Conversation

Resistance to autocrats has often come from university students. That's why in 2022 Curtis Yarvin said that if an authoritarian president were to take office in January 2025, he couldn't allow Harvard to exist after the start of April. And that's why Trump has suddenly and illegally tried to cancel $400 million of government contracts with Columbia University... and threatened to do the same with

Harvard
George Washington University
Johns Hopkins University
New York University
Northwestern University
UC Los Angeles
UC Berkeley
University of Minnesota
University of Southern California

The pretext is that these universities allowed "illegal protests" of Israel's invasion of Gaza and didn't do enough to stop anti-Semitism. However you feel about those issues, I don't believe that's the point of what's happening now. Trump is always self-serving: for him "anti-Semitism" only matters if he can use it as a cudgel against his enemies. I see other motives:

• He's trying to scare university administrators into not allowing protests against *his* forthcoming activities. By listing universities that will be looked into, he seeks preemptive compliance. There will be more congressional hearings where university presidents are pressured to suppress demonstrations, etc.

• He wants to attack elite universities because his right-wing base will applaud this. Academics, students and educated people tend to not go along with the xenophobic, racist and sexist "othering" which provides the emotional fuel for the fires of fascism. So they, too, are "others".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/us/columbia-trump-colleges-antisemitism.html

You can read this NY Times article for free here:

https://archive.is/fatxF

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