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    Now is the time for scientists to stand up against Trump’s repressive agenda | Daniel Malinsky

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    There is a stereotype that the natural political activists in academia are the humanities professors: literary scholars, social theorists and critics of culture are the ones who speak truth to power and fight back against oppression.Yet scientists also ought to stand up and organize against the Trump administration’s attacks – not only the attacks on scientific research and integrity, but also the attacks on immigrants, on political speech and on democracy. Scientists cannot see themselves as above the fray but rather in coalition with other workers resisting authoritarianism.History is replete with examples of scientists that have taken on great risks to resist authoritarianism. The Dutch neurologist GGJ Rademaker reorganized his laboratory into a base of resistance (complete with printing press, radio equipment and hidden weapons) against fascist forces in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Some German scientists, including the psychoanalyst John Rittmeister and biochemist Heinrich Wieland, opposed the Nazi regime by hiding Jews and distributing banned anti-fascist literature. Brave German scientists even aided the Allied forces during the second world war.At this year’s meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, the CEO of this research society, Margaret Foti, encouraged cancer scientists to take part in demonstrations and meetings with elected representatives. Professors from all corners of campus are already fighting back against funding cuts, the attempted deportations of our international students and usurpations of democratic governance. At Columbia, where I work, faculty have been organizing to urge our university leadership to provide real protections to students at risk of deportation and sue the Trump administration, among other demands. Contrary to the stereotype, much of the organizing work is being spearheaded by science faculty – psychiatrists, epidemiologists, astronomers, mathematicians, economists, statisticians, oceanographers – hand in hand with our colleagues in the humanities.Despite the notion that scientists are and should be cautious or apolitical, professors in the sciences are well-suited to political activism. The work of political organizing is not so different from the work of managing a research lab: skills in divvying up tasks, managing people with sensitivity and foresight, and creating clear, compelling narratives to communicate accomplishments (eg to peer reviewers reading our manuscripts) are all clearly transferrable to activism. All science professors were once science students, doing the typically monotonous labor of scientific work, spending hours carefully tinkering in the laboratory, debugging computer code, or meticulously collecting information on the human or natural world. Often political activity involves straightforward but time-consuming tasks such as printing leaflets or making phone calls to representatives. Sometimes there are simple logistics that need taking care of in organizing a protest march. Some activism involves strategizing in coalitions to distribute needed resources or build supportive institutions. None of this is as difficult as “rocket science” and it is in fact remarkably similar to the more banal parts of everyday science.Many recent actions taken by the Trump administration impinge quite obviously on the expertise of scientists: the attacks on federal research funding, the rollback of decades-long protections of our environment and human health, the excising of research specifically related to climate change or vaccine development. Robert F Kennedy Jr has recently promised to dedicate scientific resources to studying the alleged relationship between autism and vaccination – a question that has been addressed by dozens of studies and on which the scientific consensus to the contrary is clear – and thrown the weight of the government behind stigmatizing and dangerous initiatives related to autism, contested by experts and advocates. Donald Trump has also taken steps to sabotage congressionally mandated research on the climate crisis by dismissing expert authors of the National Climate Assessment. Opposing these moves and organizing against them as scientists is a no-brainer. Yet also scientists must fight tooth and nail against the secretive and seemingly baseless incarceration of immigrants, the usurpation of democratic checks and balances, and the reorganization of society along ever more hateful lines. These things affect all of us regardless of our job descriptions. It should go without saying that scientific inquiry cannot flourish in a society dominated by fear, censorship and hate.Scientists are drawn to the work we do for many different reasons, but I would venture that for most of us there is an underlying goal of advancing humanity – whether that is by finding cures to disease, new technology or more abstractly by pushing the boundaries of human knowledge so that future generations are better off. All of that is at risk if we remain “neutral” or “apolitical” at the wrong moment in history. Though there is a plausible argument for erring on the side of “apolitical” in normal times, to ensure trust and guard against undue politicization of scientific work, the argument stretches thin and breaks down given our current political environment and apparent slide toward fascism. Our scientific research itself must remain free from prejudice and aimed wherever the truth may lead, but the work before us is not only scientific research. We must also work to preserve the conditions of life that make both science and society flourish. In these times that means that scientists have a duty to dissent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

    Daniel Malinsky is an assistant professor of biostatistics in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University More

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      Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real

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      View image in fullscreenIn January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video accrued millions of views. (It currently has slightly fewer than 9m.) It spread in “mom groups, friend chat circles, political subreddits, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups”, Harfoush tells me, along with variations of: “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been feeling!” and “people tagging their friends with notes like: ‘We were just talking about this!’”View image in fullscreenWhy hypernormalization is relevant in the USThe increasing instability of the US’s democratic norms has prompted these references to hypernormalization.Donald Trump is dismantling government checks and balances in an apparent advance toward a “unitary executive” doctrine that would grant him near-unlimited authority, driving the US toward autocracy. Billionaire tech moguls like Elon Musk are helping the government consolidate power and aggressively reduce the federal workforce. Institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, which help keep Americans healthy and informed, are being haphazardly diminished.Globally, once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters, war and the lingering trauma of Covid continue to unfold, while an explosion of generative AI threatens to destabilize how people think, make a living and relate to each other.For many in the US, Trump 2.0 is having a devastating effect on daily life. For others, the routines of life continue, albeit threaded with mind-altering horrors: scrolling past an AI-generated cartoon of Ice officers arresting immigrants before dinner, or hearing about starving Palestinian families while on a school run.Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane.It’s “the visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it”, Harfoush tells me. “It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”In his 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, the British film-maker Adam Curtis argued that Yurchak’s critique of late-Soviet life applies neatly to the west’s decades-long slide into authoritarianism, something more Americans are now confronting head-on.“Donald Trump is not something new,” Curtis tells me, calling him “the final pantomime product” of the US government, where the powerful are abandoning any pretense of common, inclusive ideals and instead using their positions to settle scores, reward loyalty and hollow out institutions for personal or political gains.Trump’s US is “just like Yeltsin in Russia in the 1990s – promising a new kind of democracy, but in reality allowing the oligarchs to loot and distort the society”, says Curtis.Why the concept of hypernormalization is usefulWitnessing large-scale systems slowly unravel in real time can be profoundly surreal and frightening. The hypernormalization framework offers a way to understand what we’re feeling and why.Harfoush created her video “to reassure others that they’re not alone” and that “they aren’t misinterpreting the situation or imagining things”. Understanding hypernormalization “made me feel less isolated”, she says. “It’s difficult to act when you’re uncertain if you’re perceiving reality clearly, but once you know the truth, you can channel that clarity into meaningful action and, ideally, drive positive change.”Naming an experience can be a form of psychological relief. “The worst thing in the world is to feel that you’re the only one who feels this way and that you are going quietly mad and everyone else is in denial,” says Caroline Hickman, a psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specializing in climate anxiety. “That terrifies people. It traumatizes people.”People who feel the “wrongness” of current conditions acutely may be experiencing some depression and anxiety, but those feelings can be quite rational – not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective, Hickman says.“What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they don’t give a shit about whether we survive or not,” she says.View image in fullscreenMarielle Greguski, 32, a New York City-based retail worker and content creator, posted about everyday life feeling “inconsequential” in the face of political crisis. Greguski says the outcome of the 2024 election reminded her that she lives in a “bubble” of progressive values, and that “there’s the other half of people that are not feeling the same energy and frustration and fear”.To Greguski, the US’s failings are not only partisan but moral – like the racism and bigotry that Trump’s second term has brought out of the shadows and into policy.Greguski is currently planning a wedding. It’s hard to compartmentalize “constant cruelty, things that don’t make sense”, she says. “Sometimes I’ll be like: ‘I have to put aside X amount of money for the wedding next year,’ and then I’m like: ‘Will this country exist as we know it next year?’ It really is crazy.”The effects of hypernormalizationConfronting systemic collapse can be so disorienting, overwhelming and even humiliating, that many tune it out or find themselves in a state of freeze.Greguski likens this feeling to sleep paralysis: “basically a waking nightmare where you’re like: ‘I’m here, I’m aware, but I’m so scared and I can’t move.’”In his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, journalist Milton Mayer described a similar state of freeze in German citizens during the rise of the Nazi party: “You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? – Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”“People don’t shut down because they don’t feel anything,” says Hickman. “They shut down because they feel too much.” Understanding this overwhelm is an important first step in resisting inaction – it helps us see fear as a trap.Curtis points out that governments may intentionally keep their citizens in a vulnerable state of dread and confusion as “a brilliant way of managing a highly febrile and anxious society”, he says.When we feel powerless in the face of bigger problems, we “turn to the only thing that we do have the power over, to try and change for the better”, says Curtis – meaning, typically, ourselves. Anxiety and fear can trap us, leading us to spend more time trying to feel better in small, personal ways, like entertainment and self-care, and less time on activism and community engagement.View image in fullscreenHow to overcome hypernormalizationProgressive commentators have urgently called for moral clarity and mobilization in response to changes like the cuts to USAID funding, which has resulted in an estimated 103 deaths per hour across the globe; the dismantling of the CDC; and Robert F Kennedy’s campaign against vaccine science.“Where is the outrage?” asks the Nation’s Gregg Gonsalves. “Too many lives are at stake to rest in this bizarre moment of frozen agitation.”“I don’t know if there’s a massive shift toward racism as much as an expanded indifference toward it,” the historian Robin DG Kelley said in a February interview with New York Magazine. “People are just kind of like: ‘Well, what can we do?’”Experts say action can break the spell. “Being active politically, in whatever way, I think helps reduce apocalyptic gloom,” says Betsy Hartmann, an activist, scholar and author of The America Syndrome, which explores the importance of resisting apocalyptic thinking.Greguski and a co-worker have been helping distribute multilingual information about legal rights and helpline numbers, to be used in the event of Ice raids.“It’s easy to feel like: ‘Oh, I’m in community because I’m on TikTok,’” she says. But genuine community is about “getting outside and talking to your neighbor and knowing that there’s someone out there that can help you if something really bad goes down,” she says.“You’re actually out there talking to people, working with people and realizing there are so many good people in the world, too, and maybe feeling less isolated than before,” says Hartmann.“But I also think we need a broader vision,” Hartmann notes. She suggests looking to resistance efforts against authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, Hungary and India. “How might we be in international solidarity? What lessons can we learn in terms of rebuilding sophisticated, complex government infrastructure that’s been hacked away at by people like Elon Musk and his minions in a more socially just and sustainable way?”“We are in a period now when it’s absolutely essential to protest,” says Hartmann, citing the Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who argues that just 3.5% of a population engaging in peaceful protest can hold back authoritarian movements.What makes dysfunction so dangerous is that we might simply learn to live with it. But understanding hypernormalization gives us language – and permission – to recognize when systems are failing, and clarifies the risk of not taking action when we can.In 2014, Ursula Le Guin accepted the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, saying: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”Harfoush reflects on this quote often. It underscores the fact that “this world we’ve created is ultimately a choice”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”We have the research, technologies and wisdom to create better, more sustainable systems.“But meaningful change requires collective awakening and decisive action,” says Harfoush. “And we need to start now.” More

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      We can’t just be against Trump. It’s time for a bold, progressive populism | Robert Reich

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      Demonstrations against Donald Trump Trump are getting larger and louder. Good. This is absolutely essential.But at some point we’ll need to demonstrate not just against the president but also for the United States we want.Trump’s regressive populism – cruel, bigoted, tyrannical – must be met by a bold progressive populism that strengthens democracy and shares the wealth.We can’t simply return to the path we were on before Trump. Even then, big money was taking over our democracy and siphoning off most of the economy’s gains.Two of the country’s most respected political scientists – professors Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University – analyzed 1,799 policy issues decided between 1981 and 2002. They found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”Instead, lawmakers responded to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and big corporations – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns. And “when a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”Notably, Gilens and Page’s research data was gathered before the supreme court opened the floodgates to big money in Citizens United. After that, the voices of typical Americans were entirely drowned.In the election cycle of 2016, which first delivered the White House to Trump, the richest 100th of 1% of Americans accounted for a record-breaking 40% of all campaign donations. (By contrast, in 1980, the top 0.01% accounted for only 15% of all contributions.)The direction we were heading was unsustainable. Even before Trump’s first regime, trust in every major institution of society was plummeting – including Congress, the courts, corporations, Wall Street, universities, the legal establishment and the media.The entire system seemed rigged for the benefit of the establishment – and in many ways it was.The typical family’s inflation-adjusted income had barely risen for decades. Most of the economy’s gains had gone to the top.Wall Street got bailed out when its gambling addiction caused it humongous losses but homeowners who were underwater did not. Nor did people who lost their jobs and savings. And not a single top Wall Street executive went to jail.A populist – anti-establishment – revolution was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be a tyrannical one. It didn’t have to be regressive populism.Instead of putting the blame where it belonged – on big corporations, Wall Street and the billionaire class – Trump has blamed immigrants, the “deep state”, socialists, “coastal elites”, transgender people, “DEI” and “woke”.How has Trump gotten away with this while giving the super-rich large tax benefits and regulatory relief and surrounding himself (especially in his second term) with a record number of billionaires, including the richest person in the world?Largely because Democratic leaders – with the notable exceptions of Bernie Sanders (who is actually an independent), AOC and a handful of others – could not, and still cannot, bring themselves to enunciate a progressive version of populism that puts the blame squarely where it belongs.Too many have been eating from the same campaign buffet as the Republicans and dare not criticize the hands that feed them.This has left Trump’s regressive populism as the only version of anti-establishment politics available to Americans. It’s a tragedy. Anti-establishment fury remains at the heart of our politics, and for good reason.What would progressive populism entail?Strengthening democracy by busting up big corporations. Stopping Wall Street’s gambling (eg replicating the Glass-Steagall Act). Getting big money out of politics, even if this requires amending the constitution. Requiring big corporations to share their profits with their average workers. Strengthening unions. And raising taxes on the super-wealthy to finance a universal basic income, Medicare for all, and paid family leave.Hopefully, demonstrations against Trump’s regressive, tyrannical populism will continue to grow.But we must also be demonstrating for a better future beyond Trump – one that strengthens democracy and works on behalf of all Americans rather than a privileged few.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      ‘Protest can shape the world’: Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump

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      On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the “Hands Off” protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I’ve heard versions of “no one cares”, “no one is doing anything” and “nothing came of it” for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn’t really looking and sometimes that they don’t recognise impacts that aren’t immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing.For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he’s in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden.Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric “free trade” is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis).View image in fullscreenBut that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what’s considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world.If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of “where’s the payoff for this thing we just did”. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign’s platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.)The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don’t hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn’t happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what’s no longer there or what didn’t happen is also an art, whether it’s seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn’t cut down.One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is “everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”, attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don’t work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It’s like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you’d rather call it a log or because you haven’t quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn’t growing, since it hasn’t visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time.As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, “It’s not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It’s just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I’ve celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I’ve also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can’t win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.”One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns.View image in fullscreenIn other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It’s convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it’s convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist.Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they’re remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all.So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: “Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.” She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. “But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProtests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: “And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.”The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women’s March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it’s hard to recognise the impact of such events; they’re so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs.This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It’s built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it’s administration for liberation). The language of “save the whales/children/country” suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict.The phrase “theory of change” has become popular in recent years, as in “what’s your theory of change?” Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world.Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it’s supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we’re making the future in the present, and while you can’t predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries.Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that’s not on the map. What I’ve tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. More

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      ‘A trickle to a tidal wave’: behind the Trump protest movement that launched on Reddit

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      It started with a Reddit post.“50 PROTESTS – 50 STATES – 1 DAY,” the user who goes by Evolved Fungi wrote, kicking off a movement that has since drawn hundreds of thousands to the streets in protests against Donald Trump across the country.The movement – pronounced “fifty-fifty-one”, meaning 50 protests, 50 states, one movement – first called for a day of action on 5 February, a date chosen seemingly at random. Local organizers would lead protests in their cities and towns, but the movement would not have a leader, and it would not be centralized.As Trump moved quickly to dismantle agencies, policies and norms, slashing through the federal government, people wanted to express their dismay – and they weren’t seeing it from their elected leaders.“Trump and his cronies are actively trying to take over our country and destroy our democracy, and the Democratic party is not doing enough to stop them, so people are going to step in,” said Hunter Dunn, the national press coordinator for the movement. “That was the basic idea.”The 5 February protest drew tens of thousands across the country. A subsequent February protest got more people into the streets. Come 5 April, a large coalition that included 50501 resulted in millions of people around the country rallying in their cities and towns in a “hands off” demonstration. And on 19 April, was another big showing nationwide Some communities also held mutual aid events such as food and supply drives and potlucks, Dunn said.The movement is one of many coming together to rally in the streets, organize events, contact lawmakers and build a resistance to Trump’s second term.“It’s gone from a trickle to a tidal wave really quickly,” Dunn said.A 50501 subreddit remains an active organizing space, where people discuss ideas for local protests, messages they should put on posters, strategies for getting more people involved. The movement is active on nearly all social media channels, and local offshoots have their own pages as well.The group is planning its next day of mass protest on 1 May, which will be focused on workers’ rights and immigrant rights. 50501 is far from the only group organizing around May Day, a frequent day of action for labor groups around the world.There are now thousands of volunteers across all 50 states and in DC who help with 50501 in their communities, Dunn said. People come together to organize an event, like a protest or demonstration, and form small teams. Those small teams can then become part of state-level 50501 groups. The state-level groups help inform a national group. Local organizers vote on dates for national days of protest, he said.“50501 is not an organization,” the movement’s handbook, posted on its website, says. “It is not a company. It’s not a brand, club, or influencer. It is an agreed-upon idea to end the executive overreach of the Trump administration. Do not look to 50501 for leadership or permission to hold your own government accountable. The time has come for you to get involved. You are 50501. Together our voices cannot be ignored.”Seasoned activists were initially skeptical – they didn’t know the group behind the protest, and they feared it could be a set-up from the other side, designed to make the opposition look weak, or worse, to draw people into a trap. Now, though, established and centralized groups have partnered with 50501 on protests after their fears weren’t realized.In response to some of the early skepticism, Evolved Fungi responded on Reddit that he was “not a foreign agent, or bad actor, or whatever people seem to want to think” but “just a regular guy”. In fact, he has said on Reddit that he started organizing protests in opposition to infant circumcision. He did not respond to a request for an interview and has not yet been named publicly.“People didn’t need to find each other and then plan a date and a place – they needed a date and a place to find each other,” he wrote of the concept. “And at the core, that’s what 50501 is – a date and a place to find each other and stand together.”He later reflected on the first few actions and how the movement had grown from his concept: “You aren’t led by me, you’re led by that spirit in EVERY ONE OF US that sees a wrong and needs to do something to make it right! The same spirit that made me first write about 50501, as a normal guy who saw something wrong and did something about it to try to make it right. Just like you are doing.”The movement lists four groups as partners: Political Revolution, Voices of Florida, NoVoiceUnheard and Build the Resistance. Dunn said Political Revolution has helped build out its website and other places to coordinate events and provided technical support. Voices of Florida has helped train new organizers on how to speak to the press and keep people safe at protests, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSarah Parker, the executive director of Voices of Florida, told Rolling Stone: “We’re building the airplane while flying it. It’s amazing to see new people building this amazing infrastructure. It’s bottom-up, not top-down.”Many of those involved in the movement are new to political organizing and action, but others have been parts of previous movements, such as Black Lives Matter, or, for some older activists, as far back as anti-Vietnam war protests, Dunn said.Dunn got involved after he saw an Instagram post about 50501. He had previously organized in his local school district as a high schooler to help pass diversity initiatives and worked on some local political campaigns. He helped organize a 50501 protest in Los Angeles on 5 February.Another organizer, Sydney, told the Guardian in February that she hadn’t organized protests before, but didn’t see anyone in her part of Pennsylvania planning a 5 February action. “I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly. It’s probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” she said.Sydney, who asked to use only her first name, said the Pittsburgh protests have grown from a couple hundred people to more than 1,000 at the 19 April event. “It feels amazing. I mean that in the best way possible. But there are some days where I’m like, is this actually happening? Is this real? It’s been amazing to watch.”Each day of action has had more people than the one before it, she said.“I’m seeing more and more parts of Pennsylvania actually take up their own mantle and start their own actions, because, for whatever reason, they can’t get to Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia,” she said. “I hope that that momentum results in our elected officials hearing our voice and hearing that we are not happy with the way things are going, and listening to us.”Dunn expects the protests to continue to grow as more of Trump’s agenda takes hold.“I always like to tell people, when they ask how they can join, there’s four things you need to do: you need to be pro-democracy. You need to be trying to protect the constitution. You need to be against executive overreach. You have to be non-violent. If you’re those four things, you’re 50501 if you say you are.” More

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      The power and pitfalls of protest: how to speak out without falling victim to Trump’s playbook | Jonathan Smucker

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      On Saturday I was heartened to be one of millions of Americans who took to the streets in cities and towns across the United States to stand against “the most brazen power grab in modern history”. While no official total tally of “Hands Off!” participants is yet available, the anti-Donald Trump, anti-Elon Musk actions on Saturday were certainly among the largest single-day protests in US history, with rallies in all 50 states.As we seem to be entering a new stage of popular protest movements, it’s worth assessing the strategic value of protest, as well as the limits and potential liabilities. History is full of powerful examples of consequential bottom-up protest movements. The women’s suffrage movement secured voting rights after decades of struggle. The civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow segregation. The labor movement won the eight-hour workday, the weekend and much more. Protest was an essential tool for each of these movements. It can take many different forms, including mass demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, unruly disruption and civil disobedience.Protest is often negatively framed as naive, utopian or merely self-expressive. But it can be profoundly pragmatic. When part of a larger power-building strategy, protest can play an essential role in forcing issues onto the public agenda, changing popular opinion, delegitimizing powerholders, shifting the balance of forces and even toppling regimes. Protest movements don’t always win, of course, but history is full of stories of “Davids” defeating “Goliaths”.Only weeks into Trump’s second term, as we seek to limit the damage and, ultimately, to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy, protest is as necessary and important as ever. How can we make our voices as powerful as possible?How Trump frames protestersProtest is also rife with peril. When powerful people and institutions feel threatened, they tend to fight dirty, using every tool at their disposal, including police and legal repression. In addition to facing threats to safety and freedom, social movement participants are characteristically slandered and stereotyped by their opponents, with slanted news coverage often parroting the messages or sharing the assumptions of the ruling class.Before exploring some pitfalls of protest (and how to avoid them), let’s get a few things clear. First, it is brave and worthy to engage in protest for just causes, against powerful actors; not only that, it’s necessary if we want to have a democracy. Second, our opponents have a vested interest in disparaging and caricaturing our protests and they will attempt to slander us no matter what we do (but this doesn’t mean we have no ability to counter their attacks). Third, peril and pitfalls cannot be completely avoided: a protest where everything goes perfectly is rare, and the likelihood of errors and excesses is a poor excuse for inaction.That said, organizers of protests do have a responsibility to do everything in our power to ensure that collective action is as effective as possible. The sociologist Max Weber argued that those who seek to intervene in politics have a responsibility not only for our own intentions, but also for the counter-responses to our actions. In other words, we have a responsibility to think a few chess moves ahead and to craft a strategy that can win.A central constraint today is the dominant narrative about protest itself. In the US, this narrative casts protesters as a special type of person, with some combination of the following features: loud, shrill, naive, counter-cultural, speaking in jargon, Marxist, anti-American, violent and economically and/or educationally privileged (AKA “elitist”). The purpose of this dominant narrative is straightforward: inoculate millions of Americans against protest movements by otherizing “protesters”. In other words, there’s a well-worn caricature of a protester that holds many everyday working people back from aligning with protest movements.Ultimately it’s on us to get more people to see us differently. To be clear, I’m not talking about our hard opponents. The point of protest is never to be palatable to everyone. I’m talking here about the millions of Americans who have a high potential to join, support or at least sympathize with protest movements.Trump didn’t invent this disparaging story, but he grafts these negative tropes about protest and protesters on to his larger pseudo-populist “anti-elite” narrative. I put “anti-elite” in quotes because Trump strategically names cultural elites as culprits, intentionally diverting attention away from the concentrated economic power (eg Wall Street, huge corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk) that is actually to blame for the hardships of tens of millions of working-class Americans. Trump’s favorite “elite” targets include academia, the news media, Hollywood and Democratic politicians. “Woke protesters” take their place alongside the rest of this elite cast in Trump’s play. Opposed to these hoity-toity, overeducated, condescending elites, Trump presents himself as hero and champion of “ordinary Americans”.This framing is effective because it taps into a real and deepening class-based cultural divide in America – between a highly educated professional class occupying roughly the top 10-20% of the spectrum, and the bottom 80% below. In his book Dream Hoarders, Richard Reeves lays out how this upper stratum has pulled away from the majority of Americans – not just economically, but socially and culturally. The complex US tax code, legacy college admissions, and housing, zoning and other policies have benefited the already advantaged. As distinct from the ultra-rich “one per cent”, many in this larger upper strata see themselves as progressive, even as they benefit from invisible moats around their neighborhoods, schools and social networks. This deepening class-based insularity creates the cultural disconnect that Trump exploits. He directs populist anger toward these cultural elites, while diverting attention away from far more powerful and destructive economic culprits, offering working-class Americans cultural revenge rather than policies that could make a real positive difference in their lives.View image in fullscreenTrump’s exploitation of this cultural-economic backdrop – and Democrats’ failure to even comprehend it, let alone come up with a counter-strategy – was central to his electoral victories in both 2016 and 2024. This same backdrop should also be of great concern to protest movements. We who are attempting to organize people into collective action must recognize how easily our movements can be portrayed as extensions of this privileged class and work intentionally to break out of that framing (and, sometimes, that reality).At Trump rallies during his 2016 campaign, I observed how he would deliberately draw attention to protesters, utilizing them as characters in his story, encouraging the crowd to chant and jeer as security removed the disruptive “outside agitators”.So it was striking to watch how dramatically Trump changed his tack when military veterans spoke out at some of these same rallies. He completely ignored them, refusing to acknowledge their presence, strategically avoiding even looking in their direction. These veterans later learned from active-duty friends that Trump had gotten quite upset by their actions, because they didn’t fit into his narrative; military veterans could easily overcome Trump’s “woke protester” framing.Breaking out of Trump’s playbookIn the first several weeks of Trump’s second term, we again see powerful examples of veterans speaking out, for example, publicly confronting their representatives about Doge cuts to the benefits they earned. Grassroots organizations of veterans, like Common Defense, are helping to prepare, support and amplify the efforts of fellow veterans as they use their powerful voices to speak up in this critical moment. Protagonists in the story of America, veterans bring a unique authority and credibility that is very difficult for their powerful opponents to caricature or disparage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSimilarly, the federal workers who are organizing and showing the real-life impacts of Musk’s reckless cuts are very effective spokespeople right now. From park rangers to USPS employees, these workers are protesting threats to their livelihoods and to the valued public services they provide, speaking up as workers about the devastation wrought by Musk’s “chainsaw” on their lives and the communities they serve. Importantly, they represent a cross-section of America: diverse in race, geography, education and political leanings. They are relaying their experiences and connecting with millions of Americans who see themselves in their stories. Using plainspoken language rather than jargon, they present themselves not as “protesters” but as parents, neighbors and workers who have a stake in their country’s future.The lesson isn’t that you have to be a military veteran or federal worker if you want to effectively protest against Trump and Musk. But if our opponents are determined to otherize us as unrelatable “protesters”, what are the familiar aspects of our identities that we can emphasize instead? The story of a worker who is so fed up that she decides to join with others in collective action is very different from the dominant story about generic protesters.It’s important to also grasp and grapple with other elements of Trump’s attack narrative; his use of “protester” tropes is not the only means he uses to otherize and dehumanize. He also attacks vulnerable people because of their immigration status, their advocacy for Palestine and their gender identity, among other pretenses. Each of these attacks warrants its own strategic counter-response and it’s vitally important that we show solidarity and narrate Trump’s targeting of any of us as an attack on all of us and on our shared values and rights – as has been on display in the popular outpouring of support for the detained Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.Another important way today’s protests are breaking out of Trump’s playbook is by consistently punching up, especially at Musk as an unelected billionaire who has taken oligarchy in America to new heights. When we name powerful economic culprits, it takes the wind out of Trump’s fake populist sails. Billionaires who rigged our economy and political system make for a more convincing culprit to millions of Americans than vulnerable scapegoats (eg immigrants, trans people, or “woke”). A central reason we got into this mess is that Democrats have been so tepid and inconsistent in picking visible fights with billionaires, Wall Street and corporate power.It’s important that we consistently punch up at billionaires and the politicians doing their bidding and refrain from punching down at people who voted for Trump. To break out of Trump’s story of the “smug and condescending affluent liberal protester”, we should avoid messages that are, indeed, smug and condescending (eg, “In this house, we believe science is real”) or that mock people for their economic struggles (eg, “How are you feeling about voting for cheaper eggs now?”). Such messages are self-indulgent and counterproductive, and we can do so much better.Organizing for powerFinally, if we are to make our protests as effective as possible, we should recognize protest for what it is: a tactic. Protest is not an end in itself. Tactics require larger long-term power-building strategies. Absent strategy, protest can sometimes still hold some short-term strategic value (eg, showing that dissent exists), but if we want to accomplish more than a flash in the pan – if we genuinely intend to shape history, as powerful movements before us have done – then we need to figure out what to do after the protest ends and everyone goes home.The key is organization. Organizations transform episodic moments of outrage into sustained campaigns that can win concrete victories. Without organization, we’re no match for the powerful forces we’re up against. It’s no accident that the five decades when labor unions and other participatory organizations have declined are the same decades when capital consolidated control of our political system and inequality grew worse and worse.To rebuild people power, we need to build organizations with structure, leadership development and capacity for sustained campaigns and struggle. There are all kinds of organizations: labor unions, place-based (local and statewide), issue-based, faith and congregation-based, and more (check out the list of partner organizations that helped plan the 5 April “Hands Off!” protests). If you’re showing up to the protest as a lone individual, let it be your on-ramp to longer-term collective action. Figure out where you fit in, what capacity you can add, what skills you can develop, how much time you can give. Even just a few hours a month, when multiplied by millions, can amount to a formidable force – the kind of people power we need to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy.Because ultimately we’re not trying to build “protest movements”, we’re trying to build people’s movements; movements that use protest as one tool among many, whose ultimate aim is to win a real voice for working people in determining the policies that impact our lives and communities – and to make an America that works for all of us.

      Jonathan Smucker is a political organizer, campaigner and strategist who co-founded Popular Comms Institute, PA Stands Up, Lancaster Stands Up, Common Defense, Beyond the Choir and Mennonite Action. He is the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. More

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      Americans are beginning to fear dissent. That’s exactly what Trump wants | Robert Reich

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      I was talking recently to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say.When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts.His response worried me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.”“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.“They! The university. The government. Gotta go!” He was off.My friend has never shown signs of paranoia.I relay this to you because the Donald Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each other. It is beginning to deter open dissent, which is exactly what the US president intends.The chill affects all five major pillars of civil society – universities, science, the media, the law and the arts.In Columbia University’s capitulation to Trump, it agreed to require demonstrators to identify themselves when asked and put its department of Middle Eastern studies under “receivership”, lest it lose $400m in government funding.The agreement is already chilling dissent there, as my conversation with my friend revealed.The Trump regime also “detained” a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder who participated in protests at the school. The administration’s agents have also entered dorms with search warrants and targeted two other students who participated in such protests.On Tuesday, an international student in a graduate program at Tufts University was taken into custody outside her off-campus apartment building by plainclothes homeland security agents, handcuffed and whisked away to a prison in Louisiana. She has a valid student visa. Her apparent offense? Putting her name to an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of how the Tufts administration handled protests.Scores of other major universities are on Trump’s target list.Trump’s attack on science has involved threats to three of the largest funders of American science – the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.Tens of thousands of researchers are worried about how to continue their research. Many have decided to hunker down and not criticize the Trump administration for fear of losing their funding.Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, has charged that a French scientist traveling to a conference near Houston earlier this month was denied entry into the US because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he gave a negative “personal opinion” about Trump’s scientific and research policies. The US Department of Homeland Security denies this was the reason the scientist wasn’t admitted into the country.Meanwhile, America’s major media fear more lawsuits from Trump and his political allies in the wake of ABC’s surrender to Trump in December, agreeing to pay him $15m to settle a defamation suit he filed against the network.Journalists who cover the White House are reeling from Trump’s decision to bar those he deems unfriendly from major events where space is limited.The media chill is palpable. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, has openly restricted the kinds of op-eds appearing in its editorial pages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe latest example of Trump’s use of executive orders to target powerful law firms that have challenged him came on Tuesday, against Jenner & Block.The firm employed the attorney Andrew Weissmann after he worked as a prosecutor in the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump during his first term.The White House charged that the firm “participated in the weaponization of the legal system against American principles and values”, and an official specifically called out Weissmann.Last month, Trump removed the security clearances of lawyers at Covington & Burling who represented the former special counsel Jack Smith following his investigation of Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack.Trump has also targeted Perkins Coie, a firm linked to opposition research against Trump in 2016. His order banned Perkins Coie lawyers from federal buildings and halted its federal contracts.Another executive order took aim at Paul Weiss, who employed the lawyer Mark Pomerantz before he helped prosecute Trump over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.Last Thursday, Trump withdrew the executive order against Paul Weiss because, he said, the firm had “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of Pomerantz and pledged $40m in free legal work to support the Trump administration.Non-profits tell the Washington Post that law firms that once might have helped them fight Trump’s orders now fear Trump will pursue them if they do.Trump is even intimidating the arts by taking over the Kennedy Center, firing board members, ousting its president and making himself chairman.The comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prizes, now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump.“Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly, that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear,” she told Deadline.Every tyrant in history has sought to stifle criticism of himself and his regime.But America was founded on criticism. American democracy was built on dissent. We conducted a revolution against tyranny.This moment calls for courage and collective action rather than capitulation – resolve by universities, researchers, journalists, the legal community, and the arts to stand up to Trump.Anyone holding responsible positions in these five pillars of civil society must reject Trump’s attempts at intimidation and condemn what he is trying to do.Those who surrender to Trump’s tyranny invite more of it.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      The US is poised to use terror laws against students. This could be worse than McCarthyism | Thomas Anthony Durkin and Bernard Harcourt

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      On Monday, the Department of Justice announced the launch of “Joint Task Force October 7 (JTF 10-7)”. In an accompanying press release, the DoJ said it would bring to justice Hamas leaders who murdered and kidnapped innocent civilians in the deadly attack on Israel of 7 October 2023. Few would quarrel with this ambition. In the same breath, however, the press release claimed that the taskforce would also “investigate acts of terrorism and civil rights violations by individuals and entities providing support and financing to Hamas, related Iran proxies, and their affiliates, as well as acts of antisemitism by these groups”.In plain English, this means the student protesters. It could also include universities and colleges that have entered the government’s crosshairs.The legal risks are real. They are perilous, and they are alarming. Where a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) – such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or related organizations such as the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – is concerned, the line separating political advocacy from material support to terrorism can be razor thin, and any doubt tends to be resolved against those engaged in the political advocacy.FTOs are foreign organizations that the Bureau of Counterterrorism in the US state department designates as terrorist entities under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Once such a designation is made, it becomes unlawful for a US person to knowingly provide that group with “material support or resources”. That phrase is defined broadly in the statute as “any property, tangible or intangible, or service”, which can include “expert advice or assistance”. An aggressive interpretation of “service” and “assistance” may easily break down what were seemingly secure boundaries of free speech.What most people might assume is first amendment-protected speech and advocacy can be misconstrued by the government as assistance or propaganda provided under the direction of an FTO, and thus criminally prosecuted under the material-support-to-terrorism statutes.This is not just a theoretical possibility. Protected speech is often used to show predisposition, motive or intent in material support prosecutions. Such prosecutions have led to serious federal anti-terrorism convictions that result in lengthy sentences. Typically, sentencing guidelines call for 20 years to life in prison. Actual sentences in double-digit years are not uncommon. Even though this questionable legal strategy has been used before, its use against student protesters would be unprecedented and alarming.Legal jeopardy for political advocacy has long existed in this country despite its storied embrace of the first amendment. But the justice department’s new taskforce and threatened antiterrorist prosecutions reach deeper into policing political dissent than anything seen since the McCarthy era. The consequences could be far more draconian than the usual campus risk of a misdemeanor civil-disobedience arrest or student discipline. The threat to the values of free speech and open debate on college campuses could hardly be more consequential.Already, a number of well-funded US lawyers who aggressively support Israel’s war in Gaza have identified ways to prosecute civil claims against student protesters. On behalf of 7 October 2023 victims, these lawyers have filed federal lawsuits in Virginia, Florida, and Illinois that use the material-support statutes to seek damages against several loosely affiliated student-activist organizations that oppose the war. Like the government’s use of these criminal statutes, the civil cases allege that the US student groups have been acting under the direction of Hamas or its affiliates since 7 October 2023, essentially to disseminate Hamas propaganda.The incriminating evidence turns on the dissemination of someone else’s ideas, often by making arguments and using expressions, or distributing flyers that can be traced back to an FTO. In the ongoing detention and deportation of former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident, the government accuses him of leading activities “aligned to Hamas” and attending protests at which activists distributed flyers from “the Hamas media office”. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security detained, with the intention to deport, a Georgetown University academic who is an Indian citizen on a visa. The spokesperson for the DHS stated that he was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media”. That is precisely how the criminal investigations could proceed: by connecting free speech to propaganda under the direction or control of an FTO.Right now, the United States is allied with Israel, so the most vulnerable are those students protesting the way the state of Israel is conducting its war in Gaza. But that will not always be the case. As evidenced by Donald Trump’s 180-degree pivot against Ukraine and our closest European allies, the situation could change in a heartbeat.All social protest movements occur within larger political contexts. That is especially true of the protests surrounding the Israel-Gaza war, which are taking place not only within the context of an actual ground war in Gaza, but also within the context of larger geopolitical forces, including the ongoing “global war on terror” declared by George W Bush after September 11.In that larger “war on terror”, strategies and emergency powers that have been developed in the international arena have increasingly been deployed domestically and are now coming home to roost with a vengeance on our campuses. Counterinsurgency strategies with fewer constitutional protections for non-citizens abroad are now being repurposed at home.College students should not be forced to shrink from their political beliefs and free speech and advocacy for fear of punitive civil actions, let alone the fear of federal grand jury investigations and the criminal prosecutions threatened by the justice department taskforce. Students arrive at universities at a young age when many of them are passionate about human rights and justice – and rightly so. Some universities and colleges pride themselves on a celebrated history of student protest.It goes without saying that university presidents should be fighting against the assault on the first amendment. But by and large, they have abdicated this responsibility. They must now make it part of their mission to protect students in this new reality. They should not disavow international students who face immigration reprisals, nor take adversarial action against their students to protect only themselves. The least they can do now is work with and counsel their students to help them understand the new threats to their exercise of free speech and enable them to make informed choices and judgments.

      Thomas Anthony Durkin in one of the country’s leading national security lawyers and the co-director of the National Security & Civil Liberties Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

      Bernard E Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher professor of law at Columbia Law School and a leading death penalty lawyer. He is the author of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens More

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      Almost 100 arrested during protest occupying Trump Tower over Mahmoud Khalil

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      Protesters organized by a progressive Jewish group occupied the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City on Thursday to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University student held by US immigration authorities. About 100 were arrested.Chanted slogans included: “Free Mahmoud, free them all” and: “Fight Nazis, not students.”Other chants in footage posted to social media included: “We will not comply, Mahmoud, we are on your side” and: “Bring Mahmoud home now.”At a news briefing on Thursday afternoon, a police official said those arrested faced charges including trespassing, obstruction and resisting arrest.Many of the protesters in a group organizers said was more than 250-strong wore red T-shirts bearing the message “Jews say stop arming Israel”. By early afternoon, footage was posted showing officers from the New York police department beginning to arrest protesters.The protest in the gold-coloured lobby of Donald Trump’s signature Fifth Avenue building, the US president’s New York home, was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which describes itself as “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world” and has staged protests at New York landmarks including Grand Central Station.In a statement, the group said: “The detention of Mahmoud is further proof that we are on the brink of a full takeover by a repressive, authoritarian regime.“As Jews of conscience, we know our history and we know where this leads. It’s on all of us to stand up now. Many of us are the descendants of people who resisted European fascism and far too many of our ancestors lost their lives in that struggle. We call on the strength of our ancestors and we call on our tradition, which teaches us we must never stand idly by.”The actor Debra Winger participated in the protest.Accusing the Trump administration of having “no interest in Jewish safety” and “co-opting antisemitism”, Winger told the Associated Press: “I’m just standing up for my rights, and I’m standing up for Mahmoud Khalil, who has been abducted illegally and taken to an undisclosed location. Does that sound like America to you?”Khalil, 30, was a lead organizer of protests at Columbia University over Israel’s war in Gaza, which began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023.Having completed a master’s degree, Khalil is due to graduate from Columbia in May. Though he is a legal permanent US resident and married to an American citizen, he was arrested in New York last Saturday.He is now in custody in Louisiana, without charge but held under a rarely used immigration law provision that allows the secretary of state to approve the detention of anyone deemed a threat to US foreign policy.His lawyer, Baher Azmy, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has called the arrest “absolutely unprecedented” and “essentially a form of retaliation and punishment for the exercise of free speech”.Amid Trump administration attacks on universities over pro-Palestinian protests, observers say Khalil is being used as a test case for mass arrests. Trump has said Khalil’s arrest is “the first of many to come”, and promised to deport students seen to be guilty of “pro-terrorist, antisemitic, anti-American activity”. Khalil has not been accused of breaking any laws.On Thursday, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, spoke to Reuters. She said Khalil asked her a week ago if she knew what to do if officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) came to the door of their home.“I didn’t take him seriously. Clearly I was naive,” she said.She added: “I think it would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen.”Khalil “is Palestinian and he’s always been interested in Palestinian politics”, she said. “He’s standing up for his people, he’s fighting for his people.”On Wednesday, in a statement read by a lawyer, Abdalla, 28, said: “My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it is shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people. I demand his immediate release and return to our family.“So many who know and love Mahmoud have come together, refusing to stay silent. Their support is a testament to his character and to the deep injustice of what is being done to him.”Sonya E Meyerson-Knox, director of communications for Jewish Voice for Peace, posted footage of the Trump Tower protest on Thursday and said: “We will not comply – Mahmoud we are in your side[,] 300 Jews and friends in Trump Towers [sic] [because] we know what happens when an autocratic regime starts taking away our rights and scapegoating and we will not be silent[.] COME FOR ONE – FACE US ALL[.]”Jewish Voice for Peace said descendants of Holocaust survivors were among the protesters.Meyerson-Knox told NBC News: “My grandmother lost her cousins in the Holocaust. I grew up on these stories. We know what happens when authoritarian regimes begin targeting people, begin abducting them at night, separating their families and scapegoating. And we know that it’s one step from here to losing all right to protest and then further horrors happening, as we have seen too well in our history.“We’re calling on everyone to speak up today because otherwise we won’t be able to tomorrow.” More