That's what "conservatives" mean by "law and order". You obey them so they can put you in your place. They want to impose upon the rest of us, not be imposed upon.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Expect much much more of this as Slicon Valley scum continue to get their way. They have very loudly expressed their desire for a sort of fuedal power and hace polluted the current administration with some of their ideas.
Very true. A feudal relationship once established was never going to conform to their political interests. They simply pushed too far, too fast, and for too long for that to be a possibility.
As a staffer at Cornell and person who lives in the area, I worry most about losing students from mainland China. Whether this is an arbitrary Trumpism or the lid blows off in Taiwan matters little.
I heard University of Illinois bought a policy to protect against losing cash tuitions from Chinese grad students. Perhaps other universities have done the same.
I think it is more undergrads than grads that pay money, but I think that depends on the field.
For a physics PhD for instance at Cornell you usually get paid to teach your first two years and if all goes right do your actual research on a grant. In my case the prof had written a grant for the work I wanted to do which didn't get funded, I spent a summer thinking about the problem which helped us come back with a great grant proposal that got funded.
I know Masters of Engineering students pay their own way, maybe other departments are different. I remember there being a lot of Chinese graduate students 25 years ago but now I see lots of undergrads.
If you are a Republican and didn’t sign up for this, can you please write your representatives about impeachment? This is getting ridiculous. We’d be much better off with a president Vance.
It’s zero if nobody actually says anything. The legislature has the power to reign in the president. They only have to threaten a bipartisan impeachment.
Unfortunately I don't see a route where Republicans vote for impeachment, ever. They're already refusing to listen to constituents, hiding from their elected duties and letting Trump freely crash the economy on a whim.
Sure, but there are "get your kid to eat veggies" levels of "effectively impossible", and then there's "quantum teleport into the bank vault" levels of it.
This is more like the latter. There aren't many signs of us hitting the bottom thus far.
Even if it were possible for Dems to get control of the house and impeach the prez, there is no way that Senate will convict unless the GOP Senate goes back to becoming the GOP instead of the MAGA-GOP, which seems extremely unlikely.
Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders but you also don't have 3 republicans willing to break to impeach for doing stuff they don't want (otherwise they'd pass it as law).
a) You need 2/3 of senators to vote to convict, so you would need ~20 Republicans to get on board.
b) Impeachment is a political action; plenty of politicians can disagree with portions of their party's legislature enough to vote against it without saying "I'd like to burn down my party's control of the government (and thereby my career) over this".
> Its interesting, you don't have enough republicans united to pass any of the agenda as law instead of executive orders
No, the decision to use executive fiat to normalize dictatorship is not undertaken because of the absence of support for the policy, but because of presence of support for normalizing dictatorship and avoiding the public in-advance debate of the legislative process.
Impeachment (in the senate its conviction, technically) requires 2/3 majority. So a few republicans breaking ranks isn't going to cut it. This is why impeachment over the Jan 6 coup attempt failed even though 7 "old guard" Republicans (i.e., Cheney) voted in favor.
The ONLY time a sitting POTUS has been politically removed from power by the mechanism of impeachment, or even seriously handicapped by it, was after the GOP constituency began howling at their congresspeople about the egregious behavior of the POTUS. They resisted caring up until that moment, and that was 50 years ago.
The current GOP doesn't flinch when their candidate is found guilty of SA, with a long history of fraud and embezzlement. If Trump approved a simple burglary of a Democrat's office, it would barely make the news at this point.
Not all infinitessimals are equal, just as not all infinities are equal.
Even if impeachment is off the cards, is it impossible to imagine that there could be any sort of impact from Republican lawmakers hearing Republican voters that, or other things are not what they voted for or want?
Not at this time, and I don't see it changing enough in 3 years to make any difference. The fear of being attacked by MAGA is still very high, I think the (older) republican leadership has decided to just wait this out.
Impeachment is the wrong tactic at this moment. Eroding support of the less hardline members of the party is key. Call your reps and say I didn’t sign up for this: [specific list of things]
> I would much rather that they be knocked down a peg or three, which if it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students.
When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income [0], there's often three main choices on what can be done next [1]
* reduce the quality / variety of services provided -- i.e. cut services, keep prices the same, don't admit more students
* increase prices for remaining "customers" -- i.e. increase prices, don't cut services, don't admit more students
* increase income by getting more paying "customers" -- i.e. don't cut services, don't increase prices, get more domestic students [2]
I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for US domestic students for the same quality of education as before... unless your point is to degrade the standing of the educational institution/quality of the education provided so it becomes cheaper...? if that's true, why would you want that?
--
[0]: close to a third of annual income in this case "Over 6,700 international students were enrolled at the institution last academic year, university data shows, making up 27% of its student body."
-- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05768jmm11o
[1]: based on my random experiences and stuff i've read, this is not an exhaustive cite-able statement
[2]: could also take out a loan, but that's basically short-term increasing income
>When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income
It might be wrong to think of the university's main source of revenue as tuition or tuition-adjacent fees.
>I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for
Because we live in a supply-and-demand world.
>for the same quality of education as before.
No one going to university goes there for the quality of education. They do so for the prestigious credentials. If somehow having fewer foreign students would actually result in a lower quality of education at, say, Harvard Law School or some such, then things are fucked up far beyond my ability to care about the outcome or Trump's meddling causing that.
Why do you need a real suppressor to cosplay a pretend political stance? If you haven't already gotten the right size oil filter, just go buy a spray painted soda can from that guy at the flea market that sells decorative airplanes made from soda cans. Heck of a lot lighter, too.
The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties (and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin), and yet it's basically crickets from the otherwise-loud 2A fundamentalists - just like how the first round of Dear Leader had them dropping "from my cold, dead hands" and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
>Why do you need a real suppressor to cosplay a pretend political stance?
Because I'd like to not become deaf.
>The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties
Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?
>and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin)
The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over so much you don't even much bother with it. It's not just you doing that, basically everyone towards the left does this.
>and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
Couldn't care less about cops if I tried. Again, just more failure. We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are. But, looks like my faction has the votes. Going to be an interesting few years... and maybe unpleasant for you.
Alright sure, this is valid. But it drastically reduces your point from arguing about the ideals of liberty to just pragmatically having a device you find useful. "I don't care about the destruction of liberty because I might get a toy" isn't a compelling argument.
> We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are
Except you know, we probably actually aren't. I recognize your nick from early reddit, like a decade and a half ago at this point? Generally found your points agreeable, from my libertarian perspective. And yet here we are now, arguing on completely opposite sides.
> Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?
The natural right of free speech is under open attack by these attempts to make universities obey the whims of an autocratic executive. Even not being in college, and not even really agreeing with the speech being used as a strawman here, that is still an infringement upon my rights. Just as say, drug prohibition is an infringement upon my rights even though I'm not really big into drugs.
> The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over [economy]
I didn't gloss it over - I referenced it. Go read any of the economics threads where these arguments are hashed out. Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057663 . Maybe my coming from more of an Austrian economics analysis might actually ring true for you in some ways? I would love to hear where I'm wrong, but from what I've seen responses either fall into repeating talking points, nihilism, or ghosting the conversation.
It's most certainly true that the elites (US politicians and corporate class) have sold out the US worker with the monetary policies of the past few decades. The problem is that the Republican party is always stuck on complaining about being had by the last over-and-done con, with that energy going into supporting the setup for the next con. And I don't see how it's any different this time.
> maybe unpleasant for you
The destruction of our societal institutions, bureaucratic checks and balances, our economy, and our standing in the world are going to make things quite unpleasant for all of us. You just haven't realized it yet.
> it continues long enough might even result in lower prices for domestic students
International students pay full price so they wind up subsidizing domestic students. Many universities were already predicting strained budgets from fewer international students.
> With fewer students applying, there will be more room there for Americans.
The US has benefitted enormously from being able to brain-drain other countries for their best and brightest. As a country, you are much better off offering the limited amount of spots in higher education to smart and driven students from abroad, than to average Americans.
> suppressors are likely to become legalized here in the coming months.
The fallout of reversing the brain-drain is going to take decades to have an impact, but you don't care, because you're getting your toy now now now.
> Higher education is one of the biggest grifts out there.
Look at the man-made objects around you. Every single one of them has been improved or made less expensive by research at institutes of higher education, including the device that you're using to read this comment, the electrical system used to power that device, the vehicles used to transport the people and goods to construct that electrical system...
Maybe, according to your values, higher education isn’t worth that - but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
>Look at the man-made objects around you. Every single one of them has been improved or made less expensive by research at institutes of higher education, including the device that you're using to read this comment, the electrical system used to power that device, the vehicles used to transport the people and goods to construct that electrical system...
Yes, and I fail to see how cockblocking the foreign students could impact that. Education is their side hustle, as is commonly said, and foreign students are some fraction of that side hustle... so how will that affect research? Will the professors and doctors at Harvard who are always scribbling out grant proposals stop doing so in protest?
>but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
I'd call it worse, but I don't know anything more slanderous than "grift".
And they're irreplaceable, I take it. The not-quite-bright grad student doing scutwork in the lab... an unsung genius and the power behind this research that churns out magical doodads. No one else could substitute.
Sounds pretty fucking racist, really. In the other comment someone was claiming that foreign students pay full price, and so they subsidize domestic students... in other words, university administration prefers them because they're more lucrative. Not because they're of a higher academic caliber. This is a nest of nasty, perverse incentives that hurts our own citizens and we have all sorts of propagandists telling us it's really for our own good.
Nothing about this is straightforward. Even if (and for me it's a big if) you were correct, pretending that this is straightforward is just disingenuous.
You asked: "how will this affect research", and the answer I gave was that the people doing the research will be forced to leave. From there, you assumed this:
"And they're irreplaceable, I take it."
And then went on to conclude this:
"Sounds pretty fucking racist, really."
So ask yourself... am I sounding racist, or are you just projecting racist sounding things onto me? It's very difficult to discuss anything when when that's your chosen rhetoric.
>You asked: "how will this affect research", and the answer I gave was that the people doing the research will be forced to leave.
No, the people who do this research are constantly shuffling in and shuffling out, year after year, and when this goes into effect the people who will shuffle in will be more americans and fewer foreigners, and no one is going to see any real difference.
Well, unless you're racist and just hate americans. Then you will probably perceive that they are somehow inferior.
Yes it's true that people shuffle in and out, but you're making it seem like a lead researcher on a project leaving suddenly would have no impact on the work. Often times yes, a project can fail if key personnel leave. Many labs are just a professor and one grad student who they had to work for years to get up to speed. Many times that grad student is the one person in the whole world who has the specialized knowledge they do. Such is the nature of researching at the bleeding edge of a field. If they were to suddenly leave it would have a noticeably negative impact on their research output, even if the best American student stepped into the role immediately.
That you fail to consider that possibility but you are very keen to claim "racist and just hate Americans" leads me to unfortunately quote the HN rules at you:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I'm sorry, but the priorities you've got here are so completely fucked I don't even know how to respond respectfully.
Systematic dismantling of education? No big deal. Shoot guns with less noise? Awesome! WTF? I loose more faith in my countrymen day by day with this shit.
What does tearing down Harvard achieve again? What does punishing visitors to our country who are law abiding achieve again? Clearly it mentions these students can transfer, so all of the little benefits you dreamt up inside your head are dead on arrival. Your perpetual victimhood has a shelf life, hurting everyone you don't like because they're not from here when this country is founded on the ideas of immigrations... you never understood the plot.
Higher education is what made America rich and powerful and influential. Many immigrants who come to these schools stay there. Many others form positive links between their counties and the US. International students pay more and therefore subsidize American students. Kicking them out would likely increase the price, which is not a huge deal with Harvard but would be incredibly damaging if say he did this to all universities including state ones
Besides this is just Trump abusing and violating the law to go after his enemies. It could be anyone next including you. Impartial rule of law is one of the core aspects of a liberal democracy. It's one of the reasons we are better then corrupt Dictatorships.
It's like Nixon but worse and more open. What we need is Trump and maga to be knocked down many pegs before they destroy our country (please remember you live here in the place Trump is destroying)
But you're not allowed to call them low-informed, uneducated, or any slightly negative/offensive qualifier. Otherwise you get the "this is why Trump won" lecture.
My point is, this was the advertisement. If you thought it looked great, you signed up for it. And if you didn't vote for this, but you voted for something ridiculous like banning around dozen people from playing sports, well, I have the same amount of sympathy for you too.
Yes and no. It seems obvious it was the advertisement but I know people who voted for Trump that are otherwise fairly liberal. They were either grossly uninformed, misinformed, or simply _didn't believe_ the reporting about various issues.
The last is the most frustrating to me because there is a hint of the truth there - the stuff reported about Trump _is_ insane. They're doing things so openly and brazenly that there are kneejerk reactions to either ask "is it really so bad if they're doing it in the open" or "surely the reporting must be a lie because no one would be that shameless".
Shouldn’t voters at least try in good faith to inform themselves? How else can we expect democracy to work?
For example - The day after Brexit - so many people regretted voting to leave. They could’ve thought about it 24 hours earlier, no? “I was misinformed, uninformed” sounds lazy and shallow, isn’t it? How hard can it be to spend an hour less on Netflix and an hour more learning about what’s on the ballot?
I'm not buying it. The guy was president for 4 years, tried to steal an election, and before all of that, challenged Obamas eligibility based entirely on his name and the color of his skin.
I don't disagree. I'm furious with these people. They're close to me.
They aren't stupid... just not paying attention and skeptical due to a combination of propaganda (fake news!) and rightful incredulity at the state of things.
Lots and lots of people accurately predicted this multiple years out at this point. They were continually dismissed as alarmists by supposedly “serious people”.
There is something I think that a lot of people find very self soothing by just refusing to see what is actually in front of them so that they don’t have to actually do anything about it. There is a certain satisfaction that people get by telling others they are overreacting.
I've been like fuckin' Nostradamus since early in the Dubya admin just because I skim GAO and CBO reports on big legislation sometimes, can read graphs, take the things Republicans say they want to do seriously, and have a half-decent grasp on 20th century history, including the latter half of it.
Vance literally defended the eating cats and dogs lie during the debate. The entire fucking point of this platform is to fuck the immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Or is this actually a surprise to anyone with half a brain?
Donald Trump is genuinely an idiot and deeply and obviously corrupt. I don’t like Vance, I’m still going to be mad at his agenda, but he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground because he doesn’t understand how fixed income securities work or give away national security to fly in an obviously bugged luxury plane for funsies.
At the end of the day, there are different levels of terrible things that can happen to us, and right now we are staring down multi-generational damage to our country.
The Trump administration is a loyalty-based hierarchy. The intelligent advisors know that it is better for there careers do demonstrate loyalty than actual do anything to improve his policies. This is not rationalists paradigm, it’s a survivalist paradigm.
In fact the reason why it’s so bad now is that he blames his (more intelligent) advisers in his previous administration for his problems.
> he’s generally intelligent. He’s not going to run the country into the ground
I think you're having a hard time grasping the concept of people who care more about rolling back social and cultural change than they care about the United States being a strong and prosperous country. The tension between those priorities in the Republican party has been resolved. The current leaders in the party, including Vance, rose because they understood that their voters are ready to let go of world leadership, including technological leadership and economic competitiveness, in order to roll back social progress.
If you ask them directly, they'll invoke some magical thinking about how this is going to unleash a golden age of prosperity and technology, but they don't care if they believe it or if anyone believes it, because they don't actually care anymore. That's why they don't blink when Trump talks about backwards, impoverished countries with admiration. There's no contradiction for them. They really do look at a country like Russia and think, yes, I want the U.S. to be an American-flavored version of that.
I grew up in a wildly religious family, and was in wildly conservative areas for part of that time. There are a lot of people who want to roll back social and cultural change for good-faith religious reasons. I think are wrong for thinking these things. However, they still also want to have a strong and prosperous nation. My point is not to say that I want the future they want. It's to say I also don't want the future they don't want. We can meet in the middle, where the world is less shitty, even though it's still shitty.
I think you're describing a part of the Republican Party that is now almost irrelevant, one that kept expecting the voters to turn against Donald Trump. They're the ones who thought, what the hell is Trump doing sucking up to Putin? Our voters are patriots who have no hesitation about calling the United States the greatest nation on earth. Surely they're going to be shocked at Trump fawning over a sad sack country like Russia. Surely patriotic voters are going to be offended at the president of their precious eagle scream U! S! A! showing open admiration for an ex-superpower with a ruined economy, zero cultural capital, a laughingstock of a democratic system, and a crumbling military with zero global reach.
That point of view still exists in the Republican Party, but it has been eclipsed by something sadder and smaller-minded. Liberal progressives have long used national greatness as a lever on patriotic conservatives, telling them, look, our "national greatness" comes from our embrace of education, cultural change, new people, new ideas. If conservatives love our supposed national greatness, they should embrace the progressive liberal ideals that built it. Now, it's like the Republican Party has been taken over by conservatives who... decided the liberals were right? It's like they gave up and said, y'all are right, national greatness requires education, continual learning and self-criticism, openness to new ideas and new people, and acceptance of creative destruction, both economic and cultural. They accepted that, grieved, faced the choice with clear eyes, and decided that national greatness isn't worth the cost. They look at Russia and see a country that is marinating in its own chauvinism, and they want that instead.
The Republican party is, in fact, a coalition. When parts of that coalition become alienated enough, and that is very much happening right now, then we have a chance to coordinate with our coalition.
You sound like you don't know any decent Republicans who are really upset at what's happening. I do. They ought to be encouraged to speak up.
A lot of the "alienated" Republicans already split from the party. They're no longer in the coalition. The fundamental demographics of the party are different than they were 10-20 years ago. And this is a continuous process.
The fact of the matter is that "the party" is MAGA now, there is effectively no internal resistance, and mounting one is basically intractable. Trump won the primary with 80% of the vote despite "strong" opposition.
It really isn't anymore. I agree that there are many decent "old-time" Republicans, but they've been neutered and/or they've "self-deported" themselves from politics.
Romney might've been able to run and split the vote.
Bush the younger could've put his thumb on the scale, too.
Murkowski says "we are all afraid" [of MAGA].
Many traditional Republican congressmen have simply bowed out and not sought re-election.
McCain is dead.
The only one that I can think of that actually stood up is Liz Cheney.
To use a programming phrase, the country is in an "error state" and has been since 2017.
Sorry, we've been hearing that since before Trump clinched the nomination in 2016, but political parties change, and there's no enduring Republican norm that is going to imminently reassert itself. I do know some "decent Republicans," though they've been voting Democratic for a while now. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of people saw the Republican Party as a party of educated, foreign policy-savvy, business friendly elite pragmatists. For some people I know, that brand is cemented in their minds as the soul of the Republican Party, regardless of 30+ years of various radically different factions dominating the party since then.
But now those "decent Republicans" vote Democrat. Their feeling about it, to repurpose a saying from a different context, could be summed up as, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." They never wanted to be Democrats and still have a sentimental attachment to the Republican Party, but here they are.
> 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[i] and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
+-------
I'm not thinking that Religion is the problem here.
> There are a lot of people who want to roll back social and cultural change for good-faith religious reasons.
What makes you believe that they are engaging with their religious views in good faith?
I know a great many friends and acquaintances that take their religious studies seriously. I also have met a great many more whose approach is far more cavalier, simply using their beliefs to justify their existing biases and gut feelings, as well as justifying and excusing their own anti-social behavior.
Lots of people are "intelligent", yet you would never want to be under their rule.
Vance is a useful stooge handpicked by Peter Thiel. If push comes to shove, do you think his Yale degree is going to give him any backbone if he's ordered to do something that violates the Constitution? Did Yale provide John Yoo with one when he wrote legal memos justifying the torture of detainees held without charge in Guantanamo 20 years ago? Yoo was ready to ignore the Geneva Conventions then, and Vance is ready to deport US citizens now.
His defense of those lies was incredible. According to him, it is perfectly fine to make up and repeat fabrications because they advanced the narrative they wanted to push, full stop. The truth doesn't matter, no regrets.
Do you think he believes the lie that he said he knows isn't true and then walked back and talked about as if it was true? Are you the smart person whose been told the lie enough?
The politicians that matter most are the marginally elected representatives for their party, and they care about the marginal voter in their district. The median Republican does not matter when it comes to impeachment and removal. What matters is about one standard deviation in views left of the median.
The problems at Harvard and other high ed organizations are real. They've become pretty unhinged and concentrated, they really need to work on getting back to "open forum for discussing all ideas" rather than the "Open forum for discussing all correct ideas" that they have drifted into. I can see it first hand through my mother, who works at a major school.
That being said, republicans decided to chose an M1 Abrams tank to kill the pesky mice in the system.
In the hiring process for these institutions, until recently you had to write a "Diversity Statement" which was evaluated as part of the hiring process. This was an attempt to keep people with the "wrong ideas" out of the hiring pool. Similarly the H1B process asks you a long list of questions that you are required to answer "correctly" in order to be admitted. If you fail, you are kicked out.
I think the question is which set of ideas are not ok (e.g. clearly "I want to commit violence" is not an ok idea) which set of ideas are a grey area ("I have attended a major event of a US designated terror organization such as a funeral of a leader from a a terror organization") and which set of ideas are ok ("I want to advocate for peacefully advocate for more bike lanes"). There are very strong party affiliations for what ideas are considered ok vs forbidden (e.g. trans rights in the sports world).
I think it’s also reasonable to want to see some assurance that Harvard has reckoned with the frankly racist and discriminatory admissions policy that was well-documented in the filings for Students for Fair Admissions @ SCOTUS.
The point of a diversity statement for the candidate to ruminate on their teaching practices with respect to a diverse classroom, which is a fact of the job rather than a political or ideological matter.
Most people in the course of their job do not closely work with people of diverse backgrounds. People who work at universities will work with people of all backgrounds and abilities. It’s not just about race or gender, but language, mobility, mental disabilities, and so forth. People in roles that deal with so many diverse people need to be able to articulate how in a statement. That’s not unreasonable or political, but just a reality of the job.
To a gun advocate the point of a concealed carry would be self defense which is a reality of living in certain areas rather than a political or ideological matter. Nevertheless it is ok for a political parties to have opinions about whether concealed carry is right or wrong and some would say that "civilized" countries have made gun ownership very difficult because the pros may outweigh the cons.
Likewise the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process and if your response is going to be "this is not up for discussion because it is not a political or ideological matter" well... they are going to disagree with you and if they are in charge might respond by cutting funding and support for your institution. That's just a reality of living in a democracy.
> the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process
Most of these people haven't read a single "diversity statement" and cannot articulate what exactly the hiring process at a university is, and what actual role these statements play in the process. It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them. I'm not saying this isn't up for discussion, but the discussion better be around what the facts are and not the boogey man "the right" created.
At the end of the day the people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students need to articulate and demonstrate that they can do this task. There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers than an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"? They don't have an answer, all they know is they don't like the current process, even though they can't explain what it is.
> It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them.
I think it's fair to be frustrated that a lot of political discourse is driven by appealing to fear rather than discussing facts in goodwill but I'm not sure that's isolated to only one particular party. I do think we tend to notice when people we don't like are not operating in good faith and tend to look the other way when people we do like are not operating in good faith so to someone firmly on one side of the spectrum it can definitely look like the opposition is particularly slimy.
> people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students
I don't remotely understand how this is relevant to whether a particular instructor should be hired or not. If I need to learn math, then I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with. We can take a look at example diversity statements online https://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/_files/examples-submitted-... and we will notice people feel empowered to talk about their sexuality, race, gender etc but they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US" but if you swap words to a new value in the relevant categories i.e. "I am a Latinx queer woman from Mexico" this suddenly becomes relevant to the exercise. If changing the color, sexuality, gender, or place of origin for an applicant is relevant to the outcome then this seems like a discriminatory process (https://www.justice.gov/crt/nondiscrimination-basis-race-col...).
I do think it's perfectly ok for people to disagree with me here and I expect that if their representatives get in power we will see funding and priorities shift back towards more required diversity statements while also shifting to allow admissions processes to take into account things like race, sexuality, and gender etc which is just the reality of living in a democracy.
> I'm not sure that's isolated to only one particular party.
Of course, but I haven't brought up parties, you did. I'm taking an apolitical position from the perspective of an educator looking to just do their job free from interference of political parties. I'm not sure what you do, but I don't suppose you'd enjoy "the left" or "the right" barging in and micromanaging your hiring committee, thinking they know how to do your job better than you.
> I don't remotely understand how this is relevant
Exactly, and that's kind of my point. You are very eager to quote the law at me, but you aren't first willing to spend the time to actually understand the reason for the diversity statements, how they are used, and why they might be necessary at all.
I think that has to do with this:
> I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with.
You are looking at this from the perspective of a student, who view the job of the instructor as to teach. But the job is not to just teach, it is actually to be a member of the faculty, which comes with may other. One of our primary directives is to build a community that is conducive to learning. And how we do this is by selecting top students for admittance based on scholastic achievement, regardless of background.
Turns out when you do this, and you cast a wide net, a lot of different people end up in your classroom. Get past the culture war nonsense and put yourself in the shoes of an instructor of a math class of 100 students...
85 are from the US, 15 are immigrants and speak English as a second language. For some of them it's the first time in another country.
3 of them have ADHD. 1 is autistic. 8 have a learning disability. 5 have a motor disability. 1 is undergoing treatment for a major medical issue. 20 of them are neurodivergent in some way. 30 of them are suffering symptoms of depression. 1 of them is a psychopath. 30 are first generation students. 35 are low income. 1 is trans.
Your job is to help all those people succeed at math. How might this affect a math instructor? Here are some ways:
- Have you chosen your course materials to take into account low income individuals that can't afford a $200 textbook? Are they accessible by people with disabilities, for example are they available in electronic form?
- Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?
- What are your course policies for students with learning disabilities? How do you handle the fact that some students need 2x time than others? How do you structure your exams so that students who can't take them during the test time are able to? How do you handle students who have permission to miss instruction to deal with medical treatments?
The classroom is where the culture war meets reality. Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations they will never find themselves in. But in the classroom, things get real. For example, when a trans student asks you to call them by their preferred pronoun, what do you do in that situation? For most professors it's not a hypothetical, it's just something that happens on the job. So you need to have a real answer for these things, and not a political answer or a talking point.
The diversity statement is a really good way to open up a dialogue about these topics. So let's look at the diversity statements you brought up, and what you had to say about them:
I think we could nitpick each other's position but at the end of the day we just have philosophical differences so I won't dive into every detail before making my broader point.
> I'm taking an apolitical position
We've been over this already.
Just because you do not wish that your position is political doesn't make it so.
> Your job is to help all those people succeed at math.
Yes. Well our job is at least to help some of them succeed at math because they won't all succeed statistically https://umbc.edu/stories/math-awareness-needed-to-raise-math... "For instance, in 2022, only 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math – down from 39% in 2019.". We disagree on how best to accomplish this but metrics (e.g. PISA, NAEP or any way we have come up to evaluate this) indicate we have not achieved any incremental progress in decades even though cost per pupil has dramatically increased (e.g. student teacher ratio has declined dramatically). So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
> Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations
Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
> There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers that an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"?
It's likely that many of your goals regarding language, cultural, and "disability" (I put this in quotes because some are real and other times people pretend to have a "disability" in order to turn in their homework late) cannot be met in a way that is acceptable to the right so you need to either drop these goals or accept that you are going to lose funding in support if you attempt to accomplish these goals.
"We" are asking you to drop things that "we" consider harmful. Initially "we" attempted to negotiate (https://president.columbia.edu/news/our-next-steps, https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...) but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples of what will happen if "your" side is unwilling to budge on "your" position regarding things like diversity letters in the hiring process in the hopes that the next tier of institutions has a change of heart or at least pretend to for a few years. You and I have a difference of opinion much like I might have a difference of opinion with a fundamentalist christian who wants to use taxpayer money to teach about creationism. I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements. Now that "we" are in power the onus is on educators to decide if this is the hill they want to die on. I still find it very sad that we couldn't reach a compromise that left American institutions in a strong position to be scientific leaders in their space but unfortunately the levers available to political leadership are crude and time is short (I would also argue that "my" leadership is headed up by a geriatric unintelligent narcissist who does a lot of damage when he lashes out but I guess that can't be helped right now).
I hope you have a great rest of your day - I'm done h...
> Just because you do not wish that your position is political doesn't make it so.
Look, I get the idea that "everything is political" because of how politics touches every aspect of life. But that doesn't actually mean everyone who has an opinion on a topic that is hot in the political arena is a political actor, nor does it make their opinion political. People working in universities have had to deal with the question of how to build a close-knit diverse community long before DEI became a hot-button issue. So I'll throw it right back at you: just because you want my opinion to be political, doesn't make it any less based on a practical reality of my job.
> So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
These stats are about graduating seniors so now I'm unsure of the relevance of why you brought this up.
> Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
Yeah that would be unhinged if I said or suggested that, alas I did not. But you yourself have made it clear that while you have experience taking a class, that has not qualified you to have a cogent opinion on the topic of how to manage a classroom. The same way the experience of eating food doesn't necessarily qualify you to have an opinion on how it's made.
> in a way that is acceptable to the right
Again... this elusive "acceptable way" is left unstated. I guess we will never learn what that might be.
> but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples
Of course you're going to be rebuffed if your position doesn't even pretend to understand the other side of the issue. So then apparently instead of gaining an understanding and working toward common ground, the next step is domination in hopes of total capitulation. And you call this democracy?! The current actions against Harvard are a mockery of democracy.
> I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements.
And yet, despite wanting to destroy them so badly, you have admitted you have no real understanding of why they exist, how they are used, nor can you offer a suggestion for how to replace them in a way that is ideologically palatable to you. That is a political opinion. If you want to draw a distinction, your impulse to smash diversity statements has a political impetus that you can't really define; whereas my impulse to defend them is based on the fact they demonstrably help me do my job.
> I do wish you all the best!
You spent an entire paragraph before this statement talking about how you want to come into my place of work, disrupt it for no reason that you can articulate, and that if I don't like it tough, because you're in charge now. If that's you wishing the best, I'd hate to hear you wish someone the worst.
>Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?
As someone who has twice had to completely switch their life from one country to another, entirely different one, I'd say that for one, you should give people more credit for being able to adapt and still get the gist of what's being communicated even if it's done through local cultural color, and secondly, that adapting is exactly what these people should have to do if they came to this new country and its schools.
One can appreciate and respect the foreign cultural roots of immigrant students (in this example) without having to bend over backwards to change one's own to suit their notions of the world.
Asking otherwise is no less absurd than having an American attend a school in China and expect local teachers to communicate with him in English, using humor and anecdotes of an expressly American sort.
On the one hand, I agree. But on the other hand, I've run into actual issues in doing what I had said. So through experience I've learned it's better to take a different tactic.
I used to think that the Republican officials just put on a mask and perform kabuki for their Dear Leader. But the signalgate texts proved otherwise. This kind of thinking has penetrated deep into the party. It's not going away. Not with Vance.
The influence and dominance of conservative media is striking. They have sane-washed and explained away things that would have ended 10 other politicians careers. Trump is Asimovs "mule". His appeal to large groups of people is inexplicable. Vance is certainly NOT that. It's open question how much success the Mule's successor would have. Surely momentum and conservative media will carry him far (should that come to pass).
A curious thing about the very article you linked to is how it proved to be so wrong about this:
"Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. "
Now that he's in a second term whose winding course to fruition just about nobody could have easily predicted in early 2016, and totally dominates the Republican party, its base and most of its thinking, the above seems laughable.
Trump looks less like "The Mule" than ever today and even if he can't be replaced by anyone quite like him, he's put into motion normalizations of deviance that will reverberate through US politics for many years after he's out, either legally or through natural causes.
If you've ever waded into ragebaity online discussions, for example Europeans taunting Americans about the lack of public healthcare or basic worker rights, there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk.
Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency.
But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer.
I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China.
All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.
>there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.
The entire second part of your comment shores up exactly this notion that everyone else has the US to thank for its standard of living and that the country is exceptional.
Underlying all the things you list: the post-WWII order, the Pax Americana, the military hegemony, the position of the dollar as the World's reserve currency and so forth all underscore exactly the fact that the US is or at least has been exceptional and that the rest of the world has been heavily benefited by it.
That some of these people then took this and spun it into idiocy about cutting off "freeloaders" without being aware that this means having to take a hit to the country's exceptional position doesn't change the truth of the U.S being exceptional and many countries having many indirect benefits to thank it for
The post-WWII order was deliberately designed by clever American politicians who realised they could leverage the untouched industrial base and built-up military capability to become a world superpower, in an alliance with Western Europe. All of these policies were and are 100% America First, because the US has always been the primary benefactor of it all, but they've been marketed as some kind of benevolent altruistic goodwill-project that "leader of the free world" simply "has to do" because it's "the right thing".
Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.
Greedy or not, somebody was going to become the dominant and even hegemonic world power after that colossal war and the nation state dynamics that followed it. Would you have preferred that it be something like the then still Stalinist USSR, or later perhaps the deeply authoritarian (and under Mao batshit crazy on its internal policies) China?
Given the inevitable rise of at least one dominant power, I prefer that it was the United States with its generally benevolent democratic traditions to model off of (even if it itself often poorly applied them overseas)
People need to write their representatives. Volume of responses is what Congresscritters respond to.
Party doesn't matter. Ds need to inform their R Congresscritters every bit as much as any other combination.
For what it's worth, Republican constituents overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the R primary. Any number of candidates would have provided boilerplate Republican policies, but that wasn't what they wanted.
What Trump is doing is what these voters want.
And there's no limit. It's become an illiberal pro-authoritarian movement. It's in-progress.
Pick something you care about and defend it. It can't be everything all at once at all times, no one can do that.
What is the better path forward? Republican voters led by their representative Trump were unhappy about certain policies and events at Ivy league institutions. Voters have the right to feel this way and elect representatives to carry out their views even if this is not how you feel as a feature of democracy. Proxies of the representatives of the voters reached out to a few institutions requesting changes to be made or else face consequences. The institutions said "we are unwilling to make all of the changes that you would like to see because we think they are not reasonable". The administration's response is now to try and hurt these institutions (Harvard for now) by going after their pocketbook.
As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.
I really think you should take a step back and think about where this sort of ideology will take us in the long run. If you want to send the supporters of the other party to hell because they have differences of opinion than you, this is a step towards enabling horrible things to be done to people at scale.
I don't want a dictatorship. I probably want largely the same things as you. To be safe in and outside of my home. Affordable and quality food healthcare and education. The rule of law.
Fundamentally all people have most things in common with each other but our differences can seem magnified and exaggerated especially with things like social media and the 24 hour news hype cycle.
Please. They don’t care about higher education. These aren’t old-school white shoe Republicans. These are the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools. If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power.
I am one of "them" and I care deeply about higher education which is why I am very sad that we could not achieve reform without resorting to measures such as threatening the international student admission process. I don't know anything about the people teaching the “truth” about the 2020 election in Oklahoma public schools but if this is happening I agree with you it is very wrong.
"If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power."
I completely 100% disagree with this statement. My partner is an education at a University and remote learning had a huge negative impact on our schools and student outcomes. US academic achievement has been flat for decades despite spending and pupil rations going way up https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. Public schools in certain areas of the country are a complete failure for every student enrolled https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltim... (I choose an example of a left leaning area but obviously there are right leaning examples as well!)
Let me propose what I see as a couple of common sense reforms. Mandate the availability of pre-k nationwide starting at 4. Increase the school year from 180 days to 195 days by reducing the length of summer. If needed make this optional at first. Allow professors to fail students who have not learned the course material and make it illegal for the department to pressure professors to offer the students a way to pass the course.
In what way does this or anything else Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education towards the goals of the reform you are talking about?
I also don't think I claimed that "Trump has done or indicated to do advance the state of education". His administration has addressed grievances that I agree with but they have not introduced the positive reforms that I would support.
Oh I see - did you reply to the correct comment initially?
So far Trump's administration has seemed to address perceived grievances that they have with the university administration. In the comment you replied to I outlined some positive reforms that I would personally like to see as someone who cares deeply about education and wants to see a successful system. Trump's administration hasn't and probably won't make progress in this direction. In other words they are saying "don't do X" and aren't saying "Do Y". I approve of their progress on the former and think they are unlikely to make progress on the latter.
Btw, I am a University employee who serves (among other things) children affected by parents who abuse drugs.
My organization employs hundreds of people working on everything from low income nutrition education to researching Medicaid expenditure.
We belong to the University, but we don’t have anything to do with undergraduate education.
This is the problem with looking at higher-Ed ratios like that…there are a lot of good things happening at a University which don’t reduce to “teacher in classroom.”
I don't have first hand experience with your situation and I would imagine that you believe you are doing a great thing for society and I don't want to disparage thats so I don't intend my comments to speak to your specific institution or situation. I apologize if you see my comments this way.
---
Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.
I think where we agree is that we need to reduce the social costs of college, one way or another.
But we don’t agree on how that should happen.
The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.
We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.
US College enrollment peaked in 2012 and has been declining every since. It is projected based on demographics to continue declining. I'm not buying that a shortage of slots is responsible for the increased cost. This could be true at select institutions (e.g. Harvard like you mention) but I don't agree that the data supports the overall trend across the board.
Replace "Harvard" with "Trump University" in this conversation, and I believe many HN types would have a different opinion of the policies. The argument is, if educational institutions can't be ideologically neutral, why should they get the benefit from grants, tax free endowments, and a tax funded international customer acquisition pipeline? Especially as they become outrageously expensive debt traps, with worse ROIs.
I don't agree with this international student, and other policies, or implementations, and you can't run government like you run a "move fast and break things" startup, which seems to be how the administration is operating.
But, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and try to separate Trump's execution from the underlying ideological sentiment.
Harvard is a systematically racist institution. They even went to the Supreme Court to fight for the right to discriminate against white and Asian students.
Republicans and Trump-voting independents signed up for this. They want to see Harvard treated the same way it treats others.
Most the universities will do the thing asked in order to re-instate their student visa certification. i.e. provide intel needed to deport any students that they believe have opinions that are not in the interest of national security.
Most likely Harvard will try to fight it in court and then give in if they lose. It's not likely we see the future decertification continue into the academic year.
This is the country of free speech zones away from the main event in the early 2000s and sending WWI dissenters to jail in 1914. You’ve long pretended to have freedoms you’ve never actually been given and this is hardly new.
More like those freedoms get violated on occasion in the name of national security, because administrations are largely able to get away with it during certain crisis.
Can they really do this? You're telling me this is real and not one of those "just for show" things that have no real teeth and will eventually get overturned by a judge?
I mean Harvard will fight back in court. The courts are last bastion. Once the executive branch stops following what the courts order the checks and balances are gone.
Lol Rubio told Xinis on national TV he was intentionally stonewalling any information to her, and she took it like a bitch and just kept rolling with keeping most their 'secrets' under seal (despite earlier talking big game of exposing them to sunlight).
The courts aren't even trying, they could order someone into contempt, but they won't.
We are in a non-constitutional crazy train territory, which will continue unless the right leaning voters do something about it at mid-terms. We're in the beginning of a very dangerous era.
They're not going to do anything about it. This is what they voted for. They thrive on our fear and anger. This is their revenge for the perceived wrongs of the Obama and Biden administrations.
By that logic, Trump's orders are just words. The Trump administration obeys the courts - they push the envelope way too far, but it is still rule of law.
That is happening, but it's a narrow instance. It doesn't mean there aren't serious issues, but the GGP said, "Checks and balances are just words." Obviously that is not true.
Also, Trump is relying on Congress to pass bills, for example. It's not rule by decree.
That's one person. While it's very important, it doesn't at all mean the courts don't exit.
> order from the Supreme Court to return him.
The Supreme Court did not order that.
Edit: If you object to these things, realize you are helping the Trump administration by spreading exaggerated fears about what's happening. They want people to believe they are super-powerful, unstoppable, inevitable; it intimidates people into inaction. Also, without accurate information, people can't make good decisions and act - you are helping a propaganda campaign (unwittingly). And finally, spreading fear is not what good, responsible leaders - or teammates - do.
We have multiple judges beginning contempt proceedings against the administration, so this is open to debate.
And, there's recent action in the budget bill to attempt to defang judges' contempt powers, seemingly in response.
"No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued"
Will the people who had to transfer or leave be made whole? Even if a judge overturns this it will take time that the students impacted by this will have to pay, regardless of outcome.
Absolutely they have explicit powers to do this. Harvard is refusing to comply with the requirements of the visa program that allows them to bring student into the country so the administration is removing Harvard from the program.
There is little to no chance of this getting overturned.
Great question, right to the heart of the matter. First higher learning, somewhere down the line, ordinary people? In my small world, I'm very clear I'm anti-trump on every issue. As an ordinary person, how long before I get on some Stalin type radar? If trump lobbies for and gets a third term, will there be an awakening to how far the abuse will go?
I expect some government AI will soon be trawling through the databases of every social media network and assembling a political profile of every US resident. (They’re already starting to do this for tourists and visitors: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2479045-us-government-i...)
Seems most universities don't really care as long as the money keeps flowing. They jumped quickly on the DEI bandwagon and they will quickly hop off too.
Is it is really Trump holding a 'box cutter' to America's throat, or is it a 'controlled demolition' of an "empire" that presents obstacles for a grand plan for the future of global governance ..
[p.s. bravo to the one who downvoted as soon as I hit submit! Wow, that was quick. Bots on HN?]
Dodged a huge bullet coming to Europe instead of the US. Was considering moving there for work/startup but at this point, I'd literally rather go to China
So now the Presidency is punishing institutions that refuse to create and share spy-dossiers on what their adult students are using their free-speech for.
In the last three months, we've collected many data points which are each each further down a slope. I suggest the slope is slippery, and has a very unfortunate end.
__________
[Edit] Predicting a future that might resonate more with YC folks: "Pursuant to Trump Executive Order XYZ, you must submit regular firewall logs and social-media handles for activity by your staff. Failure to comply will result in losing the ability to post H1-B positions."
It’s so painful to hear HackerNews talk about visas. It’s pathetic how little people know about the system despite it running a large chunk of the tech industry.
DHS said that in addition to barring enrollment of future international students, “existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
damn, Trump is really gunning for Harvard
not sure what rolling over for Trump looks like, but a lot of existing foreign students will be screwed unless something gives
Don’t miss this bit. Currently enrolled students are going to need to find a new university.
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
> A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S.
That's a real issue. If you're on a student visa, and were planning on coming back in the fall, leaving the US for the summer may be a bad move. Entry to the US can be denied arbitrarily. Deporting someone is harder.
They've got a deportation order, so somebody is being put on a plane to El Salvador. Whether the name of the person being deported matches the name on the deportation order is another question, but not one ICE seems bothered by anymore
Sure, I was locked up by DHS/immigration, and I am a US citizen. CBP/ICE/HSI doesn't really need much of anything to lock you up, when they did it to me they told me I wasn't even under arrest.
IANAL but there are different categories like "detained" [reasonable suspicion, for questioning] and "arrested" [probable cause], and that's why the common advice is to just ask "am I free to go", which doesn't get bogged-down on finer-grained distinctions about why you might no be.
This is not the same issue. Judges can be fast, but not that fast. Both the decision and this action against Harvard happened within an hour of eachother.
It is not, but it isn't unrelated; this is about the individual actions for which Harvard's refusal to assist by proactively supplying information is the basis for the action against Harvard.
There were many recent instances of even long term US permanent residents being sent to immigration detention centers. Maybe El Salvador gulag is an exaggeration, but being sent to a squalid prison is a very real possibility. Here's one from yesterday [1]. What's preventing them from doing the same to a student?
Also, most people affected by this will not be the son/daughter of the president of a foreign country or a billionaire.
> Instead of hastening to correct its egregious error, the
Government dismissed it as an “oversight.”
> The
order properly requires the Government to “facilitate”
Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to
ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had
he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
> International students are on the Meng Wanzhou end of things.
The vast majority of them (of which there are over a million) don't have a Wikipedia page, nor are they "Deputy chairwoman and CFO" of a company as big as Huawei.
Rumeysa Ozturk sat in jail for six weeks for writing an op-ed. I assure you, there are plenty of international students you can mistreat without causing a major diplomatic incident.
> They sent a Salvadoran who nobody cared about to El Salvador.
They sent a lot of people, mostly not Salvadoran, to El Salvador [0] without due process, the one Salvadoran just gets covered more in the news because, as well as the issues applicable to the others, he had a existing court order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador specifically.
[0] And they've done or attempted to do that to Libya, South Sudan, and other third countries to whom the deported have no connection, as well.
With population outgrowing our capped judiciary, making access to courts increasingly pay to play, this means even less accountability for the executive branch.
I don't think this decision can force the Department of State to issue new visas for Havard students unfortunately. At least existing students *might* be alright...
If Republicans believe they will never lose the Senate, they can easily bypass the filibuster without 60 votes. To date, the adults in the room prevented either party from doing this for short term wins, but a) there are no adults in the room and b) it’s arguable the Senate will never again have a non-Republican majority (demographically, not a conspiracy theory).
I remember the same was said when GOP lost horribly in 2008 and Dems rode Obama’s coattails. The GOP was supposed to never recover. Demographically they were in a significant minority. Then they hatched REDMAP…
And thus it can only be used to pass legislation that impacts the federal budget according to the reconciliation rules. I don't see how the house putting in a provision that doesn't impact the budget but strips judges of a power could fly with the reconciliation rules. But I'm not a lawyer or legislative rules expert
The Republicans already ignored the parliamentarian ruling they couldn't use reconciliation to prevent California from setting a combustion engine sunset date.
Which isn’t at all how PhD programs work. This is a supreme dick move to students are going to be forced to leave with an AbD for no other reason than Trumps ego.
This is going to burn the children of the most powerful families across the world. Monarchies, dictators, owners of international conglomerates, etc all send their kids to Harvard. Destroying their children’s education out of a fit of malice is going to haunt him, and America on top of all the other stuff America is doing to the world.
It's not about the percentage of Harvard international students who fall into this category, it's about the percentage of students in this category who go to Harvard.
A lot? Those institutions only accept a relatively small total number of foreign students. Everyone else has to "settle for less" whether they want to or not.
I dont see why that is ever considered a problem. They are literally a private institution selling a service. Why shouldn't you be able to pay your way to the front of the line.
It's fine as long as they're open about it. It's when they say "We're a very selective institution that only accepts the academic best of the best from the entire world" and then also allow pay to play, clarifying "Also the people whose parents donated us buildings juuuuust so happen to be the academic best of the best from the the entire world" that people start to question just how selective admission really is, and just how world-class their student body and standards really are.
If they kept stats on who was an endowment/legacy admit and gave them a different colored diploma so people could filter them out when assessing things like grades and graduation rate and they didn't effect the curve I think there would be less criticism of the process.
I dont see why they would get different diplomas provided they complete the same coursework. If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.
I do think they would be more upfront about options for entry.
MIT, really? I think of MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career, not for old-money people looking to make family connections.
> MIT as being high prestige mostly for people that actually want a science or tech-related career...
Apparently you've not been to MIT in a while - it offers degrees in business management, finance, plus 17 in arts, humanities, and social sciences, not to mention grad programs. MIT admits more than its fair share of fruit-cakes with money:
I used that example because it’s my family. My mom’s family’s landholdings have grown in value as our capital city grows, so my aunts and uncles are selling plots and buying houses in California in cash. This is after distributing my grandfather’s estate among a dozen kids. From a country where the per-capita GDP is $2,400 per year. How do you think that happened? This background is table stakes for being part of the 0.1% that has the means to emigrate out of these countries and send their kids to elite American schools.
I don’t think my family was involved in corruption. But they are part of a landed gentry class that cooperated with the British colonial administration. My mom’s surname is an honorific reserved for people in a high position within a rigid class hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begum
But yes, I think that, in the aggregate, it’s not good to have a large number of people like me injected straight into America’s major institutions. We dilute what I think is a core american value against elitism and hierarchy. And our presence gives our home grown elite permission to drop certain beneficial safeguards on their behavior, such as the WASP taboo against conspicuous consumption. This is highly visible in Northern Virginia where I grew up. It was always full of elites, but now it’s full of elites that don’t feel pressured to keep a low profile and at least pretend they’re not elites.
Please don't cross into name-calling or personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before and your account has unfortunately been continuing to break the rules pretty badly.
I didn’t say France, did I? I’m talking about africa, the middle east, much of asia, and parts of eastern europe. E.g.., maybe not Poland, but probably Russia.
There are a lot of ways to group countries and form a majority of the global population. You left it open to interpretation.
It’s still unclear to me why Africa, the Middle East, much (which part?) of Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe are uniquely capable of political corruption that France and Poland are not.
I remember when you claimed the APA didn't apply to this. At least now you don't bother to defend based on legality and are cool with forcing your 'totally not corrupt' single totalitarian viewpoint on the country in order to counter... corrupt totalitarianism.
Get rid of Harvard and the person you mentioned would just... go somewhere else. You aren't actually advocated FOR anything, just saying 'there are bad people in the world'. Um, ok, yeah, we know that. That's why we disagree with you empowering those we see as bad people but that you defend illegally empowering/illegal behavior of because you happen to agree with them.
The APA doesn’t apply to this—issuing visas as a discretionary function of the executive, and thus unreviewable under section 701(a)(2). Where am I being inconsistent?
Have any of the challenges to the administration prevailed on APA grounds in an appellate court?
Lawyers rely on appellate court decisions to understand what the law actually is or isn’t. District court orders granting TROs don’t even include meaningful legal reasoning. Lots of these are being overturned. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/22/nx-s1-5407923/voa-voice-of-am....
The Supreme Court stands ready to overturn Humphreys Executor. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl.... The prospect of the Supreme Court upholding using the APA to challenge direct presidential action is nil. Courts aren’t empowered to micromanage discretionary presidential actions.
The cases where appellate courts have upheld injunctions against the administration have been mainly on due process and first amendment groups. Courts are empowered to protect individual rights from executive action.
As a percentage of -students- yes but as a percentage of world power children? That’s a much smaller cohort, and is the cohort that matters in this context.
Or maybe he could care less, but doesn't even bother to care less because caring less would exert effort and he doesn't care enough to exert any effort.
"Could care less" used as a snarky response makes sense, as in, "I could care less, but I don't want to put in the effort." Using that phrase without a sarcastic intonation is still incorrect.
Could care less meaning couldn't care less. It's the same thing as how literally has come to be used with the meaning of figuratively. If you look up "could care less" in the OED you'll find it lists it under American English with the meaning "could not care less."
You probably will be able to soon though, and it 'only' costs $5m: "A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms" [0]
I couldn't blame you for not having seen this though. It was quickly flagged and never whitelisted; like so, so many other important stories here this past few months. Check my favorites for more falsely flagged stories.
They could easily get an E2 entrepreneur visa, and the necessary cash is as little as $300k, most of which can be withdrawn later, so it's effectively a free citizenship as long as you have cash.
I don't have to! Because I didn't bring the argument into the conversation.
Burden of proof [1] should be a required reading before posting on this site.
Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas you mention, which are indeed the closest thing to this idea, come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
It is a fantasy, whether you all like it or not. Life is not a James Bond movie.
> Burden of proof [1] should be a required reading before posting on this site.
Ironic, then, that you don't understand it. You've confused "Burden of proof" with "Burden of imagining an argument for someone else who was too lazy to actually make one."
Let's try that out: "If you disagree with me, you are wrong and insane, because of reasons that you will have to find for yourself. Insert evil cackle here."
> Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas [...] come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
Oh my, look! A golden opportunity for you to show off your honest commitment to (real) Burden of Proof.
Yes, share with us these unnamed "additional requirements" you claim exist. (Hopefully not inside an invisible dragon in your garage.)
Since you assert they are not subject to corrupt presidential whims and waivers, that must mean they are federal statute, in which case linking to them should be a breeze.
Nobody even asked you to "prove" something, you were only asked to give an actual argument instead of a flat denial. Stop pretending like you're some kind of victim of unreasonable requests.
> Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas [...] come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
The students absolutely are. Up until now the law applies to everyone. Now, their applications were probably rapidly approved unlike many international students. But there’s no carve out for being powerful (yet).
Nobody said “evil.” But do you think it’s a good thing for ordinary americans to have the children of chaebols owners rubbing shoulders with the children of Fortune 500s CEOs?
I don’t think there’s anything “liberal” about facilitating the a borderless global elite. People can say whatever they want; Americans don’t need to issue everyone visas to come say things in person. The internet exists.
I actually think indoctrinating their children in western human liberalism -is- a feature. But whether it’s a feature or a flaw, it’s an aspect of having the best brand on earth that those with the most money aspire to it. If you’re in an African country Harvard degrees are extremely prestigious, more so than in America, so the drive to attain it is even greater - even if it’s largely limited to the wealthy. But not entirely - Harvard is need blind and pays 100% of the way for many international students. You are either there because you’re exceptional or exceptionally rich.
The culture that prevails at Harvard isn’t Americanism. It’s elitist managerialism and liberal internationalism. It’s an ideology that children of foreign elites can easily assimilate into, because they come from cultures where better people rule over “the masses.” (Remember, aristocrats think that their status is a kind of meritocracy.) Actual Brahmins assimilate easily into Boston Brahminism.
What defines Americanism is a quote I love attributed to Bill Buckley:
> I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Remember that Buckley was as close as it gets to being an american aristocrat. But the sentiment reflects an american tradition where people in elite positions are expected to, at least outwardly, express embarrassment or skepticism about their own status. America a country of yeoman farmers.
By that logic slavery should have been abolished by the reeducated elite in the middle east years ago. The education does nothing but provide connections.
Wait what? Outside of ISIS and groups like that there is no slavery legal in any country. Kafala isn’t actually slavery, despite its abuses. And middle eastern countries have become substantial more liberal humanist during the last 50 years which is assuredly a result of cultural exchange. King Abdullah II in Jordan, Malik Dalan, Osama El-Baz, etc the list of active reformers that are Harvard alum and power brokers in Arabic counties is long. Longer still are the people who don’t get headlines for liberal reform but push the society leftward year over year. Even hard core counties like Saudi Arabia are significantly more open and liberal than they were 50 years ago.
not really up to date with reality are we? there are tons of "permanently employed illegals" with dubious chances of payment . Half the fighting done in libya, sudan, yemen is done by refugees pressured into service.
You're very wrong if you think harvard accepts children of dictators and monarchies for its graduate programs. It's near impossible to get into those program except if you are a genius (exceptionally high GPA and GRE grades, published valuable scientific papers in prestigious journals). Just check the graduate student's directory to see what I mean.
I don't get how DHS has control over what universities foreign students can attend. Either than can attend school in the US or not. Saying they have to transfer from Harvard to another American university is total abuse of power. Surely there are lawsuits in the works over this.
i'd guess this kind of thing (per-institutional authorization to allow international students) was intended to provide the government a way to revoke that right from "sham" institutions (wonder if Trump University ever had international students?) or ones that otherwise were obviously trying to facilitate students skirting or abusing immigration law.
not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah) but it's pretty clear we're currently dealing with a regime that's willing to use ambiguous regulations in malicious ways (no comment on previous regimes, they're all bad, don't call me a HN Democrat or whatever).
It seems that the amount of fences is growing up exponentially. To the point that we are all corralled. Not so long time ago people could move from country to country relatively freely. Now it is a fucking tragedy
>Not so long time ago people could move from country to country relatively freely
The well-off rich and upper middle-class could move from country to country relatively freely, or immigrants who intended not to look back. Which puts a strong pressure on self-selection on the type of people coming into a country.
That time isn't now, with cheap airfares and the internet, it's much more easier for anyone to come in, often with no intention of integration and bringing their own sectarian politics in. When the time comes, how many of these immigrants do you think will fight for their host country? Especially if said host country make likely come into conflict with their homelands.
>"When the time comes, how many of these immigrants do you think will fight for their host country? Especially if said host country make likely come into conflict with their homelands."
Same arguments were just as valid 100-200 years ago where virtually anyone could move anywhere.
> not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah)
Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.
That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle
The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years, during which time many of our ancestors came here. The only reason we had any immigration laws to begin with was racism against Chinese people. Now we are making up other excuses for it, based on no evidence whatsoever.
> The US had no immigration laws for the first 100 years,
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship by naturalisation to “free white persons” of “good moral character” - yes, it didn’t technically bar immigration from people who didn’t meet that criterion, but it reduced them to an underclass who were denied citizenship - and this was prior to the 14th Amendment, so there was no constitutional right to birthright citizenship even for their children born in the US.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (still on the books but long dormant until recently revived by Trump) gave the federal government the power to deport citizens of countries at war with the US - effectively banning them from immigrating. The Alien Friends Act of 1798 allowed the President to deport any foreigner based on the President’s subjective determination that they were “dangerous”- however, it expired in 1800 and was not renewed.
In the early years of US independence, there were state laws enabling deportation of immigrants - e.g. in 1794 Massachusetts responded to the “problem” of poor Irish immigrants with a state law authorising their deportation back to Ireland, and several were actually deported under this Act. While nowadays, state-level deportation laws would surely be struck down as intruding into an exclusive federal domain, the lack of broad federal deportation statutes for much of the 18th/19th centuries left open a (since closed) constitutional space in which state-level deportation laws could exist
Even prior to US independence, British law gave the colonial authorities the power to deport people they viewed as undesirable - rarely exercised, but it legally existed - and the main reason they rarely exercised it was they didn’t get many “undesirable” immigrants turning up
Note I’m not defending these laws - judged by today’s standards they were racist and deeply unfair - just pointing out that the “first 100 years” of the US wasn’t as “open borders” as you paint it as having been
And while no doubt historically (and even today) many immigration laws have been racist in their terms, motivation, or implementation - I don’t think the idea of having some restrictions on immigration is inherently racist. Almost every country on earth (even non-Western) nowadays has laws saying people convicted of very serious crimes cannot immigrate without special permission - is it “racist” if Botswana says to someone just released from serving a 20 year prison sentence for terrorism “sorry, we don’t want you”?
Even in the Pre-Industrial Age, Obvious differences existed between class hierarchy or ethnicities. When an Empire does not specifically identify with one or two ethnicities, most societies have always been wary of foreigners by calling them "Barbarians". Chichimecas, Mongols, Non-Greeks, Non-Han Chinese, etc.
The F/J exhange visa is tied to a specific sponsor (ie the University) for a very specific goal. There are a lot of restrictions on what you can and can't do. If your visa sponsor has its privilege revoked then presumably you have a choice to transfer to a different institute, if one will take you, or leave the country.
There is a mechanism for that transfer built into the visa, which could be used for example if your professor moved institutions and wanted to re-hire you to fulfil the original goals of your exchange program.
It's unclear if this affects all foreign academic staff, many of whom who would be on the J, or just the F visa.
They're afraid of losing to a primary challenger if they break with Trump. It used to be a Trump endorsement would hurt your campaign. Now a Trump critique is believed to be a scarlet letter. He's got a lock on the racist zealots that make up the most consistent voting bloc in the GOP.
They (the current administration) doesn't want to be competitive. They want to be in full control and willing to destroy any institution, organization or person that opposes them, internal or external.
Trump won because those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream. If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power… they view the Democrats as out of touch. It is the equivalent of Let Them Eat Cake or brioche.
And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant.
Republicans are the ones bringing up gender, trans issues etc into discussion again and again. Not democrats.
> They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream.
No, because vote for Trump and republicans is vote for higher prices, more expensive healthcare and tax cuts for rich. Every single time. This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal. Republicans will lie, fox news will like and media will both side it.
> And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Women are working class and struggling. And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ... and democrats were not running on dei.
> Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant
That explains why people voted for Trump. That doesn't explain why people didn't vote for Harris.
> This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal.
1. Republican voters either want to destroy the working class, or are detached from reality and believe the lies from Fox News.
2. Maybe it's not about what the Democrats signal. But let's pause for a second: what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
> And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ...
What do you mean? Trump said grocery prices would drop on day 1! He said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1! And the war in Gaza too! He said he would bring jobs back to America!
The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class. Of course, it was all a lie, but it doesn't matter if your voters just believe anything you say.
> That explains why people voted for Trump. That doesn't explain why people didn't vote for Harris.
Harris does not provide what project 2025 calls for. She would not own the libs either.
> what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good". They were not talking about DEI, women in general nor about minorities as OP suggests.
> The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class.
And all those concerns stopped mattering the day after - both to the voters and to the party too. Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that. These are pretend concerns. Something republican votes can pretend they care about when democrats are in power. Something that does not matter when republicans are in power. Something they will call "bad" during democrat governments regardless of how things really are and something they never blame republican government for.
You can add debt to it too. Deficit matters only when democrats are in power. It does not matter when republicans are in power.
It is and never was about any of that. It is primary about identity and secondary about cultural war. Economy and everything else is far far behind these.
---------------
Pretending this is about economy, pretending that trying to make these voters life better would get you vote is how democrats are loosing. Even when they succeed, those voters punish them, because it was never ever about that.
> Harris does not provide what project 2025 calls for. She would not own the libs either.
So we should vote for Harris because she isn't Trump? What's wrong with Trump though? We already had him for 4 years, and the country didn't explode. Trump also has nothing to do with Project 2025, he said so himself.
> They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good".
Right, but how will the Dems "make the economy good"? Look at California, people are fleeing in droves, crime rate is through the roof, Dems are just as corrupt as everyone else! Trump is right, we need to be tough on crime and deport the people destroying our country.
> Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that.
Again, it's not like the Democrats really did all that great either. I never really saw them push for universal healthcare. Student loan forgiveness was cool, but just a way to saddle the country with more debt without solving the real problem (and Trump rolled it back anyways).
---------------
Ok, I don't actually believe these things anymore. But the problem is: I did believe some of these things before the election. I apologize for my stupidity, though at least I can say I was not directly responsible since while I live in the US, I don't have voting rights.
> Right, but how will the Dems "make the economy good"? Look at California
The fourth largest economy in the world—is that what you want us to look at and then ask how the Democrats will make the economy good? Gee, I wonder where they'd find an answer for that stumper.
True, but I wrote it off as the work of the tech bros, and I didn't see how that could be replicated in other states (e.g. New York's economy didn't grow at the same rate).
It's not the politicians' jobs to start the companies, it's their job to create an environment that companies can start and thrive in. I don't think you could argue that it didn't happen in California.
Yup, agreed. My earlier reply was my previous uninformed opinion and I no longer hold that opinion strongly. Though I also don't hold any other strong opinions on current California governance as I haven't been paying close attention and I've previously been fooled by some of the media messaging about high crime rates.
Another issue that I've been trying to understand are the delays and budget overruns in the high-speed rail project. Some people argue it was NIMBYs but isn't governance responsible for making sure NIMBYs don't become a major problem? My current understanding is that it was partially due to valid safety & environmental concerns, and partially the project looked simple but turned out to involve very complicated/hard engineering work. It's just very difficult to sell people on this argument... Glad to hear any insights, or links/books.
But you can ask if it happened because of California's political environment,
or despite it. Could a version of California with high speed rail, more public transportation, ample housing, less corrupt politicians, no homeless problem, an encouraging business environment be more or less prosperous than the California we have today?
> But you can ask if it happened because of California's political environment, or despite it.
You can ask that, and it's a good question, but it's a much harder case to make in a political ad. "Sure, the Californian economy is enormous, but it would have been bigger if someone else was in charge!" isn't an easy case to make.
You're right, that doesn't fit into a convenient soundbyte, but I will mention that San Francisco's current mayor was elected partially on the back of a tough on homeless(ness) stance.
california is 2 rich guys , it could have been 3.
People voted for trump, because he is incompetent enough to bring the machine that is openly working against them to an end. They do not want a life support for the monster that eats them.
Trump is literally making the project 2025 happen. It was no secret before election and it was no secret he is going to do it. Amd people saying so were very literally correct and right.
Second, no. Republicans are massively more corrupt. Trump himself went from a guy who had debts to a rich guy due to his first term corruption. The goverment and its positions are quite literally openly on sale right now.
Trump and republicans are not tough on crime, they are heavily involved in crime. They are also ok woth cops breaking the law which makes crimes worst. And makes cops into criminals. Oh, and they are against law enforcement in taxes and such.
Democrats actually did much better then republican on healthcare while repuocans systematically opposed it. Every single time.
I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
The reason I didn't believe Project 2025 would happen was because Trump was much more moderate during his first term. I foolishly ignored all the signs that Trump was actually an unhinged madman and that the country only survived because his administration reigned him in.
So yes, I know the Republicans are massively more corrupt. But the Dems contributed to normalizing corruption in government. When you point at obvious corruption in the Republican party, and then they respond by pointing out obvious corruption in the Democratic party, and then you resort to saying stuff like: "sure we have corruption, just less of it and you have more of it", you have lost.
Universal healthcare: if it was such a partisan issue, then the problem would be easy to fix, no? Dems pass universal healthcare in blue states. Republicans see how good it is and get jealous. So why isn't it happening?
> I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
Prop 47 was dragged through the mud on basically every major new outlet (although TBF, nearly every major new outlet is right-leaning). Same for the homeowner's insurance market.
Yes, this is what I mean by not taking responsibility for their beliefs. They can't just admit they like Trump because of doing things like illegal impoundment or trying to get Harvard to install conservative commissars. It's always about the Democrats forcing them to vote for fascists. I doubt the people saying this on Hacker News and political boards are ever working class, either.
You’ve got a severe case of TDS. I voted for Trump. I did it in 2016 and 2020 and 2024. And you don’t know anything about me.
You like to cry “fascism! Fascism!” while you turn a blind eye to ‘Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’, to the deterioration of the economy, and to the social cohesion of the US at large. To be so blinded by your rage that you can’t look past Trump’s demeanor and actually look at his performance tells me you’re out of touch. If the egg prices aren’t concerning you, then you are in no place to talk about what is motivating commonfolk who voted for trump. By the way, this all started because elites like Hillary openly showed contempt for working class folk with her “basket of diplorables” statements. I voted for Trump because he represents my interests. Maybe if the left didn’t hate me for being a cis white male, I wouldn’t be so inclined to vote for him out of spite. But make no mistake, you’re not in the party of love and acceptance just because you voted for the other guy. You very much have a lot of hate in your heart. And if you feel like punching my face right now, just know that you are everything you claim to hate so much.
> "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
> "But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Why, isn't that exactly the opposite meaning of how you summarized it? She literally said that these disappointed working class people who support Trump are not deplorable!
After the election, Diane Hessan, who had been hired by the Clinton campaign to track undecided voters, wrote in The Boston Globe that "all hell broke loose" after the "basket of deplorables" comment, which prompted what she saw as the largest shift of undecided voters towards Trump.[40] Political scientist Charles Murray said, in a post-election interview with Sam Harris, that because the comment helped get Donald Trump elected, it had "changed the history of the world, and he [Haidt] may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans".
> those in control of the Democratic Party underestimated the anger and economic desperation of the working class.
They don't care. Why would they?
The worse Republicans act, the more Democrat leaders are happy to present themselves as the only 'sane' alternative.
That 'sanity' now includes arming genocide, campaigning with Dick Cheney, removing being 'anti-torture' from their platforms, etc. Very little media holds them to account on any of this.
The people who fund (read: own) the Democrats and the media are a higher priority to politicians than their actual voter base. That has been made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention: just look at Gaza, healthcare, environmental protection, fracking, or any number of issues where the majority of Americans want progress while <5% of Dem politicians actually fight for them.
Again, Gaza made this wildly clear: Even though 77% of Dem voters wanted an arms embargo, and >30% of 2020 Biden voters in swing states were loudly saying that arming genocide was probably a red line as far as getting their vote, Harris decided that bombing children was more important than winning the election. And the rest of the party leadership supported this, again, against the will of the vast majority of their voters.
I do not see Republicans slowing down what is going on in Gaza ... instead it is becoming more violent and unrestricted. Like common ... if democrats said anything against israel politics, they would be called anti-semitic, would be hit by easy campaign and would lose more votes.
There are actual big differences in terms of how those two parties behaves. Saying anything else is just lie.
Supposed economic desperation vote rejected economy that was doing good. They do not want better cheaper healthcare nor functioning economy. They want republican program, they just hoped it will be only other people who will be harmed.
Between Trump and Harris, Trump was obviously a much worse choice for Gaza. Anyone equivocating the distinction between them doesn't care about Gaza at all and is functioning entirely within the realm of performative activism.
There is nothing 'performative' about refusing to vote for a candidate who promises to arm a genocidal regime currently doing a live-streamed holocaust. That's just your basic bare-minimum moral and legal duty as a human.
The fact that such an assertion is a tolerated talking point in US society is absolutely damning.
Israel was going to be armed either way, this is decades long u.s. policy and nobody was going to change that.
The choice was between a liberal candidate that's at least nominally interested in good outcomes for Gaza and a candidate that's openly hostile to Gaza, the same candidate that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and enacted a total ban on Muslim immigrants in the u.s.
Now, Trump is openly proposing ethnic cleansing so he can build hotels in Gaza. People who equivocate on lesser-of-two-evils are those who simply don't care about real outcomes.
> If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power
If you didn't pay any attention to the last campaign, just say so. It was not the Democrats who spent a billion dollars running a campaign on identity politics. This attempted retconning something that millions of people were forced to sit through is embarrassing, and you should absolutely feel bad.
> The Democrats refusing to admit the economy was terrible for working people was enough.
That's a fine topic for a real conversation, but it was 100% not what the person I replied to was talking about.
> Of course it will be worse now.
Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
> "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true
It doesn't matter if it is true, when it isn't really benefitting your average person in any meaningful way
> "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
You have to understand that the lie Trump is telling isn't "I'll make the economy better", it is "I am going to make it so you, a person, has more money and can afford things you want to buy"
Average People don't care about "the economy" they care about their bank accounts and their ability to buy and own things they want to buy
Trump makes empty promises that he will make people's actual lives better in ways that matter to them
The Democrats make empty promises that they will make "society" better, whatever that means.
But I don't really believe that many of the problems in society can be improved by the government from the top down
Some can, like access to healthcare and regulations and such
But most problems in society today imo are caused by trying to offload social responsibility to the government and corporations rather than people living in their communities
> Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
Yes, unfortunately, because an incumbent has to run against the state of the world during the election cycle, and their opponent gets to run against it. And yes, Trump created the terrible economy that Biden inherited. But it doesn't matter. Kamala and her campaign should've realized that early and switched course.
I agree, it was very annoying hearing how great the economy was doing when inflation and just the general cost of living rose significantly starting with covid and when anyone tried to have a talk about that a lot of people would just parrot how great the economy was doing and everyone they knew was doing fine. thats great for you but that doesnt mean what your experiencing is what a lot of other people are.
I tolerate my normie family saying it, but it grates on me because of how many of the constituencies have switched sides by now. For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party, while nowadays the fascists seem to really loathe that class stratum.
"For instance, educated professionals were a major base for the original Nazi Party."
Thats not entirely true. While there were definitely many people in education who supported the nazi party there were still quite a few in the education field during the beginning of Hitlers power who were not and many fled to other countries starting around 1933. https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/Online/5299/The-scientific.... it was why albert einstein spent a great deal of time in the US.
Through laws they shaped and molded the education to be inline with nazi ideology and only those who towed the line were allowed to continue to teach/study. heres a small article from the US Congress (shocked its still up) that discusses higher education in germany during nazi occupation. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116973/documents/...
Basically if you disagreed with the nazi party you were fired/expelled in the beginning and later sent to camps. the entire point of studying history is so we dont repeat it and just looking at the amount of US universities bending to the republican parties ideals on what they believe is scarily similar to early nazi germany.
I dont get how people dont understand that the strength of the US for the longest time has been our diversity; especially in education. hell, after world war 2 we actively recurited many nazi scientist to help us with the space program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip many would argue it is the reason why we beat the soviet union to the moon. the harm that is slowly being done to this country will take decades to repair if it can be and i dont believe that is being hyperbolic
Not really. The nazis party had the same rethoric. Of course they recruited business leaders etc despite that. Just like people like Elon are part of the MAGA movement.
> Why would it be condescending to remind people actions have consequences?
I think yes, explicitly. I think every person on planet Earth is aware actions have consequences. That's never been a debate. The debate is always what consequences have come from what actions, and to what extent.
Yeah, and my grandmother lived under Nazi Germany, although she was a supporter and not put in any camps. Call me an elitist all you want, I don't care.
I'd be fine with banning political discussion altogether on this site, but until that happens, I'm not going to self-censor as others confidently let their opinions be known.
Banning political discussion was briefly tried here, nearly a decade ago. It failed, but it did reveal (or, remind) that there's no way to get a community like HN to agree on where the line should be between "politics" and "everything else", and that indeed that very question is itself political. So, there will be no more attempts to ban political discussion here. There will just be continued emphasis on the guideline that only stories that contain "significant new information" are considered worthy of discussion on HN.
But we do ask you and everyone to heed the guidelines, particularly these ones:
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Please don't comment like this on Hacker News, no matter what you're replying to. In discussions like this we need everyone to pay extra attention to the guidelines, particularly these ones:
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Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Marxism is when ultra-capitalist slightly right leaning politicians make boring policies to further enrich the American capitalist class. Oh and also some token "woke" stuff that doesn't really help anyone but I guess doesn't make anything worse either.
There's not a single Marxist in American politics at any level of power that matters. We have two neo-liberal parties that are both right leaning. One is ultra-right and one is ever so slightly right leaning.
> In what world is a party advocating for universal healthcare, free college, and expanded immigration "slightly right?"
1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
> 1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
They were literally in Biden's platform. If Biden didn't stand for "most of the party" IDK what to tell you.
> 2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures (living space, degree attainment, etc.) Many of them have private healthcare systems and require students to pay for college.
> 3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
Uh, no. Universal healthcare and free college were not in the platform. Expanding the ACA and programs like Medicaid is not universal healthcare. There are almost zero politicians currently advocating we completely abolish private insurers. In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
> Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures
And the US also loses on many important quality-of-life measurements. For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
> Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
To this day, the ACA is still a common punching bag for a variety of politicians and constituents.
Ultimately, the democrats are trying to win over moderate and on-the-fence voters. That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
> There are almost zero politicians currently advocating we completely abolish private insurers.
This is not universal healthcare either, and many countries achieve universal coverage without single-payer. I would encourage you to look this up.
> In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
Dude, seriously? Biden proposed free college for families making less than $125k/yr. I'm not gonna shadow box with you, this stuff was literally written down.
You are making an excellent point about the informedness of the average voter, here.
> For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
Obesity, for the outcomes. The price is good old-fashioned regulatory capture :)
> My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
Healthcare is a full FIFTH of all economic activity in the US. The ACA was stuffed full of compromises and carve-outs to get those people on board. There's no faceless villain here, there were plenty of people with skin in the game if you're looking to blame someone.
> That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
If Bernie Sanders cannot even win with Democrats in the primary process, he would be smoked in the general election. That's basic numeracy. And no, the party did not railroad him - he was actually just not very popular outside of college students. The US is further right than Europe or whatever other "true left" place you want to name, and our politics reflect that.
were the banks nationalized? All capital over 1 million seized and redistributed? Private property collectivized? Abandoned properties commandeered for the homeless by the state? I must have missed it.
What's "communism" now? The public park? A library? What's the current communist thing that makes you couch faint?
were the death camps created? all minorities sized and placed into camps? all members of society involved in the war effort? expansionist wars being started? I must have missed it.
What's "fascism" now? Enforcing borders? Deporting illegal immigrants? What's the current fascist thing that makes you couch faint?
I never called it fascism. But doing things like tackling senators for asking questions in a public hearing and snatching children up off the street to send them off to forever jail doesn't look great.
I'm sure you'll defend it though, this guy has an R next to his name and you're on team R!
(I'm not on team D btw and never was so you can drop that pretext right now)
I never called it marxism. But doing things like attempting to subvert democracy by banning your opponent from running and groomimg and mutilating children doesn't look great.
I'm sure you'll defend it though, this guy has an D next to his name and you're on team D!
(I'm not on team R btw and never was so you can drop that pretext right now)
I think the problem is that half of the country (has been made to) wants to sabotage itself. Therefore, they elect and keep in power someone that gives them exactly what they want.
Yeah, the way the Democratic Party self-destructed was indeed enlightening and frightening. And they continue to point fingers at each other and present specious arguments why they failed in the last election.
Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
DOGE has destroyed institutions that will likely not recover in the next Democratic majority term. If they sell off the federal lands or damage them with resource extraction, Dems probably wont have the bandwidth to fix that either. Those are just two examples but there are probably many more.
Harvard doesn't have higher academic standards for foreign students. So I don't think foreign students are any "better or brighter" than their American counterparts.
So if you can find equally qualified American students on the margin shouldn't you do so? I think an American university that benefits greatly from American taxpayers and institutions should primarily benefit American students. If you're picking truly exceptional student, that's one thing. But I don't think that's happening.
But foreign students pay foreign money which helps against the deficit.
On top of that many students stay in the US afterwards means a brain plus for the US and a loss their home country. These kind of braun drain is a big advantage for the US they know destroy.
I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...
The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...
To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.
China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.
Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
> You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...
just a guess but i'd assume these decisions are being made on an emotional/ideological basis, not long term viability, but maybe i'm missing something obvious...
rather than say anything likely unconstructive myself in direct response to this, i would very much like to see you elaborate on your understanding of mao and what value and predictive power you find in this comparison.
I've seen people use the USSR hammer and sickle for the O in GOP.
It's from people who think horseshoe theory has legs: that wanting to shut down prisons is the same as wanting to build concentration camps or that the people who want to say nationalize the banks are also the people who want to privatize the post office.
It's from centrists being unable to understand this difference
Maoism and Trumpism share a certain self-sabotaging ideological fetish for the virtues of rural life that expresses itself politically more in destructive resentment of urbanites and urban institutions than productive development of rural ones.
Academic standards are kind of irrelevant when it comes to Harvard undergraduate admissions.
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
Slam Harvard? Trump is slamming them because they are a known name that is resisting him.
Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
Many of Trump’s supporters and conservatives generally. Harvard is the beating heart of liberal theology, and going to the Supreme Court to defend racialism has earned it plenty of enemies.
>Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities.
Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized.
They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA.
They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward.
Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
> Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
Conservatives are a minority in the U.S., but conservative-to-moderate populists are a majority. According to Vox, Trump would have won by almost 5 points if everyone had voted: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202.... And don’t forget that the populist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly love Harvard either, as the beating heart of borderless neoliberal elitism. A large chunk of the party is in it for the Obamacare.
Heck, the Democratic Party as it exists today would not be viable at the national level without first or second generation immigrants. It’s reliant on the people who have the shallowest roots in and least understanding of america, who can be most easily be manipulated through ethnic machine politics.
After the U.S. nearly banned immigration in the 1920s, the foreign born population slowly shrank, reaching a low of under 5% by 1970. Italians and Irish lost much of their separate ethnic identity and began voting as individuals free. Between 1972-1992, Republicans then won 4 presidential elections by landslides over 5 cycles. That’s what happens when the electorate comprises mostly assimilated americans.
> As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student.
I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.
It doesn’t actually matter if the foreign students are better or not: by having a mixed student body, with lots of cultures and backgrounds, students learn more from each other. They learn skills to work with other cultures, and ways of doing things that may be better.
Of course, in America’s future of autarky and Shogunate-style isolationism, those skills will no longer have any value, even to the elite. There’s no need to learn about other countries if everything we need is produced here and no one could ever threaten us once America is made great again. (/s maybe?)
I don't know. A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students. Goes against the whole we want diversity thing, no?
> A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students.
How do I put this delicately - the Race part is not what is bringing the difference in lived experience.
The university defines diversity broadly, encompassing race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, nationality, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity.
Don't gaslight me and pretend they don't focus a lot on race when figuring out their student body. They report on it and it's a huge distinguishing characteristic when looking at median standardized scores across diff characteristics. There's little difference between socio economic groups, gender, nationality etc. But if you look across just Asian and non Asian students, the scores are dramatically higher with Asians meaning that they have higher standards. Courts found this to be true
I agree. Then why are Asian students held to a higher standard?
Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800. By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704
Notwithstanding the unfounded isolationist argument, having international students is valuable to the university and the domestic students. A diversity of life experiences, knowledge, backgrounds, etc. results in better educational outcomes. But you probably wouldn't understand that concept.
Harvard does not have "the best and brightest" students and that's a meme that needs to die as is discriminatory to literally all the other students in the US and the planet.
You are nitpicking. It is an elite institution that still attracts elite class people or else it wouldn't be worth so much to so many groups. There are hundreds of universities in the US, many of which have no kind recognition of the kind Harvard has.
One could also call it a bubble. Last as long as it lasts, which is as long as the stakeholders believe in it.
I think your argument doesn't hold. Just because people still believe something to be the case, doesn't mean it really is the case. It being "worth so much to so many groups" just means they believe in it being worth as much. A well formed argument would come up with examples of the brightest hailing from Harvard and perhaps statistics about achievements of former Harvard students.
Only if you look at one aspect of the school: A bubble wouldn't produce a cadre of skilled people that move multiple fields forward. The elite nature of the institution comes from people maintaining that elite status through accomplishment. You don't need a "belief" when the school continually produces many examples of excellence. Thats just hard evidence.
I think it may have been an [un]intentional callback to Trump saying that about who "Mexico was sending over the border" - at least that's how I interpreted it.
Why do students need to be inside the US in order for Harvard to issue them a degree? Surely there is an international network -- collaborators abroad who could host students, etc, etc. For example , Harvard already has an infrastructure of exchange programs. It's not ideal for the students, but I don't see why they can't continue to "be Harvard students" from anywhere.
Hopefully, though, this is an "escalate to deescalate" thing, and this whole discussion will become moot.
I feel US higher education, which brain drains the rest of the world, is easily one of the best strategic advantages it could have for the next 100 years.
Let’s throw that all away because learning is liberal.
If Canada wasn't having it's own immigration and post-secondary issues, this would be great. But no, we already shot ourselves in the foot with that...
Yeah, getting the worlds top brainiancs and enticing them with a good education and having some of them build their lives here is one of our greatest imports.
"The worlds top brainiacs" were a huge part of what "Made America Great" in the first place. The MAGA "leadership" is doing the exact literal polar opposite of the stated mission of their slogan (and with far more than just education; wrecking the economy, alienating our allies, destroying freedom of speech, enabling and even encouraging pollution [and trying to even mandate it in California apparently] ... the list goes on).
The action by itself comes as a punishment which imply that this is indeed great resource but because Harvard was a naughty boy means that can't have it.
I want to note that when Brexit happened EU citizens had about 2 years period to move to UK and just like that get their full rights there and those with enough years of stay had the right to obtain British citizenship. Streamlined process through scanning your id using an app, little to no hassle.
IIRC half of the EU citizens left despite having all those rights and streamlined bureaucracy. My observation was that those desperate or those who ware having their perfect life stayed, those who had other options left UK because it wasn't worth the stress and you future being bargaining chips for politicians.
I bet you, if this continues for some more time USA will no longer receive the best and the brightest. Those have options and their parents will prefer the options where their golden kids don't risk being subject to life changing actions or even abuse.
Even if it stopped immediately, we'll still get a lot fewer of these people. The US is now a country where anonymous government thugs can snatch foreigners off the street and put them in jail for saying the wrong things. Even if we stop doing that today, what's to say we won't start it up again at any time? Who's going to risk that just to go to an American university? Our universities are good but not that good.
Be that as it may, look at the names on any random research paper or journal article that originates from any randomly-chosen American university, and see what they tell you.
There's certainly an allotment for the rich and connected(Erdoğan's son studied at Harvard and he is a meme for his brains in Turkey, having trouble to understand his father's commands on leaked police surveillance tape. Turks don't say ELI5, they say ELI Bilal - the Harvard boy) but hardy its the majority. Maybe for BS and on some lighter majors, definitely not on the real deal.
Just check papers for ground breaking research, you'll see the names are predominantly foreign. This recent AI breakthrough is heavily done by people from Europe, Israel, Canada and China. That's why the speakers at AI videos have funny accents.
People with options will start avoiding USA unless the have to.
Nope! Harvard and some of the top ivies offer full, need-blind financial aid to all students, especially international. I attended and did not have to spend much at all, coming from a poor country. Many such cases and it is a lifeline for gifted students in developing countries
Oxbridge suffered a lot of collateral damage from Brexit because of EU funding cuts and massive loss of EU staff and EU students, who now have to pay foreign fees (4-5x regular home fees). An increase in fees also made it prohibitively expensive to hire EU PhD students.
The situation is slowly recovering, as the UK has now first-class access to EU funding programs and there is an open negotiation to bring back home fees for EU students. However, visas are becoming more restrictive and the exceptionally high fees associated with them might be again increasing, which is putting off potential new employees.
Besides, I am not sure Oxbridge has sufficient extra spots for overseas students diverted from the US due to its peculiar tutorial system. There are lots of top EU universities that could collectively benefit from this as they are much cheaper and larger: Heidelberg, TUM, KU, DTU, KI, KTH, etc.
What is taught matters a lot. Suppose a foreign adversary were able to infiltrate key US higher education institutions and subtly change the curriculum to be pro-communism and avoid STEM subjects.
Suppose a foreign adversary were able to infiltrate the key US institution that determines if higher education institutions have been infiltrated and subtly accuses them of being pro communist?
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the institution that appoints the individuals who run the institution that determines whether a higher education institution has been infiltrated!?
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the… !?!
The beauty of a system where many different and independent institutions compete for students and teachers independently, develop and share ideas and technologies, cross examine each other, and collectively build knowledge, is that they don’t have some single point in the system that can be infiltrated, and all have to compete in the arena of ideas.
The closest thing to a single point that can be infiltrated is the federal government, which can be used to put pressure on the whole system from a point of higher power.
Competition is a beautiful system so let those independent institutions compete without the government playing favorites by funding some and not others.
I wonder what avenues there are for Harvard to challenge this; it looks like the mechanism the Trump Admin used was for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cancel Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification [0] which is managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) [1].
Does ICE just have full discretion over SEVP? Can they do this to any school for whatever reason they want?
Maybe, but I doubt it. Trump is not a mafia boss - time after time he showed that his words cannot be trusted. If Harvard makes a concession, there's no guarantee that Trump will "forgive" it.
Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
> Trump is not a mafia boss - time after time he showed that his words cannot be trusted. If Harvard makes a concession, there's no guarantee that Trump will "forgive" it.
> Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
Doesn't this example make the opposite of your point?
The point I'm trying to make is: if Trump bullies you, and you make a concession, Trump will feel no obligations to pay you back and may bully you further. China played hardball (up to some degree - I'm sure there were backstage talks), and that apparently made Trump "respect" China more.
I see two risks with your analysis. First, you generally underestimate a person if you try to distill his personality into one negative trait (or, for that matter, if you select a bunch of negative traits but assume no positive.)
Second, he's still the president, so I don't see what pull the Penn degree has vs. that.
> The actual letter explains they can regain status by ratting out their students.
Trump's history has shown that if you cave into his demands, he doesn't leave you alone—instead he starts demanding even more, since he knows you'll fold.
Apple just got warned if they don’t bring manufacturing to USA they will be hit by company specific tariffs after Tim Cook bent the knee twice with personal pleas to lower tariffs for a bit and million dollar personal donations.
Pretty much a guarantee that Harvard will choose to stay the course. This is the quintessential organization that thinks along the lines of, "100 years from now Harvard will still be Harvard. And Trump will be one of the answers on a middle school history exam".
Ratting out in my mind means informing authorities in a way that something negative might be expected to happen to the subject.
For instance, I don't think smoking weed is wrong, but if I go tell an officer you have weed in your car, I have ratted you out despite nothing 'wrong' happening.
If you provide information to an actor when you have a clear indication that said actor will then take disproportionate action against the one on which you provide information, how is that not wrong?
Under 8 U.S.C. § 1372, the SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) program requires schools to report data on international students including what DHS has been asking for.
Harvard may argue that DHS’s request was overly broad, lacked due process, or sought information beyond what the law permits.
8 CFR § 214.3(g) and § 214.4(b), which require schools to maintain and furnish records “as required by the Service,” including disciplinary actions and other conduct relevant to maintaining status.
8 CFR § 214.3(l)(2)(iii) allows for withdrawal of certification if a school fails to “provide requested documentation” to DHS.
Not to mention other overly broad immigration laws
But given the laws on the books, DHS has broad authority to take this action.
Not arguing one way or the other just laying out the facts. This could have happened under the prior administration if the law was applied
yep. the laws have been written to be broad... my best guess would be the best legal argument Harvard could claim would be that it construes the existing law as a bill of attainder (a law targetted at an individual or group of individuals called out by person -- versus called out by some category of actions -- that is judged without trial)
The actual statute provides the categories of information schools must provide about their students. It’s not a “whatever we happen to ask for” list. See 8 U.S.C. § 1372. Needless to say, “protest activity” is not included.
We do not know yet what Harvard did and did not respond to. All we have is their word. If they didn’t provide what was required after DHS demanded what was legally required to be provided then DHS is on solid legal ground. I can’t really defend not providing something that isn’t called out as part of the law though
No, we gave the SEVIS revocation letter demanding a handful of categories of information, one of which is “protest activity.” And they are already required under the statute to provide one category of information requested: “any disciplinary action taken by the institution against the alien as a result of the alien’s being convicted of a crime or, in the case of a participant in a designated exchange visitor program, any change in the alien’s participation as a result of the alien’s being convicted of a crime.”
My main point, though, was this: (1) the information required to maintain SEVIS program is statutorily defined, so the government doesn’t get to arbitrarily expand that and then punish a school for noncompliance; and (2) we know of at least one category requested information that they are not allowed to ask for and that implicates nothing other than the exercise of a student’s First Amendment rights.
My point is we don’t know if they actually provided all the info that is statutorily required and/or the government is saying within those statutory rules you still didn’t provide it so by law it’s revoked (for now). We only have statements from both sides.
Seeing as it’s private most likely won’t see it via FOIA
Nah, this one is going to federal court for sure. It’ll all come out. But part of the rules are also that schools must provide the relevant information within 30 days of the start of an alien’s academic term. There’s a whole system set up to handle this. The system is not, government, go ask for this set of information whenever you feel like it and if the school doesn’t hop to it immediately, you may suspend. It says that if a school does not provide the information within the relevant period before the term starts, it shall be suspended. There is no discretionary wiggle room for the government to be like, well, I don’t think you’re giving me enough, or you’re not being cooperative enough.
Actually, that interpretation isn’t quite correct. The 30-day reporting window you’re referring to applies to initial SEVIS data entry and student registration at the beginning of each term-things like confirming enrollment, course load, address, etc. That’s under 8 CFR § 214.3(g)(2) and (l)(2), which govern routine reporting timelines for active F-1/M-1 students.
But the April 16 DHS request to Harvard wasn't routine. It invoked 8 CFR § 214.3(g)(1), which covers ad hoc or investigative information requests by DHS. That section gives DHS broad power to request any time the records needed to assess a student’s compliance with immigration status.
Yes, I was being sloppy. Nevertheless, they can still only request that particular set of documents. And it’s not to assess a particular student’s status but the school’s compliance with the program requirements. (They can of course check individuals to make sure they’re also complying.) And just from the face of the letter to Harvard you can see they’re going way beyond the enumerated categories of information. Not to mention intermingling other SEVP-unrelated complaints (DEI! Antisemitism!) as to why Harvard is being targeted.
Our immigration system is so profoundly screwed up, and there is no doubt the executive agencies have wide powers to draw on, but they’re not even trying to provide a fig leaf of legality. It’s straight, “Comply or suffer!”
yes, there are clear problems with the scope and political context of the request. But the legal framework does give DHS room to request information tied to student status compliance, even outside of term-start reporting. The question now is how much of that request was actually lawful, and how much was political theater cloaked in regulatory form.
Rights don’t exist if you’re not a citizen. Isn’t that the whole crux of the debate? Glossing over that part, and as a former lawyer you should know better, means everything.
You’re wrong about that. It doesn’t say “Congress shall make no law, unless it targets non-citizens.” The First Amendment is a constraint on what governments may do.
Wish I had a way to privately get your digits. We accidentally seem to be knocking heads, and I bet you’re a great person to grab a coffee with. East coast?
Governments may remove foreigners. Especially ones who come here to expand their internecine desert tribal rivalries that have no place in American communities.
And all we have is DHS' word that Harvard didn't provide what was required. This is simply ridiculous and everything needs to be easier for the public to double-check so we can call bullshit in the right direction.
Ah yes, the justice system only works when it favors your guy. But sure, 12 random jurors in New York just happened to all get their talking points from MSNBC. Totally not how trials work. Let us know how the appeal goes - third time's the charm, right?
I mean Biden was totally with it his entire term and didn’t have cancer either right?
The bayesean priors aren't the same for the two parties: One is a 30-time convicted criminal infamous for lying to get his way (tens of thousands of such lies on the record); The other is not.
If your first instinct isn't that the infamous known liar isn't the one lying here, then the bias here is yours.
Given that Harvard’s own report supports this administration’s findings I am doubtful. Harvard’s own ASAIB report proved there is a prevalence of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias which includes verbal harassment, discriminatory comments hostile environments in academic settings pertaining to Israel and the Middle East, and exclusion of Jewish students from certain campus activities and organizations due to their perceived political affiliations
Under 8 CFR § 214.3(a)(3) and § 214.4(a)(2)(ii), schools are required to maintain accurate records and comply with all SEVP-related responsibilities, which include ensuring that F-1 students are not engaged in activities that violate status or federal law. If DHS believes that international students were involved in threatening, discriminatory, or unlawful activity and the school either failed to document, disclose, or respond appropriately, that’s a direct compliance issue.
Harvard’s own ASAIB report admits that antisemitic conduct occurred-including exclusion of Jewish students, verbal harassment, and bias in classroom settings. If any of that involved foreign students-and Harvard didn’t report it or take disciplinary action-DHS can reasonably infer noncompliance with 214.3(g)(1) (required records) and failure to enforce visa conditions.
In fact, the ASAIB report might be evidence that Harvard knew about the issues and didn’t fully cooperate, justifying DHS’s conclusion that the university wasn’t acting in good faith.
If Harvard has maintained approval for international students, and Harvard's policies with respect to the approval haven't changed recently, then withdrawing approval would be arbitrary.
I am going to get downvoted and flagged because I will bring up a topic that is not to be discussed here:
From a similar CNN article:
"Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered her department to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, making good on a promise made last month when she demanded the university hand over detailed records on its international students’ “illegal and violent activities” before April 30 or face the loss of its certification."
Okay, who could they possibly be talking about? Right. The Gaza protesters.
Miriam Adelson - $150m donated to Trump, second highest
Elon Musk is not the only one that bought the White House. So there is a genocide that if any of us tech people had some courage we could easily make some pretty wild visualizations of the before/after of Gaza maps, and the current full scale ethnic cleansing of it, but we can't bring it up. We're failing as tech people on this, but so is the whole world.
No, it can't be anyone. Please don't do this. This is about the Palestinian situation. They tried to pressure the TikTok purchase so they change their algorithm to show less Gaza deaths. It is simply about that, and there is also a money trail of top donors that corroborate this. They also made a show of arresting the Columbia Palestinian organizer. They are not looking for illegal Mexicans in the Ivy League.
Yes, the Admin is even more pro-Israel (and by that I mean pro-Israeli gov/Netanyahu) than previous ones. But it's also using accusations of anti-Semitism at these universities as a cover to generally bring these "liberal" institutions to heel (as outlined in Project2025).
So it's not really about Gaza, Palestinians, or Jews. It's about control.
Sure, but do you think that if nothing had ever happened in Gaza, the Trump administration wouldn't have found some other pretext to go after higher education, and foreign students in particular? They're defunding research programs all across the board and are sending people to gulags for having tattoos.
If you read the original list of demands[1],very few of the bullet points seems to be actually about the protests and anti-semitism, with the bulk of the demands involving DEI , reverse-DEI (i.e. more inclusion of white, conservative voices ) and greater federal control and oversight over Harvard's administration. If you read Harvards's response[2], you will see that the university is more than willing to co-operate on 'anti-semitism' and suppression of the protestors, but are pushing back against all the other items.
It seems that what is portrayed as a dispute over Palestine, antisemitism and qamas is actually a cover for a power-struggle between the liberals and conservatives ( such as the Heritage foundation, Project 2025, and Yarvinites)
edit : But when i think of it more, maybe it is about Israel and Zionism but over a longer time-scale than recent events. If you look at some of the early anti-'woke' and anti-left movements like the self-proclaimed 'Intellectual dark web', lot of them are zionists who viewed the growing liberal disenchantment with zionism in the college campus and left-wing activism (including pro-palestine activism like the BDS movement) as an existential threat to Israel.
> When a University’s SEVP certification is revoked, currently enrolled international students must choose between transferring to a different institution, changing their immigration status, or leaving the country, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.
It's crazy they're punishing tons of students who don't even have anything to do with these protests
They might prefer to start with certain targets, but all international students are target of opportunity [0] the same way they've attacked people with lawful residency.
This is exactly how division works. Threaten all and they turn on each other. "Why me? I'm not the one you want! Take them!" It's not so much about the Gaza protests, that's just another occassion to normalize division and mistrust within all parts of society.
Private schools can create and enforce their own rules how they wish. The United States government is forbidden from creating or enforcing rules on content of speech.
It's actually only a 1st Amendment question in one case and not the other. Looks like they tricked ya though!
(Technically it's a 1st Amendment question in both cases in that private entities have a 1st Amendment right to create rules for their own campuses)
In regards to protest though, the activity they are interested in, that is a right of 'the people to peaceably assemble' per 1A.
Non-immigrants are not 'the people' per current interpretation of the constitution. If they were people, they would have all the rights ascribed to 'the people' including right to bear arms. Non immigrants do not have a right to bear arms, thus it cannot logically follow they are [the] people.
You can read here, but in short 'the people' are those who are members of the 'political community' according to certain criteria. Generally this doesn't include non-immigrants.
> immigrants are not 'the people' per current interpretation of the constitution.
Not true. The meaning of "the people" is interpreted differently from Amendment to Amendment. In the 1st and 5th Amendments, it has historically been interpreted to include non-citizens (even illegal ones!) while in the 2nd Amendment it has been interpreted much more narrowly.
And regardless, this in no way authorizes the government to compel Harvard to do anything. Even in the most fascist interpretation you can dream up, it would mean the government itself is allowed to curtail their assembly. Harvard has no obligations (under the 1st Amendment!) to do any such thing.
I'm not sure anyone can take seriously the proposition that 'the people' is Jekyll and Hyded amendment by amendment, especially when the constitution is completely devoid of any suggestion it is interpreted as such.
Whoops! That was meant to be a 4. But yeah, like a 7th grade civics class (in the US) would’ve educated you on the role of case law as it relates to interpreting the Constitution. Presumably your home country didn’t spend much time on it though, which makes sense!
But the 4th amendment doesn't appear to provide 'the people' protection to non-immigrants. A US citizen cannot be compelled to produce their citizenship with out a warrant, whereas a non-immigrant can be compelled to produce their papers on the spot.
Also the recent Bruen ruling was taken by at least one case law in Illinois [] that applied 'the people' the same as the other amendments (as it was in early American history), when they overturned (from memory) a prohibited possessor conviction. They just came to a different conclusion what 'the people' is and held an illegal immigrant (as applied) was part of 'the people'.
And finally, despite the fact the case law isn't as 'unequivocal' as you seem to think, you still have to get around the fact that the very writers of those amendments believed the rights in the bill of rights were god given natural rights, thus case law can at best reflect them and at worst incorrectly apply them but not modify the natural right. In fact this was part of the reason why the 2nd amendment was written, was because the founders needed a check when the case law, legislator, and executive all applied the constitution in contradiction to the acknowledged natural rights.
They sure can! You can choose not to attend them. You can go stand on public property and yell at them.
Under the US Constitution, "the consequences" are absolutely not allowed to include weaponization of the State through coercion, punishment, or threat to control what the public thinks.
Fascist goobers skipping out on their "Basics of Being an American" course lmao
And I can vote for Trump who will cast shame and doubt on their reputation and damage them as far as his authority allows. I have no sympathy for any of them: students, administration, professors that plagiarized their way to the top, those who had connections to Epstein. Burn it down
Well no, he's extending well beyond his authority. That's the whole problem, and you're sitting here making excuses.
You don't need to have sympathy for them. You need to respect the US Constitution's protection for them nonetheless. Or just admit that you hate America, which you're also welcome to do (because America rocks)!
Also, absolutely lmfao about "connections to Epstein." Bro Epstein said on tape he was Trump's best friend [0]. Trump came out and said "Epstein likes em young" decades ago [1]. Trump also said on the Apprentice that he's good friends with Diddy [2].
You're in a cult amigo. Keep these comment threads around so when you wake up from whatever daze you're in, you can inspect them closely for clues about how he managed to break your brain so thoroughly.
Often, these protests were overtly supporting an organization officially classed as "terrorist" (HAMAS). The Americans making foreigners who are found to openly support a known terrorist organization leave is par for the course, I would say. If you showed up at the German border and told them you were a HAMAS supporter, my guess is you wouldn't get in.
Now, the Trump admin is not this careful, and many people who are not overt HAMAS supporters have probably been affected. But I wish to make the point that there is a substantial group of students (non-citizen HAMAS supporters) for whom punishment is not crazy.
None of this allows the government to compel Harvard to do something. The government can revoke visas and deport people (after due process) if it wishes to and believes it can make its case.
Few understand this. You’re allowed to openly advocate for whatever absolutely insane, horrific ideas you want.
You’re allowed to be a Nazi, you’re allowed to be a Hamas (non-financial) supporter, you’re allowed to be a pro-Gaza genocide advocate if you want. You can advocate for the extermination or enslavement of all black or white or Christian or atheist or gay people if you want.
You may (and probably should) become a social pariah and private parties can decline to affiliate with you, but the government isn’t allowed to do a damn thing about it.
The question is: To whom do these rights extend in the U.S.?
They certainly don't extend to foreigners at the border (any country would rightly turn away an avowed Al-Qaeda member). Foreigners in the U.S. are in the U.S. at the pleasure of the government.
Do foreigners currently in the U.S. have these rights? I don't know for sure, maybe it's not a settled issue. My guess is that the U.S. gov't asks "Are you a terrorist?" at the border for good reasons, and one reason is so they can kick you out for lying to them when they learn you're a HAMAS supporter.
Should they have these rights? I'm honestly not sure of my feeling on this. Perhaps the way to handle it is to prevent the renewal of a visa or re-entry, but not actually kick anyone out for it.
The country obviously has no obligation to give visas to anyone. However, once you are within US jurisdiction (i.e. in the country), you have a suite of Constitutional rights including (unambiguously) 1st Amendment and 5th Amendment rights. So, correct, they definitely cannot be deported without due process. They cannot be deported even with due process for protected speech. They cannot even lose their visas for protected speech. There are a million different reasons the government may decline to give someone a visa or they may revoke one, but "engaging in protected speech" is not one of them.
And yes, yelling "kill all X" during a protest is protected speech in this country, which AFAIK is far beyond what any of these people are alleged to have done.
"It is well established that noncitizens have at least some First Amendment rights," wrote Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District of Massachusetts. "Although case law defining the scope of noncitizens' First Amendment rights is notably sparse, the Plaintiffs have at least plausibly alleged that noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents, are being targeted specifically for exercising their right to political speech."
It's protected speech if you're a citizen, but it's not clear to me that non-citizens, especially when they're at the border rather than within the country, would be so-protected.
- 1A limits what congress may do, "Congress shall make no law...". It does not positively define what people may do, and therefore doesn't pick out a class of people to whom it applies.
- It is settled that the U.S. government may condition immigration-related decisions on your speech and actions. They don't have to let in an Al-Qaeda member when he shows up at the border, and they don't have to give a pro-HAMAS agitator in the country on a temporary visa a green card. It's still not totally clear to me if a green card might have some sort of special-but-noncitizen status, and maybe it's not clear in general.
- The U.S. government asks people who are applying for entry or a visa questions like, "Are you a terrorist, or have you ever belonged to or supported terrorist organizations?". Part of the reason they do this is to catch you in a lie if it then turns out that you are e.g. supporting HAMAS. If you lied on your immigration documents, they can throw you out.
- For this reason, it seems like e.g. refusing to renew a visa on the grounds of HAMAS support would be fine. But maybe canceling a visa and kicking someone out wouldn't be fine?
Trump is acting in the manner of all previous authoritarians: What is good for him is what's good for the country and the laws that align with this are proper, and those that do not will be ignored or changed where possible. The rule of law is anathema to authoritarians, and hence why they detest it. As individuals we might even feel the same about some laws. But in totality, the rule of, law and not by law is the foundation of our society, because its benefits are immense and usually taken for granted.
I get flak for hating Republican voters with the general feeling of most people being that voters are not responsible for the officials THEY elected to represent them.
I still haven't found a valid argument for why a voter isn't held responsible for the actions of representatives. Especially if the actions would be likely to occur.
In what way would you like to hold them responsible? If there are reprisals for voting, do we live in a liberal democracy?
Edit: If by "hold responsible" you mean "be mad at them" then yes, of course you can, I can't read a comment section that isn't mostly that, and you knew that before making this comment.
Why would you feel the need to state this? Obviously it would and it should. If Trump was a Democrat and the same situation was occurring then Democrat voters should be called out
You make it sound simplistic. I mean calling them out, demanding an explanation. You have friends who support this then let them know you think they are wrong.
All these horrific regimes throughout history, how did it happen? The majority of people agreed with it or was a vocal minority left alone because most people just wanted to avoid conflict?
I call this selfish. It's like hoping the problem gets solved later that way you get to maintain your relationships.
If you want to blow up personal relationships over politics because you think it will help, be my guest. People do it routinely. If it is "good" is an open question.
Because you stated you "hate Republican voters". If you hate Republicans (as a method of "holding them responsible"), it doesn't really make sense to remain friends.
What Republican voter is facing consequences for this specific situation?
I do appreciate this notion as I read articles of government workers fired who supported Trump (why a person working for the government would vote Republican is beyond me).
Many of Trumps actions attack those that would either likely never vote Republican or can't vote (illegals, groups on special visas that lost them, foreign students, etc)
I do not know if you will see this.. however, the consequence is faced by the society for electing someone. It is not that the republican voters face something separate.
If you agree that the actions of the current administration are detrimental to the US over long term, those are the consequences.
Take Alabama or Oklahoma for example - their policies have made those states backward. People in those states have poor education outcomes, less wealth and less health, lower social mobility etc. It impacts everyone in those states. Either the opposition needs to mobilize, message better etc. or the voters need to compare and realize what they are missing. If not, they will continue to face the consequences.
That does sound a bit iffy. Not to mention that the ability to vote for who you want without repercussions is rather important to a democracy.
Of course if someone loudly states who they voted for they should not be surprised someone else calls them out on it. After all what is voluntarily giving up anonymity, if not an act of support?
It's more of an ethical question. Were the people who voted for Hitler bad people because they voted for a bad person? I'd argue that they were. You can't just vote for a horrible person and then say you had nothing to do with the consequences. I'm not the one you replied to, but I assume this is something family related, a la "just because grandpa voted for Trump doesn't mean he's a bad person".
People didn't have good choices. There was plenty to not like about the Democrats as well. You can argue who is worse, or even if the concerns are valid, but there are plenty of things many people don't like about how the democrats use their power. As such what was a voter to do?
There are a long list of things, and most people are not willing accept that "their side" does anything someone else might not like. Doesn't matter what side. Most people are not even willing to honestly listen to "the other side's" concerns.
Waters of the US. All the various "woke" issues which harms someone who isn't a minority who sees someone less competent getting business (and then calling them racist when the feel cheated). Immigration or China taking all their jobs. The above is what I can think of just off the top of my head that many people feel democrats have messed up on. (I don't not agree with this entire list, but I'm sure people will shoot the messenger anyway...)
People may not have had a good choice, but they had an obvious choice. The status quo of a Harris term - even considering the likely negatives, her pandering to the right and pro-Zionist stance - would have been objectively preferable to Trump. What is a voter to do? Not vote for the greater evil because they aren't in love with the lesser evil.
They strongly disagree. This is not a debate here - I didn't vote for Trump for a number of reasons. However I make an effort toiundertand because that is the first step to try to figure out how to win. When you just name call you ensure you lose
The Democrats didn't "just name call," though. They had a platform and everything. Meanwhile no one name calls more than Trump. His party is the party of "fuck your feelings" and "empathy is a sin" after all.
And even if I did, trying to turn the conversation to me rather than the subject at hand is base trolling. I could call them all shitheads and that still wouldn't be relevant. They didn't vote for Trump because I hurt their feelings, nor did I vote for Kamala Harris because Trump voters hurt my feelings.
This is not a "both sides are bad" issue. Literally one side was openly advertising a culture revolution and remaking the US into a fascist state and the other side was using policies to improve minority participation in institutions. Even if you were completely opposed to "woke" issues, the alternative was voting for a dictator.
>if you cannot understand your ophonents you are no better than them?
Literally no. I don't understand serial killers but I'm better than them and to use a more relevant example, I have limited understanding of some racists but I'm better than them (in that specific case).
Understanding is only useful for engagement but if a person is being manipulated by lies or exaggerations then what am I to do?
Solve a non-existent or exaggerated problem? Tell them their information is wrong?
I contend their dislike of the Democrats is based a meaningful amount on Republican lies and exaggerations.
For example
1. Blaming Biden wholly for inflation via spending even though it was worldwide, Trump also used government spending to attempt to help the economy, and Republicans controlled congress for half his term.
2. Blaming Biden for not fixing inflation which assumes this was possible
3. Blaming all illegal immigrants for the crimes of some. This is the same as blaming all Black people for the crimes committed by some.
Why is immigrantion bad, why are illegal immigrants bad?
>the various "woke" issues which harms someone who isn't a minority who sees someone less competent getting business
Do you have evidence this was a widespread problem?
It people are woke, for example Disney decides to put more gay people in movies to promote diversity, what is the government going to do? Why would electing Republicans stop this?
don't ask me - I'm just a messanger who doesn't believe the full message. I've long supported more immigration
what disney does should be their own business. However when a competent person is not allowed to do a job because the government wants a different minoity that hurts me. at best it means that projects are more expensive because there is less competition, at worst someone incompetent is hired and we get junk.
Well, it’s not the popular vote but the electoral college. There may be plenty of people in blue states who voted for Trump because they were fed up with democrats having foisted an unelected candidate on them. They would for the most part know that the vote kinda doesn’t count - e.g. if you live in CA or IL. In this case you’re mostly voting to make a point.
So with the current system, that varies. If it’s a popular vote, then I’d say you have a point.
>were fed up with democrats having foisted an unelected candidate on them
What power was this candidate given? By saying "unelected" you're trying to imply that a person was given power in the government without a vote.
=------------------------
The election is a choice between two candidates.
It's not "Did you like that the Democrats did X"? It's "Which candidate would make a better president"?
The reason is that the effects of the outcome aren't limited to the Democrat party leadeship.
For example a student who is deported wasn't responsible for the decision by the Democrat party leadership not to hold a primary but are affected by the outcome of the election.
The logical flaw in the voters you are referring to is not comparing choices while making a selection.
>Were the people who voted for Hitler bad people because they voted for a bad person?
Depends on what they know or heard. The situation is very different today. The internet gives each person access to all the information. I'm sure time can be a factor but in Germany you have more an excuse.
Also, with Germany, the economic situation was used by Hitler and worked to his advantage.
There's also the more controversial take but I've only read bits and pieces and many disagree with this as it implies a multigeneration swaying and ingrained cultural change
People voting for Hitler wasn't a problem either way.. Enough of them never voted for him under the German electoral system of the time that he never won enough of a majority to become president of his country.
Instead he then used backroom deals with useful idiots and cynics who thought they could use him in favor of their careers, to get himself appointed to a position (chancellor) from which he could become dictator.
The more valid criticism based on the above comparison isn't quite so much against American voters as it is against the cynics, spineless opponents and useful idiots inside the federal political system, who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different reasons of their own.
I particularly note the other republicans in his party here, who could actually stop Trump's more deranged nonsense but are letting centuries of restrained, relatively democratic and lawful political tradition go to shit for the sake of their own short-sighted ambitious idiocies.
I didn't realize Hitler didn't win the 1932 election but became chancellor after the Nazi party obtained a majority in the government and Hindenburg, who won, appointed him.
>who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different
There are consequences that can follow in response to protected actions that don't rise to the level of prohibited retribution.
For example I can give a speech in a public square where I advocate some completely stupid conspiracy theory and I do it in the most offensive language possible pissing off everyone who hears, and be protected by the First Amendment.
That doesn't stop you from inferring from that speech that (1) I'm an idiot and (2) I'm a very unpleasant person to be around and then based on those inferences declining to hire me if I apply to you for a job. Neither idiots nor assholes are protected classes so you are free to discriminate against me. That you learned that I'm an idiot and asshole through my First Amendment protected speech shouldn't be relevant.
If someone lets it be known who they voted for and their reasons something similar could happen.
Registered voters was 174m, voter eligible population is estimated at 244m. The number who actually voted in 2024 was 154m. So he did win the popular vote. The total population doesn’t count when checking for popular vote winnings.
Most people don't think hard or carefully about politics, and their political views are a very tiny fraction of what they give to the world (this is true even for most people who do think hard and carefully about politics, by the way). Their vote is never pivotal, and their views do not shape any major institutions.
Why would you want a valid argument for holding a voter responsible for the actions of representatives? Arguments have nothing to do with it. Just hold them responsible, or not, for any reason. It makes no difference.
Voters don't really choose a representative. They are given choices. Two choices, of which, let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side". Those choices are created by outside forces. And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want. There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want. So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with. You're as likely to get what you want by praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as by voting. The "choices" are just gonna do whatever the hell they want anyway. Whether you get what you want or not is incidental.
But let's assume you do hold somebody responsible for choosing something they have no control over. What does that mean to "hold them responsible" ? You gonna actually do something? Throw them in jail? Kill them? Probably not. You're probably just gonna say nasty things about them on Facebook. Which you could do at any time, for any reason. So who gives a shit what the argument is? It makes no difference to anything at all. You might as well ask for a valid argument for why the sky is blue. Ain't gonna change the sky.
I want them to think about it because...
"let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side"."
>And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want
What does this mean? It's not even close to being random or unpredictable.
>There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want.
Elections
>So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, do you mean an elected person has full control of their position's power? Then yes, obviously but you can predict what they will do, you are giving them power.
Yes, the options are two choices externally picked. And?
> I still haven't found a valid argument for why a voter isn't held responsible for the actions of representatives. Especially if the actions would be likely to occur.
Does that apply to Gaza as well? Or is it just when people you don't like vote?
There is a reason we don't do this, why we didn't punish everyone who voted for Hitler etc.
What about the Dems who primaried Hillary and Biden, ruining the 2016 and 2024 elections? All they had to do was pick someone at least mildly likable and not so old that they'd bomb a 2nd election.
Sure, but it’s still couched in legal theory that seeks to legitimize it. That phrasing suggests the rules need to be changed to legitimize it, which tracks with my understanding but not the rhetoric.
Trump has repeatedly asserted he wants to run for a "third term" and his base worship him.
His electorate's beliefs are whatever he tells them they are. The same is true for the Republican Party. Trump is effectively free to ignore the constitution without consequence.
Much of my extended family would absolutely join a civil war on side Trump to get him into a permanent position of power if given the opportunity. Some of them are in the military. So it’s not unreasonable by world history standards that he could get a subset of the military on his side in a coup scenario.
I think people in large urban centers or outside of the US don’t realize how much certain parts of the country truly worship him above anything else. I know many people like this, I have to see them at family events, so you can’t tell me it’s an exaggeration. I’m not sure there are enough to do anything substantial, but the seeds are there.
Martial law will be declared, for whatever reason they can come up with. Maybe the "invasion" excuse again, maybe Greenland, maybe Canada, maybe Mexico. But one thing is sure: Trump will be the last president of this democracy iteration.
You do realize that the last time he was voted out an angry crowd literally stormed the capitol to overturn the election? What more can they do with better preparation?
I'm glad we're testing the guardrails by making our country unappealing the best talent in the world and wasting government resources on a revenge tour.
This is quite literally the appeal to tradition or inertia fallacy. Just because they've been around for a while does not mean they are not facing an existential threat. Every structure humans create will one day collapse. This certainly looks difficult for Harvard and could be their end because there is no divine protection, only the decision that will be made by an extremely conservative Supreme Court and the willingness of authoritarian minded government employees in the trump admin to listen to the courts.
Reality is complex and dynamic, and through all of that Harvard's endurance pre-dates the US, therefore I would expect it to endure a 4 year term of Government. Not to say with a 100% certainty, but I would expect it to with a greater degree of confidence than many other things, based on its history.
However I wouldn't extend that line of thinking to stock markets, superannuation etc.
Tsinghua survived the Cultural Revolution. DU survived the Emergency. Cal survived Nixon. Harvard will survive this
That said, I personally believe Harvard's public reputation is significantly overstated - Stanford has become the new Harvard for at least 2 decades now.
This. If Trump is suddenly gone for whatever reason, the succeeding President is going to continue with the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda. Trump may be dumb and stupid, but imagine a US President who is young, energetic and speaks coherently that continues with the same agenda. (Hint: look at DeSantis and what happened in Florida.)
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
So DHS revoked the visas for all existing students at Harvard? That doesn't seem quite possible?
Doesn't give them a timeline either.
The best and the brightest from around the world will prioritize top universities at other countries, and this will damage one of the US' biggest attractions and advantages.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] thread“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Who's selling that policy?
edit: looks like they started this in 2017! https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/29/university-il...
That's some forward thinking!
For a physics PhD for instance at Cornell you usually get paid to teach your first two years and if all goes right do your actual research on a grant. In my case the prof had written a grant for the work I wanted to do which didn't get funded, I spent a summer thinking about the problem which helped us come back with a great grant proposal that got funded.
I know Masters of Engineering students pay their own way, maybe other departments are different. I remember there being a lot of Chinese graduate students 25 years ago but now I see lots of undergrads.
This is more like the latter. There aren't many signs of us hitting the bottom thus far.
b) Impeachment is a political action; plenty of politicians can disagree with portions of their party's legislature enough to vote against it without saying "I'd like to burn down my party's control of the government (and thereby my career) over this".
No, the decision to use executive fiat to normalize dictatorship is not undertaken because of the absence of support for the policy, but because of presence of support for normalizing dictatorship and avoiding the public in-advance debate of the legislative process.
The current GOP doesn't flinch when their candidate is found guilty of SA, with a long history of fraud and embezzlement. If Trump approved a simple burglary of a Democrat's office, it would barely make the news at this point.
Not all infinitessimals are equal, just as not all infinities are equal.
When an organization loses a significant portion of it's annual income [0], there's often three main choices on what can be done next [1]
* reduce the quality / variety of services provided -- i.e. cut services, keep prices the same, don't admit more students
* increase prices for remaining "customers" -- i.e. increase prices, don't cut services, don't admit more students
* increase income by getting more paying "customers" -- i.e. don't cut services, don't increase prices, get more domestic students [2]
I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for US domestic students for the same quality of education as before... unless your point is to degrade the standing of the educational institution/quality of the education provided so it becomes cheaper...? if that's true, why would you want that?
--
[0]: close to a third of annual income in this case "Over 6,700 international students were enrolled at the institution last academic year, university data shows, making up 27% of its student body." -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05768jmm11o
[1]: based on my random experiences and stuff i've read, this is not an exhaustive cite-able statement
[2]: could also take out a loan, but that's basically short-term increasing income
It might be wrong to think of the university's main source of revenue as tuition or tuition-adjacent fees.
>I struggle to see how you believe this could end up reducing prices for
Because we live in a supply-and-demand world.
>for the same quality of education as before.
No one going to university goes there for the quality of education. They do so for the prestigious credentials. If somehow having fewer foreign students would actually result in a lower quality of education at, say, Harvard Law School or some such, then things are fucked up far beyond my ability to care about the outcome or Trump's meddling causing that.
The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties (and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin), and yet it's basically crickets from the otherwise-loud 2A fundamentalists - just like how the first round of Dear Leader had them dropping "from my cold, dead hands" and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
Because I'd like to not become deaf.
>The authoritarian jackboots are here today, destroying individual liberties
Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?
>and the economy to really put the nails in the coffin)
The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over so much you don't even much bother with it. It's not just you doing that, basically everyone towards the left does this.
>and replacing it with "blue lives matter".
Couldn't care less about cops if I tried. Again, just more failure. We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are. But, looks like my faction has the votes. Going to be an interesting few years... and maybe unpleasant for you.
Alright sure, this is valid. But it drastically reduces your point from arguing about the ideals of liberty to just pragmatically having a device you find useful. "I don't care about the destruction of liberty because I might get a toy" isn't a compelling argument.
> We've got so little in common, it'd be difficult to even describe how far apart we are
Except you know, we probably actually aren't. I recognize your nick from early reddit, like a decade and a half ago at this point? Generally found your points agreeable, from my libertarian perspective. And yet here we are now, arguing on completely opposite sides.
> Which liberty do you no longer have, that you had one year ago?
The natural right of free speech is under open attack by these attempts to make universities obey the whims of an autocratic executive. Even not being in college, and not even really agreeing with the speech being used as a strawman here, that is still an infringement upon my rights. Just as say, drug prohibition is an infringement upon my rights even though I'm not really big into drugs.
> The argument that was most likely to convince me to be concerned is glossed over [economy]
I didn't gloss it over - I referenced it. Go read any of the economics threads where these arguments are hashed out. Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057663 . Maybe my coming from more of an Austrian economics analysis might actually ring true for you in some ways? I would love to hear where I'm wrong, but from what I've seen responses either fall into repeating talking points, nihilism, or ghosting the conversation.
It's most certainly true that the elites (US politicians and corporate class) have sold out the US worker with the monetary policies of the past few decades. The problem is that the Republican party is always stuck on complaining about being had by the last over-and-done con, with that energy going into supporting the setup for the next con. And I don't see how it's any different this time.
> maybe unpleasant for you
The destruction of our societal institutions, bureaucratic checks and balances, our economy, and our standing in the world are going to make things quite unpleasant for all of us. You just haven't realized it yet.
International students pay full price so they wind up subsidizing domestic students. Many universities were already predicting strained budgets from fewer international students.
The US has benefitted enormously from being able to brain-drain other countries for their best and brightest. As a country, you are much better off offering the limited amount of spots in higher education to smart and driven students from abroad, than to average Americans.
> suppressors are likely to become legalized here in the coming months.
The fallout of reversing the brain-drain is going to take decades to have an impact, but you don't care, because you're getting your toy now now now.
Look at the man-made objects around you. Every single one of them has been improved or made less expensive by research at institutes of higher education, including the device that you're using to read this comment, the electrical system used to power that device, the vehicles used to transport the people and goods to construct that electrical system...
Maybe, according to your values, higher education isn’t worth that - but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
Yes, and I fail to see how cockblocking the foreign students could impact that. Education is their side hustle, as is commonly said, and foreign students are some fraction of that side hustle... so how will that affect research? Will the professors and doctors at Harvard who are always scribbling out grant proposals stop doing so in protest?
>but to call it a grift is ridiculous.
I'd call it worse, but I don't know anything more slanderous than "grift".
It's very straightforward: many of those foreign students who are being forced to leave Harvard were the ones actually doing research.
Sounds pretty fucking racist, really. In the other comment someone was claiming that foreign students pay full price, and so they subsidize domestic students... in other words, university administration prefers them because they're more lucrative. Not because they're of a higher academic caliber. This is a nest of nasty, perverse incentives that hurts our own citizens and we have all sorts of propagandists telling us it's really for our own good.
Nothing about this is straightforward. Even if (and for me it's a big if) you were correct, pretending that this is straightforward is just disingenuous.
No, the people who do this research are constantly shuffling in and shuffling out, year after year, and when this goes into effect the people who will shuffle in will be more americans and fewer foreigners, and no one is going to see any real difference.
Well, unless you're racist and just hate americans. Then you will probably perceive that they are somehow inferior.
That you fail to consider that possibility but you are very keen to claim "racist and just hate Americans" leads me to unfortunately quote the HN rules at you:
Systematic dismantling of education? No big deal. Shoot guns with less noise? Awesome! WTF? I loose more faith in my countrymen day by day with this shit.
Besides this is just Trump abusing and violating the law to go after his enemies. It could be anyone next including you. Impartial rule of law is one of the core aspects of a liberal democracy. It's one of the reasons we are better then corrupt Dictatorships. It's like Nixon but worse and more open. What we need is Trump and maga to be knocked down many pegs before they destroy our country (please remember you live here in the place Trump is destroying)
The last is the most frustrating to me because there is a hint of the truth there - the stuff reported about Trump _is_ insane. They're doing things so openly and brazenly that there are kneejerk reactions to either ask "is it really so bad if they're doing it in the open" or "surely the reporting must be a lie because no one would be that shameless".
Anyone pikachufacing here is a liar.
For example - The day after Brexit - so many people regretted voting to leave. They could’ve thought about it 24 hours earlier, no? “I was misinformed, uninformed” sounds lazy and shallow, isn’t it? How hard can it be to spend an hour less on Netflix and an hour more learning about what’s on the ballot?
Being "grossly uninformed" is no excuse anymore.
They aren't stupid... just not paying attention and skeptical due to a combination of propaganda (fake news!) and rightful incredulity at the state of things.
But I can't excuse them.
(Been ridiculed for it. Still get ridiculed for pointing out the current reality of it, with or without the additional "I told you so!" included.)
Vance literally defended the eating cats and dogs lie during the debate. The entire fucking point of this platform is to fuck the immigrants, legal or otherwise.
Or is this actually a surprise to anyone with half a brain?
At the end of the day, there are different levels of terrible things that can happen to us, and right now we are staring down multi-generational damage to our country.
There has to be more than a few of them, right? They could halt or correct this agenda at any time they choose.
In fact the reason why it’s so bad now is that he blames his (more intelligent) advisers in his previous administration for his problems.
I think you're having a hard time grasping the concept of people who care more about rolling back social and cultural change than they care about the United States being a strong and prosperous country. The tension between those priorities in the Republican party has been resolved. The current leaders in the party, including Vance, rose because they understood that their voters are ready to let go of world leadership, including technological leadership and economic competitiveness, in order to roll back social progress.
If you ask them directly, they'll invoke some magical thinking about how this is going to unleash a golden age of prosperity and technology, but they don't care if they believe it or if anyone believes it, because they don't actually care anymore. That's why they don't blink when Trump talks about backwards, impoverished countries with admiration. There's no contradiction for them. They really do look at a country like Russia and think, yes, I want the U.S. to be an American-flavored version of that.
That point of view still exists in the Republican Party, but it has been eclipsed by something sadder and smaller-minded. Liberal progressives have long used national greatness as a lever on patriotic conservatives, telling them, look, our "national greatness" comes from our embrace of education, cultural change, new people, new ideas. If conservatives love our supposed national greatness, they should embrace the progressive liberal ideals that built it. Now, it's like the Republican Party has been taken over by conservatives who... decided the liberals were right? It's like they gave up and said, y'all are right, national greatness requires education, continual learning and self-criticism, openness to new ideas and new people, and acceptance of creative destruction, both economic and cultural. They accepted that, grieved, faced the choice with clear eyes, and decided that national greatness isn't worth the cost. They look at Russia and see a country that is marinating in its own chauvinism, and they want that instead.
You sound like you don't know any decent Republicans who are really upset at what's happening. I do. They ought to be encouraged to speak up.
The fact of the matter is that "the party" is MAGA now, there is effectively no internal resistance, and mounting one is basically intractable. Trump won the primary with 80% of the vote despite "strong" opposition.
It really isn't anymore. I agree that there are many decent "old-time" Republicans, but they've been neutered and/or they've "self-deported" themselves from politics.
Romney might've been able to run and split the vote.
Bush the younger could've put his thumb on the scale, too.
Murkowski says "we are all afraid" [of MAGA].
Many traditional Republican congressmen have simply bowed out and not sought re-election.
McCain is dead.
The only one that I can think of that actually stood up is Liz Cheney.
To use a programming phrase, the country is in an "error state" and has been since 2017.
I don't know what the re-set is.
But now those "decent Republicans" vote Democrat. Their feeling about it, to repurpose a saying from a different context, could be summed up as, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." They never wanted to be Democrats and still have a sentimental attachment to the Republican Party, but here they are.
+-------
I'm not thinking that Religion is the problem here.
What makes you believe that they are engaging with their religious views in good faith?
I know a great many friends and acquaintances that take their religious studies seriously. I also have met a great many more whose approach is far more cavalier, simply using their beliefs to justify their existing biases and gut feelings, as well as justifying and excusing their own anti-social behavior.
Vance is a useful stooge handpicked by Peter Thiel. If push comes to shove, do you think his Yale degree is going to give him any backbone if he's ordered to do something that violates the Constitution? Did Yale provide John Yoo with one when he wrote legal memos justifying the torture of detainees held without charge in Guantanamo 20 years ago? Yoo was ready to ignore the Geneva Conventions then, and Vance is ready to deport US citizens now.
https://youtu.be/vVJ_Icosa3s?si=urohSO8q_iLFJpg2
That being said, republicans decided to chose an M1 Abrams tank to kill the pesky mice in the system.
I think the question is which set of ideas are not ok (e.g. clearly "I want to commit violence" is not an ok idea) which set of ideas are a grey area ("I have attended a major event of a US designated terror organization such as a funeral of a leader from a a terror organization") and which set of ideas are ok ("I want to advocate for peacefully advocate for more bike lanes"). There are very strong party affiliations for what ideas are considered ok vs forbidden (e.g. trans rights in the sports world).
Most people in the course of their job do not closely work with people of diverse backgrounds. People who work at universities will work with people of all backgrounds and abilities. It’s not just about race or gender, but language, mobility, mental disabilities, and so forth. People in roles that deal with so many diverse people need to be able to articulate how in a statement. That’s not unreasonable or political, but just a reality of the job.
Likewise the right does not agree with you that the diversity statement is a positive and non-ideological contribution to the hiring process and if your response is going to be "this is not up for discussion because it is not a political or ideological matter" well... they are going to disagree with you and if they are in charge might respond by cutting funding and support for your institution. That's just a reality of living in a democracy.
Most of these people haven't read a single "diversity statement" and cannot articulate what exactly the hiring process at a university is, and what actual role these statements play in the process. It's mostly ideological posturing about something that sounds scary to them. I'm not saying this isn't up for discussion, but the discussion better be around what the facts are and not the boogey man "the right" created.
At the end of the day the people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students need to articulate and demonstrate that they can do this task. There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers than an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"? They don't have an answer, all they know is they don't like the current process, even though they can't explain what it is.
> people who are being hired to teach in a classroom that will include a diverse group of students
I don't remotely understand how this is relevant to whether a particular instructor should be hired or not. If I need to learn math, then I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with. We can take a look at example diversity statements online https://physicalsciences.ucsd.edu/_files/examples-submitted-... and we will notice people feel empowered to talk about their sexuality, race, gender etc but they never proudly mentioned things like "I am a white heterosexual man from the US" but if you swap words to a new value in the relevant categories i.e. "I am a Latinx queer woman from Mexico" this suddenly becomes relevant to the exercise. If changing the color, sexuality, gender, or place of origin for an applicant is relevant to the outcome then this seems like a discriminatory process (https://www.justice.gov/crt/nondiscrimination-basis-race-col...).
I do think it's perfectly ok for people to disagree with me here and I expect that if their representatives get in power we will see funding and priorities shift back towards more required diversity statements while also shifting to allow admissions processes to take into account things like race, sexuality, and gender etc which is just the reality of living in a democracy.
Of course, but I haven't brought up parties, you did. I'm taking an apolitical position from the perspective of an educator looking to just do their job free from interference of political parties. I'm not sure what you do, but I don't suppose you'd enjoy "the left" or "the right" barging in and micromanaging your hiring committee, thinking they know how to do your job better than you.
> I don't remotely understand how this is relevant
Exactly, and that's kind of my point. You are very eager to quote the law at me, but you aren't first willing to spend the time to actually understand the reason for the diversity statements, how they are used, and why they might be necessary at all.
I think that has to do with this:
> I want my instructor to be knowledgeable, personable, patient, good at explanations, and dedicated to their work. I don't care what equipment they have between their legs, what color it is, or who they want to use it with.
You are looking at this from the perspective of a student, who view the job of the instructor as to teach. But the job is not to just teach, it is actually to be a member of the faculty, which comes with may other. One of our primary directives is to build a community that is conducive to learning. And how we do this is by selecting top students for admittance based on scholastic achievement, regardless of background.
Turns out when you do this, and you cast a wide net, a lot of different people end up in your classroom. Get past the culture war nonsense and put yourself in the shoes of an instructor of a math class of 100 students...
85 are from the US, 15 are immigrants and speak English as a second language. For some of them it's the first time in another country.
3 of them have ADHD. 1 is autistic. 8 have a learning disability. 5 have a motor disability. 1 is undergoing treatment for a major medical issue. 20 of them are neurodivergent in some way. 30 of them are suffering symptoms of depression. 1 of them is a psychopath. 30 are first generation students. 35 are low income. 1 is trans.
Your job is to help all those people succeed at math. How might this affect a math instructor? Here are some ways:
- Have you chosen your course materials to take into account low income individuals that can't afford a $200 textbook? Are they accessible by people with disabilities, for example are they available in electronic form?
- Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?
- What are your course policies for students with learning disabilities? How do you handle the fact that some students need 2x time than others? How do you structure your exams so that students who can't take them during the test time are able to? How do you handle students who have permission to miss instruction to deal with medical treatments?
The classroom is where the culture war meets reality. Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations they will never find themselves in. But in the classroom, things get real. For example, when a trans student asks you to call them by their preferred pronoun, what do you do in that situation? For most professors it's not a hypothetical, it's just something that happens on the job. So you need to have a real answer for these things, and not a political answer or a talking point.
The diversity statement is a really good way to open up a dialogue about these topics. So let's look at the diversity statements you brought up, and what you had to say about them:
> they never proudly mentioned things lik...
> I'm taking an apolitical position We've been over this already.
Just because you do not wish that your position is political doesn't make it so.
> Your job is to help all those people succeed at math.
Yes. Well our job is at least to help some of them succeed at math because they won't all succeed statistically https://umbc.edu/stories/math-awareness-needed-to-raise-math... "For instance, in 2022, only 31% of graduating high school seniors were ready for college-level math – down from 39% in 2019.". We disagree on how best to accomplish this but metrics (e.g. PISA, NAEP or any way we have come up to evaluate this) indicate we have not achieved any incremental progress in decades even though cost per pupil has dramatically increased (e.g. student teacher ratio has declined dramatically). So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
> Most online culture warriors are talking about people they'll never meet in hypothetical situations
Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
> There are real language and cultural barriers, as well as disability barriers that an instructor needs to consider. How can this be done in a way that is acceptable to "the right"?
It's likely that many of your goals regarding language, cultural, and "disability" (I put this in quotes because some are real and other times people pretend to have a "disability" in order to turn in their homework late) cannot be met in a way that is acceptable to the right so you need to either drop these goals or accept that you are going to lose funding in support if you attempt to accomplish these goals.
"We" are asking you to drop things that "we" consider harmful. Initially "we" attempted to negotiate (https://president.columbia.edu/news/our-next-steps, https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...) but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples of what will happen if "your" side is unwilling to budge on "your" position regarding things like diversity letters in the hiring process in the hopes that the next tier of institutions has a change of heart or at least pretend to for a few years. You and I have a difference of opinion much like I might have a difference of opinion with a fundamentalist christian who wants to use taxpayer money to teach about creationism. I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements. Now that "we" are in power the onus is on educators to decide if this is the hill they want to die on. I still find it very sad that we couldn't reach a compromise that left American institutions in a strong position to be scientific leaders in their space but unfortunately the levers available to political leadership are crude and time is short (I would also argue that "my" leadership is headed up by a geriatric unintelligent narcissist who does a lot of damage when he lashes out but I guess that can't be helped right now).
I hope you have a great rest of your day - I'm done h...
Look, I get the idea that "everything is political" because of how politics touches every aspect of life. But that doesn't actually mean everyone who has an opinion on a topic that is hot in the political arena is a political actor, nor does it make their opinion political. People working in universities have had to deal with the question of how to build a close-knit diverse community long before DEI became a hot-button issue. So I'll throw it right back at you: just because you want my opinion to be political, doesn't make it any less based on a practical reality of my job.
> So I might humbly suggest that the approaches we have taken so far have not been successful.
These stats are about graduating seniors so now I'm unsure of the relevance of why you brought this up.
> Are you trying to suggest that most of us who disagree with you and others like you haven't set foot in a classroom? This is unhinged.
Yeah that would be unhinged if I said or suggested that, alas I did not. But you yourself have made it clear that while you have experience taking a class, that has not qualified you to have a cogent opinion on the topic of how to manage a classroom. The same way the experience of eating food doesn't necessarily qualify you to have an opinion on how it's made.
> in a way that is acceptable to the right
Again... this elusive "acceptable way" is left unstated. I guess we will never learn what that might be.
> but "we" were rebuffed. I believe the strategy now is a to make a few prominent examples
Of course you're going to be rebuffed if your position doesn't even pretend to understand the other side of the issue. So then apparently instead of gaining an understanding and working toward common ground, the next step is domination in hopes of total capitulation. And you call this democracy?! The current actions against Harvard are a mockery of democracy.
> I and many others like me will happily vote for candidates who will take a sledgehammer to any institution that wishes to institute things like diversity statements.
And yet, despite wanting to destroy them so badly, you have admitted you have no real understanding of why they exist, how they are used, nor can you offer a suggestion for how to replace them in a way that is ideologically palatable to you. That is a political opinion. If you want to draw a distinction, your impulse to smash diversity statements has a political impetus that you can't really define; whereas my impulse to defend them is based on the fact they demonstrably help me do my job.
> I do wish you all the best!
You spent an entire paragraph before this statement talking about how you want to come into my place of work, disrupt it for no reason that you can articulate, and that if I don't like it tough, because you're in charge now. If that's you wishing the best, I'd hate to hear you wish someone the worst.
As someone who has twice had to completely switch their life from one country to another, entirely different one, I'd say that for one, you should give people more credit for being able to adapt and still get the gist of what's being communicated even if it's done through local cultural color, and secondly, that adapting is exactly what these people should have to do if they came to this new country and its schools.
One can appreciate and respect the foreign cultural roots of immigrant students (in this example) without having to bend over backwards to change one's own to suit their notions of the world.
Asking otherwise is no less absurd than having an American attend a school in China and expect local teachers to communicate with him in English, using humor and anecdotes of an expressly American sort.
Don't give the guy the credit of being a reasonable adult.
https://newrepublic.com/article/128107/classier-two-evils
"Trump, on the other hand, is so anomalous a figure that the GOP establishment can console themselves with the knowledge that he leads no faction. Even if he wins the nomination, Trump can be safely relegated to the category of a one-off, a freak mutation, never to be repeated. "
Now that he's in a second term whose winding course to fruition just about nobody could have easily predicted in early 2016, and totally dominates the Republican party, its base and most of its thinking, the above seems laughable.
Trump looks less like "The Mule" than ever today and even if he can't be replaced by anyone quite like him, he's put into motion normalizations of deviance that will reverberate through US politics for many years after he's out, either legally or through natural causes.
It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk.
Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency.
But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer.
I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China.
All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.
The entire second part of your comment shores up exactly this notion that everyone else has the US to thank for its standard of living and that the country is exceptional.
Underlying all the things you list: the post-WWII order, the Pax Americana, the military hegemony, the position of the dollar as the World's reserve currency and so forth all underscore exactly the fact that the US is or at least has been exceptional and that the rest of the world has been heavily benefited by it.
That some of these people then took this and spun it into idiocy about cutting off "freeloaders" without being aware that this means having to take a hit to the country's exceptional position doesn't change the truth of the U.S being exceptional and many countries having many indirect benefits to thank it for
Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.
Given the inevitable rise of at least one dominant power, I prefer that it was the United States with its generally benevolent democratic traditions to model off of (even if it itself often poorly applied them overseas)
This is what the Republican party is about.
Party doesn't matter. Ds need to inform their R Congresscritters every bit as much as any other combination.
For what it's worth, Republican constituents overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the R primary. Any number of candidates would have provided boilerplate Republican policies, but that wasn't what they wanted.
What Trump is doing is what these voters want.
And there's no limit. It's become an illiberal pro-authoritarian movement. It's in-progress.
Pick something you care about and defend it. It can't be everything all at once at all times, no one can do that.
Maybe in reruns of The West Wing. America is a long way past that now.
As someone with some "right-leaning" views I am indeed very sad that the US is losing our edge as an international destination for higher education but I do want to see major reforms at elite institutions. I don't see a good way to accomplish these reforms without being willing to go after institutions in the only way they really care about (hurting the budget). I think we would reach a better place if we could agree to compromises where the universities concede on the "less important points" (e.g. make an earnest effort to drop everything the right calls DEI and reduce the administration to student ratio back to ~1980 levels) while the right agrees to leave funding and privileges in place but if we cannot compromise then we unfortunately end up in a position that is worse for everyone. I suspect most of the left will blame the right for being unable to compromise while most of the right will blame the right but this is kind of the same theme for every major party-aligned disagreement.
I don't want a dictatorship. I probably want largely the same things as you. To be safe in and outside of my home. Affordable and quality food healthcare and education. The rule of law.
Fundamentally all people have most things in common with each other but our differences can seem magnified and exaggerated especially with things like social media and the 24 hour news hype cycle.
"If our schools have lost any edge, it’s since Trump came back to power." I completely 100% disagree with this statement. My partner is an education at a University and remote learning had a huge negative impact on our schools and student outcomes. US academic achievement has been flat for decades despite spending and pupil rations going way up https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf. Public schools in certain areas of the country are a complete failure for every student enrolled https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/at-13-baltim... (I choose an example of a left leaning area but obviously there are right leaning examples as well!)
Let me propose what I see as a couple of common sense reforms. Mandate the availability of pre-k nationwide starting at 4. Increase the school year from 180 days to 195 days by reducing the length of summer. If needed make this optional at first. Allow professors to fail students who have not learned the course material and make it illegal for the department to pressure professors to offer the students a way to pass the course.
> why I am very sad that we could not achieve reform without resorting to measures such as threatening the international student admission process
So far Trump's administration has seemed to address perceived grievances that they have with the university administration. In the comment you replied to I outlined some positive reforms that I would personally like to see as someone who cares deeply about education and wants to see a successful system. Trump's administration hasn't and probably won't make progress in this direction. In other words they are saying "don't do X" and aren't saying "Do Y". I approve of their progress on the former and think they are unlikely to make progress on the latter.
My organization employs hundreds of people working on everything from low income nutrition education to researching Medicaid expenditure.
We belong to the University, but we don’t have anything to do with undergraduate education.
This is the problem with looking at higher-Ed ratios like that…there are a lot of good things happening at a University which don’t reduce to “teacher in classroom.”
---
Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.
But we don’t agree on how that should happen.
The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.
We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.
I don't agree with this international student, and other policies, or implementations, and you can't run government like you run a "move fast and break things" startup, which seems to be how the administration is operating.
But, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and try to separate Trump's execution from the underlying ideological sentiment.
Republicans and Trump-voting independents signed up for this. They want to see Harvard treated the same way it treats others.
J.D. Vance gave a big speech at the Nationalism Conservatism Conference titled "The Universities are the Enemy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FR65Cifnhw
Destroying universities has been his schtick since long before he was a VP candidate.
He has stated that he believes 4-year degrees make people dumber.
I'm constantly amazed by how many people don't know that waging wars on Universities has been Vance's thing for years.
Most likely Harvard will try to fight it in court and then give in if they lose. It's not likely we see the future decertification continue into the academic year.
So people committing thought crimes huh?
This is the US in 2025 - indefinitely imprisoning people without any actual charges for having opinions the current administration doesn't like.
The courts have been beaten months ago. We are well into crazy train territory.
The courts aren't even trying, they could order someone into contempt, but they won't.
By that logic, Trump's orders are just words. The Trump administration obeys the courts - they push the envelope way too far, but it is still rule of law.
No they don't:
https://apnews.com/article/deportation-immigration-south-sud...
Also, Trump is relying on Congress to pass bills, for example. It's not rule by decree.
> order from the Supreme Court to return him.
The Supreme Court did not order that.
Edit: If you object to these things, realize you are helping the Trump administration by spreading exaggerated fears about what's happening. They want people to believe they are super-powerful, unstoppable, inevitable; it intimidates people into inaction. Also, without accurate information, people can't make good decisions and act - you are helping a propaganda campaign (unwittingly). And finally, spreading fear is not what good, responsible leaders - or teammates - do.
We have multiple judges beginning contempt proceedings against the administration, so this is open to debate.
And, there's recent action in the budget bill to attempt to defang judges' contempt powers, seemingly in response.
"No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued"
Will the people who had to transfer or leave be made whole? Even if a judge overturns this it will take time that the students impacted by this will have to pay, regardless of outcome.
There is little to no chance of this getting overturned.
Harvard will sue, lose in court, and then give DHS everything they want at which point they'll get their visas back.
They just want to pretend to be the victim for a while so that their overwhelmingly far-left faculty don't leave.
People want to study in the US, and the administration is revoking Harvard's ability to be on the list of study destinations.
The students want to go to Harvard, it's not that Harvard wants the students (of course they do, but that's not the direct concern here).
[p.s. bravo to the one who downvoted as soon as I hit submit! Wow, that was quick. Bots on HN?]
We are in a global war, and US and the west is taking damage.
In the last three months, we've collected many data points which are each each further down a slope. I suggest the slope is slippery, and has a very unfortunate end.
__________
[Edit] Predicting a future that might resonate more with YC folks: "Pursuant to Trump Executive Order XYZ, you must submit regular firewall logs and social-media handles for activity by your staff. Failure to comply will result in losing the ability to post H1-B positions."
They will be accommodated.
damn, Trump is really gunning for Harvard
not sure what rolling over for Trump looks like, but a lot of existing foreign students will be screwed unless something gives
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/judge-blocks-tr...
> A federal judge in California has blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S.
It used to be harder and mostly seems to be a matter of ICE finding the right door to break down now.
Can you expand - what happened?
It is not, but it isn't unrelated; this is about the individual actions for which Harvard's refusal to assist by proactively supplying information is the basis for the action against Harvard.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/09/libya-deport...
[1] e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/20/trump-admini...
Also, most people affected by this will not be the son/daughter of the president of a foreign country or a billionaire.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/green-card-holder-detained-ice-immi...
Who remains there, despite SCOTUS ordering his return? https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
> Instead of hastening to correct its egregious error, the Government dismissed it as an “oversight.”
> The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
The vast majority of them (of which there are over a million) don't have a Wikipedia page, nor are they "Deputy chairwoman and CFO" of a company as big as Huawei.
Rumeysa Ozturk sat in jail for six weeks for writing an op-ed. I assure you, there are plenty of international students you can mistreat without causing a major diplomatic incident.
They sent a lot of people, mostly not Salvadoran, to El Salvador [0] without due process, the one Salvadoran just gets covered more in the news because, as well as the issues applicable to the others, he had a existing court order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador specifically.
[0] And they've done or attempted to do that to Libya, South Sudan, and other third countries to whom the deported have no connection, as well.
50+ Venezuelans Imprisoned in El Salvador Came to US Legally, Never Violated Immigration Law
50+ Venezuelans Imprisoned in El Salvador Came to US Legally, Never Violated Immigration Law
This is going to burn the children of the most powerful families across the world. Monarchies, dictators, owners of international conglomerates, etc all send their kids to Harvard. Destroying their children’s education out of a fit of malice is going to haunt him, and America on top of all the other stuff America is doing to the world.
America first is rapidly becoming America alone.
When you frame it like this... it doesn't sound like such a loss. But yeah, it's not the only way to frame it.
If they kept stats on who was an endowment/legacy admit and gave them a different colored diploma so people could filter them out when assessing things like grades and graduation rate and they didn't effect the curve I think there would be less criticism of the process.
I dont see why they would get different diplomas provided they complete the same coursework. If they are inferior, they should only help others on the curve.
I do think they would be more upfront about options for entry.
Not if they're given unearned grades
I forget the exact stat, but I think the median GPA there is about an A-.
Apparently you've not been to MIT in a while - it offers degrees in business management, finance, plus 17 in arts, humanities, and social sciences, not to mention grad programs. MIT admits more than its fair share of fruit-cakes with money:
https://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/
But yes, I think that, in the aggregate, it’s not good to have a large number of people like me injected straight into America’s major institutions. We dilute what I think is a core american value against elitism and hierarchy. And our presence gives our home grown elite permission to drop certain beneficial safeguards on their behavior, such as the WASP taboo against conspicuous consumption. This is highly visible in Northern Virginia where I grew up. It was always full of elites, but now it’s full of elites that don’t feel pressured to keep a low profile and at least pretend they’re not elites.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before and your account has unfortunately been continuing to break the rules pretty badly.
It’s still unclear to me why Africa, the Middle East, much (which part?) of Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe are uniquely capable of political corruption that France and Poland are not.
Get rid of Harvard and the person you mentioned would just... go somewhere else. You aren't actually advocated FOR anything, just saying 'there are bad people in the world'. Um, ok, yeah, we know that. That's why we disagree with you empowering those we see as bad people but that you defend illegally empowering/illegal behavior of because you happen to agree with them.
Have any of the challenges to the administration prevailed on APA grounds in an appellate court?
The Supreme Court stands ready to overturn Humphreys Executor. https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-bl.... The prospect of the Supreme Court upholding using the APA to challenge direct presidential action is nil. Courts aren’t empowered to micromanage discretionary presidential actions.
The cases where appellate courts have upheld injunctions against the administration have been mainly on due process and first amendment groups. Courts are empowered to protect individual rights from executive action.
I doubt that most of those people are reliant on student visas.
You probably will be able to soon though, and it 'only' costs $5m: "A ‘Trump Card Visa’ Is Already Showing Up in Immigration Forms" [0]
I couldn't blame you for not having seen this though. It was quickly flagged and never whitelisted; like so, so many other important stories here this past few months. Check my favorites for more falsely flagged stories.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43921421
1. "Trump isn't that corrupt."
2. "They'll try, but federal law will successfully interrupt the bribe at some stage."
3. "That hyper-exact event is improbable... but perhaps a slightly different favor or a different way of Trump extracting personal gain."
P.S.: For more context, two days ago Trump's Secretary of Commerce was promoting website to go live this week for selling (personally invented, illegal) "Gold Card" visas. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/business/us-gold-card-investo...
Again, again, again ...
I don't have to! Because I didn't bring the argument into the conversation.
Burden of proof [1] should be a required reading before posting on this site.
Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas you mention, which are indeed the closest thing to this idea, come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
It is a fantasy, whether you all like it or not. Life is not a James Bond movie.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
Ironic, then, that you don't understand it. You've confused "Burden of proof" with "Burden of imagining an argument for someone else who was too lazy to actually make one."
Let's try that out: "If you disagree with me, you are wrong and insane, because of reasons that you will have to find for yourself. Insert evil cackle here."
> Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas [...] come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
Oh my, look! A golden opportunity for you to show off your honest commitment to (real) Burden of Proof.
Yes, share with us these unnamed "additional requirements" you claim exist. (Hopefully not inside an invisible dragon in your garage.)
Since you assert they are not subject to corrupt presidential whims and waivers, that must mean they are federal statute, in which case linking to them should be a breeze.
I didn't write that, I'm only contesting it.
Make an effort, buddy, I know you can grasp it.
Nobody even asked you to "prove" something, you were only asked to give an actual argument instead of a flat denial. Stop pretending like you're some kind of victim of unreasonable requests.
> Even the upcoming "Gold Card" visas [...] come with some additional requirements that no money in the world can circumvent.
Again, link to them, ya hypocrite.
In a liberal society ideas live and die by their merits and we all benefit by the best ideas floating to the top.
What defines Americanism is a quote I love attributed to Bill Buckley:
> I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.
Remember that Buckley was as close as it gets to being an american aristocrat. But the sentiment reflects an american tradition where people in elite positions are expected to, at least outwardly, express embarrassment or skepticism about their own status. America a country of yeoman farmers.
Changing my last name to Aaaaaaaaaaaa now.
Or a certain skin color known for their personality... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-universities-p...
not really up to date with reality are we? there are tons of "permanently employed illegals" with dubious chances of payment . Half the fighting done in libya, sudan, yemen is done by refugees pressured into service.
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5316202-future-queen-...
not that i agree with that anyways (citizenship is stupid, borders are stupid, countries are stupid blah blah blah) but it's pretty clear we're currently dealing with a regime that's willing to use ambiguous regulations in malicious ways (no comment on previous regimes, they're all bad, don't call me a HN Democrat or whatever).
The well-off rich and upper middle-class could move from country to country relatively freely, or immigrants who intended not to look back. Which puts a strong pressure on self-selection on the type of people coming into a country.
That time isn't now, with cheap airfares and the internet, it's much more easier for anyone to come in, often with no intention of integration and bringing their own sectarian politics in. When the time comes, how many of these immigrants do you think will fight for their host country? Especially if said host country make likely come into conflict with their homelands.
Same arguments were just as valid 100-200 years ago where virtually anyone could move anywhere.
Millions of people worldwide have values that are radically different from yours or mine or >99% of people reading this. Consider, a country like Afghanistan-no doubt there are millions of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and are trapped under the rule of a government whose policies and values they radically oppose - and they are denied any realistic outlet to advocate for change using non-violent means-but, at the same time, there are also millions of Afghans who support the Taliban, who think it is great and its values and laws and policies and actions are all wonderful-do you really want millions of pro-Taliban Afghans to be allowed to move to your country if they want to and can afford to do so, and be allowed to vote in your elections as soon as they turn up? This isn’t saying we should ban immigrants or refugees from Afghanistan, only have some kind of filtering process which excludes those with radically opposed values, such as those who are pro-Taliban - and, so nobody thinks I’m singling out Afghans for special treatment, there are several other countries for which the same concern exists (consider e.g. Iran, North Korea), and such a “filtering process” can be designed to work in a way which treats immigrants/refugees of different nationalities/ethnicities/religions equally. But complete abolition of citizenship and immigration control would leave your country at the mercy of chance in terms of protection against takeover by newcomers with radically different values, and although in the short-run you’d escape that outcome (even if they were all free to come, most of them either don’t want to or can’t afford to), in the long-run the odds that you’d succumb to it only go up. And such a policy is fundamentally unstable, in that it would eventually become the cause of its own demise: once these newcomers with radically different values (whatever those values might be) take over, their new values will cause them to reinstate immigration and citizenship controls, to prevent anyone else doing to them what they did to you.
That’s not to say I agree with what the Trump administration is doing here - I actually sympathise with some conservative criticisms of Harvard, but this isn’t a gentle federal nudge in the right direction, it is attacking Harvard with a legally dubious sledgehammer - but just because an administration abuses immigration laws (something many governments around the world have done many times before) doesn’t change the fact that some degree of legal control of immigration and naturalisation is the right thing to have in principle
The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship by naturalisation to “free white persons” of “good moral character” - yes, it didn’t technically bar immigration from people who didn’t meet that criterion, but it reduced them to an underclass who were denied citizenship - and this was prior to the 14th Amendment, so there was no constitutional right to birthright citizenship even for their children born in the US.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (still on the books but long dormant until recently revived by Trump) gave the federal government the power to deport citizens of countries at war with the US - effectively banning them from immigrating. The Alien Friends Act of 1798 allowed the President to deport any foreigner based on the President’s subjective determination that they were “dangerous”- however, it expired in 1800 and was not renewed.
In the early years of US independence, there were state laws enabling deportation of immigrants - e.g. in 1794 Massachusetts responded to the “problem” of poor Irish immigrants with a state law authorising their deportation back to Ireland, and several were actually deported under this Act. While nowadays, state-level deportation laws would surely be struck down as intruding into an exclusive federal domain, the lack of broad federal deportation statutes for much of the 18th/19th centuries left open a (since closed) constitutional space in which state-level deportation laws could exist
Even prior to US independence, British law gave the colonial authorities the power to deport people they viewed as undesirable - rarely exercised, but it legally existed - and the main reason they rarely exercised it was they didn’t get many “undesirable” immigrants turning up
Note I’m not defending these laws - judged by today’s standards they were racist and deeply unfair - just pointing out that the “first 100 years” of the US wasn’t as “open borders” as you paint it as having been
And while no doubt historically (and even today) many immigration laws have been racist in their terms, motivation, or implementation - I don’t think the idea of having some restrictions on immigration is inherently racist. Almost every country on earth (even non-Western) nowadays has laws saying people convicted of very serious crimes cannot immigrate without special permission - is it “racist” if Botswana says to someone just released from serving a 20 year prison sentence for terrorism “sorry, we don’t want you”?
There is a mechanism for that transfer built into the visa, which could be used for example if your professor moved institutions and wanted to re-hire you to fulfil the original goals of your exchange program.
It's unclear if this affects all foreign academic staff, many of whom who would be on the J, or just the F visa.
Edit: apparently all exhange visas.
I mean seriously, if a malicious saboteur was running things, what would the differences be?
We've all had bad bosses ... and that's a problem, but it's 10x worse when the people around know better and do nothing.
They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream. If the Democrats only messaging is DEI, inclusivity and girl/woman power… they view the Democrats as out of touch. It is the equivalent of Let Them Eat Cake or brioche.
And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Republicans are the ones bringing up gender, trans issues etc into discussion again and again. Not democrats.
> They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream.
No, because vote for Trump and republicans is vote for higher prices, more expensive healthcare and tax cuts for rich. Every single time. This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal. Republicans will lie, fox news will like and media will both side it.
> And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.
Women are working class and struggling. And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ... and democrats were not running on dei.
That explains why people voted for Trump. That doesn't explain why people didn't vote for Harris.
> This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal.
1. Republican voters either want to destroy the working class, or are detached from reality and believe the lies from Fox News.
2. Maybe it's not about what the Democrats signal. But let's pause for a second: what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
> And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ...
What do you mean? Trump said grocery prices would drop on day 1! He said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1! And the war in Gaza too! He said he would bring jobs back to America!
The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class. Of course, it was all a lie, but it doesn't matter if your voters just believe anything you say.
Harris does not provide what project 2025 calls for. She would not own the libs either.
> what did the Democrats signal? What was the big message that the Harris campaign really wanted people to know?
They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good". They were not talking about DEI, women in general nor about minorities as OP suggests.
> The Republicans absolutely addressed the economic concerns of the working class.
And all those concerns stopped mattering the day after - both to the voters and to the party too. Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that. These are pretend concerns. Something republican votes can pretend they care about when democrats are in power. Something that does not matter when republicans are in power. Something they will call "bad" during democrat governments regardless of how things really are and something they never blame republican government for.
You can add debt to it too. Deficit matters only when democrats are in power. It does not matter when republicans are in power.
It is and never was about any of that. It is primary about identity and secondary about cultural war. Economy and everything else is far far behind these.
---------------
Pretending this is about economy, pretending that trying to make these voters life better would get you vote is how democrats are loosing. Even when they succeed, those voters punish them, because it was never ever about that.
So we should vote for Harris because she isn't Trump? What's wrong with Trump though? We already had him for 4 years, and the country didn't explode. Trump also has nothing to do with Project 2025, he said so himself.
> They run on "we will govern responsibly" and "we can make economy good".
Right, but how will the Dems "make the economy good"? Look at California, people are fleeing in droves, crime rate is through the roof, Dems are just as corrupt as everyone else! Trump is right, we need to be tough on crime and deport the people destroying our country.
> Previous republicans governments, including Trumps one did not made economy great, did not made healthcare cheaper, none of that.
Again, it's not like the Democrats really did all that great either. I never really saw them push for universal healthcare. Student loan forgiveness was cool, but just a way to saddle the country with more debt without solving the real problem (and Trump rolled it back anyways).
---------------
Ok, I don't actually believe these things anymore. But the problem is: I did believe some of these things before the election. I apologize for my stupidity, though at least I can say I was not directly responsible since while I live in the US, I don't have voting rights.
The fourth largest economy in the world—is that what you want us to look at and then ask how the Democrats will make the economy good? Gee, I wonder where they'd find an answer for that stumper.
Another issue that I've been trying to understand are the delays and budget overruns in the high-speed rail project. Some people argue it was NIMBYs but isn't governance responsible for making sure NIMBYs don't become a major problem? My current understanding is that it was partially due to valid safety & environmental concerns, and partially the project looked simple but turned out to involve very complicated/hard engineering work. It's just very difficult to sell people on this argument... Glad to hear any insights, or links/books.
You can ask that, and it's a good question, but it's a much harder case to make in a political ad. "Sure, the Californian economy is enormous, but it would have been bigger if someone else was in charge!" isn't an easy case to make.
And that’s a much easier message than using California to say Democrats are bad for the economy.
Second, no. Republicans are massively more corrupt. Trump himself went from a guy who had debts to a rich guy due to his first term corruption. The goverment and its positions are quite literally openly on sale right now.
Trump and republicans are not tough on crime, they are heavily involved in crime. They are also ok woth cops breaking the law which makes crimes worst. And makes cops into criminals. Oh, and they are against law enforcement in taxes and such.
Democrats actually did much better then republican on healthcare while repuocans systematically opposed it. Every single time.
I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
So yes, I know the Republicans are massively more corrupt. But the Dems contributed to normalizing corruption in government. When you point at obvious corruption in the Republican party, and then they respond by pointing out obvious corruption in the Democratic party, and then you resort to saying stuff like: "sure we have corruption, just less of it and you have more of it", you have lost.
You mention police corruption: what happened to "defund the police"? https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-wen...
Universal healthcare: if it was such a partisan issue, then the problem would be easy to fix, no? Dems pass universal healthcare in blue states. Republicans see how good it is and get jealous. So why isn't it happening?
> I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
Prop 47 was dragged through the mud on basically every major new outlet (although TBF, nearly every major new outlet is right-leaning). Same for the homeowner's insurance market.
You like to cry “fascism! Fascism!” while you turn a blind eye to ‘Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’, to the deterioration of the economy, and to the social cohesion of the US at large. To be so blinded by your rage that you can’t look past Trump’s demeanor and actually look at his performance tells me you’re out of touch. If the egg prices aren’t concerning you, then you are in no place to talk about what is motivating commonfolk who voted for trump. By the way, this all started because elites like Hillary openly showed contempt for working class folk with her “basket of diplorables” statements. I voted for Trump because he represents my interests. Maybe if the left didn’t hate me for being a cis white male, I wouldn’t be so inclined to vote for him out of spite. But make no mistake, you’re not in the party of love and acceptance just because you voted for the other guy. You very much have a lot of hate in your heart. And if you feel like punching my face right now, just know that you are everything you claim to hate so much.
What Clinton actually said:
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/10/493427601/hillary-clintons-ba...
> "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.
> "But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
Why, isn't that exactly the opposite meaning of how you summarized it? She literally said that these disappointed working class people who support Trump are not deplorable!
After the election, Diane Hessan, who had been hired by the Clinton campaign to track undecided voters, wrote in The Boston Globe that "all hell broke loose" after the "basket of deplorables" comment, which prompted what she saw as the largest shift of undecided voters towards Trump.[40] Political scientist Charles Murray said, in a post-election interview with Sam Harris, that because the comment helped get Donald Trump elected, it had "changed the history of the world, and he [Haidt] may very well be right. That one comment by itself may have swung enough votes, it certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the New Upper Class looks at mainstream Americans".
They don't care. Why would they?
The worse Republicans act, the more Democrat leaders are happy to present themselves as the only 'sane' alternative.
That 'sanity' now includes arming genocide, campaigning with Dick Cheney, removing being 'anti-torture' from their platforms, etc. Very little media holds them to account on any of this.
The people who fund (read: own) the Democrats and the media are a higher priority to politicians than their actual voter base. That has been made abundantly clear to anyone paying attention: just look at Gaza, healthcare, environmental protection, fracking, or any number of issues where the majority of Americans want progress while <5% of Dem politicians actually fight for them.
Again, Gaza made this wildly clear: Even though 77% of Dem voters wanted an arms embargo, and >30% of 2020 Biden voters in swing states were loudly saying that arming genocide was probably a red line as far as getting their vote, Harris decided that bombing children was more important than winning the election. And the rest of the party leadership supported this, again, against the will of the vast majority of their voters.
There are actual big differences in terms of how those two parties behaves. Saying anything else is just lie.
Supposed economic desperation vote rejected economy that was doing good. They do not want better cheaper healthcare nor functioning economy. They want republican program, they just hoped it will be only other people who will be harmed.
> ### If Harris Opposes Trump’s Horrific Gaza Policies, She Should Say So
> Her defenders insist she would have been “better on Gaza.” This is very possible. But why doesn’t she explain how in her own words?
I'm still waiting.
The fact that such an assertion is a tolerated talking point in US society is absolutely damning.
The choice was between a liberal candidate that's at least nominally interested in good outcomes for Gaza and a candidate that's openly hostile to Gaza, the same candidate that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and enacted a total ban on Muslim immigrants in the u.s.
Now, Trump is openly proposing ethnic cleansing so he can build hotels in Gaza. People who equivocate on lesser-of-two-evils are those who simply don't care about real outcomes.
If you didn't pay any attention to the last campaign, just say so. It was not the Democrats who spent a billion dollars running a campaign on identity politics. This attempted retconning something that millions of people were forced to sit through is embarrassing, and you should absolutely feel bad.
That's a fine topic for a real conversation, but it was 100% not what the person I replied to was talking about.
> Of course it will be worse now.
Yes. So the Democrat's message of "The economy is improving" is a bad lie even though it was true, and "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
It doesn't matter if it is true, when it isn't really benefitting your average person in any meaningful way
> "I'll make the economy the best ever" is a good lie even though it's false?
You have to understand that the lie Trump is telling isn't "I'll make the economy better", it is "I am going to make it so you, a person, has more money and can afford things you want to buy"
Average People don't care about "the economy" they care about their bank accounts and their ability to buy and own things they want to buy
Trump makes empty promises that he will make people's actual lives better in ways that matter to them
The Democrats make empty promises that they will make "society" better, whatever that means.
Don't we, in fact, live in a society? I'm pretty sure someone told me that once.
But I don't really believe that many of the problems in society can be improved by the government from the top down
Some can, like access to healthcare and regulations and such
But most problems in society today imo are caused by trying to offload social responsibility to the government and corporations rather than people living in their communities
Yes, unfortunately, because an incumbent has to run against the state of the world during the election cycle, and their opponent gets to run against it. And yes, Trump created the terrible economy that Biden inherited. But it doesn't matter. Kamala and her campaign should've realized that early and switched course.
Through laws they shaped and molded the education to be inline with nazi ideology and only those who towed the line were allowed to continue to teach/study. heres a small article from the US Congress (shocked its still up) that discusses higher education in germany during nazi occupation. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116973/documents/...
Basically if you disagreed with the nazi party you were fired/expelled in the beginning and later sent to camps. the entire point of studying history is so we dont repeat it and just looking at the amount of US universities bending to the republican parties ideals on what they believe is scarily similar to early nazi germany.
I dont get how people dont understand that the strength of the US for the longest time has been our diversity; especially in education. hell, after world war 2 we actively recurited many nazi scientist to help us with the space program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip many would argue it is the reason why we beat the soviet union to the moon. the harm that is slowly being done to this country will take decades to repair if it can be and i dont believe that is being hyperbolic
I think yes, explicitly. I think every person on planet Earth is aware actions have consequences. That's never been a debate. The debate is always what consequences have come from what actions, and to what extent.
I'd be fine with banning political discussion altogether on this site, but until that happens, I'm not going to self-censor as others confidently let their opinions be known.
But we do ask you and everyone to heed the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can we say "Marxism" out loud yet or are moderates still pretending everything is fine?
There's not a single Marxist in American politics at any level of power that matters. We have two neo-liberal parties that are both right leaning. One is ultra-right and one is ever so slightly right leaning.
That's sure as hell not capitalism.
In what world is a party advocating for universal healthcare, free college, and expanded immigration "slightly right?"
1. Most of that party is not advocating for that, those are actually fairly fringe beliefs.
2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
They were literally in Biden's platform. If Biden didn't stand for "most of the party" IDK what to tell you.
> 2. Our fellow capitalistic allies in the west have all of that.
Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures (living space, degree attainment, etc.) Many of them have private healthcare systems and require students to pay for college.
> 3. The closest things the dems tried to universal healthcare was the ACA, and despite being obvious legislation, was fought tooth and nail. You had droves of people legitimately arguing that insurers SHOULD be able to drop you for pre-existing conditions. That's how unbelievably fucking propagandized our population is. We're advocating against ourselves every day.
Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
Uh, no. Universal healthcare and free college were not in the platform. Expanding the ACA and programs like Medicaid is not universal healthcare. There are almost zero politicians currently advocating we completely abolish private insurers. In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
> Sort of - but they are also significantly poorer on an individual basis, and the US beats them on important quality-of-life measures
And the US also loses on many important quality-of-life measurements. For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
> Democrats are not a right-wing party because Trump or "swing voters" exist.
My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
To this day, the ACA is still a common punching bag for a variety of politicians and constituents.
Ultimately, the democrats are trying to win over moderate and on-the-fence voters. That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
This is not universal healthcare either, and many countries achieve universal coverage without single-payer. I would encourage you to look this up.
> In addition, loan forgiveness is also not free college.
Dude, seriously? Biden proposed free college for families making less than $125k/yr. I'm not gonna shadow box with you, this stuff was literally written down.
You are making an excellent point about the informedness of the average voter, here.
> For example, we pay significantly more per person for healthcare while simultaneously having significantly worse healthcare outcomes. Gee, I wonder why?
Obesity, for the outcomes. The price is good old-fashioned regulatory capture :)
> My point more so was that the ACA was incredibly reasonable and obvious and still shocking unpopular. Even among the democrats, there were some at the time claiming it went too far.
Healthcare is a full FIFTH of all economic activity in the US. The ACA was stuffed full of compromises and carve-outs to get those people on board. There's no faceless villain here, there were plenty of people with skin in the game if you're looking to blame someone.
> That means they're trying to be slightly more left of the republican party, but not by much. When the republican party is far-right, as it currently is, we then have to ask ourselves: where do we land if we're trying to be slightly left of that? It's not socialism, I'll tell you that.
If Bernie Sanders cannot even win with Democrats in the primary process, he would be smoked in the general election. That's basic numeracy. And no, the party did not railroad him - he was actually just not very popular outside of college students. The US is further right than Europe or whatever other "true left" place you want to name, and our politics reflect that.
What's "communism" now? The public park? A library? What's the current communist thing that makes you couch faint?
What's "fascism" now? Enforcing borders? Deporting illegal immigrants? What's the current fascist thing that makes you couch faint?
I'm sure you'll defend it though, this guy has an R next to his name and you're on team R!
(I'm not on team D btw and never was so you can drop that pretext right now)
I'm sure you'll defend it though, this guy has an D next to his name and you're on team D!
(I'm not on team R btw and never was so you can drop that pretext right now)
Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
So if you can find equally qualified American students on the margin shouldn't you do so? I think an American university that benefits greatly from American taxpayers and institutions should primarily benefit American students. If you're picking truly exceptional student, that's one thing. But I don't think that's happening.
On top of that many students stay in the US afterwards means a brain plus for the US and a loss their home country. These kind of braun drain is a big advantage for the US they know destroy.
Same is true for income from foreign student tuition fees.
I mean they will now with a candidate pool reduction of 96%...
The rest is kinda wild. I guess Ilya Sutskever should leave? Sergey Brin would have never started Google, Jony Ive would be in the UK, Jensen Huang and Nvidia would be hailing from Taipei, Elon Musk would be in Johannesburg, Linus Torvalds would still be in Finland, the Rasmussen brothers would have launched Google maps in the Netherlands, Satya Nadella would be in Hyderabad, the Broadcom CEO would be in Malaysia...
You're beheading like 50% of the S&P my friend...
Not to mention say, the faculty of engineering at places like MIT https://www.eecs.mit.edu/role/faculty-cs/
To me places like Stanford and Caltech are world class schools that happen to be in the US. Over 90% not being American born is what I'd expect from a globally renown world class institution because that's what the world population looks like.
China has many programs to attract top global talent. If you want to fast track the transition from Silicon Valley to Beijing, kicking out the foreigners is an excellent move.
Graduate level coursework at Peking is already in English. All these scholars have to do is get on a plane.
And that's why we call it MAGA Maoism.
It's from people who think horseshoe theory has legs: that wanting to shut down prisons is the same as wanting to build concentration camps or that the people who want to say nationalize the banks are also the people who want to privatize the post office.
It's from centrists being unable to understand this difference
Harvard is a tiny university at the absolute top of the prestige hierarchy. As far as they are concerned, every serious (non-legacy/donor) applicant is a truly exceptional student. At least to the extent it can be determined from the admission materials and a short interview. They could choose randomly from all good enough applicants with no noticeable impact on academic standards.
But Harvard is not in the business of educating the most deserving. Instead, they want to educate the ones who will be successful and influential in the future, and to give them the best networking opportunities possible. The standard joke is that if the admissions officer knew that the applicant would become a tenured professor at Harvard, they would reject the applicant for the lack of success. Most Harvard graduates fail to reach that standard, but it's better to choose a likely failure (and an unlikely unicorn) over a certain failure.
PhD admissions are another story. At that stage, Harvard starts caring a lot more about academic potential. They don't want to restrict their recruitment to the US, because Americans are only a small fraction of the people with access to good education. Especially because Americans are reluctant to do a PhD due to the low pay effectively mandated by public research funders.
https://www.harvard.edu/about/history/nobel-laureates/
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/research-leaders/2024/in...
https://hms.harvard.edu/about-hms/history-hms/timeline-disco...
https://www.harvard.edu/in-focus/innovation/
Roughly a third of the 50-something of Harvard's Nobel laureates were immigrants by the way.
Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Who else is slamming them? I'd imagine techies are humble enough to understand that the school is not some hillbilly institution in the middle of nowhere.
Many of Trump’s supporters and conservatives generally. Harvard is the beating heart of liberal theology, and going to the Supreme Court to defend racialism has earned it plenty of enemies.
>Nobodies on Twitter are just that, nobodies that accomplished nothing in their lives. They have nothing better to do than slam a university that they have no chance of getting even close to yet they feel entitled to dictate how it should run.
Most of the people granted "free speech" on post-Musk twitter are still the same losers. Thats why they have so much time to complain about something that they think they have a say in. There is nothing more important going on in their lives/communities.
Conservatives are the defacto minorities in a modern western country.
They don't set the culture: ex: people visiting the US go to NYC & LA not Nebraska and Alabama, movies are dictates by the new ideas coming out of liberal circles, all conservative movies need to be subsidized.
They don't develop the innovations that keep the country ahead: ex: Texas, no matter how hard they try, is still second fiddle to SF and all these big companies they love to brag about (Tesla) started in CA.
They can hem and haw how much they hate that institutions like Harvard drag the country forward but in the end these whiners don't really have any long term lasting power because they are looking backwards, not forward.
Lets talk about a hypothetical: They actually manage to destroy Harvard. They are destroying the thing that gives them any say on the world stage. They may feel like they won but they will sink. The US is only 5% of the world population the rest of the world as much as they even care anymore about the US only look to their progressive institutions...not their backwater losers. Why would they?
Conservatives are a minority in the U.S., but conservative-to-moderate populists are a majority. According to Vox, Trump would have won by almost 5 points if everyone had voted: https://www.vox.com/politics/403364/tik-tok-young-voters-202.... And don’t forget that the populist faction of the Democratic Party doesn’t exactly love Harvard either, as the beating heart of borderless neoliberal elitism. A large chunk of the party is in it for the Obamacare.
Heck, the Democratic Party as it exists today would not be viable at the national level without first or second generation immigrants. It’s reliant on the people who have the shallowest roots in and least understanding of america, who can be most easily be manipulated through ethnic machine politics.
After the U.S. nearly banned immigration in the 1920s, the foreign born population slowly shrank, reaching a low of under 5% by 1970. Italians and Irish lost much of their separate ethnic identity and began voting as individuals free. Between 1972-1992, Republicans then won 4 presidential elections by landslides over 5 cycles. That’s what happens when the electorate comprises mostly assimilated americans.
I know it's fun to dunk on legacy admissions but legacy students are actually more qualified by objective measures than non legacy. It makes sense that some genetics that predisposes children to an academic environment gets passed on. Not to mention the fact that their parents value education. This holds up even when you compare them against their non legacy peers in the same parental income bracket.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-legacy-adm...
Of course, in America’s future of autarky and Shogunate-style isolationism, those skills will no longer have any value, even to the elite. There’s no need to learn about other countries if everything we need is produced here and no one could ever threaten us once America is made great again. (/s maybe?)
> A lot of foreign students from Harvard are Chinese. Seems kind of weird that they were found to discriminate against American Asians and then they import foreign Asian students.
How do I put this delicately - the Race part is not what is bringing the difference in lived experience.
Don't gaslight me and pretend they don't focus a lot on race when figuring out their student body. They report on it and it's a huge distinguishing characteristic when looking at median standardized scores across diff characteristics. There's little difference between socio economic groups, gender, nationality etc. But if you look across just Asian and non Asian students, the scores are dramatically higher with Asians meaning that they have higher standards. Courts found this to be true
That is what you conflated in your framing.
Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. Every section of the SAT has a maximum score of 800. By comparison, white admits earned an average score of 745 across all sections, Hispanic-American admits earned an average of 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian admits an average of 712, and African-American admits an average of 704
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/10/22/asian-american...
Less obvious corruption.
I think your argument doesn't hold. Just because people still believe something to be the case, doesn't mean it really is the case. It being "worth so much to so many groups" just means they believe in it being worth as much. A well formed argument would come up with examples of the brightest hailing from Harvard and perhaps statistics about achievements of former Harvard students.
I am doing the opposite, @kristopolous is the one who attached the "best and brightest" label to Harvard students. I am arguing that's unfair.
Hopefully, though, this is an "escalate to deescalate" thing, and this whole discussion will become moot.
Let’s throw that all away because learning is liberal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
(/s in case it wasn't obvious)
/s in case not obvious
I want to note that when Brexit happened EU citizens had about 2 years period to move to UK and just like that get their full rights there and those with enough years of stay had the right to obtain British citizenship. Streamlined process through scanning your id using an app, little to no hassle.
IIRC half of the EU citizens left despite having all those rights and streamlined bureaucracy. My observation was that those desperate or those who ware having their perfect life stayed, those who had other options left UK because it wasn't worth the stress and you future being bargaining chips for politicians.
I bet you, if this continues for some more time USA will no longer receive the best and the brightest. Those have options and their parents will prefer the options where their golden kids don't risk being subject to life changing actions or even abuse.
International students are heavily selected for wealth rather than brightness.
Just check papers for ground breaking research, you'll see the names are predominantly foreign. This recent AI breakthrough is heavily done by people from Europe, Israel, Canada and China. That's why the speakers at AI videos have funny accents.
People with options will start avoiding USA unless the have to.
The situation is slowly recovering, as the UK has now first-class access to EU funding programs and there is an open negotiation to bring back home fees for EU students. However, visas are becoming more restrictive and the exceptionally high fees associated with them might be again increasing, which is putting off potential new employees.
Besides, I am not sure Oxbridge has sufficient extra spots for overseas students diverted from the US due to its peculiar tutorial system. There are lots of top EU universities that could collectively benefit from this as they are much cheaper and larger: Heidelberg, TUM, KU, DTU, KI, KTH, etc.
Makes me think of:
"Reality has a well known liberal bias" - Stephen Colbert
The amount of "burn it all down because I don't like the people that like this thing" is depressing.
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the institution that appoints the individuals who run the institution that determines whether a higher education institution has been infiltrated!?
What if a foreign adversary infiltrates the… !?!
The beauty of a system where many different and independent institutions compete for students and teachers independently, develop and share ideas and technologies, cross examine each other, and collectively build knowledge, is that they don’t have some single point in the system that can be infiltrated, and all have to compete in the arena of ideas.
The closest thing to a single point that can be infiltrated is the federal government, which can be used to put pressure on the whole system from a point of higher power.
Does ICE just have full discretion over SEVP? Can they do this to any school for whatever reason they want?
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/05/22/harvard-university-loses...
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhsicepia-001-student-exchan...
It will quietly be done, although likely in a way that make it look as if Harvard hasn't.
Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
> Look how China is dealing with Trump. Trump announces tariffs, China returns Boeing planes, tariffs somehow comes down.
Doesn't this example make the opposite of your point?
When you revoke the degree of a sitting president, that costs him...?
Second, he's still the president, so I don't see what pull the Penn degree has vs. that.
Trump's history has shown that if you cave into his demands, he doesn't leave you alone—instead he starts demanding even more, since he knows you'll fold.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elec...
like I'm thinking trump saying "china needs to come to the table", so china comes to the table, and they get a 90 day stay on the 150% tariffs.
Pretty much a guarantee that Harvard will choose to stay the course. This is the quintessential organization that thinks along the lines of, "100 years from now Harvard will still be Harvard. And Trump will be one of the answers on a middle school history exam".
Expect escalation.
For instance, I don't think smoking weed is wrong, but if I go tell an officer you have weed in your car, I have ratted you out despite nothing 'wrong' happening.
Harvard may argue that DHS’s request was overly broad, lacked due process, or sought information beyond what the law permits.
8 CFR § 214.3(g) and § 214.4(b), which require schools to maintain and furnish records “as required by the Service,” including disciplinary actions and other conduct relevant to maintaining status.
8 CFR § 214.3(l)(2)(iii) allows for withdrawal of certification if a school fails to “provide requested documentation” to DHS.
Not to mention other overly broad immigration laws
But given the laws on the books, DHS has broad authority to take this action.
Not arguing one way or the other just laying out the facts. This could have happened under the prior administration if the law was applied
My main point, though, was this: (1) the information required to maintain SEVIS program is statutorily defined, so the government doesn’t get to arbitrarily expand that and then punish a school for noncompliance; and (2) we know of at least one category requested information that they are not allowed to ask for and that implicates nothing other than the exercise of a student’s First Amendment rights.
Seeing as it’s private most likely won’t see it via FOIA
But the April 16 DHS request to Harvard wasn't routine. It invoked 8 CFR § 214.3(g)(1), which covers ad hoc or investigative information requests by DHS. That section gives DHS broad power to request any time the records needed to assess a student’s compliance with immigration status.
Our immigration system is so profoundly screwed up, and there is no doubt the executive agencies have wide powers to draw on, but they’re not even trying to provide a fig leaf of legality. It’s straight, “Comply or suffer!”
This is all being argued in the court of public opinion now
I mean Biden was totally with it his entire term and didn’t have cancer either right?
If your first instinct isn't that the infamous known liar isn't the one lying here, then the bias here is yours.
Link https://www.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/FINAL-Har...
…why? Why does an internal Harvard report obviate damages for an unrelated illegal executive action?
I’m not arguing they have that claim. I’m just fairly certain this report doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Under 8 CFR § 214.3(a)(3) and § 214.4(a)(2)(ii), schools are required to maintain accurate records and comply with all SEVP-related responsibilities, which include ensuring that F-1 students are not engaged in activities that violate status or federal law. If DHS believes that international students were involved in threatening, discriminatory, or unlawful activity and the school either failed to document, disclose, or respond appropriately, that’s a direct compliance issue.
Harvard’s own ASAIB report admits that antisemitic conduct occurred-including exclusion of Jewish students, verbal harassment, and bias in classroom settings. If any of that involved foreign students-and Harvard didn’t report it or take disciplinary action-DHS can reasonably infer noncompliance with 214.3(g)(1) (required records) and failure to enforce visa conditions.
In fact, the ASAIB report might be evidence that Harvard knew about the issues and didn’t fully cooperate, justifying DHS’s conclusion that the university wasn’t acting in good faith.
If Harvard has maintained approval for international students, and Harvard's policies with respect to the approval haven't changed recently, then withdrawing approval would be arbitrary.
From a similar CNN article:
"Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered her department to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, making good on a promise made last month when she demanded the university hand over detailed records on its international students’ “illegal and violent activities” before April 30 or face the loss of its certification."
Okay, who could they possibly be talking about? Right. The Gaza protesters.
Miriam Adelson - $150m donated to Trump, second highest
Elon Musk is not the only one that bought the White House. So there is a genocide that if any of us tech people had some courage we could easily make some pretty wild visualizations of the before/after of Gaza maps, and the current full scale ethnic cleansing of it, but we can't bring it up. We're failing as tech people on this, but so is the whole world.
They’re trying to hit some targets for deportation numbers and shipping home “criminal” foreign students is an easy win.
They're targeting everyone they can find. Russian refugees (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/science/russian-scientist...), Danish people who missed a form (https://www.mississippifreepress.org/ice-arrests-mississippi...), etc.
So it's not really about Gaza, Palestinians, or Jews. It's about control.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritag...
It seems that what is portrayed as a dispute over Palestine, antisemitism and qamas is actually a cover for a power-struggle between the liberals and conservatives ( such as the Heritage foundation, Project 2025, and Yarvinites)
[1] - https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
[2] - https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
edit : But when i think of it more, maybe it is about Israel and Zionism but over a longer time-scale than recent events. If you look at some of the early anti-'woke' and anti-left movements like the self-proclaimed 'Intellectual dark web', lot of them are zionists who viewed the growing liberal disenchantment with zionism in the college campus and left-wing activism (including pro-palestine activism like the BDS movement) as an existential threat to Israel.
It's crazy they're punishing tons of students who don't even have anything to do with these protests
They might prefer to start with certain targets, but all international students are target of opportunity [0] the same way they've attacked people with lawful residency.
[1] Though perhaps with some very particular and suspicious quasi-ethnic exceptions. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crljn5046epo
[0] Ex. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/us/immigration-green-card..., https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article304988381.html
The champions of One True America are just using international students as pawns to force Harvard's hand.
It's actually only a 1st Amendment question in one case and not the other. Looks like they tricked ya though!
(Technically it's a 1st Amendment question in both cases in that private entities have a 1st Amendment right to create rules for their own campuses)
Non-immigrants are not 'the people' per current interpretation of the constitution. If they were people, they would have all the rights ascribed to 'the people' including right to bear arms. Non immigrants do not have a right to bear arms, thus it cannot logically follow they are [the] people.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca5.214...
Not true. The meaning of "the people" is interpreted differently from Amendment to Amendment. In the 1st and 5th Amendments, it has historically been interpreted to include non-citizens (even illegal ones!) while in the 2nd Amendment it has been interpreted much more narrowly.
And regardless, this in no way authorizes the government to compel Harvard to do anything. Even in the most fascist interpretation you can dream up, it would mean the government itself is allowed to curtail their assembly. Harvard has no obligations (under the 1st Amendment!) to do any such thing.
Are you American/did you attend American middle or high schools?
I went to the one where they didn't teach 'the people' was written anywhere in the 5th amendment.
I'm definitely not being interested in being lectured by those who think imaginary words exist in the 5th amendment.
Also the recent Bruen ruling was taken by at least one case law in Illinois [] that applied 'the people' the same as the other amendments (as it was in early American history), when they overturned (from memory) a prohibited possessor conviction. They just came to a different conclusion what 'the people' is and held an illegal immigrant (as applied) was part of 'the people'.
And finally, despite the fact the case law isn't as 'unequivocal' as you seem to think, you still have to get around the fact that the very writers of those amendments believed the rights in the bill of rights were god given natural rights, thus case law can at best reflect them and at worst incorrectly apply them but not modify the natural right. In fact this was part of the reason why the 2nd amendment was written, was because the founders needed a check when the case law, legislator, and executive all applied the constitution in contradiction to the acknowledged natural rights.
[] https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ilnd-1_20-cr-00...
Under the US Constitution, "the consequences" are absolutely not allowed to include weaponization of the State through coercion, punishment, or threat to control what the public thinks.
Fascist goobers skipping out on their "Basics of Being an American" course lmao
You don't need to have sympathy for them. You need to respect the US Constitution's protection for them nonetheless. Or just admit that you hate America, which you're also welcome to do (because America rocks)!
Also, absolutely lmfao about "connections to Epstein." Bro Epstein said on tape he was Trump's best friend [0]. Trump came out and said "Epstein likes em young" decades ago [1]. Trump also said on the Apprentice that he's good friends with Diddy [2].
You're in a cult amigo. Keep these comment threads around so when you wake up from whatever daze you're in, you can inspect them closely for clues about how he managed to break your brain so thoroughly.
[0]: https://www.salon.com/2024/11/03/my-closest-friend-for-10-ye...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ll1ZUjAB7lo
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBbf3c0P_fc
Now, the Trump admin is not this careful, and many people who are not overt HAMAS supporters have probably been affected. But I wish to make the point that there is a substantial group of students (non-citizen HAMAS supporters) for whom punishment is not crazy.
You’re allowed to be a Nazi, you’re allowed to be a Hamas (non-financial) supporter, you’re allowed to be a pro-Gaza genocide advocate if you want. You can advocate for the extermination or enslavement of all black or white or Christian or atheist or gay people if you want.
You may (and probably should) become a social pariah and private parties can decline to affiliate with you, but the government isn’t allowed to do a damn thing about it.
The question is: To whom do these rights extend in the U.S.?
They certainly don't extend to foreigners at the border (any country would rightly turn away an avowed Al-Qaeda member). Foreigners in the U.S. are in the U.S. at the pleasure of the government.
Do foreigners currently in the U.S. have these rights? I don't know for sure, maybe it's not a settled issue. My guess is that the U.S. gov't asks "Are you a terrorist?" at the border for good reasons, and one reason is so they can kick you out for lying to them when they learn you're a HAMAS supporter.
Should they have these rights? I'm honestly not sure of my feeling on this. Perhaps the way to handle it is to prevent the renewal of a visa or re-entry, but not actually kick anyone out for it.
The country obviously has no obligation to give visas to anyone. However, once you are within US jurisdiction (i.e. in the country), you have a suite of Constitutional rights including (unambiguously) 1st Amendment and 5th Amendment rights. So, correct, they definitely cannot be deported without due process. They cannot be deported even with due process for protected speech. They cannot even lose their visas for protected speech. There are a million different reasons the government may decline to give someone a visa or they may revoke one, but "engaging in protected speech" is not one of them.
And yes, yelling "kill all X" during a protest is protected speech in this country, which AFAIK is far beyond what any of these people are alleged to have done.
"It is well established that noncitizens have at least some First Amendment rights," wrote Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District of Massachusetts. "Although case law defining the scope of noncitizens' First Amendment rights is notably sparse, the Plaintiffs have at least plausibly alleged that noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents, are being targeted specifically for exercising their right to political speech."
So it seems less than clear.
From: https://reason.com/2025/05/02/immigrants-and-radicals-have-t...
sorcerer-ma’s comment made it sound like we are speaking of Mahmoud Khalil and others.
I am under the impression that the settled law is that 1A applies to everyone physically present in the country.
A little reading leads me to believe:
- 1A limits what congress may do, "Congress shall make no law...". It does not positively define what people may do, and therefore doesn't pick out a class of people to whom it applies.
- It is settled that the U.S. government may condition immigration-related decisions on your speech and actions. They don't have to let in an Al-Qaeda member when he shows up at the border, and they don't have to give a pro-HAMAS agitator in the country on a temporary visa a green card. It's still not totally clear to me if a green card might have some sort of special-but-noncitizen status, and maybe it's not clear in general.
- The U.S. government asks people who are applying for entry or a visa questions like, "Are you a terrorist, or have you ever belonged to or supported terrorist organizations?". Part of the reason they do this is to catch you in a lie if it then turns out that you are e.g. supporting HAMAS. If you lied on your immigration documents, they can throw you out.
- For this reason, it seems like e.g. refusing to renew a visa on the grounds of HAMAS support would be fine. But maybe canceling a visa and kicking someone out wouldn't be fine?
Source?
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/23/trump-admin-rev...
I still haven't found a valid argument for why a voter isn't held responsible for the actions of representatives. Especially if the actions would be likely to occur.
Edit: If by "hold responsible" you mean "be mad at them" then yes, of course you can, I can't read a comment section that isn't mostly that, and you knew that before making this comment.
Being shamed into a little introspection wouldn't hurt.
That's what's happening now..
>"hold responsible" you mean "be mad at them"
You make it sound simplistic. I mean calling them out, demanding an explanation. You have friends who support this then let them know you think they are wrong.
All these horrific regimes throughout history, how did it happen? The majority of people agreed with it or was a vocal minority left alone because most people just wanted to avoid conflict?
I call this selfish. It's like hoping the problem gets solved later that way you get to maintain your relationships.
I do appreciate this notion as I read articles of government workers fired who supported Trump (why a person working for the government would vote Republican is beyond me).
Many of Trumps actions attack those that would either likely never vote Republican or can't vote (illegals, groups on special visas that lost them, foreign students, etc)
If you agree that the actions of the current administration are detrimental to the US over long term, those are the consequences.
Take Alabama or Oklahoma for example - their policies have made those states backward. People in those states have poor education outcomes, less wealth and less health, lower social mobility etc. It impacts everyone in those states. Either the opposition needs to mobilize, message better etc. or the voters need to compare and realize what they are missing. If not, they will continue to face the consequences.
Of course if someone loudly states who they voted for they should not be surprised someone else calls them out on it. After all what is voluntarily giving up anonymity, if not an act of support?
There are a long list of things, and most people are not willing accept that "their side" does anything someone else might not like. Doesn't matter what side. Most people are not even willing to honestly listen to "the other side's" concerns.
Waters of the US. All the various "woke" issues which harms someone who isn't a minority who sees someone less competent getting business (and then calling them racist when the feel cheated). Immigration or China taking all their jobs. The above is what I can think of just off the top of my head that many people feel democrats have messed up on. (I don't not agree with this entire list, but I'm sure people will shoot the messenger anyway...)
And even if I did, trying to turn the conversation to me rather than the subject at hand is base trolling. I could call them all shitheads and that still wouldn't be relevant. They didn't vote for Trump because I hurt their feelings, nor did I vote for Kamala Harris because Trump voters hurt my feelings.
Literally no. I don't understand serial killers but I'm better than them and to use a more relevant example, I have limited understanding of some racists but I'm better than them (in that specific case).
Understanding is only useful for engagement but if a person is being manipulated by lies or exaggerations then what am I to do?
Solve a non-existent or exaggerated problem? Tell them their information is wrong?
I contend their dislike of the Democrats is based a meaningful amount on Republican lies and exaggerations.
For example
1. Blaming Biden wholly for inflation via spending even though it was worldwide, Trump also used government spending to attempt to help the economy, and Republicans controlled congress for half his term.
2. Blaming Biden for not fixing inflation which assumes this was possible
3. Blaming all illegal immigrants for the crimes of some. This is the same as blaming all Black people for the crimes committed by some.
4. Lying about election fraud
>the various "woke" issues which harms someone who isn't a minority who sees someone less competent getting business
Do you have evidence this was a widespread problem?
It people are woke, for example Disney decides to put more gay people in movies to promote diversity, what is the government going to do? Why would electing Republicans stop this?
what disney does should be their own business. However when a competent person is not allowed to do a job because the government wants a different minoity that hurts me. at best it means that projects are more expensive because there is less competition, at worst someone incompetent is hired and we get junk.
So with the current system, that varies. If it’s a popular vote, then I’d say you have a point.
What power was this candidate given? By saying "unelected" you're trying to imply that a person was given power in the government without a vote.
=------------------------
The election is a choice between two candidates.
It's not "Did you like that the Democrats did X"? It's "Which candidate would make a better president"?
The reason is that the effects of the outcome aren't limited to the Democrat party leadeship.
For example a student who is deported wasn't responsible for the decision by the Democrat party leadership not to hold a primary but are affected by the outcome of the election.
The logical flaw in the voters you are referring to is not comparing choices while making a selection.
Depends on what they know or heard. The situation is very different today. The internet gives each person access to all the information. I'm sure time can be a factor but in Germany you have more an excuse.
Also, with Germany, the economic situation was used by Hitler and worked to his advantage.
There's also the more controversial take but I've only read bits and pieces and many disagree with this as it implies a multigeneration swaying and ingrained cultural change
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary...
Instead he then used backroom deals with useful idiots and cynics who thought they could use him in favor of their careers, to get himself appointed to a position (chancellor) from which he could become dictator.
The more valid criticism based on the above comparison isn't quite so much against American voters as it is against the cynics, spineless opponents and useful idiots inside the federal political system, who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different reasons of their own.
I particularly note the other republicans in his party here, who could actually stop Trump's more deranged nonsense but are letting centuries of restrained, relatively democratic and lawful political tradition go to shit for the sake of their own short-sighted ambitious idiocies.
>who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different
They won't do this because of his public support.
For example I can give a speech in a public square where I advocate some completely stupid conspiracy theory and I do it in the most offensive language possible pissing off everyone who hears, and be protected by the First Amendment.
That doesn't stop you from inferring from that speech that (1) I'm an idiot and (2) I'm a very unpleasant person to be around and then based on those inferences declining to hire me if I apply to you for a job. Neither idiots nor assholes are protected classes so you are free to discriminate against me. That you learned that I'm an idiot and asshole through my First Amendment protected speech shouldn't be relevant.
If someone lets it be known who they voted for and their reasons something similar could happen.
Either way, at the point you’re talking of socially ostracizing a majority of the US population since Trump won the popular vote too.
75~ million vs 300 million. Don't confuse population with voters.
>That’s why there is a secret ballot. There cant be retribution unless you advertise your vote.
By the government and this shouldn't change. However people who freely broadcast who they support are open to attack by others
If they vote they should
> Their vote is never pivotal..
Votes are pivotal as a sum. This is like not recycling because as an individual action it has no effect.
>and their political views are a very tiny fraction of what they give to the world
So?
Voters don't really choose a representative. They are given choices. Two choices, of which, let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side". Those choices are created by outside forces. And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want. There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want. So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with. You're as likely to get what you want by praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster as by voting. The "choices" are just gonna do whatever the hell they want anyway. Whether you get what you want or not is incidental.
But let's assume you do hold somebody responsible for choosing something they have no control over. What does that mean to "hold them responsible" ? You gonna actually do something? Throw them in jail? Kill them? Probably not. You're probably just gonna say nasty things about them on Facebook. Which you could do at any time, for any reason. So who gives a shit what the argument is? It makes no difference to anything at all. You might as well ask for a valid argument for why the sky is blue. Ain't gonna change the sky.
I want them to think about it because... "let's face it, most people will just pick whichever one is on "their side"."
>And those choices, once chosen, will do... whatever the hell they want
What does this mean? It's not even close to being random or unpredictable.
>There's no consequence to them doing whatever the hell they want.
Elections
>So it doesn't really matter what the choice is to begin with.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say, do you mean an elected person has full control of their position's power? Then yes, obviously but you can predict what they will do, you are giving them power.
Yes, the options are two choices externally picked. And?
Does that apply to Gaza as well? Or is it just when people you don't like vote?
There is a reason we don't do this, why we didn't punish everyone who voted for Hitler etc.
Yes, it does apply to all situations and people
>There is a reason we don't do this, why we didn't punish everyone who voted for Hitler etc.
What reason? You just asked a question
Biden is 3 years younger than Trump
>was pick someone at least mildly likable
Likeable how?
https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/
> Rewrite the rules with the Trump 2028 high crown hat.
Or perhaps I misunderstand what they mean with "rewrite the rules".
His electorate's beliefs are whatever he tells them they are. The same is true for the Republican Party. Trump is effectively free to ignore the constitution without consequence.
Much of my extended family would absolutely join a civil war on side Trump to get him into a permanent position of power if given the opportunity. Some of them are in the military. So it’s not unreasonable by world history standards that he could get a subset of the military on his side in a coup scenario.
I think people in large urban centers or outside of the US don’t realize how much certain parts of the country truly worship him above anything else. I know many people like this, I have to see them at family events, so you can’t tell me it’s an exaggeration. I’m not sure there are enough to do anything substantial, but the seeds are there.
You are quite naive, aren't you?
Martial law will be declared, for whatever reason they can come up with. Maybe the "invasion" excuse again, maybe Greenland, maybe Canada, maybe Mexico. But one thing is sure: Trump will be the last president of this democracy iteration.
Shit needs to get ugly fast enough to make the masses take notice or they may just get their way.
However I wouldn't extend that line of thinking to stock markets, superannuation etc.
The longer something has been around, the more likely it's going to be around in the future.
That said, I personally believe Harvard's public reputation is significantly overstated - Stanford has become the new Harvard for at least 2 decades now.
Judge blocks Trump administration from revoking Harvard enrollment of foreign students
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harvard-sues-trump-administ...
The TRO:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.285...
> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”
So DHS revoked the visas for all existing students at Harvard? That doesn't seem quite possible?
Doesn't give them a timeline either.
The best and the brightest from around the world will prioritize top universities at other countries, and this will damage one of the US' biggest attractions and advantages.
Unbelievable.
I mean ... it's still nuts, but slightly different.
Instead of breaking the "keys" (visas) that unlock the doors to Harvard, they're just putting glue in the locks.