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    John Oliver on Trump’s attack on higher education: ‘No capitulation will be enough’

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    On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the Trump administration’s assault on higher education in the US. “Trump has long held a grudge against higher education, and now that he’s in power, he’s acting on it,” Oliver explained. Among other things, Donald Trump has targeted the billions of dollars granted to universities for scientific research “in order to bend them to his will”.Trump’s “war on higher education” continues a long tradition of conservative distrust of universities. Back in 1972, Richard Nixon said “the professors are the enemy,” and as Oliver noted, Republicans have railed for years against higher education for supposedly wasteful spending on scientific research – think the Fox News fixation on the alleged “shrimp on a treadmill” study – and for being supposed bastions of liberal indoctrination. “Conservatives have long sought to orient universities sharply to the right,” he said. “And in recent years, they’ve seized upon a new justification for doing this – specifically, to ‘combat antisemitism’ in the wake of student protests over Gaza.”Of those protests, Oliver noted: “Multiple things can be true. You can think some critics of the protests were conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and that some are pointing out actual instances of antisemitism. You can also acknowledge that some Jewish students did feel unsafe because of the actions of some protesters and that some protesters were made unsafe by universities calling the police on them. You can also argue that many universities did themselves no favors by failing to figure out a coherent, consistent response.“But none of that nuance has been present in the White House’s response, which has been to suggest the wholesale destruction of certain universities.” Soon after taking office, Trump convened a “Task Force to Combat Antisemitism” backed by Stephen Miller with the goal of targeting certain schools with large protest movements and, to quote its lead Leo Terrell, “taking away their money”.“Look, if colleges were spending all of their federal money on inventing a big automatic antisemitism generator, then yeah, it would make sense to take their money away,” said Oliver. “But the thing is, they’re not doing that, partly because it seems to be Elon Musk’s project.“Instead, the money being taken away is largely going to research studies, and cutting those has nothing to do with antisemitism.”As Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, put it on Face the Nation: “The idea that you are attacking antisemitism by attacking universities, I think is a complete charade. It’s just an excuse for getting universities to conform.”“Right, it’s obviously bullshit,” Oliver confirmed. “The very idea that Trump’s actions are part of some great effort to defend the Jewish people is, as charades go, slightly less convincing than a toddler playing hide-and-seek.”Oliver considered a non-exhaustive list of “telltale signs that this isn’t really about antisemitism concerns”, including but not limited to the fact that Trump reportedly kept a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed, dined with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes this summer, brought people into his administration with records of antisemitic comments, reportedly said during his first term that “Hitler did a lot of good things”, and was endorsed in his first campaign by both David Duke and the KKK. “Hearing that Trump is suddenly waging war against antisemites is like hearing that Billy Joel is waging war against dads from Long Island,” he joked.Oliver then looked into exactly what the administration is doing, such as cancelling Columbia’s grants until the school stopped considering race in admissions, paid $200m in fines and reformed their Middle Eastern studies department, among other requirements. The university “caved in about five seconds”, Oliver noted, “officially solidifying Columbia’s reputation as the Little Bitch University, rather than what it was known for before: being the place that Timothée Chalamet went to for five minutes before realizing he didn’t need it”.The capitulation didn’t change anything, either; weeks later, the administration froze all of the university’s remaining funding from the National Institutes of Health, about $700m in total, and threatened the school’s accreditation. “There’s no guarantee the administration is going to stop making demands from Columbia, and why would they when they keep getting met?” said Oliver.The situation, which has caused a chilling effect on campus, “goes much further than Harvard and Columbia”, Oliver explained, as the administration has frozen hundreds of millions in research funds at several other private institutions, and slashed studies at several public universities. Even Northwestern, a school that tried pre-capitulating to the administration by releasing public steps taken to combat antisemitism, was targeted anyway, with over $790m in grants frozen. Those funds have still not been unfrozen, even though the university’s president, Michael Schill, the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, stepped down amid forced layoffs.That case, in particular, highlighted for Oliver what the government’s assault on universities was really about. He pointed to a clip of JD Vance from 2021: “We go to the universities, we use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to them as leverage and we say: ‘Unless you stop indoctrinating our children, unless you stop indoctrinating our entire society, you don’t get another dime of our money.’”“That is the exact same plan as now, just hastily remodeled to be about ‘fighting antisemitism’, expecting no one to notice,” said Oliver. “It’s basically the rhetorical equivalent of when a random business clearly used to be a Pizza Hut.”The end result, as one researcher put it, is that the “science in this country is going to be destroyed”, which is bad for future innovations as well as for the private sector. One study found that every dollar of medical research funded by the NIH delivered $2.56 in economic activity. “So even if you are someone who hates learning and loves money – and yes, I am talking to one guy in particular here – publicly funded research is just a no-brainer,” said Oliver. “But obviously that is not what this is really about. This is about the right being willing to sacrifice everything, up to and including a generation’s worth of scientific progress, to get what it wants.”“And it is not hard to see what that is. Because when the administration is launching investigations like ‘why aren’t there more white men teaching at Harvard?’, you know what they’re up to,” he continued. “Just like you know what the plan was when they suddenly canceled diversity grants awarded to PhD students who were members of certain racial or ethnic groups, disabled, or from disadvantaged backgrounds.”Where do things go from here? “I don’t really know, and I’m not sure this administration does either,” said Oliver. But “even if there is not a fixed destination, there is a clear direction. And that is they want to turn back a clock that, quite honestly, had taken way too long to move forward, and restore all of academia to being a training ground for those looking to uphold old systems of power instead of questioning them.”In conclusion, he added: “You can have problems with academia. You can think it’s too cloistered or too liberal. You can think it’s becoming too expensive or that its resources are misallocated. But the notion of the state suddenly executing a sweeping takeover of higher education to this degree is chilling.”Based on everything that has happened so far, “no capitulation will be enough, and they will never stop demanding more.” Given that, Oliver argued, universities should “stop yielding, stand firm and fight back” because although it is tempting to think one more capitulation will safeguard your independence, “it’s worth asking at what point have you compromised so much that the thing you’re supposed to be defending is gone.” More

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      More than 500 workers at Voice of America and other broadcasters to be laid off

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      The agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating jobs for more than 500 employees, a Trump administration official said. The move could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.Kari Lake, acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, announced the latest round of job cuts late Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.US district judge Royce Lamberth had ruled separately that the Republican administration had failed to show how it was complying with his orders to restore VOA’s operations. His order Monday gave the administration “one final opportunity, short of a contempt trial” to demonstrate its compliance. He ordered Lake to sit for a deposition by lawyers for agency employees by 15 September.On Thursday, Lamberth said Abramowitz could not be removed without the approval of the majority of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Firing Abramowitz would be “plainly contrary to law”, according to Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan.Lake posted a statement on social media that said her agency had initiated a reduction in force, or RIF, eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees. She said the agency “will continue to fulfill its statutory mission after this RIF– and will likely improve its ability to function”.“I look forward to taking additional steps in the coming months to improve the functioning of a very broken agency and make sure America’s voice is heard abroad where it matters most,” she wrote.A group of agency employees who sued to block VOA’s elimination said Lake’s move would give their colleagues 30 days until their pay and benefits end.“We find Lake’s continued attacks on our agency abhorrent,” they said in a statement. “We are looking forward to her deposition to hear whether her plan to dismantle VOA was done with the rigorous review process that Congress requires. So far we have not seen any evidence of that.”They added: “We will continue to fight for what we believe to be our rights under the law.”In June, layoff notices were sent to more than 600 agency employees. Abramowitz was placed on administrative leave along with almost the entire VOA staff. He was told he would be fired effective 31 August.The administration said in a court filing Thursday that it planned to send RIF notices to 486 employees of VOA and 46 other agency employees but intended to retain 158 agency employees and 108 VOA employees. The filing said the global media agency had 137 “active employees” and 62 other employees on administrative leave while VOA had 86 active employees and 512 others on administrative leave.The agency also houses Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Martí, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. The networks, which together reach an estimated 427 million people, date to the cold war and are part of a network of government-funded organizations trying to extend US influence and combat authoritarianism.In March, Abramowitz warned that Trump’s attempts to dismantle the VOA would be a “self-inflicted blow” to American national security, saying: “If America pulls off the playing field and cedes it to our adversaries, then they’re going to be telling the narratives that people around the world are going to be hearing, and that can’t be good for America … They’re going to be hearing an anti-America narrative. We need to fight that with truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe added: “The major challenge for the United States in general is this global information war in which countries like China and Russia are essentially really having our lunch. … So, I really feel that we need an organization that is accurate, unbiased, objective, and that tells the truth about America to the rest of the world in the languages that they understand.”This week, Trump also moved to remove union protections from a handful of federal employees, including those from the VOA.In response, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest trade union of public employees, said: “AFSCME members who fulfill the Congressionally mandated mission to broadcast Voice of America around the globe shine the beacon of freedom on the most oppressive of regimes. Now, because they have been fighting to keep Voice of America’s mission alive, their own voice on the job has been stripped from them. AFSCME will fight this illegal action in court.”Earlier this year, foreign staff at US-backed media outlets voiced concerns over their safety following Trump’s shuttering of the global media agencies.Speaking to the Guardian in March, Jaewoo Park, a journalist for Radio Free Asia, said: “We have many co-workers in different services, several of whom came here and sought asylum visas. If their own government knew they worked for RFA [Radio Free Asia] and they went back to their own country, their lives would be at risk.”“Authoritarian governments have praised what Trump is doing right now … In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA. It’s very risky for them. Their lives are in danger if Radio Free Asia doesn’t exist,” he added. More

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      Why Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian matters | Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley

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      In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuseums allow us to reckon with the brutality of the American legacy as well as expose our citizens to the people, institutions and strategies that charted a different course towards becoming a “more perfect” union. Fascist erasures like Trump’s hide behind the claim that truthful encounters with the past inflame and divide. This instinct is the opposite of the truth. A functioning democracy does not restrict perspectives to those of the dominant group, much less make it illegal to teach alternative ones.A people who cannot remember their past are a people who cannot resist a fascist future. Knowing our history can give us the weapons and wherewithal to battle Trump’s efforts to catapult us back to a time when the majority of Americans lacked both the civic and economic power that we have now. The fight for our museums and for our memory is a critical bulwark against the unraveling of American democracy. It is vital that we fight to protect our repositories before it’s too late.

      Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues

      Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump’s attacks on the ‘Blacksonian’ have a history in a century-old myth

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      It should surprise no one that former cast members from reality shows that ran for more than 15 seasons are running out of new material. Days ago, Donald Trump, former star of NBC’s The Apprentice and current US president, posted a lengthy Truth Social rant in which he (again) threatened the country’s leading cultural institutions to adhere to his political ideology. The target was one he has had in his crosshairs before – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) – which Trump called “OUT OF CONTROL” in his post. “Everything discussed [in NMAAHC exhibits] is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” Trump unloaded. “WOKE IS BROKE,” he continued through his customary use of all caps and misplaced capitalization of common nouns. “We have the HOTTEST Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”The tirade left many wondering what exactly Trump saw as the upsides of slavery, but also where they had previously heard this recycled talking point. The comment seemed to echo comments made just days prior by his fellow reality show bully Jillian Michaels, a former trainer on NBC’s The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss competition show that launched alongside The Apprentice in 2004. Michaels had been making her rounds in media and public appearances, rebranding from verbally abusive fat shamer to Maga influencer.On CNN’s NewsNight, the host Abby Phillips moderated a roundtable discussion on Trump’s months-long overreach into cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the NMAAHC. Michaels hijacked the conversation into a lament about slavery’s prominence in the massively popular museum’s displays on US history. “[Trump] is not whitewashing slavery, he’s not,” Michaels said. “You cannot tie slavery to just one race, which is what every single exhibit [at NMAAHC] does.” Turning towards the representative Ritchie Torres, who was seated beside her, Michaels unloaded popular far-right talking points. “Do you realize that only less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves?” she continued. “Do you realize slavery is thousands of years old? Do you know who was the first race who tried to end slavery?”Torres’s interjections that slavery was a system of white supremacy, not a set of individual white acts, went unaddressed by the TV star. (From 20% to 50% of the white population in southern US states owned enslaved people, and all white people nationwide benefited from slavery’s racial order. Michael’s false claims prompted Phillips to later post a public correction.)The tirade was an escalation of Trump’s previous open declarations to “restore truth and sanity to American history”, an effort to overhaul exhibits and installations across federally operated museums and galleries and politicize their content, with the NMAAHC locked squarely in the administration’s sights for what it called “corrosive ideology”. Previous edicts about the museum, lovingly nicknamed “The Blacksonian” by many of its patrons, had not specifically identified slavery as the White House’s gripe. But Trump’s Truth Social post more directly reflected a return to a century-old tactic to minimize chattel slavery as “not that bad”.If we have learned anything from reality television, it is that every narrative is scripted. No matter how easily their claims were debunked, both Michaels and Trump were in lock step in their effort to vindicate white people from their role in slavery, both by insisting that slavery’s conditions and aftermath are overblown, and refuting that it played a major role in US history.These assertions are a refresh of a century-old “lost cause” myth spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an organization of more than 100,000 white women who set out to make slavery respectable again by rebranding the Confederacy’s bloody image. The “genteel ladies” campaign euphemized slave trading as a “celebration of memory” and “a southern way of life”. Like Michaels, Trump and like-minded slavery deniers, proponents of “the lost cause” promoted an outlandishly misleading account of history in which slavery was both irrelevant as the cause of the American civil war, and benevolent because Christianity and plantation life, they said, benefited African-descended people who were otherwise unfit for civilization.UDC members capitalized on their social status as wives and mothers to indoctrinate children, notably through catechisms, the control and production of school textbooks, essay and scholarship contests, and their spinoff organizations, like the Children of the Confederacy. Their purported concern for white children provided a gender-appropriate cover for their goals to terrorize Black people in the south. They took full advantage of the threat of lynching that loomed over any Black person, including children, who dared to challenge a white woman. Confederate statues and memorials, which UDC lobbied to have strategically placed outside courthouses and in public squares, parks and other spaces, were meant to intimidate African Americans who were merely engaging in civic life.Trump’s obsessive preoccupation with the Smithsonian’s 19th installation signals that history is repeating. Since its 2016 opening, the NMAAHC has welcomed more than 10 million in-person visitors, with families and school groups driving much of that number. Across seven floors and 12 galleries, the museum offers a remarkably comprehensive deep dive into the story of Black life in the US. It is as accessible to grammar school pupils as it is impressive to nationally celebrated historians.On his initial tour in 2017, Trump lauded the institution as “a shining example of African Americans’ incredible contributions to our culture, our society and our history”. Today, the museum serves as a go-to supplement for the Black history curriculums that many American public school systems have stripped or disbanded under Republican state legislatures’ “anti-woke” policies.Trump’s Truth Social post went on to announce that he had instructed his attorneys to “go through the museums and start the exact same process that has been done with colleges and universities”, comparing the funding cuts the administration has wielded over university curricula and research to an overhaul of NMAAHC’s exhibits relevant to slavery.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s a play right out of the UDC’s book: the daughters understood that they had lost the war but could win the battle for the national narrative if they could successfully undermine Black progress and Black accounts of slavery in educational institutions. Vindication, as the organization deployed it, was a tool for vengeance, not justice – divorced from all reality and set on a narrative in which they insisted they were the victims of the very war their families provoked. They perfected a manipulation of public memory that controlled the racial hierarchy by controlling education.The late sociologist and historian James Loewen, who studied Confederate monuments across the US, once explained that the past is what happened, history is what we say about the past, and some of us believe that should be the same thing. We are locked in a battle, however, with those who seek to pervert history and replace it with a fiction that absolves their present-day wrongdoing.UDC members continued to lobby for revisionist school curricula and the placement of Confederate memorials well into the 20th century, where they fought against Black progress in the civil rights movement. Ultimately, backlashes against Confederate monuments successfully removed nearly 100 of them in the protests following the state murder of George Floyd. Still, hundreds more remain, including those Trump has recently replaced. He is clinging to a century-old storyline hoping to be renewed for another political season. But it’s old material that isn’t nearly as effective when your opponents already know the playbook.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      South Park has become the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era | Jesse Hassenger

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      I’ll admit it: I’m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys – I’ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven’t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable enough to revive my interest in episodes old and new. South Park has a thinner bench by comparison, and as the show itself astutely pointed out years ago, it’s difficult for a satirically minded animated sitcom to explore ground that The Simpsons hasn’t covered already. South Park’s political bent, too, has often seemed less varied than the warmer (but still sometimes cutting) social ribbing of Matt Groening’s signature show. It’s a fine line between omnidirectional satire and libertarian crankiness.And yet the 27th season of South Park has accomplished something vanishingly few of its peers, whether in animation or topical comedy, have been able to do: getting laughs taking shots at the second Trump administration. It’s not that the White House is beyond reproach. Quite the opposite problem, much-documented: the Donald Trump cabal is so outsized in its stupidity and cruelty that it’s hard to distend it into a “funny” caricature, even a bleak one. In Trump’s second term, it has only gotten bleaker; jokes that were worn out by the end of 2020 are getting retold with a nasty vengeance, and the bar for cathartic laughter has been raised considerably.For a comedy fan, this winds up translating to an aversion. The occasional shots taken by The Simpsons somehow don’t land as squarely as they did when aimed at presidents I liked much, much more. I watch Saturday Night Live every week, and mostly dread James Austin Johnson’s accurate but ultimately defanged impression. (Some weeks, Johnson himself seems bummed out to be doing it.) I respect the hell out of Stephen Colbert, but I have never sought out his Trump commentary; I don’t need any more clapter – the reaction encouraged by comedy that wants your approval more than your laughter – in my life. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to agree; Parker’s 2017 announcement that they’d grown bored of taking shots at Trump – then barely into his first presidential term – was one of the show’s many controversies over the years.So how is it that South Park’s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker’s allergy to clapter and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with “everybody chill”-style speeches at an episode’s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn’t much moralizing – just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn’t vocally or visually imitated; he’s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He’s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn’t break new ground, but there’s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they’d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there’s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.Not all of the season’s satire has involved making real-life figures regulars on the show. Because South Park’s ensemble has rarely felt as vast or believably developed as Springfield of The Simpsons (or even Arlen on King of the Hill), it’s also flexible enough to turn Randy, Stan’s desperately trend-following dad, into a ketamine-microdosing, tech-bro moron addicted to the soothing, empty reassurances of ChatGPT – the focus of the most recent episode, to the point where most of the core child cast doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, this season has deployed forever favorite Cartman more sparingly so far, again getting self-referential in the season’s second episode, where the id-driven and arguably evil little kid is incensed to find out that podcasters have stolen his “shtick” – his pervasive hatefulness, repackaged as a challenge to debate where the aggressor is always the self-appointed winner. Ascribing this “master debater” title to Cartman (alongside a fellow kid serving as an obvious Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro stand-in) somehow manages to make this ridiculous behavior funny in its petty smallness without glorifying it.A South Park diehard would probably describe this praise as a fair-weather fan only enjoying the show when it goes after the “right” targets. Maybe that’s true, but it’s also a lot easier to take some joy in savaging Vance as a meme-faced version of a Fantasy Island sidekick than, say, accusing George Lucas and Steven Spielberg of cultural rape. It’s probably wishful thinking to wonder if Parker and Stone might actually move the needle of the perception on tech bros, debate-me podcasters and Trump-world ghouls, especially among the dude demo. But it’s also just a blessed change of pace to see say-anything, first-amendment types finding a fresher target than the wokeness bogeyman. While countless standups continue to whine about being silenced, Parker and Stone seem highly aware of their rarified position (and, as Paramount contractors, also aware of what actual political-corporate interference looks like). In a world where Trump’s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty. More

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      Trump administration’s anti-woke campaign targets seven flagship museums

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      Amid the Donald Trump administration’s heavy-handed review of Smithsonian museums, the Guardian has seen a document compiled by the White House that details examples of how the widely visited cultural institutions have overly negative portrayals of US history.The document, based on public submissions shared with the administration, points to what it says are problematic exhibits at seven different museums, including a Benjamin Franklin exhibit that links his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people and a film about George Floyd’s murder that it says mischaracterizes the police.“President Trump will explore all options and avenues to get the Woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable,” a White House official said. “Until we get info from the Smithsonian in response to our letter, we can’t verify the numbers of artifacts that have been removed because the Smithsonian has removed them on their own.”Trump announced the initiative on Truth Social earlier this week, writing: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”The seven museums that have so far been flagged for review include the National Museum of American History, National Museum of the American Latino, National Museum of Natural History, National Museum of African Art, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Asian Art.The administration argues exhibits at these museums focus excessively on oppression rather than American achievements. At the National Museum of American History, the document flagged the ¡Presente! Latino history exhibition for allegedly promoting an “anti-American agenda” by examining colonization effects and depicting the US as stealing territory from Mexico in 1848.Examples from the document also shames the museum’s Benjamin Franklin exhibit for linking his scientific achievements to his ownership of enslaved people, and the Star-Spangled Banner display for focusing on American historical failures and controversies rather than celebrating national achievements.The National Portrait Gallery is being singled out for focusing on how the Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist immigration laws contradicted the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming message. The African art museum is targeted over the George Floyd film. And the Asian art museum is flagged for exhibitions for claiming to impose western gender ideology on traditional cultures.Last week, the White House budget director, Russ Vought, sent letters to eight museums demanding information about exhibits within 30 days and instructing officials to implement “content corrections” including replacing “divisive” language.The review follows similar Trump administration pressure on universities, which resulted in institutions paying hundreds of millions to the government and walking back diversity initiatives.Separately, the Smithsonian has already made changes to exhibits referencing Trump, removing all mention of his impeachments from a presidential power display at the American history museum in July, leaving only generic references to three presidents facing potential removal from office.The Smithsonian Institution did not immediately respond to requests for comment. More

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      ‘Rural America costs a lot of money’: Trump cuts are decimating a radio station at the edge of the world

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      In Sand Point, Alaska, the radio dial is mostly empty. For a commercial broadcaster, running a station in this Aleutian Island fishing town of about 600 people just is not worth the cost of doing business. But KSDP, the local public radio station for Sand Point, is a community anchor, bringing listeners music, emergency alerts, live color commentary of high school sports, state and local news. Without a newspaper specifically serving the town, the station is residents’ resource for all things local.On 1 August, for example, KSDP hosted an interview with local fish biologist Matthew Keyes. Asking the questions was Austin Roof, general manager of the station. Over fuzzy microphones, the two volleyed stats back and forth about the escapement rates of “pinks” and “kings” (colloquialisms for two of the most fished species of salmon). Roof served as a stand-in for the laborers listening at home or aboard their ships, asking about the noticeably low catches early that summer; Keyes told listeners that while June was among the lowest harvests on record, July had been much better. He then announced the fishing schedule for early August: there would be no fishing allowed for 60 hours straight as officials monitored fish populations, after that, anglers could tune to the radio daily for specific opening and closing times. In a region where livelihoods are tied to this turbulent and highly regulated industry, this information gave residents a chance to plan their summer of labor.In just the past few summer months KSDP has brought listeners not only crucial information about local fisheries, but also delivered updates and orders to get to high ground in the wake of two tsunamis. All the while, legislators 4,000 miles away in Washington DC were solidifying a decision that will fundamentally alter the media available to millions of Americans, especially in rural areas: on 17 July, Congress voted to rescind all funding for public broadcasting.Within hours of Roof’s fishery interview, the hammer dropped: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), through which federal funding is disbursed to public radio and television stations, announced it will close down at the end of September.The average public radio station in the US gets less than 13% of its budget from the federal government. For many coastal and big-city stations, it is an even smaller portion. But at smalltown and rural stations, where donor bases are less robust, that number can climb above 50%. KSDP, which operates a far-reaching AM signal, a web stream and four small FM repeater signals placed in villages across a several hundred mile stretch of islands, gets 70% of its operating budget from CPB – among the highest shares of federal support for any station in the country.“The rural communities are definitely gonna be hit the hardest,” Roof says. “How do you prepare for the end of the world? The loss of federal funding is truly that seismic for us.”View image in fullscreenChairs in KSDP’s broadcasting studio and office are stacked high with jackets. Shoes overflow from a cardboard box in the small meeting room, and haphazardly folded garments fill any unused tables or shelf space. Crammed in Sand Point’s city hall, the station doubles as a donation center and hosts clothing swaps a few times a year. If you attend a community barbecue in town, a public back-to-school party, or holiday celebration, there’s a good chance the radio station put it on. Power tools are a permanent fixture in the studio, and there is always a neighbor ready to do the simple fixes for free or cheap. Roof has personally ascended the station’s 200ft AM tower in climbing gear many times to save money on repairs.Until a few years ago, KSDP and the Sand Point area did not have a reporter dedicated to their stretch of the Aleutian Islands: a remote archipelago extending south and west from mainland Alaska, and home to roughly a dozen communities ranging in size from about 20 to a few thousand residents. For years, KSDP relied on coverage from the radio station KUCB in the larger Aleutian town of Unalaska, nearly 400 miles (644km) south-west, as well as statewide and national programs.Now the station finally has its own reporter: Theo Greenly, who splits his time between KSDP and two other radio stations, KUCB and KUHB, each hundreds of miles apart across the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands.Together with his colleagues Sofia Stuart-Rasi and Maggie Nelson at KUCB in the larger 4,400-person town of Unalaska, Greenly is one of just three journalists covering the 1,000-mile archipelago, and the only one assigned to cover Sand Point.View image in fullscreenGreenly’s reporting regularly brings him to isolated communities for weeks at a time, as ferries between towns in his coverage area sometimes run only monthly, and flights are often delayed or cancelled. “There are many, many places to get news from Washington or New York,” says Greenly. “But there are zero alternatives for news from this region.”Greenly has covered dangerous sea algae blooms, Indigenous language revitalization efforts, and a cargo ship carrying lithium batteries that caught on fire in a local port. He was on the ground when the Aleutian town of King Cove’s main employer, the Peter Pan fishing cannery, closed down, leaving many residents without jobs and many anglers unpaid for the hauls they had already delivered.In July, a resident of the 400-person town St Paul, located about 400 miles north-west of Sand Point, informed Greenly that the town was running out of food; the sole grocery store, owned by the local tribal government, had been waiting over a month to receive a large shipment of stock that it had paid for, but was stuck at the Anchorage airport. Ace Air Cargo had not flown to St Paul in all that time, citing weather issues. Not long after Greenly reported the story, the company got its cargo planes in the air, delivering more than 10,000lb of food and two tons of mail to St Paul.It costs money to report these stories but there is not a lot of money to be made in sharing them – especially in the far-flung, sparsely populated Aleutian Islands. Commercial radio stations are exceedingly rare here; there’s simply not enough listeners. Public media, by design, fills the market gap. “Rural America costs a lot of money,” says Roof.View image in fullscreenAlaska is one of the most heavily federally subsidized states in the US in terms of public services such as education, internet connection and media. Nevertheless, Nick Begich, Alaska’s sole congressperson, voted with all but two of his fellow Republicans to take back federal funds that had been allocated for broadcasting.Greenly followed debate on the cuts closely. “I mean, there is nobody covering this stuff,” he says, noting that he and his two colleagues in the Aleutians essentially double as the region’s only newspaper reporters, as the paper serving the archipelago runs print versions of the public radio pieces alongside stories reported out of Anchorage or by national newsrooms. And he says it is not just locals who will suffer if public journalism in Alaska takes a hit, mentioning that his colleagues were key in covering the 2023 story of the possible Chinese surveillance balloons over Alaska.“When Shell was doing exploratory drilling in the Arctic, this was their home port. When Chinese and Russian military ships cross into the Exclusive Economic Zone, we are the closest reporters,” he says. “If you don’t have reporters here, the nation is missing out on vital information.”Roof, the general manager, says KSDP has enough to “keep the lights on for a while”. And while he doesn’t have imminent plans to close, he knows that losing more than two-thirds of the station’s operating budget will fundamentally change what they can do. He says they will have to rely increasingly on volunteers rather than paid staff if they want to survive. And he can’t imagine how he will be able to continue hosting things like big public events. “Those are the kinds of things that really make our community a fun place to live,” Roof says. “And so I just don’t see that coming back.”View image in fullscreenRoof is already planning one major change due to the cuts: he expects to have to shut down KSDP’s far-reaching but costly AM signal by the end of the year. While AM listenership may be declining nationwide, it still plays an essential role here: AM signals reach much farther than FM, penetrate terrain, and carry extraordinarily far – sometimes hundreds of miles – over water, making it easy to be heard on distant islands or on ships. Roof is planning to shutter the AM signal rather than sell it, as he does not expect to have any interested buyers. The tower, he assumes, will be torn down and sold for scrap.For now, Roof plans to keep operating KSDP on a handful of very small, localized FM signals located in four villages across the Aleutians, and online via web stream, since many people in this region have internet connection for the first time thanks to new fiber optic lines and satellite systems such as Starlink. But not everyone lives in the villages with FM coverage, and the web is not always reliable, says Greenly. A ship’s anchor once ripped apart the fiber cable bringing internet to the Aleutian Islands.Ultimately, says Greenly, cuts to public radio will have an impact on residents regardless of how they tune in. “The word ‘radio’ is kind of a misnomer in a way,” he says. He tells me that people always ask him if people can’t just get this information online. “Yes,” he tells them, “because we, the radio station, did the work, investigated it, and put it on the internet.” Without the newsrooms and stations supported by CPB, he says, “they can’t get that information.”Greenly says he doesn’t know what will happen to his position. His role as the shared reporter for KSDP and two other local stations is funded by a grant from CPB. But his livelihood, he says, is the least of his concerns. “I’m more saddened for the nation than for myself. I’m worried about the community. I’m worried about Sand Point,” he says.As for him, the intrepid local reporter braving the elements to cover stories from fishing to fracking? He says: “I mean, I go back to bartending.” More

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      Trump administration to review 19 Smithsonian museums to ensure exhibits are ‘patriotic’

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      The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter posted on the White House website, the administration told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Museums will have 120 days to replace content the administration finds “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions”.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.Earlier in August, the museum removed and later amended an exhibit on US presidential impeachments that mentioned Trump’s two impeachments during his first term. Officials at the Smithsonian later said museum officials “were not asked by any administration or other government official to remove content from the exhibit”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, which was first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.“This initiative aims to ensure alignment with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions,” the letter is reported to say.It was signed by Lindsey Halligan, White House senior associate; Vince Haley, the director of the domestic policy council, and Russ Vought; the director of the office of Management and Budget.Halligan was appointed to effectuate JD Vance’s oversight of the Smithsonian. In a statement, she said the review was “about preserving trust in one of our most cherished institutions”.Halligan added: “The Smithsonian museums and exhibits should be accurate, patriotic, and enlightening – ensuring they remain places of learning, wonder, and national pride for generations to come.”The formal review comes as the Trump administration placed Washington DC’s police department under direct federal control and deployed the national guard into the city, citing a public safety emergency related to crime and homelessness, though data shows a sharp decrease in violent crime.In January, Washington DC’s metropolitan police department and US attorney’s office released a report showing that total violent crime in DC in 2024 was down 35% from the prior year, resulting in the lowest violent crime rate in more than 30 years. Meanwhile, data have consistently shown that unhoused people are more likely to be victimized by crimes than commit them.The review will initially focus on eight of the following Smithsonian museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House’s letter noted that others will be reviewed at a later date.The Smithsonian’s Board of Regents had previously agreed to conduct a thorough review of all its museum and zoo content to eliminate political influence and bias. That preceded the resignation in June of Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery who Trump said was involved with diversity initiatives he opposed.Separately, figurative painter Amy Sherald cancelled a career review of her work – including a portrait of Michelle Obama, the former first lady – at the Smithsonian over concerns that the institute would not show Trans Forming Liberty, a portrait of a transgender woman with pink hair and a blue dress holding a torch as the Statue of Liberty.Monday’s letter later goes further, however, ordering a review of exhibits planned for the US’s 250th birthday. It also is part of a broader push to assert oversight over a broad swathe of cultural and academic institutions.The White House states that museums should correct “divisive or ideologically driven” language with text that is “unifying, historically accurate”.A team from the White House reportedly plans to conduct observational visits and museum walk-throughs to document themes and messaging. The letter also said that the White House had asked to review organizational charts, visitor surveys, exhibited artists who received Smithsonian grants, outside partners and internal communications related to section and approval processes.The outlet said the White House had given 30 days for requested materials to be turned over and that it expected to complete its review by early 2026. More

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      ‘It felt like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale’: US comics on the dangers of political satire

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      In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: ‘What do you joke about?’ Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: ‘Everything other than airport security!’ He didn’t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: ‘What do you joke about?’”Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Do you joke about politicians?’”She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way” put her on high alert. “It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,” she says. “But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican’s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said ‘Yes?’ Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?”View image in fullscreenFriedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she’s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She’s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The vibe in certain circles does feel like we’re grieving. So there’s something about my show that’s connecting to the larger moment.”Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year’s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She’s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: “I’m keeping an eye on it.”Comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O’Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because “the audiences are great” and there’s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won’t happen until there’s “an impetus to go, something I don’t think is far off, like: you can’t talk about this any more, you can’t talk about that any more”.Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: “There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”Friedman’s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there’s a “chill”. “The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, “seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope”.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf’s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she’s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society “through the lens of being a mom now”. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. “We’re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that’s very refreshing,” she says.Still, political comedy isn’t absent. “I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day’s news but, “I don’t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There’s always something crazy happening, but it’s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?”It’s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: “How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?”Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the “unconfident whites” who founded the nation. She describes the show as “a fun, risky little ride” as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. “It’s this broader conversation I’ve been having about America and race,” Jay says.The whole world feels unsettled right now and there’s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. “How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we’re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.”Trump came up plenty during Jay’s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a “braggadocious” fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America’s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: “He’s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it’s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.”Friedman agrees: “I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.” This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. “They’re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,” Friedman says. “As a political comic, I’ve always done better in the UK than the US. It’s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell’s going on over there?” says Friedman.The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, “the mood in America … chaos. There’s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.”All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. “Even if it’s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,” Friedman says. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it’s to get people to see things slightly differently.”Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we’re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.”What does the future hold for US comedians? “It’s too soon to tell,” says Friedman. “But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that’s funny and disarming is really important right now.”Jay says: “Once I’m on stage, I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If I can’t come back as a result, I’ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.” More