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      Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details in second Signal chat – report

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      Before the US launched military strikes on Yemen in March, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, sent detailed information about the planned attacks to a private Signal group chat that he created himself, which included his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people, the New York Times reported on Sunday.The Guardian has independently confirmed the existence of Hegseth’s own private group chat.According to unnamed sources familiar with the chat who spoke to the Times, Hegseth sent the private group of his personal associates some of the same information, including the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets that would strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, that he also shared with another Signal group of top officials that was created by Mike Waltz, the national security adviser.The existence of the Signal group chat created by Waltz, in which detailed attack plans were divulged by Hegseth to other Trump administration officials on the private messaging app, was made public last month by Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who had been accidentally added to the group by Waltz.The fact that Hegseth also shared the plans in a second Signal group chat, according to “people familiar with the matter” who spoke to the Times, is likely to add to growing criticism of the former Fox weekend anchor’s ability to manage the Pentagon, a massive organization which operates in matters of life and death around the globe.According to the Times, the private chat also included two senior advisers to Hegseth – Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – who were fired last week after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.Hegseth has previously been criticized for including his wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, in sensitive meetings with foreign leaders, including a discussion of the war in Ukraine with Britain’s most senior defense officials at the Pentagon last month, during which she was pictured sitting directly behind her husband. Phil Hegseth, the secretary’s younger brother, is a podcast producer who was recently hired as a Department of Homeland Security liaison to the Pentagon. It is unclear why either would need to know the details of strike plans in advance.According to the Times, Hegseth used his private phone, rather than a government device, to access the Signal chat with his family and friends.CNN reported later on Sunday that three sources familiar with Hegseth’s private Signal group confirmed to the broadcaster that he had used it to share Yemen attack plans before the strikes were launched.The same information was also confirmed to the Associated Press by a source familiar with the group chat who said that it included 13 people.Shortly after the news of the second Signal chat broke, Politico published an opinion article by Hegseth’s former press secretary, John Ullyot, which began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president – who deserves better from his senior leadership”. More

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      US citizen wrongfully arrested by border patrol in Arizona held for nearly 10 days

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      Immigration officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona, according to court records and press reports.As the NPR affiliate Arizona Public Media, first reported, 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, a New Mexico resident visiting Arizona, was detained by border patrol agents in Nogales, a city along the Mexico border about an hour south of Tucson.According to a border patrol criminal complaint, on 8 April, a border patrol official found Hermosillo “without the proper immigration documents” and claimed that the young American had admitted entering the US illegally from Mexico. Two days later, the federal court document notes that Hermosillo continued to claim he was a US citizen. On 17 April, a federal judge dismissed his case.Hermosillo’s wrongful arrest and prolonged detention comes amid escalating attacks by the Trump administration on immigrants in the US. Since Donald Trump took office, the administration has emboldened immigration officers to arrest and deport undocumented people, including foreign students whose visas have been revoked, leading to a series of errors.“Under the Trump administration’s theory of the law, the government could have banished this U.S. citizen to a Salvadoran prison then refused to do anything to bring him back,” Mark Joseph Stern, a legal analyst for Slate, wrote on Bluesky. “This is why the Constitution guarantees due process to all. Could it be more obvious?”During his campaign for the presidency, the US president promised to carry out “mass deportations”. In the three months since he took office, several foreign tourists have been wrongfully detained, federal agents from other agencies have been deputized to engage in immigration enforcement and Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that Venezuelan gang members are a leading foreign invasion of the United States to give himself the power to expel immigrants to a notorious Salvadorian prison.According to AZPM’s report, Hermosillo was visiting the Tucson area from Albuquerque, got lost without identification and was arrested by border patrol officials near its headquarters in Nogales. Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s family made numerous calls looking for him before they discovered he was being held at the Florence Correctional Center, a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility. After his arrest, the court docket shows, he was temporarily detained in the custody of the US marshals.After the family tracked him done, they provided officials with his birth certificate and social security card.“He did say he was a US citizen, but they didn’t believe him,” Hermosillo’s girlfriend’s aunt told AZPM. “I think they would have kept him. I think they would have, if they would have not got that information yesterday in the court, and gave that to Ice and the border patrol. He probably would have been deported already to Mexico.”Ice, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security and Hermosillo’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal magistrate judge Maria S Aguilera dismissed the case on 17 April. Hermosillo was released later that evening.Since Trump stepped into office, there have been a rising number of US citizens detained by immigration officials around the country. But immigration officials’ detention of citizens is not new, and it has taken place across presidential administrations. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found that from 2015 through 2020, Ice arrested 674 US citizens and deported 70 of them. And from 2007 through 2015, 818 US citizens were held in immigration detention, according to a 2016 analysis from NPR.In recent months, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of foreign students, many for taking part in Gaza solidarity protests the administration call antisemitic . Among those swept up in that crackdown is Aditya Wahyu Harsono, an Indonesian student in Minnesota, who is married to a US citizen, arrested at his hospital workplace this month after his visa was secretly revoked. More

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      Amy Klobuchar calls on supreme court to hold Trump officials in contempt

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      Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar warned on Sunday that the US is “getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis”, but the courts, growing Republican disquiet at Trump administration policies, and public protest were holding it off.“I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold,” Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union, adding “but Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”Klobuchar said the US supreme court should hold Trump administration officials in contempt if they continue to ignore a court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador, the Maryland resident the government admitted in court it had deported by mistake.Klobuchar said the court could appoint a special prosecutor, independent of Trump’s Department of Justice, to uphold the rule of law and charge any officials who are responsible for Ábrego García’s deportation, or have refused to facilitate his return.The senator’s comments came hours after supreme court released justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion on the court’s decision to block the Trump administration from deporting more Venezuelans held in north Texas’s Bluebonnet detention center .In his dissent, Alito criticized the decision of the seven-member majority, saying the court had acted “literally in the middle of the night” and without sufficient explanation. The “unprecedented” relief was “hastily and prematurely granted”, Alito added.Alito, whose dissent was joined by fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas, said there was “dubious factual support” for granting the request in an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to block deportations of accused gang members that the administration contends are legal under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.The majority did not provide a detailed explanation for the order released early on Saturday, only that the administration should not to remove Venezuelans held in the “until further order of this court”.The court has said previously that deportations under the 1798 law can only proceed if those scheduled to be removed are offered a chance to argue their case in court and were given “a reasonable time” to contest their pending removals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlito further wrote that both “the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law”, but it was not clear whether the supreme court had jurisdiction until legal avenues had been pursued through lower courts. He also objected to the fact that and the justices had not had the chance to hear the government’s side.“The only papers before this Court were those submitted by the applicants,” Alito wrote. “The Court had not ordered or received a response by the Government regarding either the applicants’ factual allegations or any of the legal issues presented by the application. And the Court did not have the benefit of a Government response filed in any of the lower courts either,” Alito said.In his dissent, Alito said the applicants had not shown they were in “imminent danger of removal”.“In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order,” Alito wrote.“I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate”, Alito added. More

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      Massachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’

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      Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”In the past week, the US president cut off billions of dollars to Harvard in federal funds, after the university refused to concede to a number of the administration’s demands. Trump also called for its tax-exempt status to be revoked, a potentially illegal move, against the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of the moves against colleges, Healey said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, and it’s really bad for American competitiveness. There’s no way a state can make up for the cuts from federal funding.”She added: “I was in a hospital recently, Boston Children’s, where some of the sickest kids in the country receive care. Cuts to Boston Children’s and other hospitals are a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as these are part of a teaching hospital system.“These cuts to universities have significant ripple effects, resulting in layoffs of scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatments have been shut down.“As governor, I want Massachusetts and America to soar. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries, like China, to take our scientists and researchers. This is terrible, especially considering what he has done to the economy. I am working hard every day to lower costs in my state, cut taxes, and build more housing, while Donald Trump is making life more expensive and harder for all of us.”Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “antisemitism taskforce” to demand various policy changes at different universities around the country.Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the taskforce, quickly caved to the Trump administration’s demands to restore $400m in federal funding. Some of the measures that Columbia conceded to included banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to arrest people, and placing control of the Middle Eastern department under a new senior vice-provost.Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions represent a significant attack on first amendment rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” Bolinger said on CNN, adding that it “seems like a campaign of intimidation”.“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” he said.Earlier this month, the federal government sent Harvard two separate letters with specific demands. After the university publicly rejected those demands, the administration quickly froze nearly $2.3bn in federal funding.The conflict between the administration and the elite university took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that an 11 April letter from the administration with additional demands – which escalated the showdown – was “unauthorized”. The university disputed that the letter was “unauthorized,” claiming the federal government has “doubled down” on its offensive. More

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      Senator says trip to El Salvador was to support Kilmar Ábrego García’s due process

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      Senator Chris Van Hollen, who travelled to El Salvador last week to meet Kilmar Ábrego García, the man at the center of a wrongful deportation dispute, said on Sunday that his trip was to support Ábrego García’s right to due process because if that was denied then everyone’s constitutional rights were threatened in the US.The White House has claimed Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 gang though he has not been charged with any gang related crimes and the supreme court has ordered his return to the US be facilitated.But in an interview with ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen, a Maryland senator, stressed that the government had presented no evidence linking Ábrego García to MS-13 in federal court. “Mr President,” the senator said, “take your facts to court, don’t put everything out on social media.”Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, Van Hollen said Trump’s “argument that you can’t fight gang violence and uphold people’s constitutional rights at the same time. That’s a very dangerous view. If we deny the constitutional rights of this one man, it threatens the constitutional rights of everyone in America.”Van Hollen, who returned to the US on Friday after meeting with Ábrego García, has accused administration officials of lying about Ábrego García’s case in attempt to distract from questions about whether his rights were violated when he was deported to El Salvador last month.“I’m for whatever gives him his due process rights,” Van Hollen told the outlet. “An immigration judge in 2019 said he should not be deported to El Salvador because that would put his life at risk from gang members like MS-13.“The Trump administration did not appeal that immigration judge’s order to keep him in the United States. He is here legally now, has a work permit, is a sheet metal worker, has a family, and three kids,” he said.“I am fine with whatever result happens as long as he is given his due process rights under the constitution,” Van Hollen added. The administration has said Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error” and the supreme court has ordered that the government “facilitate” his return, setting up a contentious debate of what that means in practical terms.As Van Hollen made the rounds of political shows on Sunday, he expanded on the theme of a constitutional crisis. On NBC’s Meet the Press he was asked if the US was in constitutional crisis with the Trump administration.“Oh, yes, we are. They are very much flouting the courts as we speak. As the courts have said, facilitating his return means something more than doing nothing, and they are doing nothing. Yes, they’re absolutely in violation of the court’s orders as we speak,” he said.“My whole point here is that if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody,” Van Hollen said later to Fox News Sunday host, Shannon Bream. “I would hope that all of us would understand that principle – you’re a lawyer. I’m not vouching for the individual, I’m vouching for his rights.”On ABC’s This Week, Van Hollen was asked if he had walked into a trap when García was brought to his hotel for an hour-long meeting and the pair were pictured with margaritas. The senator said the drinks were placed there by a government official for the photos, and not touched, and added that the trip wasn’t a trap because his purpose had been to meet with García so he could “tell his wife and family he was okay”.“That was my goal. And I achieved that goal,” he said.But he added that “the Salvadorian authorities tried to deceive people. They tried to make it look like he was in paradise. They actually wanted to have the meeting by the hotel pool originally.”The senator also accused Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, of “lying through his teeth” about Ábrego García, and strongly rejected comments by Gavin Newsom, the California governor seen as a potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, who said that it was politically dangerous for Democrats to defend the wrongly deported man.“I think what Americans are tired of, is people who want to put their finger to the wind to see what’s going on,” the senator said. “I would say that anyone that’s not prepared to defend the constitutional rights of one man, when they threaten the constitutional rights of all, doesn’t deserve to lead.”After the meeting, President Nayib Bukele post the image on X, writing that García “miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Senator Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”Van Hollen said the venue for the meeting and the subsequent picture “just goes to show the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to try to deceive people about what this case is all about”.On Friday, the White House mocked Van Hollen by annotating a headline about his Thursday meeting with García. “Fixed it for you, New York Times,” the White House X account shared. “Oh, and by the way, Chris Van Hollen – he’s NOT coming back.”The annotated headline changes “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” included crossing out “Wrongly” in red ink and replacing the words “Maryland Man” with “MS-13 Illegal Alien”. They also added “Who’s Never Coming Back.”But Ábrego García’s deportation was also facing opposition from Republicans. On Sunday, Louisiana senator John Kennedy was asked on Meet The Press if Ábrego García should be returned to the US.Kennedy said that Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador and calls for Ábrego García to be returned to the US were “utterly and gloriously wrong” and said that “most of this gauzy rhetoric is just rage bait. Unless you’re next level obtuse, you know that Mr García is never coming back to the United States, ever.”But Kennedy conceded that Ábrego García’s deportation “was a screw up”, adding that “the administration won’t admit it, but this was a screw up. Mr Garcia was not supposed to be sent to El Salvador. He was sent to El Salvador.” But he said Democrats’ response was typical.“The Democrats say, ‘Look, you know, we told you, Trump is a threat to democracy’. This is going to happen every other Thursday afternoon. I don’t see any pattern here. I mean, you know, some day pigs may fly, but I doubt it,”” he added. More

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      Trump draft order calls for drastic restructure of state department

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      A draft Trump administration executive order reported to be circulating among US diplomats proposes a radical restructuring of the US state department, including drastic reductions to sub-Saharan operations, envoys and bureaus relating to climate, refugees, human rights, democracy and gender equality.The changes, if enacted, would be one of the biggest reorganizations of the department since its founding in 1789, according to Bloomberg, which had seen a copy of the 16-page draft. The New York Times first reported on the draft.The US state department disputed the report, with a spokesperson telling Newsweek that the reporting is “entirely based on a fake document”.Earlier on Sunday, the US secretary of state Marco Rubio called the reported overhaul “fake news” in a post on X. “The ⁦nytimes falls victim to another hoax.”The proposals reportedly also include the elimination of the Bureau of International Organizations, which liaises with the United Nations and a cut in diplomatic operations in Canada.Under the changes, the sprawling state department would be reorganized into four regional bureaus covering Indo-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Eurasia. But an unspecified number of “non-essential” embassies and consulates in Sub-Saharan Africa would be closed.The New York Times said the proposal executive order could be signed by Donald Trump this week and the changes would take effect by 1 October.The order is designed to impose “a disciplined reorganization” of the state department and “streamline mission delivery” while cutting “waste, fraud and abuse”, the outlet quoted from the document.If the proposals happened, they would be a significant rejection of the US commitment to a multilateral world order.A senior diplomatic official in Africa said information circulating within the state department about foreign service reforms that are set to be announced would be less sweeping than those described in the document.One poster on a US foreign service-dedicated Reddit page said they doubted that the changes would go as far as the draft order. “I suspect this is being leaked as a red herring designed to make us grateful for a more modest but still unpopular reorganization,” wrote one user. “It will be basically immediately challenged and enjoined, and then ‘implementation’ will be dragged out until Trump is voted out.”Still, any radical reorganization of the US foreign operations comes after the Trump administration moved to fold the US Agency for International Development (USAID) into the state department, cut operations, and then reinstate some, including programs for emergency food assistance.The bureau of humanitarian affairs would “assume any mission-critical duties previously carried out by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)”, the order reads.The draft order leaked on Sunday would eliminate the Bureau of African Affairs, the special envoy for climate, the Bureau of International Organizations, and the Office of Global Women’s Issues.“Diplomatic relations with Canada shall fall under a significantly reduced team delegated as the North American Affairs Office (NAAO) within the Office of the Secretary,” according to the document. That includes a substantial downsizing of the US embassy in the capital, Ottawa.The shake-up would also see US diplomatic staff assigned to regions for the duration of their careers rather than be deployed in rotations around the world. State department-awarded Fulbright scholarships would be reformed as “solely for master’s-level study in national security-related disciplines” with emphasis placed in “critical” languages.Fellowships associated with historically Black Howard University in Washington, would also be cancelled as part of the administration’s effort to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.“All positions and duties must receive explicit written approval from the President of the United States,” according to the order, which also calls for ending the foreign service exam for aspiring diplomats. The new criteria for hiring, it said, includes “alignment with the president’s foreign policy vision”.But the order is not the only internal document circulating to propose changes to US diplomatic operations. Another proposes a 50% reduction in the state department budget, and a third calls for the cutting 10 embassies and 17 consulates.The US state department workforce includes 13,000 members of the foreign service, 11,000 civil service employees, and 45,000 locally employed staff at more than 270 diplomatic missions worldwide, according to its website. More

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      RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies | John Harris

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      In the recent past, Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that Donald Trump is “a terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath”. But in the US’s new age of irrationalism and chaos, these two men are now of one voice, pursuing a strand of Trumpist politics that sometimes feels strangely overlooked. With Trump once again in the White House and Kennedy ensconced as his health and human services secretary, what they are jointly leading is becoming clearer by the day: a war on science and knowledge that aims to replace them with the modern superstitions of conspiracy theory.Nearly 2,000 members of the US’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have warned of “slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration”. Even work on cancer is now under threat. But if you want to really understand the Trump regime’s monstrousness, consider where Kennedy and a gang of acolytes are heading on an issue that goes to the heart of millions of lives: autism.Last Wednesday, Kennedy spoke at a press conference staged in response to a report about apparently rising rates of autism published by the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And out it all came: an insistence that autism is an “epidemic” and a “preventable disease”, and – in complete defiance of the science – that the root cause lies with “environmental toxins”. A range of new studies, he said, will begin reporting back in September: with the same banality that defines his boss’s promises on international conflict and global economics, he told his audience that answers would be presented to the public “very, very quickly”.Most of the people present would have been aware of Kennedy’s past support for the thoroughly discredited idea that autism is somehow linked to the use of vaccines. As he spoke, they were presumably reminded of the occasions when he has talked about autistic people with a mixture of disgust and complete ignorance. Autism, he said, “destroys” families; today’s autistic children “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” Those comments have rightly triggered a huge backlash. But what has been rather lacking is a broader critique of Kennedy’s ideas, and how they go deep into aspects of the US’s culture and politics.As I explain in the book I have just written about my autistic son, James, I began my immersion in autism and the arguments that swirl around it 15 years ago, when he received his diagnosis from the NHS. That came amid visits from speech therapists and educational psychologists, and increasingly futile appointments with a paediatrician, who in effect told us to go away and manage as best we could. But straight away, I was also aware of a much more exotic subculture rooted in the US, based around the idea that autism could somehow be cured, and an array of regimens and pseudo-treatments.The anxieties surrounding Andrew Wakefield’s disgraced work on a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) jab were still easy to pick up. I read about “chelation”: injecting chemicals into the bloodstream, supposedly to remove the toxic preservatives used in vaccines from the body and send autism on its way. It was easy to find stuff about impossibly restrictive diets, and the terrifying notion of forcing people to drink diluted bleach. These ideas, moreover, came with claims of endless government cover-ups: proto-Maga stuff, which had long been snowballing online.That said, the underlying logic of all this quackery was encouraged by much more mainstream voices. By and large, British campaigning and research tends to focus on what autism actually is, and how to make autistic lives better – whereas in the US, very powerful forces have seen autism as a disease. In 2006, President George W Bush signed a legislative package tellingly called the Combating Autism Act, hailed by one of its supporters as “a federal declaration of war on the epidemic of autism”. At that point, there were initiatives and organisations with names such as Cure Autism Now and Defeat Autism Now! All this had already spawned the autistic self-advocacy movement that continues to loudly contest such ideas, but its appeal obviously still lingers.If I were in the US, I would now have two big worries. As well as constant attacks on the public sector that have already hacked back help for autistic people, there is a huge question about what Kennedy’s nonsense might mean for other areas of federal government policy, and the kind of MMR-style panics his “answers” on toxins might trigger. But some of those concerns also apply to the UK, thanks to the ease with which ideas travel, and how Trump and his allies influence politics across the world.Kennedy’s pronouncements are not only about what causes autism; they also reflect an age-old perception of autism as an aberration, and many autistic people as “ineducable” and beyond help. This surely blurs into populists’ loathing of modern ideas about human difference: once you have declared war on diversity, an attack on the idea of neurodiversity will not be far away. It also chimes with one of the new right’s most pernicious elements: its constant insistence that everything is actually much simpler than it looks.Which brings me to something it feels painful to have to write. Autism denotes a fantastically complicated set of human traits and qualities, but that does not make them any less real. It presents with and without learning disabilities, and can be synonymous with skills and talents. Its causes (if that is even the right word) are largely genetic, although careful research is focused on how those heritable aspects might sometimes – sometimes– intersect with factors during pregnancy, and with parental age. And obviously, those characterisations barely scratch the surface, which is some indication of the absurdity of Kennedy’s position, and how dangerous it is.On this side of the Atlantic, there are very good reasons why many of us who have families with autistic members feel deep anxiety about the constant shunting of politics to the right. The care, education and official understanding of the people we love and sometimes look after is fragile enough already: what would happen if their fate was in the hands of the Trumpist know-nothings of Reform UK, or Alternative für Deutschland? The American tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes shows the future we now have to avoid, and the kind of people we may have to fight, who will not just be arrogant and inhumane, but set on taking us back to a failed past: terrible human beings, you might call them. More

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      The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

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      The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.“They’re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.”The government said on Monday it planned to freeze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept a series of demands made by the Trump administration. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”, and that Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs”.Garber said the government’s edicts “represent direct governmental regulation” of the school’s independence and constitutional rights.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s emotional post on Wednesday, the government’s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, he has praised in the past.“[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,” Wolfson said.“And so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.”The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump’s efforts – led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller – go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.“The Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,” said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom.“This new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.”The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.“As a Jewish faculty member, I’m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who’ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,” Pinker said.Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America’s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard’s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn’t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.“We’ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.“The other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.”Just as Harvard’s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” – the state’s flagship university.Reagan’s tactics bear echoes of Trump’s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley’s chief public information officer at the time, told the university’s news service years later that Reagan “wanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines”.“In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,” Colvig said.Reagan wasn’t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy’s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration’s efforts were “worse than McCarthy”, and Shepherd said Trump’s attacks were “much more accelerated” than the communist-paranoid senator’s tactics.“McCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we’re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It’s also not just relegated to the professors. We’re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,” Shepherd said.Trump hasn’t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding, while the White House has announced funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back – even if it came after it was reported in March that the leaders of the university’s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump – and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing’s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.“The right don’t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don’t want them to hear about structural inequalities,” Shepherd said.“They don’t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don’t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.“They don’t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.” More