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US judge bars Trump from cutting off University of California funds

by Evelyn Reynolds 15 November 2025, 03:43

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funding and threatening hefty fines against the University of California amid the administration’s attempts to coerce elite US universities into adopting and promoting conservative ideals.US district judge Rita Lin of San Francisco issued the preliminary injunction late Friday, saying the government was not allowed to demand payments from the California school system over the administration’s claims that it violates civil rights by allowing antisemitism and practising affirmative action.In her ruling, Lin said that the plaintiffs – who include UC faculty, researchers and students – have submitted “overwhelming evidence” illustrating the Trump administration’s “concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities”.Lin ruled that the government had a “playbook of initiating civil rights investigations” at universities in order to cut federal funding, “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune”.In July, the Trump administration froze $584m in federal funding for the University of California, Los Angeles, while accusing the university of discrimination and violating civil rights over its handling of the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests on campus. The administration claimed UCLA was “acting with deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students”.In October, the administration proposed a deal to nine prominent universities in the US that promised funding in exchange for schools imposing policies and changes that included banning race or sex as considerations in admissions and hiring and removing departments that “purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.While the University of California school system was not offered the deal, the University of Southern California – a private institution – was.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, responded to the offer with a warning that any California universities that signed Trump’s proposed settlement would lose their state funding.Democracy Forward, a progressive legal advocacy group, called the Trump administration’s efforts to influence policy at universities “strong-arm tactics”.“This is not just a harmful attempt to stifle speech, it is a betrayal of the constitution and a dangerous step toward autocracy,” the group said in a statement. More

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Students and faculty at over 100 US universities protest against Trump’s attacks
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 November 2025, 19:05
Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students’ and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations such as Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.Protesters called on university administrators and elected officials to denounce the president’s months-long effort to force US universities to abide by its ideological priorities and urged them to reject Trump’s “compact”, which would give universities preferential access to federal funding in exchange for a commitment to advance the administration’s conservative agenda. Only one university, New College of Florida – a public school that state legislators have turned into a bastion of conservatism – has so far accepted it.“Universities should be a place of learning, not propaganda machines,” Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, said ahead of the protests. “That’s why students, workers and alumni around the country are taking action.”As the day unfolded, hundreds of students across the country walked out of classes, unfurled banners and rallied on campuses, often joined by faculty and other staff. In addition to denouncing the compact, they called for a more affordable education and for the protection of all students – from transgender to international ones.At the University of Kansas, about 70 students demanded administrations divest from weapons manufacturers and Israel, refuse to collaborate with ICE, safeguard gender-affirming housing and meet faculty’s demands for fair contracts. At Duke University, in North Carolina, professors held signs demanding the university stand with immigrants, pay its workers a $25 hourly wage, and protect trans and international students. At Brown University in Rhode Island – one of the first institutions to reach a settlement with the Trump administration earlier this year – passersby were invited to endorse a banner listing a series of demands by dipping their hands in paint and leaving their print, while a group of faculty members nearby lectured about the history of autocracy.View image in fullscreen“Trump came to our community thinking we could be bullied out of our freedom,” said Simon Aron, a sophomore and co-president of Brown Rise Up. “He was wrong.”In New York City, students and faculty from multiple campuses gathered by the midtown headquarters of the investment firm Apollo Global Management to protest against its CEO, Marc Rowan, a billionaire Trump donor and key architect of the compact whom they say “has no business making policy for higher education”.They cited Rowan’s involvement with the online University of Phoenix, which they described as “the largest single producer of student debt in the country” and his role in paving the way for the ongoing abuse of civil rights legislation to target universities over students and faculty’s criticism of Israel.A spokesperson for Apollo did not respond to a request for comment but the firm reportedly instructed staff to stay home on Friday in anticipation of the protest. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Rowan defended the compact, writing that American higher education was “broken” and that “course correction must come from the outside”.Amy Offner, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the campaign against Rowan is part of a broader effort to protect US higher education from the influence of ultra-wealthy individuals. “Billionaires should not control what can be taught and studied in the United States,” she said.The protests marked the first time that students, faculty and staff have staged such a large-scale response. “There is only one way forward in saving higher education and democracy writ large and that is students, faculty, staff united,” Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, said on a call with protest organizers last week. “We have to become a new political force.” More
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Move over, gender studies: the conservative tide coming for US universities
by Evelyn Reynolds 31 October 2025, 10:00
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A small conservative revolution has swept the humanities at some US colleges and universities. Its vanguard are new programs, called centers or institutes, that have begun cropping up at schools in recent years. Often funded by outside donors or earmarks from state governments, the programs tend to bear names featuring words such as “civic”, “freedom” or “classical”.These centers do credible teaching and research, and are usually not explicitly political. But their goal, to counter what conservatives see as hegemonically leftwing teaching, arguably is.Their rise has created a peculiar irony: just as the economic utility of the humanities is being questioned, and academic departments are gutted on budgetary or ideological grounds, some schools have found money for heady, old-fashioned curricula emphasizing the “great books” of western civilization and the literature of what used to be called the western canon.While students arriving at some universities this fall may have thought Ancient Greek to be dead and French lit struggling for survival, students at these new centers are discussing the philosophical ideas of the ancient world, Christian thought, the Enlightenment and the founding of the American republic, and reading the literature of William Shakespeare and John Milton.Students at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, for example, can choose this semester from courses such as “What Is the Common Good?”, “Just War”, “Great Books of the Ancient World”, “Liberty and Order” and “The Rule of Law”.View image in fullscreenAs the Trump administration attempts to bend major universities to its will, and many Republican politicians accuse higher education of being a hotbed of leftwing ideological indoctrination, schools are feeling pressure to demonstrate that their faculty and curricula are hospitable to conservatives.William Inboden, a conservative academic and the executive vice-president of the University of Texas at Austin, argued in a recent essay that the American people have lost trust in US higher education, in part because of “a sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from, or even turned against, the fundamental values of the nation and what was once quaintly known as ‘the American way of life’”.University administrators and state governments have embraced these centers as an end-run strategy, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin who until recently taught in the US. Academic departments tend to resist outside reforms, Faggioli said, and freestanding “centers” are a way for university administrations to add conservative-coded spaces to their schools while avoiding messy confrontations with existing departments.Some of the best known of these programs are Stanford’s Civics Initiative, conceived in 2017 and expanded in 2021, and the University of Texas’s School of Civic Leadership and Civitas Institute, founded in 2023. The University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom dates to 2008, but recently hired several new faculty members.Earlier this year, the government of Utah went even further – not only establishing by state law a Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University, but giving that center statutory control over the university’s entire general education curriculum. Students there will take new required courses on the “foundational primary texts” that “continue to shape society’s self-understanding, the American experience and the modern world”.According to the legislation, they will study the most famous of the dead male Europeans – such as Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville – as well as Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe.View image in fullscreenAnd last month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a $10.4m grant, the largest in its history, to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organization, for a project that will include the “development of university courses … to be offered in partnership with new western civilization BA programs at various major academic centers”.For some academics whose research interests or views have not been in vogue, the changing winds may come as welcome news – at least by the relative, and still mostly bleak, standards of the academic job market.Musa al-Gharbi is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and a sociologist who studies politics, culture and institutions. He noted that these centers are hiring people “who do decent work, who do serious scholarship for the most part”, but in some cases “probably wouldn’t have a job in academia were it not for this”, because their work is too conservative, too interdisciplinary or too “outside the lines” to appeal to typical academic departments at mainstream universities.The Hamilton school’s faculty at the University of Florida include a scholar working on a “history of conservative critics of higher education”. The Civitas Institute’s fellows include economists, law professors and philosophers of a conservative, libertarian or pro-market bent – including John Yoo, the lawyer who, while a White House official under George W Bush, famously wrote a series of legal memos justifying the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists.In some cases, these new centers have been pressed on unwitting or resistant universities; some faculty at Utah State University have sharply criticized the new center there and accompanying curricular reforms as a kind of hostile takeover of the internal affairs of the university. Similarly, the University of Florida has said that it did not ask for the Hamilton school, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.View image in fullscreenThese centers bear some resemblance to the “para-educational” institutes that began springing up at some prominent universities starting about 10 years ago: independent centers funded by conservative donors and sited near universities, but not affiliated with them, to provide extracurricular courses and events about conservative, classical or Christian ideas. They include the Morningside Institute at Columbia, the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard and the Zephyr Institute at Stanford. This month, the Morningside Institute is holding discussions on Dante’s Inferno, St Francis of Assisi and Roger Scruton, the conservative British philosopher.Unlike those programs, these new centers are formally part of universities; like them, however, they tend to reflect an implicit view that the American humanities – allegedly consumed by ideas from critical theory, Marxism, postcolonial thought and the like – have drifted too far left, suffer from ideological conformity and promote an excessively negative view of the US’s history and place in the world.In an email, Josiah Ober, a professor of political science and classics who co-directs Stanford’s Civics Initiative, noted that state governments have directly established some of these new centers and that it would be mostly “fair to say that the motives of the legislators in question … include a concern for viewpoint diversity in university faculties perceived as being overwhelmingly more progressive than conservative”.Al-Gharbi, the sociologist, believes that ideological conformity and a lack of conservative views are a genuine problem in higher education, but that the “reception” of these centers is complicated by the fact that the right is elsewhere engaged in attacking academic programs, such as women’s, ethnic and area studies, whose ideas they find objectionable.That makes conservatives’ enthusiasm for plurality of thought feel hypocritical, he said – and also risks making these centers more isolated from their broader universities “than might be ideal for them to achieve their actual goals”. He added: “One of the dangers of these centers is that you could end up with the same kind of groupthink that they were concerned about, just going in the other direction.”Yet he and other academics also said that it would be wrong to assume that the revival of interest in the western tradition will only attract people who are politically conservative.“We have all types,” said Charles McNamara, a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota. Some “classics undergraduates wear Oxford shirts, some of them wear cutoff shorts”.View image in fullscreenSimilarly, Dhananjay Jagannathan, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College, said that he knows someone “who was hired by a small, private institution for one of these rightwing-coded ‘great books’ programs, and he is a socialist, and I don’t think he hides that about himself”. Jagannathan is “cautiously optimistic” about the programs; at the end of the day, he said, “it’s good if more talented young classicists have jobs”.Zena Hitz is a tutor at St John’s College, a school in Annapolis and Santa Fe that has taught a strict “great books” curriculum since 1937, and the founder of the Catherine Project, a non-profit that organizes discussion groups on the great books for members of the public. She sees the new centers appearing at universities as embodying an unusual mixture of goals – both functioning as “a kind of beachhead within the university where conservative ideas are welcome”, she said, and representing a “strategic move” to protect old-fashioned humanities fields, especially at public universities in conservative states “that would normally just be slashing the crap out of that stuff”.Although the great books curriculum may be perceived as conservative or elitist in the current context, Hitz noted that it springs from a historical movement that possessed a “radical egalitarianism”. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, miners and other blue-collar workers raised funds for libraries where they could read and discuss works of literature and political theory.Similarly, the great books curriculum has historically enjoyed unusual bipartisan support, she said. “Conservatives like it because it’s the western canon, and it’s old, but liberals and progressives like it because the style of education is open-ended and honors the individual’s development.”A few years ago, she co-taught a course on the Bible; as is not unusual at St John’s, about a third of her students were devout Christians, many from homeschooled backgrounds, and another third were gender-nonconforming students with generally activist leftwing politics. Despite some tense moments, it was an “amazing” experience, she said.Al-Gharbi said that even if these centers actually wanted to exclusively hire conservatives, that might be difficult. “I’ve talked to some people who have set up these schools and run them,” he said, and they acknowledged that the recruiting pool for right-of-center scholars is small. Conservatives, in recent decades, have tended to self-select out of academia.“They hope that over time, the pipeline could get a bit wider,” he said, “than is the case at present.”Similarly, even the small bump in academic hiring that these centers may bring will not mean a major sea change, McNamara said, for classics and similar fields. “We have not had a good job market in the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. And if there happen to be two extra jobs at an institute that’s appeared at one state university somewhere, I don’t think that really quite qualifies as a particularly robust job market.”Quoting Aristotle, he added: “One swallow does not make a summer.” More
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The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 October 2025, 12:00
Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More
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US universities must reject Trump’s ‘compact’. It is full of traps | Jan-Werner Müller
by Evelyn Reynolds 7 October 2025, 10:00
Sticks are bad, but sometimes corruption through carrots is worse. The Trump administration – after having brutally cut federal funding earlier this year – is now trying to make nine universities an offer that they seemingly cannot refuse. In exchange for preferential treatment in funding and bonuses like “invitations to White House events” – apparently the same logic as a fancy credit card that promises you backstage access at concerts – the universities are expected to sign a “compact” with the government. All nine institutions must reject this proposal: it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of “academic excellence in higher education” (as opposed to what kind of excellence in education, one is tempted to ask).Some features of the compact might look reasonable at first sight. No one is against addressing ever-rising tuition fees (never mind that the Republican party at the same time is capping federal loan programs and shoveling money to high-cost private lenders). And some might welcome the Stephen Miller-lite version of xenophobia: capping the number of foreign students at 15% and forcing foreigners to take American “civics” (it is unclear who would decide the content of lessons “about how great our country is”).But the document also functions as a kind of rap sheet for institutions portrayed as single-mindedly focused on discriminating against white males. Formulations such as “signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence” would make one believe that, as of now, universities encourage terrorist agitators to run rampant on campus; the demand to “transform or abolish institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” suggests that, as of now, anyone saying the wrong thing about abortion is beaten up by progressive vigilantes (never mind the question what it means to treat an idea as such “violently”).It is no small irony that one of the strategists of the assault on higher education, May Mailman, charges universities with having committed to a “culture of victimhood” in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; obviously, it is the Trumpist grievance-industrial complex which mass-produces resentment among supposed “real Americans” held down by nefarious liberal elites. For all the talk of fostering open debate, the goal appears to be the creation of safe spaces for the fragile egos of Maga students suffering from universities’ supposed culture of “negativity”.The clearest attack on academic freedom consists in the demand to ensure “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school, and teaching unit”. Faculty, students “and staff at all levels” will first have to be tested for ideology; once “empirical assessments” have been completed, the diversity of viewpoints judged appropriate will have to be engineered, presumably by a bureaucracy that can also guarantee consistent viewpoints over time (for what if our new conservative colleague starts to hold different views?). In theory, the result would not just be affirmative action for the right, but forcing the economics department to employ Marxists.To be sure, some Trumpists themselves insist that the government should not be in the business of micromanaging the distribution of political attitudes. But the rejection is not a principled one centered on a proper understanding of academic freedom. It is simply the fear of setting a precedent with what they openly call “policing” and one fine day having the Democrats flood universities with leftists.As with other aspects of Donald Trump’s emerging mafia state, there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again. The government can always come back to universities and accuse them of having violated the agreement (still too many courses in victimhood studies; still too much “violence” – as defined by bureaucrats – vis-a-vis someone’s cherished ideas). The government will also encourage donors to claim back their cash. Since the compact’s criteria are exceedingly vague, those who take the offer will probably overdo compliance.At the risk of sounding like one of those dreadful self-styled victims: universities are fragile institutions. Many American ones are excellent precisely because people trust each other and cooperate successfully without over-regulation (some Europeans can tell you what it means to be subject to constant assessments – and how a Soviet-style bureaucracy constantly distracts from research and teaching). Of course there is always plenty of academic infighting, but what the Trumpists are doing is consciously trying to create divisions by setting potential Trump administration collaborators against those determined to resist it. As has become apparent with other autocrats’ assaults on universities, even if institutions escape (sometimes literally, as they have to relocate to other countries) the worst, much damage has been done. This is why the nine universities should not only reject the compact, but also publicly explain what is wrong with it (otherwise they will be immediately charged with wanting to protect their tuition-racket, helping foreigners and “importing radicalism” to undermine American greatness).Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More
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‘Unprecedented in history’: global academic freedom group warns of dismantling in US
by Evelyn Reynolds 1 October 2025, 04:01
A global academic freedom group has warned that the Trump administration’s assault on universities is turning the US into a “model for how to dismantle” academic freedom.“We are witnessing an unprecedented situation – really as far as I can tell in history – where a global leader of education and research is voluntarily dismantling that which gave it an advantage,” said Robert Quinn, executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR).In its annual Free to Think report, the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project at (SAR), an international network devoted to the promotion of academic freedom worldwide, counted some 40 attacks against academic freedom in the US in the first half of 2025, ranging from the government’s revocation of research funds to the detention and attempted deportation of foreign scholars over their political views, as well as a “torrent” of executive, legislative and other actions targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and other programs.The report noted that the data points to a continued erosion of academic freedom in the US after it counted 80 instances of pressure against universities in the prior year. While most of those came from state governments and local actors, the “nature of these attacks shifted after January 2025” to pressure from the federal government following the re-election of Donald Trump, and his administration’s efforts to control university admissions, hiring, research, teaching and disciplinary processes, the report noted.The SAR report analyzed 395 attacks on higher education leaders, faculty, staff and students in 49 countries between mid-2024 and mid-2025, including targeted killings, disappearances, arrests and prosecutions, as well as firings, travel restrictions and administrative measures. In addition to the US, the report highlights “concerning developments” in 15 other countries – including Bangladesh, where student-led anti-government protests were met with a brutal crackdown that led to the deaths of up to 1,400 people, and Serbia, where authorities threatened to defund public universities and withheld the salaries of faculty who supported a student-led movement against government corruption.Globally, the picture for academic freedom painted in the report is grim.“The space for academic freedom has shrunk at an accelerating pace over the past decade,” the report concludes. “Even in societies that have long had strong and stable democratic institutions, elected officials with autocratic impulses are using both the levers of democracy and extralegal administrative measures to undermine democratic institutions, including universities.”In the US, the war in Gaza, and widespread campus opposition to it, has offered a pretext for the targeting of universities, students and faculty whose values and views don’t align with the government’s agenda. Before 2023, SAR tallied an average of 15 to 20 attacks on academic freedom, many driven by elected officials at the state and local levels.“The pressure on the higher education space has been going on for decades,” said Quinn, noting that before the targeting of pro-Palestinian views and diversity initiatives, universities and scholars faced attacks over critical race theory and gender studies. “That being said, there’s no question that the administration is using as a bold pretext the allegations of antisemitism centered around the Palestinian issue to justify in many cases extralegal activity to crack down on the space for independent thought.”Trump’s return to power marked a “turning point”, the report notes, including more than 30 pieces of legislation related to higher education introduced during the first 75 days of his administration, executive orders eliminating diversity and gender equity programming, antisemitism investigations of more than 60 universities that flouted established processes, the freezing of billions in federal research funds and new caps on student loans and restrictions on Pell grants’ eligibility.The report also underscored the negative impact on global education of the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of international students’ visas and new restrictions for foreign applicants, as well as cuts at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that devastated higher education and research initiatives from Africa to Afghanistan. More
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The students who debated with Charlie Kirk: ‘His goal was to verbally defeat us’
by Evelyn Reynolds 20 September 2025, 18:00
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In the days after his killing, Charlie Kirk was remembered by his allies as a great debater. A quote taken from a widely shared video of Kirk discussing his life’s work – “when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens” – emblematized such eulogies.Kirk toured American college campuses with his rightwing non-profit Turning Point USA, where he would set up a tent, table and microphone, and debate with undergrads. The goal, he said, was to “save western civilization”, and remembrances after his death positioned him as a budding statesman – a conservative hero who strode across the political divide for the sake of open dialogue.Kirk applied basic rules of civility to his debate style, asking opponents their name and saying it was nice to meet them. He engaged young people in political discourse at a time when society has been split into bitterly antagonistic camps. But his critics are taking issue with any version of his legacy that does not account for the bigoted nature of his arguments. They are also closely examining his very style of deate.“I don’t think Charlie entered debates to come to a common consensus or to discover the truth,” said Mason, a 26-year-old graduate student who debated with Kirk on the YouTube show Surrounded last fall. “I think Charlie came to debates to verbally beat his opponents.”This made him a formidable combatant. “He knew the arguments for nearly every conservative principle and even theological concept, and he spent years to develop that ability, so he was very great at pivoting and changing the conversation when it was not going his way,” said Mason, who is based in Los Angeles.During one debate, Kirk insisted on the truthfulness of a racist hoax about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. In another, he falsely called the term foetus “just a word for a human being”. He goaded college students, who eagerly stepped up to query or challenge him, with leading questions that were intended to elicit strong emotions – “what is a woman?” and “what is racism?” were two of his go-tos.“At its core, debate is supposed to be an academic exercise, with the goal being to be forthright and genuine in the information you present,” said Trent Webb, a professor of writing studies and rhetoric and director of the speech and debate team at Hofstra University. “In a good faith debate, the final goal is to reach consensus. If that doesn’t happen, then a lot of academics would consider it to be an exercise in futility.”View image in fullscreenAfter a Kirk debate, clips spun out on to social media, inviting millions into the fray. In celebration of perceived wins, Turning Point USA titled its YouTube videos things like: “Charlie Kirk ANNIHILATES Smart-Aleck Student Accusing Him of Propaganda”, “Charlie Kirk wrecks DEI talking points” and “Liberal Student Can’t Answer Charlie Kirk’s Simple Question.”Dr Charles Woods, a professor of rhetoric and composition at East Texas A&M University, and the host of The Big Rhetorical Podcast, said Kirk distilled nuanced topics into stifling, good v bad arguments.“Charlie turned myriad opportunities for meaningful dialogic transactions rooted in civility and turned them into confrontational interactions by amplifying binaries in his argumentative structure,” Woods wrote in an email. “What we know is that there is a spectrum of ideologies and worldviews, not just two: Charlie’s and whoever is on the other side of the microphone.”Hasan Piker, the popular leftist Twitch streamer who was scheduled to debate with Charlie Kirk later this month, wrote in a guest essay published in the New York Times that his would-be opponent was an “expert” at “[taking] advantage of people’s resentments and [redirecting] them toward vulnerable communities”.Still, leftists lined up to debate with him. Some, like a sociology professor who appeared genuinely curious to talk about the economic prospects of young people under Donald Trump, desired a meeting of the minds. For his part, Piker told Slate that while he is “not the biggest fan of the debate format”, he finds the forum “entertaining” and “galvanizing”.Perhaps no forum fit Kirk’s shtick better than the platform given to him by Jubilee Media, a YouTube channel that produces Surrounded, a thunderdome of debate where one person is encircled by a ring of ideological opponents who attempt to undercut his stances in lightning-fast rounds of verbal sparring, governed by literal red flags.“Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?” asked the series’ first episode, an hour and a half of nonstop ragebait released last September. In the show, Kirk debated with his opponents such statements as: “Abortion is murder and should be illegal” (wherein Kirk said yes, he would hypothetically make his 10-year-old daughter carry a child to term if she were to get pregnant from rape); “college is a scam”; and “Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate.” (Consider these Kirk’s greatest hits; he often debated these topics on campuses.)Naima Troutt, a 22-year-old film student at the University of Southern California, said the students made $25 for their appearance on the show, which has since raked in more than 35m views on YouTube and spawned countless viral clips.A campus organizer who was involved with Black Lives Matter and Palestinian solidarity protests, Troutt did not know who Kirk was when she showed up to set that day, which helped her see him as less of a rightwing celebrity and more as a man she disagreed with.View image in fullscreenTroutt described a “camaraderie” between the students, with some of the more “chronically online” trying to explain Kirk’s significance to her before they started filming. But Kirk was not as eager to chum it up. “He was either on his phone, or outright rude. You got the sense that you were an opponent to him even when you weren’t debating.”Troutt jumped into the hot seat twice to spar with Kirk over fetal viability, Harris’s qualifications for president and affirmative action. They agreed on practically nothing, but Troutt found some merit in debating Kirk. “I think I became much better at articulating my viewpoints and defending my viewpoints, because one thing about Charlie is that as much as I disagree with – and at times hate – everything that he believed and stated in the past, the fact is he’s one of the only rightwingers who regularly puts themselves out there,” Troutt said.Troutt is not alone in this opinion. California governor Gavin Newsom, who debated with Kirk on his podcast earlier this year (and admitted his son was a fan), wrote in a statement that he “admired [Kirk’s] passion and commitment to debate”. Representatives for New College of Florida, formerly a progressive school that fell under the control of rightwing allies of Governor Ron DeSantis, announced it will commission a statue of Kirk with his table and mic on campus. The school’s social media officer told Fox News that the statue will represent “what America is all about”.Ultimately it was not rhetorical prowess but an insult that made Troutt a social media folk hero in #resistance circles: after Kirk attempted a gotcha moment by saying that “foetus” means “little human being” in Latin, Troutt called his self-satisfied smile “creepy”.“Smiling is creepy?” Kirk clapped back, to which Troutt responded: “No, your smile specifically.” The quip landed her an Interview magazine feature branding her “the college student who owned Charlie Kirk”. (Foetus in Latin actually means “a bringing forth; producing; fertile”.)In March, Kirk asked her to come to the stage for a 10-minute debate he held at USC, where they tussled over DEI again.“I was shocked by that,” Troutt said. “I literally just roasted this man, and now he wants to debate with me again. But the second time he was a lot nicer. A lot of Trump and Kirk supporters came to watch it, and it was a more hostile environment, but he was less hostile to me.”Mason, who debated with Kirk on Surrounded, describes himself as a progressive and felt it important to showcase leftist values.View image in fullscreen“They’re so often caricatured, especially for those in echo chambers of the right,” Mason said. (He asked that his last name not be shared for privacy reasons.) “As someone who feels very confident in my beliefs and convictions and my ability to communicate, I think it’s beneficial for me to go on a platform like this.”Mason and Kirk’s topic was gender and transgender rights. Mason got Kirk to admit that he did not know the bimodal theory of gender, to which Kirk called him “condescending”; Mason apologized for his tone, but said he was “trying to match” Kirk’s energy toward other debaters. Despite the testiness, the pair had a lively debate.“Having a conversation with him was very easy to do,” Mason said. “I’ve consumed so much of his content that I knew what he was going to say. I wouldn’t say that it was easy for a lot of the other [Surrounded debaters], because he understands the sport of rhetoric and debate, and is really good at controlling the conversation. I had to put in a strong effort to assert myself.”Webb, the Hofstra professor, called the unmoderated format of Surrounded where claims are not factchecked, “unnerving”.“You can’t negate that it’s very interesting to watch,” Webb said, “but those students are not armed with proper data and evidence, and a lot of times they’re speaking to things that sometimes are blatantly untrue.”After the debate, Kirk hinted that he wanted Mason to come on his radio show. That never happened, but the two kept in touch. The second time they debated – about wealth inequality at the USC event – Kirk praised his “high IQ”. But Kirk never put the debate up online. “I like to believe that’s because the conversation didn’t go the way he planned,” Mason said, “but it could have also just been because I don’t have the same online presence as someone like Naima.”The circus around Kirk’s social media did not just advance conservative causes. His work boosted young leftists like Troutt and to a lesser extent Mason. Gaining a platform as “the girl who owned Charlie Kirk” overwhelmed Troutt at first. “It did feel like getting thrown to the wolves,” she said. But she sustained her viral moment and has over half a million followers on TikTok, where she posts about politics.This small online community of Kirk debaters consider themselves an influential voice of reason against “alt-right” internet stars like Kirk, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens.Hungry for another go, Troutt and other Surrounded debaters were scheduled to star in a reunion episode with Kirk later this month. On the morning of the day Kirk was killed, debaters in a Surrounded group chat were theorizing what topics might come up so they could start preparing. “It was surreal that in the middle of all of that, we got a news article sent by someone, saying: ‘Oh my God, this just happened,’” Mason said.After Kirk died, a range of reactions poured out on social media, with many recalling Kirk’s incendiary takes or honoring his memory. Kirk allies advocated for firing those who they said spoke against him. Meanwhile, some of the debaters were criticized by followers for their eulogies of their former opponent and the sadness they expressed about his killing.View image in fullscreenDean Withers, who appeared on the Surrounded episode and was called “the Democrats’ Bro Whisperer” by the the New York Times, mourned Kirk’s death through tears in a TikTok video. Tilly Middlehurst, a student who Kirk asked about feminism and what defines a woman at an event for Cambridge Union Society, her university’s debate club, choked up as she said the act of political violence left her “shaken and disgusted”.Withers later said that he became emotional watching the violent video of Kirk’s shooting online, because a close friend had been in the audience of the event and because he knew Kirk personally. “My tears weren’t me telling you how you should feel, but rather you happening to see me in how I felt,” he said. Middlehurst made her social media profiles private. (Neither responded to a request for comment. A representative for Cambridge Union Society wrote in an email: “Any comments made by speakers who openly debated with Mr. Kirk during our event earlier this year are expressed in a personal capacity and do not reflect the views of the Cambridge Union.”)Troutt felt “hesitant” to speak about Kirk’s death, though people looked to her for comment. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing and hurt people and lead to more violence. But I do want to help people in this moment process what this means for our country,” she said.After speaking with the Guardian, Troutt posted her own TikTok. “All acts of gun violence are horrible and must be condemned. That is my baseline,” she said in the clip. She added: “Mind your karma, watch what you put online.”Mason believes that “two things” can be true at once: “The video [of the shooting] was incredibly grotesque, this is terrible across the board, and I do grieve for his young children, but that does not make the life or the principles that the victim stood for any more palatable.”He found it hard to square the Kirk he interacted with, if briefly – a professional, nice enough man – with the hateful views he promoted.“I think that speaks to the dissociation that politics allows, where somebody can have these abstract concepts of what a group is, or speak ill of them, but it’s much more difficult to be insulting or vitriolic toward somebody who’s right in front of you,” Mason said.In the aftermath of his death, Kirk’s legacy remains as divisive as one of his debates. But there is no denying his influence on public discourse.“When we teach argumentation and debate in our classrooms, it’s not necessarily agenda-driven,” said Webb, the rhetoric professor.“Social media has taught us to believe that all opinions said online are valid and require response, and because of that, people are nowadays easily baited into these ‘debates’.” More
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They managed to get accepted to US universities. But they’re still stuck in Gaza
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 11:00
Within days of 7 October 2023, much of Maryam’s world had been wiped out: her home in Gaza City, her children’s schools, and the Islamic University of Gaza, where she was a graduate student in physics, were all destroyed by airstrikes. In early December, Maryam’s mentor – Sufian Tayeh, a prominent Palestinian scientist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza – was killed along with his family in an Israeli strike.The professor has been a “father figure” to her, Maryam told the Guardian. When she learned of his death, she remembers closing the physics notebooks she had grabbed as she fled her home and thinking her studies would be over. “My entire world had collapsed,” she said.But as she repeatedly fled Israel’s bombs, Maryam sought ways to keep not only her family alive, but also her dream of becoming a physicist. While living in a tent in Rafah, with no stable access to internet or electricity, she learned of a spot near the border where she could get a faint internet signal from Egypt. Despite the risks, she started going there to research opportunities abroad, eventually managing to earn admission to a fully funded PhD program at the University of Maryland. After deferring her start date by a year, she was meant to start this month.But Maryam remains in Gaza. She is one of dozens of students from the devastated territory who have been admitted to US universities and colleges but are stuck, advocates say, after the Trump administration suspended nearly all non-immigrant visas for Palestinian passport holders.As part of its campaign against US universities, the administration has made it more difficult for international students to travel to the US, and claims it has revoked the visas of thousands of foreign students already in the US over unspecified violations.But for Palestinians in Gaza, the policy change is uniquely devastating.“I will never forget the moment I received the message confirming my acceptance into a fully funded PhD program. I rushed back to our tent to hold my children tightly and tell them the good news – that we would survive this nightmare,” said Maryam, who is using a pseudonym to protect her and her family. “Everything came crashing down again when I heard about the suspension of visa processing. It felt like my dreams had been destroyed once more.”Leila, a 22-year-old from Gaza City, was four years into a five-year engineering program when the war started. She would walk up to two hours a day to find wifi, relying on solar power to charge her phone, and managed to apply and be admitted to a university in the north-western US as a transfer student. (Leila is also a pseudonym, and she asked that the Guardian not publish the name of the university.)Then came the news that all visas were suspended. “We are just stuck in Gaza right now,” she told the Guardian in a series of voice memos.A spokesperson for the state department said in a statement that the department had suspended the processing of nonimmigrant visas for Palestinian Authority passport holders “while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to vet individuals from Gaza” and that it will “take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review”.“Every visa decision is a national security decision,” the spokesperson added.According to a cable viewed by the Associated Press, department officials said the new restrictions were intended “to ensure that such applications have undergone necessary, vetting, and screening protocols to ensure the applicants’ identity and eligibility for a visa under US law”. The suspension doesn’t apply to Palestinians who hold passports from other countries – unless they are found to have ties to the Palestinian Authority, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.The Student Justice Network, a US-based collective formed after Donald Trump signed orders in January targeting international students, has been supporting students from Gaza who are seeking to continue their interrupted studies abroad. But of the dozens of students the group says it has helped with university and visa applications, only a handful have made it to the US. (They declined to provide more specific numbers.)Securing a visa to travel to the US from Gaza was an arduous process even in quieter times. Before the war, Palestinians in Gaza had to secure appointments at US embassies outside the territory – usually Egypt or Israel. Obtaining a permit to travel to Israel has been impossible since the war began, while the border with Egypt has remained largely closed.International students have been targeted with a series of federal actions aimed both at Palestinian students specifically and the broader community of more than one million foreign nationals studying in the country.The state department has enlisted consulates overseas into the effort. Earlier this year, it paused all student visa appointments. They have resumed, but prospective students are now being subjected to additional vetting for, among other things, “anti-American” views.But for Palestinians the restrictions are blanket. “Every single one of them has been impacted by this,” Majid said of the students her group has been helping who were meant to start their studies this fall. “There’s no clear understanding as to when their applications will be processed, and this affects their ability to attend their universities on time – and in some cases it could actually impact whether or not they’re able to maintain their scholarships.”Looking elsewhereThomas Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, told the Guardian that Maryam was one of two physics students from Gaza admitted to the university last year. But getting them out of Gaza proved so difficult that the university ended up deferring the students’ admissions by a year as they tried to get visa appointments.Maryam was able to book an interview at the US embassy in Egypt, and Cohen offered to personally pay for her way there – but the border was shut down when Israeli forces took control of it in May 2024. She was still looking for a way out when the US announced the suspension of visas for Palestinians.Cohen said he tried all he could to help Maryam and the other student – because their academic records earned them a spot at the university but also because he understood that the opportunity could save their lives. He spoke of the Holocaust survivors in his own family, and those who “didn’t survive because they had no way to leave” Nazi-occupied Poland.Cohen is now advising the students to pursue opportunities in Europe or Canada. Even if they were to get a visa to the US, “the political climate we’re in, it’s dangerous for Palestinians”, he says.Majid, of the Student Justice Network, said the group had also been encouraging the students they support to pursue options in other countries. But even if they gain admission elsewhere, the border with Egypt remains sealed shut as Israel has intensified its military campaign.“These are students who have gone through two plus years without an educational infrastructure,” Majid said, noting that all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed.“Think about having applied to university when you were 17 or 18, and then think about applying under bombardments, and starvation, and with limited resources, and having your documents destroyed, and having lost your family members,” she added. “To yank these fully funded opportunities away from them is devastating.” More
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Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?
by Evelyn Reynolds 10 September 2025, 14:30
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Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television.The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal.But one of the most buzzed-about aspects is Paramount’s possible acquisition of the Free Press, the digital media company founded by Bari Weiss as a Substack newsletter in 2021, and Weiss’s potential new role steering CBS’s editorial slant. In July, the Financial Times reported that Weiss was seeking at least $200m for her website – more than double its valuation a year earlier and more than the site’s admittedly impressive 155,000 paid subscribers (roughly a 10th of total subscribers) would seem to justify. That same week, the media newsletter Puck published an anonymously sourced report that Weiss would possibly be advising David Rhodes, a former CBS and Fox News executive and the current chair of Sky News, in the event that Rhodes resumes running CBS. And just last week, Puck reported that the deal was all but finalized, with the Free Press to be acquired for somewhere in the $100m to $200m range (less than Weiss sought but nothing to sneeze at) and with Weiss tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”.If all this comes to pass, it will cement Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.Weiss, 41, is no stranger to publicity; since 2019, she has been the subject of mostly fawning profiles in Vanity Fair, Semafor, Los Angeles Magazine, the Times of London, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and her former employers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The product of an idyllic and fiercely Zionist upbringing in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, she first gained notice for her campaign against pro-Palestinian faculty during her undergrad years at Columbia University. A stint at the Bret Stephens-run neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page followed, before she and Stephens both departed for the New York Times, where her tenure as an opinion editor and writer was stormy well before her resignation. She and her wife, fellow voluntary Times exile Nellie Bowles, decamped to Los Angeles, where she wasted little time launching new projects: she co-founded the “heterodox” University of Austin and launched a Substack, originally dubbed Common Sense and then rebranded as the Free Press, which quickly acquired venture capital backers, a sizable subscriber base, and an editorial staff numbering in the dozens and including many media industry veterans. Her triumphant return to New York City last year marked her as a power broker in her own right. More than any other figure in her age cohort, Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and “woke” progressives, even as she decried “cancel culture” and claimed to champion free speech – and with the Free Press, she has developed a whole newsroom around that mission. The Guardian put detailed claims in this piece to Bari Weiss and the Free Press and did not receive an official response.View image in fullscreenWhen New York Magazine convened 57 of “the most powerful people in media” to discuss the industry’s future last year, Weiss was on the list. A month later, after Trump’s victory, the Free Press co-hosted an inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X and Uber, attended by the former British prime minister Liz Truss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dr Mehmet Oz. For each of her haters, and there are many, Weiss counts Jeff Bezos, Jerry Seinfeld (whose daughter is on staff at the Free Press), and Sheryl Sandberg among her fans, and Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Howard Schultz among her financial backers. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” the conservative pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times last year. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.To get a sense of the kind of opportunities Weiss might have to influence decisions and coverage at CBS, it is worth flashing back a year to the fall of 2024. On 30 September, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS’s morning news show, where he was interviewed by anchor Tony Dokoupil over Coates’s new book, The Message, which includes a scathing firsthand account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dokoupil questioned Coates aggressively (some would say condescendingly) over what he called a one-sided depiction of Israel, and the interview was litigated on social media for days, pitting supporters of Israel and Palestine against each other on predictable lines.A week later, the Free Press joined the fray with an exclusive from inside CBS News, where the Coates interview was at least as divisive as it was to the wider public. On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, someone high up at CBS leaked recordings of an editorial meeting to the Free Press, revealing that, as the site’s editors put it, “the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’” Though the article acknowledged that CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, defended Dokoupil’s tough questions, it portrayed the meeting overall as an example of the woke conformity endemic to institutions such as CBS.“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” the Free Press editorialized, in a sweeping indictment both of CBS and of elite liberalism writ large. “He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”A month later, Trump won the presidential election. Since then, what the Free Press editors termed “this new elite consensus” has been under siege from the federal government, which has openly sought to purge anything it considers “wokeness” from universities, newspapers and NGOs, and in particular has sought to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. Weiss, who has presented herself as a leading defender of free speech, has in effect leveraged her publication to help the government suppress it.The Free Press’s involvement in the administration’s war on Columbia University, Weiss’s alma mater (and, full disclosure, mine; I socialized with Weiss as an undergraduate, though we have not spoken in years) has been a case in point. Trump’s joint task force to combat antisemitism chose the Free Press to break the news on 7 March that the administration was withholding $400m in federal grants to Columbia over the university’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks – essentially the opening volley in Trump’s assault on elite higher education. Two weeks later, on 21 March, Columbia conceded to Trump’s blackmail, agreeing to place its Middle East studies department – which Weiss has been crusading against since she was an undergraduate two decades ago – under academic receivership. Just four days after that, the Free Press published a leaked transcript of a private Zoom call in which the university’s then president, Katrina Armstrong, told about 75 faculty members that she did not intend to comply with all of Trump’s demands, despite her public surrender. Three days later, Armstrong resigned – and according to the New York Times, a key reason why was that Trump’s antisemitism task force expressed concern over the transcript leaked to the Free Press.Weiss’s publication, in short, was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that. Just as with CBS a year ago, Weiss and the Free Press were there to help reactionaries at elite institutions advance their internal turf wars – and unlike a year ago, those reactionaries can now count on the full weight of Trump’s authoritarian administration to back them up.The same playbook can also be seen in the Free Press’s efforts to discredit National Public Radio, which from 1971 until this summer served as America’s major publicly supported broadcaster. Last April, the Free Press published an error-laden article by a disgruntled NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, who accused his employer of pervasive liberal bias and of betraying America’s trust. Berliner was predictably hired by the Free Press two months later, and within a year, he was being invited by House Republicans to testify against his former employer. In July of this year, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill voted to defund NPR, and the Free Press published Berliner’s victory lap. The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.These are the real stakes of Weiss potentially joining CBS. If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly “apoplectic” at the news of her impending role, with some raising concerns about a “hall monitor” approach to coverage and others threatening to resign – resignations Ellison and Weiss might welcome, as it would give them an opportunity to start fresh. Weiss could be responsible for shaping coverage and enforcing her own orthodoxy, especially with regard to Israel and its critics – an issue around which Weiss has consistently provided cover for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government. This would represent a shift for CBS; Paramount’s outgoing chair, Shari Redstone, is an avowed supporter of Israel who has reportedly been outraged by 60 Minutes’s coverage since the 7 October attacks, and has openly expressed hope that the Trump administration could force CBS to clamp down on “anti-Israel bias”, which Weiss is ideally suited to facilitate.View image in fullscreenLast month, the Free Press sparked widespread outrage by publishing an article by staffers Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, who reported that the starving Palestinian children whose images appeared in multiple mainstream outlets were all suffering from pre-existing conditions such as cystic fibrosis or rickets – a clear attempt to bolster a narrative the publication has been pushing for months that widely reported famine conditions in Gaza are a hoax. Reingold and Lukyanova’s article drew condemnation from many quarters, including from the president of Refugees International, who pointed out that it is precisely children with such conditions who are most vulnerable in a famine. But the Free Press brushed off its critics and claimed credit for pushing CNN and the Washington Post to caveat their coverage in light of their reporting. “Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors. As if to prove their point, Netanyahu himself posted a video of Reingold defending her work, with the caption: “Facts matter.” (The Guardian stands by the stories it published that included the image and says the photo did not act to deceive.)One of the critics the Free Press singled out was Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama, who, the Free Press noted, was once nicknamed “Hamas”, an epithet used by his Obama administration colleague Rahm Emanuel (who sat for a friendly interview with Weiss in July) for his willingness to criticize Israel. In an appearance on Pod Save the World – which is part of Crooked Media, the independent progressive podcasting network run by former Obama staffers – Rhodes called Reingold and Lukyanova’s reporting “sociopathic” and “grotesque”. “There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply fucked up,” he added. These would be harsh words coming from anyone, but Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, who has been floated as CBS’s next executive and who reportedly would be working closely with Weiss. In Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, he acknowledged political differences with his brother while also saying they have always been close. That he would speak publicly with such undisguised contempt about Weiss’s media company in that context suggests serious alarm at the possible direction of CBS News.Alarm is a justifiable reaction. Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition. That is in spite of internal turmoil: in May, the media newsletter Breaker reported that the Free Press had seen a number of notable departures amid its rapid expansion and that staff had been skeptical of Weiss’s “chaotic” management style.But in the context of Trump’s federally funded culture war, it is unclear any of that will matter. In order to avoid the president’s disfavor and present themselves as worthy of access, legacy media companies are desperate to tap into the audience and the relationships that Weiss has so effectively courted.Although the Free Press did not respond on the record to the Guardian’s questions, a source within the Free Press defended the range of views the organization publishes and emphasized that it was not a partisan shop.When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a “Never Trumper”, following the lead of her mentor Stephens and other prominent neoconservatives, and in 2017 she described the first Trump administration as “shambolic”. But this February, as Trump kicked off his second term, Weiss told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz that her stance on Trump had softened. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said, claiming she cried at her desk the first time Trump won. Now, she explained, she had come to appreciate Trump for two main reasons: first, she saw the left’s “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” as “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”, and second, she approved of some of his actual policies, noting particularly his Israel-aligned moves in the Middle East.The Free Press claims to be independent and non-partisan, and ahead of the 2024 election it canvassed its own staff and determined that it was equally divided between supporters of Trump, Kamala Harris and neither. But during Trump’s second term, the site has been noticeably sympathetic to the administration. As the UnPopulist has carefully documented, Weiss has made a choice in the Trump restoration era – rather than position the Free Press as a heterodox champion of “classical liberalism”, as it was initially presented during the Biden years, she has aligned herself with the White House’s priorities. The hiring of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a formerly left-leaning journalist turned fervent Maga pundit, this April was a clear signal of Weiss’s repositioning. This choice has alienated many of her former champions – for instance, Glenn Greenwald, who achieved a public rapprochement with Weiss in the early days of the Free Press (both Weiss and Greenwald have thrived and handsomely profited on Substack), has since excoriated her for consistently attacking the free speech rights of Israel critics. But it has also set her up well to ascend to even greater influence.Weiss is not afraid to burn bridges, scandalize critics or be branded a hypocrite in pursuit of power. In that sense, she has something in common with the president who has done so much to enable her rise. But Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish. With her education, experience and extensively cultivated networks, she is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements. Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss, and now at least one could be hers to remake.
David Klion is a columnist for the Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and currently working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism More

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