbach, you will recognize this behavior. This is how the authoritarian regimes always operate, seeking to demonize their critics and neutralize their opposition by lies, exaggerations and the blunt force of state power. This despicable and dangerous conduct has now come to the land of the free and the home of the brave as official policy.The Trump administration doesn’t even bother to disguise the ideological assault that characterizes Khalil’s arrest. Khalil was an active member of Columbia University’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, a war that has been characterized as a genocide by Israel by experts and multiple human rights organizations around the world. Khalil also served as a negotiator between the university administration and student activists who had set up an encampment on campus.It was in that role that Khalil’s profile grew, particularly among extreme rightwing organizations supporting Israel that began sending lists of students to the Trump administration who, they said, should be deported from the US because of their views. This blatant attempt to shut down free speech picked up after Donald Trump issued two executive orders in late January that called for deporting “perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment”. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the Trump administration is actively canceling every form of protection for other minority populations, while appearing deeply concerned about antisemitism, as it also tacitly supports antisemitic behavior.)Khalil had already suffered so much harassment by these pro-Israel groups that the day before his arrest, he wrote to the interim president of Columbia University, telling her that he was afraid that government officials or private actors would target him or his family, urging her to provide him legal support and protection. After his arrest, the official White House account on X issued a post that said: “Shalom, Mahmoud,” using a Hebrew word that can mean goodbye. Haha. Whoever wrote the post must think this very clever. But in a court of law, the post will only buttress the argument that Trump is on a rampage to shut down any types of speech he doesn’t like.Exactly which crime has Mahmoud Khalil committed? Which activities has he engaged in to warrant arrest and deportation? The best the Department of Homeland Security can come up with are the same flimsy innuendo that we hear over and over again. Any show of concern for Palestinians is, presto, turned into “activities aligned to Hamas”.That “aligned to Hamas” is not a legal standard is hardly surprising. It comes after all from the Trump administration, which operates almost definitionally as the opposite of a legal standard. Expecting something reasonable from this administration is like eating a razor-blade sandwich and thinking you won’t come out all bloodied, which is of course why the Trump administration is repeatedly offering you such aromatic and enticing fresh bread.I expect as much from Trump, but I demand more from Columbia University, my own alma mater. After Trump withdrew some $400m of federal funding over an unproven and completely ideologically driven allegation that Columbia was a hotbed of antisemitism, the interim president didn’t bother to defend her institution. Instead, she immediately sent us Columbia affiliates an email to “assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns”. I’m educated enough to know that the word “appeasement” has a specific history. I also know that cowards run away from Palestine, even if they too will be the ones who suffer in the end.I also demand more from my local officials. This federal assault on protected speech from a New Yorker should raise huge alarms from the mayor of New York, but all we’ve heard from Eric Adams thus far is … well, what sound would crickets make if they were flying business class on Turkish Airlines? If it’s any sound at all, I imagine the jet engine hums louder than the lack of objection he’s made. His silence is matched only by Andrew Cuomo, Adams’s new competition for the next New York mayoral race. Together, they might have enough courage to lose a game of chicken to the lion in the Wizard of Oz.But mostly, I demand a whole lot more from the Democratic party. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? They seem to believe the best way to defend free speech in this country is not to speak at all. Irrelevance has never been so recognizable.Democracy has always been a fragile, improvised, teetering wall of bricks that extends high in the air. It takes a lot of people to support it, but it gives quickly when faced with pressure from the other side. The thing is, even if you’re not supporting it, you’ll still get crushed when the wall falls. Too many people seem ready to be crushed. That’s only the tiniest reason to support Mahmoud Khalil. We all need to rush to the wall and do what we can to free him from his unjust imprisonment. For him and also for us. Because, you know what? He won’t be the last.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More
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I’m a transgender veteran. Trump’s military order is reckless and dangerous | Alleria Stanley
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 13:00
Late last month, the Trump administration moved to fire transgender people serving in the armed forces.This includes those who have honorably served for for 19 years (one year short of retirement) those who have served honorably in combat situations, and those in whom the military has already invested millions of dollars in training.I’m a transgender woman who medically transitioned while on active duty service. I wish more people knew that transgender service members are not a threat. Instead, we’re the ones who volunteer when others won’t. We bring unique perspectives and skills to the armed forces. Transgender individuals are twice as likely as all adults in the US to have served in the armed forces, a testament to our commitment and dedication.We are also seven times more likely than US civilians to attempt suicide during our lifetimes. This is no surprise when we are constantly told – through actions like this drastic transgender military ban – that our careers and our lives are not worth saving.I served for 20 years in the army and endured my share of hardships. In 2005, I was deployed to Afghanistan, working as a repairer on Apache helicopters, when I found out that my wife had been diagnosed with cancer. She died 12 months after I got home, and I became a single parent to our young children.As their only provider, I was fortunate to be able to keep my job when I came out publicly in 2016 under President Obama. But while I was stationed in Missouri, I faced a frightening amount of transphobia. I was verbally harassed, physically threatened, and once, someone stood in my driveway and shot into my car. My kids saw all of it. This is the reality of the discrimination that transgender service members face.If I were still actively serving in the military today, I would lose my career, health insurance, and other benefits, and so would my family.The Trump administration is wrong about transgender service members. The Pentagon memo declares that being transgender is “incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service”. This couldn’t be further from the truth.There are at least 15,000 transgender individuals in the military, and they serve everywhere. They are pilots, submariners and infantry; they are in command positions; they are trusted in the highest-skilled military jobs and the riskiest; they hold top secret clearances (as I did). The cumulative loss of institutional and career knowledge across the spectrum that will come from this decision is devastating, as is the personal loss to these service members and their families.This new order is reckless and counter-productive to military preparedness. When we face threats worldwide, we need a strong and resilient military. We don’t need to leave 15,000 skilled positions vacant.Furthermore, what precedent does this set? We already know that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, does not believe women should serve in combat. Many people don’t realize that equal African American military service is not codified by law – only by President Truman’s Executive Order #9981. This means it can be reversed at any time. I use this as an example because when policies are allowed to ping-pong between executive orders instead of law, it puts people’s lives at risk.I was fortunate to have found an online arts organization during my lowest moment in Missouri. Community Building Art offers creative writing and art workshops for female and non-binary veterans. Participating in a community like this saved my life and has proven to reduce suicidality among participants.But I worry now for all those suddenly forced out of the careers and communities they’ve known. We should support their service to our nation, and should they be dismissed, we must offer them safe spaces. Yet, instead of focusing on crises like veteran suicide, the administration is endangering veterans’ care. We will need the private sector to support service members and veterans in this dangerous time.Having retired from the military, I recently discovered a disheartening change in my Veterans Affairs (VA) profile. My medical records now mark me as “male”, a stark reminder of the personal impact of policies like the transgender military ban. While I have weathered storms like these, I worry about those with much more to lose.
Alleria Stanley is a retired United States army service member, advocate, and member of the LGBTQ+ community. She is a board member of Transgender American Veterans Association
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org More
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The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 10:00
In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More
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Arrest of Palestinian student activist raises alarm about free speech – US politics live
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 08:35
US president Donald Trump on Tuesday said he will buy a new Tesla car to show support for the electric carmaker’s chief and his ally Elon Musk amid recent “Tesla Takedown” protests and the slump in the company’s stock price.Musk’s role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump has led to protests in the US against Tesla, Reuters reported.About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla electric vehicle dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, while nine people were arrested during a raucous demonstration outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March.Musk is spearheading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump defended Musk by saying he was “putting it on the line” to help the country and was doing a “fantastic” job.“I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump said.Musk thanked the president for his support on his own social media platform X.The World Health Organization has started a process of fixing new priorities and announced a one-year limit on staff contracts, an internal memo showed on Tuesday, as it aims to make the UN agency more sustainable after the US withdrawal.The memo, dated 10 March and signed by WHO’s Assistant Director-General Raul Thomas, laid out further cost-cutting measures – the latest in a series of such steps since US president Donald Trump’s announcement in January.Senior WHO officials have begun “prioritisation” work over the past three weeks to make the global health agency sustainable, the document says.“While operating in an extremely fluid environment, WHO’s senior management are working to navigate these shifting tides by undertaking a prioritisation process,” the memo said.“Their work will ensure that every resource is directed toward the most pressing priorities while preserving WHO’s ability to make a lasting impact,” it said.Good morning, and welcome to our US politics blog.The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest Mahmoud Khalil – a vocal critic of Israel’s war on Gaza – for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union has warned.Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was reportedly detained at his Columbia apartment building in Manhattan in front of his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, on Saturday evening.The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.” The US president said Khalil’s arrest was the “first arrest of many to come”.The Department of Homeland Security accused the former student of “leading activities aligned to Hamas” but gave no details.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”This morning, a federal judge in New York City ordered that Khalil not be deported for now and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday.The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. More
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Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 08:00
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View image in fullscreenTechno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Accelerationism”, which argued for maximum acceleration of technological advancement. The 10-point manifesto, which proclaimed that “the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness” was imminent, quickly went viral, as did follow-up posts.Effective accelerationism, or “e/acc”, exploded from being a fringe movement dedicated to pushing back against AI extinction-fearing “doomers” to being namechecked by major Silicon Valley CEOs such as Garry Tan, the CEO of start-up accelerator Y Combinator; Sam Altman, head of OpenAI; Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer; and Elon Musk.In 2023, Andreessen issued his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, expanding beyond the e/acc’s focus on AI to encompass all questions of technological progress. “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology,” he writes, yet previously and for hundreds of years, we had glorified it. The enemies of techno-optimism are, he says, statism, economic planning and socialism. Andreessen tells us: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential … It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag.”And last year saw the release of the Techno-Humanist Manifesto from the Roots of Progress Institute and Jason Crawford, who makes similar arguments for the liberatory power of technology, while also arguing that anything that can be for profit should be.But where is the left in all this?One would think that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the market flounder and the state rise to the occasion with responses such as Operation War Speed’s vaccine development and rollouts, the left would be crowing about how it produced technological progress far better than all this market fundamentalism.It was the embrace of varieties of economic planning that produced the innovation needed to defeat the virus. For decades, large firms had gotten out of the business of vaccine development because it was insufficiently profitable. The mRNA vaccine delivery vehicle that is now recognized as revolutionary for the life sciences far beyond Covid had been sitting on the shelf for about a decade, spurned by uninterested, risk-averse investors.At the start of the pandemic, big pharma remained wary that transmission might fizzle out and they’d be left having spent billions on a white elephant. Instead, it was the advance purchase agreements, subsidies and coordination of the government – which does not need to turn a profit – via the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) and Operation Warp Speed that delivered the vaccine and saved the world.Meanwhile, free-market driven distribution of PPE, ventilators, medical fridges and oxygen had produced little more than corruption, bottlenecks and irrational allocation to those who could pay the highest price – not allocation where it was most needed. 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The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid
The left should be proudly flaunting the record of governments around the world in responding to Covid. It should make the case that all major technological and scientific advancements are best delivered by governments. And it should make the case that we – the people – should embrace faith in technological progress that is rooted in public investment.In other words, the left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left – from cynicism about space-faring to fear of genetic engineering and opposition to nuclear power.The left should be calling for government intervention to ensure decarbonization of data centers for AI. It should demand that we direct machine-learning research to prioritize the solving of grand scientific challenges such as prediction of protein folding instead of than bad fantasy-art fabrication and plagiarism. But instead, the most popular leftwing tech podcast calls for degrowth of generative AI and data centers due the latter’s carbon intensity.Progressives could be reminding the world of Neil Armstrong’s warning about the privatization of space – while still cheering on SpaceX’s work to develop reusable rocketry, radically reducing the cost of humans and payloads escaping our planet’s gravity well, all the better to deliver the space and planetary science we need to monitor and solve so many ecological challenges.We could be explaining how space colonization, a worthwhile multigenerational, perhaps millennia-long endeavor, will be public sector led or it will not happen, due to the risible likelihood of it being profitable. Musk won’t get to mars without Nasa. But instead the left declares space-faring to be settler-colonialism, oddly equating lifeless rocks with indigenous peoples.Environmentalists and green NGOs should be celebrating research into genetically modified crops that if successful will reduce pesticide use, nitrogen pollution, and land-use change. But instead, anti-GMO campaign groups vandalized an Italian research trial of rice-blast-resistant arborio (risotto) rice this summer, while Greenpeace successfully convinced a Filipino court to overturn approval of commercial cultivation of Golden Rice, a variety modified to combat vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death in tens of thousands of children annually in Asia.This leftwing technophobia is something of an historic aberration. Traditionally, the left had always been enthusiastic about the potential of technology for liberation, to release us from drudgery and boundlessly expand our degrees of freedom – so long as technology was unfettered from the irrationality of profit and hierarchy and yoked to egalitarian reason. Prometheus plus Spartacus, as mid-century Marxist Hal Draper put it.We sometimes forget that the Communist Manifesto was itself a techno-optimist declaration of intent. It was a critique of capitalism but it was also a celebration of the new technologies, both industrial and social, that this system had set loose.From Karl Marx’s enthusiasm for the Industrial Revolution through to British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson’s call to harness the “white heat” of the Scientific Revolution, the conventional left position was that its programme would enable society to surpass the technological progress of mere capitalism. The point was not to retreat from capitalism, but instead to advance from it. We the people would develop the “forces of production” much more rapidly through conscious, democratic planning (albeit to greater or lesser degrees of such planning, depending on the flavour of leftist) rather than leaving such development to the fetters imposed by the risk-averse, poorly coordinated and unconscious anarchy of the market.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline 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The left should be the real techno-optimists. But instead, in recent years, there has been a growing skepticism of technology on the contemporary left
Scientific, technological and industrial development would not only be faster, but broader, for the left would share the fruits of development with all humanity as rapidly as economic capacity would allow, rather than limiting their spread to those locations and populations where such production was profitable. A virtuous circle was then supposed to emerge as a result: with ever more humans benefiting from such progress, ever more humans would be able to contribute to science, engineering, medicine and agronomy, resulting in yet more progress. Liberation would beget ever accelerating liberation.It was instead the counter-Enlightenment right – aristocrats, the church, Burkean critics of the French Revolution – who were horrified at how technology and industry constantly revolutionized society, washing away ancient traditions and endlessly transforming social relations. The industrial engineering of the factory and the “social engineering” of democracy were the same thing to the reactionary, anti-modernist mind. The children of the Radical Enlightenment, both liberals and socialists, also made little distinction between social and technological progress, but thought them good, and were intent on carrying out French revolutionary Georges Danton’s commandment: “De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” (“Audacity; yet more audacity; always audacity!”)Today, however, that leftwing optimism and confidence about humanity’s capacity for superior, entwined social, scientific and technological progress – once political economy was thoroughly democratized, has been lost, especially on the environmental left. It has been replaced by a techno-scepticism and cynicism about progress that varies from a soft neo-Luddism through to a more thoroughgoing Malthusian opposition to further economic development, prompted by a fear that we have long since outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet. Many believe industrial modernity was a mistake.(Note that these contemporary neo-Luddites should not be confused with the historical Luddites, the 19th Century stockingers – workers running stocking frame mechanical knitting machines – who engaged in riot and sabotage of automated textile machinery to protest employers’ use of such machines to drive down wages. It was the capitalist socio-economic relations surrounding this technology that the Luddites were protesting, not technology itself. If anything, today’s neo-Luddites should learn from their namesakes and focus less on the machines and more on who owns them.)All of this creeping anti-modernism threatens not merely human development and the expanding freedom that flows from it, but also undermines our ability to adequately respond to a range of existential threats, from climate change to pandemics. We are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends.Thankfully, there is – to coin a phrase – a third way.In place of technophobia, the left’s traditional arguments around the “market alignment problem” still offer a better path toward enhancing human liberation. In place of both market fundamentalist neoliberalism and green-inflected neo-Luddism, the left should be talking once again about conscious design of the economy – and thence which technologies we want to develop and accelerate – through industrial policy, public ownership and other forms of democratic economic planning.As of 2024, we are roughly at the halfway point between the first climate treaty, 1997’s Kyoto Protocol, and the 2050 deadline for net-zero decarbonization of the economy. Yet due to policymakers’ overdependence on market-based mechanisms such as carbon-pricing (and the developing world’s understandable demand for fossil-fueled development), the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption has barely moved, dropping from 86% to 82%. But industrial policy domestically – building on Bidenomics’ version of the Green New Deal, the Inflation Reduction Act – and a properly egalitarian approach to climate finance and economic development internationally, can turn all this around.Our suite of antibiotics is rapidly failing and so in the absence of new discovery and development of new ones, as well as new diagnostic techniques and vaccines, clinicians warn that we are nearing a collapse of the foundation of antimicrobial protection upon which almost all of modern medicine depends. But decommodification of pharmaceutical production and, again, internationalism could solve the problem entirely.Similarly, pandemic monitoring and early warning systems require robust public-sector funding, restructuring of intellectual property rights, and even global democracy. All of this is optimized by a more muscular social democracy.@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress
Biodiversity loss threatens to undermine ecosystem services that we depend upon, but precision agriculture, new genetic techniques and “lab meat” can radically reduce humanity’s land-footprint, so long as there is strong state intervention to de-risk these new technologies.In order to overcome less well known but still profound risks from space debris and near-Earth asteroids, we need not cynicism about space, but a revival of space as primarily a public-sector enterprise and the sort of internationalism and global democracy that the left favours.But a left approach to technology is not just about avoiding harm, but about grand ambition. Getting to Mars and beyond, spreading life throughout the cosmos, is a gargantuan multi-generational endeavour, of the level of audacity that Danton commanded. Markets will never get us there if it isn’t profitable enough – and it is unlikely to be so.Artificial intelligence has already solved the hard problem of protein-folding, and soon it could radically enhance medical diagnosis, accelerate materials discovery, and reduce mineral exploration costs, and maybe even predict earthquakes, but much of this will require humans working alongside AI rather than AI replacing humans – meaning an increased cost over either humans or computers alone, which will thus tend to be far less attractive to capital. And so AI thus far appears to be primarily directed at much more profitable but far less freedom-enhancing endeavours such as enterprise software, theft from artists and musicians, and ever more panoptical state surveillance.To steal a phrase from artificial intelligence discourse, the market has an “alignment problem”. It is an algorithm independent of human control. And so it could be said that the techno-libertarians want to liberate themselves from all things that unconsciously dominate humanity – except for markets.There are so many areas where the left should have so much more to say about technology and progress, whether the challenges we face are existential threats or how to achieve the most soaring of ambitions.Neither Silicon Valley tech hucksters nor eco-austerity technophobes are up to the task.
Leigh Phillips is a science writer and a political journalist More
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Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump | Owen Jones
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 05:00
For those who fear Donald Trump is a despot in the making, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he triumphantly declared in his State of the Union address. “It’s back!” JD Vance scolded Europe in his speech at the Munich security conference last month, declaring that “free speech is in retreat” across the continent.Like all authoritarian creeds, Trumpism turns reality on its head and empties words of their meaning in an effort to sow confusion and disarray among its critics. On the same day Trump announced the revival of free speech in Congress, he posted on Truth Social that federal funding for educational institutions that allow “illegal protests” will be ceased. Notably, illegality was not defined, but the issue Trump is referring to, of course, is Palestine. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he declared. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”Trump’s first target: Columbia University, which has had $400m of federal funding slashed because of what the government says is “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and the University of California – could be next. All were the sites of overwhelmingly peaceful encampments protesting over Israel’s genocidal attack against the Palestinian people. They weren’t simply opposing their government’s facilitation of this atrocity, through weapons, aid and diplomatic support, but demanding their colleges divest from companies linked to Israel.Just as Trumpism is no guarantor of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, the opposite. The very real menace of antisemitism has been systematically conflated with any critique of crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what is meant by “anti-Israel hate”, as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as new ambassador to the UN puts it, who became a rightwing icon after facing down university presidents over Israel. The president’s most powerful ally is Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet claiming Jewish communities were pushing “hatred against whites”, and recently performed Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.Trump himself declared that Jewish Americans who support the Democrats – that is, the vast majority – “hate their religion”, “hate everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and menacingly said they would have a “lot” of blame if he lost the presidential election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a large Jewish presence, and hundreds of Jewish students signed a letter rejecting “the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic”.Indeed, Columbia in particular victimised its own students. The university banned Jewish Voice for Peace before the encampment began, ordered police raids which led to more than 100 students being arrested, disciplined and expelled, and targeted sympathetic academics.One was Katherine Franke, a professor who was publicly denounced by Stefanik and forced into retirement. Far from protecting Jewish students, Franke claims, this is about “radical advocates for Israel” lying about the campus protests. “This university has bent a knee and coddled bullies,” she says of Columbia’s repression of students’ free speech – and still it had its funding slashed.It gets more sinister. The Department of Homeland Security arrested one of the lead negotiators of Columbia’s encampment: Mahmoud Khalil, a US green card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unknown to his wife, he was sent more than 1,000 miles away to a notorious detention centre in Louisiana. The department’s claim: that “he led activities aligned to Hamas”, a blatant attempt to conflate Palestinian solidarity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on 7 October.Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech simply does not exist. Surely there is one man who will be particularly incensed by this outrage. After all, just last week he grandly proclaimed: “We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.” That was the vice-president, JD Vance.But the truth is, the US right never actually cared about free speech. It was simply a ruse, intended to stigmatise any attempt to rebut its bigotry against largely voiceless minorities. The Trump administration has escalated the biggest onslaught against free speech since McCarthyism: even before its assumption of power, those opposed to Israel’s genocide have faced being deplatformed, victimised and indeed targeted by institutions like Columbia.Yet it was not just the hardcore right who defamed these protests. Many self-described “liberals” and “centrists” joined in, smearing those opposed to some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hateful, dangerous extremists – Jewish Americans among them. In doing so, they helped legitimise the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that is now under way. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of Jewish American campaign group IfNotNow, told me we are now seeing “the terrifying logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling for Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white nationalist administration carrying out its war on civil rights and free speech under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. We are all endangered by this blatant assault on our democracy.”It would be deeply naive to believe this repression will end with the attacks on people expressing solidarity with Palestine. A precedent that is established can swiftly be expanded. As it is, the US media are increasingly menaced by – among other things – Trump’s libel actions, the threat of vexatious investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos bending the knee to the would-be king. Free speech is being pummelled by those who claim to be its greatest advocates.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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Taoiseach must tread carefully amid tensions before Trump meeting
by Evelyn Reynolds 11 March 2025, 04:00
St Patrick’s Day has long been one of the sacred moments of the Irish-American calendar with more than 200 years of parades in New York and a shamrock reception at the White House launched by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 to cement political ties between the two nations.But this year’s annual meeting between the taoiseach and the US president, a week early because of a congressional recess on 17 March, is laden with anxiety over the future of Ireland’s economy, which is heavily reliant on US multinationals Donald Trump wants to repatriate.While nobody expects Micheál Martin to be subjected to the same humiliating attack as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president’s unpredictability and thin skin means Ireland’s taoiseach should be prepared for anything on Wednesday.Adding to the tensions was the recent public contradiction by the Irish foreign minister, Simon Harris of an account of a phone call he had with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whose representatives had said Ireland’s “trade imbalance” had been raised as a priority during the conversation.Harris told reporters: “The trade imbalance wasn’t specifically referenced. I was on the call. I was on it for over 20 minutes. It was a very good conversation.” Some saw it as an untimely poking of the beast.Martin is going to DC with three missions: protecting the Irish economy from Trump’s tariffs, raising the plight of the Palestinians, who have strong public support in Ireland, and pressing home the EU’s request that the US sticks with Europe for another few years to give it the time to build up an independent defence capacity.The Irish prime minister is afforded a full day of events in an unusually long agenda – adding to the risk of being tripped up.Martin will start with a traditional breakfast meeting with the vice-president, JD Vance, before a “stakeout” or questions from the media stationed outside the White House.At about 10am, he will move to the Oval Office to sit down in front of the cameras with Trump before the pair disappear from public view behind closed doors for the bilateral meeting.The delegation will then participate in the House speaker’s lunch, an event usually also attended by the president with other meetings before they all convene again for the Shamrock Bowl reception in the East Room, again hosted by Trump, at about 5pm.“The real risk moment is the media spray,” said one source close to the Irish government, referring to the on-camera press event in the Oval Office before Martin’s private meeting with Trump. In the past this has just been a 15-20 minute session with cameras but Trump has got into the habit of turning it into an unscheduled press conference.As Zelenskyy found recently, this can result in hostile questions or tension between the guest and his host – in Martin’s case, potentially on Palestine or trade.The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has already complained that it was a nonsense that Ireland “of all places” is running a trade surplus with the world’s biggest economy.Last year Ireland exported €72bn to the US – a 34% increase on 2023 – compared with imports valued at €22bn.The US may also raise EU regulation of the big tech firms such as X, Google, Facebook, Instagram, all of which have their EU headquarters in Dublin.Writing in the Irish Times, historian Eoin Drea was withering about Ireland’s reliance on the US.“No other country in the EU is as hopelessly and naively dependent on the US as Ireland,” he said, warning that at “a stroke of pen” Trump could precipitate a budgetary crisis in Dublin.“Ireland is woefully unprepared for Washington’s new political mantra”, he added.One senior business source concurred: “There is obviously intense diplomacy going on. Brexit shows that we know as a country how to read a risk but this time we have been caught offside.”The source added that the fallout from last year’s European court ruling forcing Apple to pay up €13bn in back taxes was a case in point.“We were embarrassed by it. We didn’t want the money. For years nobody really cared about Americans in Ireland, but now the whole world is paying attention. It means that our trade has now got bound up with politics,” said the business source.They were also scathing about a new taskforce set up by Harris to head off ill winds with the inaugural meeting with business representatives two weeks ago.“It was headless chickens. After about an hour and three-quarters of talking what were we left with? Minutes and a diary line for the next meeting, which is not until May. It was fairly perfunctory.”Former Irish ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall said he hoped Martin would emerge unscathed from the day-long Trump experience.“You have to remember Trump likes to like people and he likes to be liked. He’s even managed to convince himself that Putin likes him so it’s not a big stretch to conclude that maybe he likes Micheál too,” he said.“But my view is that there is a long established St Patrick’s Day [tradition of] visits by the taoiseach and they carry a certain kind of tone and content. This gives me hope.”Mulhall suggested an invitation to host a special EU-US summit at Trump’s Irish golf resort in Doonbeg in County Clare combining flattery and business.This however is not in Ireland’s gift – such an invitation would have to come from European Council president, António Costa. More

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