Trump's Phase II Assault on Democracy Has Begun. Fight back.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-phase-2-now-begins?

 

“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”

-Thomas Paine

December 23, 1776. 

 

Trump's Assault on the Universities is fascism in practice

 Assault on the University and on Public Education.

The attacks by the Trump Administration on Harvard and other universities are a critical component of the present consolidation of fascist power in the U.S. 

Trump is attacking all of higher education.  May 27.2025. Chemerinsky. 

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article307078651.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/opinion/teachers-education-trump-administration.html  

Universities are critical to the development of democracy.  I have my own concerns about the role of elite private universities, but the survival of universities, of free- open dialogue and investigation is currently at stake.

Most political assessments underestimate the substantive contribution to our society by the development of free public high schools in the 1920-1945 era. The creation of free open education system was a major contributing factor in the development of a more democratic society from 1940- 1960. Education promoted public participation in decision making about public issues such as health care, social security, unionization and more. 

The growth and extension of public universities in the post 1945 era had a similar effect on the expansion of democracy. All of this is under assault. 

Today’s fight to democracy included the defense of education itself- public, private, secondary schools and more. The assault on equal opportunity in public education is an adjacent struggle, one that deserves more attention.

Trump's Assault on Higher Education :Robert Reich

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/what-i-told-the-ed-school-graduates?

Yesterday, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, notified Harvard University that “effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.” 

Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students. Existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status. This could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body. 

Noem said she did this because of the university’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.” 

Rubbish. There was nothing simple about the trove of information Noem demanded from Harvard — including the coursework of every international student and information on any student visa holder who had been involved in “illegal” activity — information beyond what Harvard is legally allowed to share with the government. 

We are in deep authoritarian fascist territory, friends. 

Trump is escalating his war against American higher education and against the rest of the world. 

We will be the worse for this. 

To Trump, the only useful non-Americans are those who invest in his crypto schemes and global resorts or gift him jumbo “palace in the sky” aircraft. 

Yet global brains have been crucial sources of our scientific and economic advances. Since the end of World War II in particular, we have benefited enormously from talented students and faculty drawn here from all over the planet to learn, study, research, and innovate. 

Once again, it will be up to the federal courts to stop this idiocy. The rest of us must speak out loudly and clearly against what is being done. 

Here’s what I told the graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education at their commencement ceremony earlier this week (before I learned of the Trump regime’s latest move): 

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. People imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.

Jefferson assured Americans that if they could “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

So America became the cradle of free, universal, public education.

I don’t have any easy answers to the many challenges we’re experiencing today in classrooms across the land, but we must never give up on these three basic educational ideals: free, universal, and public.

If we stop thinking about education solely as a private investment on the way to a good-paying job and see it as a public good, we’d give every child an understanding of the Constitution, the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it.

This is, after all, what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens: They have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and the Constitution. 

Civic education should instill in young people a passion for truth — enabling them to think critically, be skeptical (but not cynical) about what they hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction.

Such an education would also urge young people to communicate with others. With people of different races, classes, creeds, nationalities. 

Teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do.

Yet the current president of the United States does not appear to have learned any of this.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.” 

He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress and ordered his wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary to shut most of her department.

He is attacking the freedom of speech of university students and professors, trying to deport international students and faculty solely because of what they say or write, and threatening to halt federal funds to universities that practice DEI.

He has gutted the funding of the National Institutes of Health, which provides a large portion of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for much of America’s engineering and computer research.

Along with certain governors, he is attacking the teaching in our schools of America’s shameful histories of slavery and Native American genocide.

He has cut funding for libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, and reliable internet access for those without it at home.

I keep hearing that all this amounts to an “attack on the liberal state” or “the culmination of our culture wars.”

No. What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

You who are soon to graduate from this wonderful school of education have chosen instead to enhance the American mind, to broaden it, to enlighten our young people, to expose them to a world of possibility. 

May you educate like democracy depends on it. 

Share

3,735 Likes∙

809 Restacks

The MAGA Assault on Public Education

Top Democrat Accuses House GOP of ‘Full-Scale Attempt To Eliminate Public Education’ Jake Johnson June 26, 2024 Common Dreams     Rep. Rosa DeLauro said Republicans' newly proposed funding cuts threaten "the future of an entire generation." , Freepik   The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday accused her Republican colleagues of working to completely decimate U.S. public education by proposing steep cuts to key programs in a newly released funding bill. Republicans on the appropriations panel, chaired by Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), weren't shy about the expansive spending cuts they're pursuing: In a statement, the committee's GOP majority noted that its fiscal year 2025 funding legislation for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and other related agencies would fully eliminate 57 programs, slash 48 more, and reduce spending on K-12 education grants. An appropriations subcommittee is scheduled to mark up the bill on Thursday morning. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, said in response to the majority's legislation that "Republicans are in the midst of a full-scale attempt to eliminate public education that makes the American Dream possible," noting that the proposal gashes "support for children in K-12 elementary schools, threatening the future of an entire generation." According to a fact sheet released by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, the proposed GOP funding levels would cut the Department of Education by $11 billion, or 14% below 2024 levels. Specifically, the measure would slash Title I Grants to local educational agencies by roughly $5 billion, reducing assistance for school districts with a large number of students from low-income families.

Local Congressman Kevin Kiley ( R-California) supports this anti education agenda.

See below.

Project 2025. 

 

Last weekend, Kevin Roberts, the president of The Heritage Foundation, which is behind the Project 2025 plan, went on MSNBC to not just defend the policy proposal but to gloat about it and celebrate it.¹

During his interview, he said that the goal of Project 2025 was to "institutionalize Trumpism" as the guiding principles for our government.² Terrifying.

The vast majority of voters do not agree with plans laid out in Project 2025, and when they hear about it, they abandon Trump and the Republicans in droves. The problem is, not enough voters know that it exists. Which is why MoveOn is dedicating our resources to get the truth out to voters.

There are so many awful, bigoted, and authoritarian elements of Project 2025, but let's focus on one that Roberts discussed at length during his interview and that Trump has parroted on the campaign trail: abolishing the Department of Education.³

On MSNBC, Roberts affirmed that Project 2025 calls for firing "more than 50,000" career civil servants and that thousands of those would come from the Education Department when it is shut down.⁴

What he refused to discuss, however, were the actual consequences of eliminating the department. In short, they would be catastrophic.

The DOE has wide-ranging responsibilities overseeing education in our nation, but its three largest areas of work are providing student loans, managing the Title I program, and implementing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).⁵

So what would happen to these programs if the department suddenly disappeared?

Student Loans
Each year, the federal government provides more than $111 billion in federal student aid to nearly 7 million students.^6,7 If Project 2025 is implemented, funding for these loans will be cut by at least half and could be eliminated altogether.⁸

That means 7 million students who are currently able to access higher education because of federal financial aid will be at risk of losing those opportunities. The impacts will be felt entirely by students from poor, working, and middle-class families and will disproportionately affect students of color.

This would radically reshape the future of our country, which is precisely the goal of Project 2025. 

Title I
Each year, the Title I program provides nearly $18 billion in supplemental funding to schools and school districts in poor and underserved communities across the country.⁹ It is one of the most important pieces of education legislation in U.S. history, and it helps to provide equal access to education for all children in America, no matter where they live or how much money they have.¹⁰

Cutting funding would mean even less money for teachers, mental health staff, and interventions at Title I schools. It would mean even less money to pay essential educators. It would mean leaving tens of millions of students behind.

Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
IDEA ensures that more than 6.5 million infants, toddlers, children, and young adults with disabilities have free access to special education and other resources from birth to age 21.¹¹ It was originally passed in 1975 and since then has helped to provide both funding and legal protection against discrimination for hundreds of millions of people with disabilities.¹²

Without funding for IDEA, there will be no way to hold schools accountable for not providing adequate services to students, programs that millions of people with disabilities rely on will be cut, and millions of families will be left in the lurch. 

Let's get one thing straight: It is not an accident that so many of Project 2025's policies harm poor and marginalized communities and people of color.

This program is a surgical attack on those communities, with the goal of making America a white Christian nationalist nation that is run by and serves only the wealthy.

Duane, the policies laid out in Project 2025 are so extreme, so cartoonishly villainous, that voters have a difficult time believing it is even real.

But it is very real.

1. "Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: Project 2025 framework will carry on for the next 10 years," Media Matters for America, June 24, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/194204?t=7&akid=395211%2E22927824%2EO_CySw

2. Ibid.

3. "Project 2025: The Trump presidency wish list, explained," BBC, June 11, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/194205?t=9&akid=395211%2E22927824%2EO_CySw

4. "Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: Project 2025 framework will carry on for the next 10 years," Media Matters for America, June 24, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/194204?t=11&akid=395211%2E22927824%2EO_CySw