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Student Suppression

new cat 5/17

promote primary on wi 2016 23k v 170K

no merri

see texas

see (main) academic suppression

see mission canary palestine gaza

see pinko prof and snowflakes coddle

see campus free speech for hypocrisy

see CRT kid indoctrination

see activist suppression

SEE GAZA PALESTINE

includes voter suppression (neglected here?)

see Gen Z and zz

student press?

see daca dreamers

see sunrise movement

see hofeller north carolina (texas vote suppress ~ student)

PC multicult

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an 8 26

President Donald Trump won North Carolina three times, yet as Democrats seem poised to take the state's Senate seat in the upcoming midterm election, Republicans are going to great lengths to cling to power — including by limiting voting opportunity for North Carolina's African American community.

"North Carolina’s state board of elections once again refused to provide an accessible early voting location at North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black college or university," reported Democracy Docket's Natalie Hausmann on Thursday. "With student activists in the front row, the GOP-controlled board rejected student pleas for an on-campus polling place in November’s general election during a Thursday vote."

Hausmann added, "Earlier this year, the board voted along party lines to deny students a voting site on their campus. Brian Kennedy of Democracy North Carolina told Democracy Docket at the time that the vote served as a 'blueprint for what voter suppression across the nation can look like.' Now, it’s happened all over again."

The students were allowed to attend the meeting in which the decision was announced, even though that choice was ultimately made against them. In addition to making it more difficult for African Americans to vote in a state with a long history of segregation and other forms of racial discrimination, the decision is controversial because it specifically targets a voting practice that is disproportionately popular among African American communities.

"The denial followed a series of election board votes to curtail Sunday voting – popular among black voters – across several counties," Hausmann wrote. She went on to quote one of the Democrats on the state board who outright claimed the decision could have been racially motivated.

"Jeff Carmon, one of two Democrats on the state board, said some GOP county plans had 'racial undertones,'" Hausmann reported. "'Can we identify a single voter who is better served by having fewer opportunities to cast a ballot?' Carmon asked at the start of the meeting."

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1st amend STUDENT SUPPRESS 6 26

GGL

AI Overview

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) is actively representing pro-Palestinian student activists at the University of Michigan (U of M). Legal actions include a federal civil rights lawsuit against U of M officials, campus police, and private contractors for the alleged targeting, surveillance, and arrest of student advocates. [1, 2, 3]

Key developments and legal actions concerning CAIR-MI and U of M students:

Review additional information on these cases via the official CAIR Press Releases or read the initial reporting from CBS News Detroit.

MICHIGAN STUDENTS DOJ 6 26 cair-mi-raises-serious-first-amendment-concerns-regarding-university-of-michigan-protest-indictments

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI) today expressed serious concerns regarding the recently unsealed indictments arising from protests at the University of Michigan, warning that while allegations of criminal conduct should be addressed through the judicial process, charging documents should not blur the line between alleged unlawful acts and constitutionally protected political expression, peaceful protest, and advocacy on matters of public concern.

WOW MJR CYA PARa]

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NYT

Eight people who federal prosecutors said had ties to the University of Michigan were accused Wednesday of conspiring to threaten campus leaders and others into severing ties with Israel.

An indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, accused the pro-Palestinian activists of crossing the line from campus protest to crimes that included threats and vandalism. The defendants face varying charges, but the indictment included federal counts of conspiracy to transmit threats, witness intimidation and destruction of property to prevent seizure.

The charges in Michigan, all felonies that carry the possibility of years in prison, appeared to signify an escalation in the federal government’s efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism that roiled American campuses in recent years.

“Their criminal activity included spray-painting threats, breaking windows and throwing glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes,” the indictment said. “They marked their victims with threatening symbols used by Hamas, including red inverted triangles and red handprints. They used the internet and social media to broadcast their message to ensure their threats and commitment to continuing criminal activity were heard by their victims and others who support Israel.”

The Trump administration has taken a hard line against pro-Palestinian protesters, whose activism after the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza led to tumult on campuses. Until now, the administration had mostly targeted universities themselves over their response to protests, although it did move to strip visas and deport some individual students last year.

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A Palestinian middle school student in Michigan who was publicly admonished for refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance as part of a personal protest against the war on Gaza has settled with her school district following a lawsuit around her first amendment free speech rights.

The teenager, identified as DK in court documents, said she faced racism from a teacher at the East middle school in Plymouth, Michigan, after she did not participate in the pledge. The teacher reportedly told DK to “go back to her country”, Fox 2 Detroit reported.

In a statement following the settlement, DK called the ordeal “terrifying” and “overwhelming” at times.

“But it taught me the importance of speaking up for what I believe is right,” said DK. “I feel proud of the outcome and of being part of something that reinforces how important free speech is. I’ve learned that even when it feels uncomfortable or risky, speaking out can make a difference, not just for me, but for others as well.”

DK, who is 14, chose not to participate in the pledge on 10 January 2025 given the continuing war on Gaza.

“I decided I wanted to sit down because I didn’t feel comfortable standing because of what’s happening in Palestine,” said DK at a February press conference.

After the pledge, DK said that a teacher told the class that “anyone that was sitting down was being very disrespectful to soldiers, to America”. DK said she tried to explain her view to the instructor but was told that if she did not like the US, she should go back to her own country. DK later left the room in tears.

The Arab American Civil Rights League and the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan later filed a lawsuit in June 2025 against the Plymouth-Canton community schools district on behalf of DK.

As a part of the recent settlement, the Plymouth-Canton community schools district has pledged to provide diversity, sensitivity and first amendment training for staff. The district has also agreed not to punish DK, remove any indication from school files that suggest her protest was inappropriate and provide needed counseling.

Jacob Khalaf, DK’s father, applauded his daughter for her bravery in advocating for her freedom of speech.

“My daughter has shown her strong moral fiber throughout all of this,” he said in a statement to Fox 2 Detroit. “She had the courage to resist when a person in authority tried to make her relinquish her right to free speech, and then, with the help of the ACLU and ACRL, brought a lawsuit to make sure her first amendment rights, as well as those of others, were protected.”

A representative of the district could not be reached for comment by the Guardian.

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JACOBIN LEVER 11 25?

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Louis Gobern, one of the names listed in the initial Prince memo, is currently the president of Resilient Logistics Services & Solutions, a defense contractor that advertises its work with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. The company names SOS International, ICE’s new skip tracing contractor, as an “industry partner,” and both companies have previously worked as subcontractors on the same Customs and Border Protection contract.

SOS International has been vying for Department of Homeland Security contracts in recent months, poaching one of ICE’s top intelligence chiefs, Andre Watson, in August. The company boasted that Watson, who helped run the ICE program targeting students for political speech, would help the contractor “expand its business and deliver capabilities to the federal and state law enforcement agencies.”

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AN 3 26

When President Donald Trump and his allies targeted pro-Palestinian activists for deportation, civil libertarians were quick to sound the alarm. Trump, they stressed, had every right to criticize their views, but targeting them for deportation because of those views was anti-First Amendment.

Now, a federal judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge William G. Young, is taking the Trump administration to task.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, March 11, Young ruled that targeting pro-Palestinian activists for deportation because of their views "was unconstitutional, abhorrent to a society that cherishes free speech."

Young wrote, "As this Court recognizes, the entire theory of this administration is that of a unitary executive with no agency independence where every single employee within the Article II executive dances to the tune of the President…. This conduct must never happen again."

President Reagan first nominated Young, now 85, for the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in September 1984 during his reelection campaign. Reagan enjoyed a landslide victory that year, winning 525 electoral votes and defeating Democratic nominee Walter Mondale by 18 percent in the national popular vote. And Young was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 1985 a few months into Reagan's second term.

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AN 1 26

A Reagan-appointed federal judge declared that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had “conspired” to chill First Amendment rights in a case involving pro-Palestinian student protesters.

Senior Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, on Thursday said that Rubio and Noem had “failed in their duty to uphold the constitution,” as Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported.

Judge Young’s remarks were reported in real time by journalists covering the proceedings and shared on social media as the hearing unfolded.

“What happened here is an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people, to twist the laws,” Judge Young said, denouncing the lack of any actual policy. “Two cabinet secretaries conspired … they intentionally, knowing what they were doing, counseled by professionals who cautioned them, nevertheless went ahead to pick off these people with the intention that your clients would be chilled. And did so rather effectively, by the way.”

Judge Young, 85, also invoked President Donald Trump.

“The big problem in this case,” Young said, “is that the cabinet secretaries and ostensibly the president of the United States are not honoring the First Amendment.”

Young, who has served on the bench for over four decades, continued, saying, “let’s talk the truth here,” as he denounced decisions made at DHS that directed professionals to be “taken off anti-terrorist investigations.”

“They were taken off human trafficking investigations all to look up … what dirt they could find on this group … the very highest levels of the DHS decided – that’s the best use of those people.”

He called it “chapter and verse about how the government can be weaponized against a disfavored group.”

According to All Rise News editor-in-chief Adam Klasfeld, Judge Young also slammed President Trump.

“It’s fairly clear that this President believes, as an authoritarian, when he speaks, everyone, everyone, in Article II, is going to toe the line absolutely.”

According to Reuters, Judge Young indicated that he would issue an order presuming immigration actions against the plaintiffs’ members were retaliatory unless the government could prove otherwise in court.

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AN 10 25

A Boston federal judge's "blistering" 161-page ruling on what he called the president's attackson the Constitution contains a stunning warning for the president's enemies, Axios reports.

Judge William G. Young's ruling maintains international students' rights to free speech despite the administration's efforts to deport them after a professors union and student groups sued the Trump administration over its efforts to detain and deport immigrants who expressed pro-Palestinianviews.

Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was detained for six weeks over a pro-Palestinian op-ed she co-wrote in the university newspaper.

Young blasted the Homeland Security and State departments for being used to crack down on free speech, saying if they can be manipulated to do that, so can the IRS, Social Security Administration and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.

They, he wrote, can be "unconstitutionally weaponized" against Trump's enemies, even though "political persecutionis anathema to our Constitution and everything for which America stands."

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Young, who called this the biggest case the Boston federal court ever faced, called the State and Homeland Security departments' moves "unconstitutional attacks on political speech," saying Trump's support for this strategy violates his duties as president to defend the Constitution.

Trump's executive orders, Young wrote, singled out pro-Palestinian speech "for a campaign of speech-chilling retribution" under the guise of combating antisemitism and hate speech.

The judge also weighed in on federal immigration agents sporting face masks, likening them to "to KKK members and 'cowardly desperados,'" noting that even the military doesn't shield soldiers with masks, Axios reports.

He called the federal employees who raised concerns about insufficient evidence to deport these students "true patriots" who were "weaponized by their highest superiors to reach foregone conclusions for most ignoble ends."

Also included in the judge's ruling was a random postcard he received from an anonymous sender that said, "Trump has pardons and tanks. What do you have?"

"Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty," the judge replied. "Together, we ... you and me — have our magnificent Constitution."

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an 10 25

Senior U.S. District Judge William Young — a Ronald Reagan appointee — included a photocopy of a postcard sent to him by an anonymous critic complaining of judicial power in U.S. government.

Young, a U.S. District Judge in Boston, ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s policy of targeting foreign students and faculty for pro-Palestinian activism violated the First Amendment’s free speech protections. He included with his decision a scornful scolding of the administration’s attempt to terrify dissent on college campuses — as well as a rebuke to what looks like a pro-Trump voter boasting that: “Trump has pardons and tanks ... What do you have?”

“Dear Mr. or Ms, Anonymous,” Young replied in writing. “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States — you and me — have our magnificent Constitution.”

“Here’s how that works in a specific case,” added Young, who then submitted a court opinion concluding that “Secretaries Noem and Rubio and their several agents and subordinates acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech.”

“They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen pro-Palestinian individuals, pro-actively (and effectively) curbing lawful Pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals (including the plaintiffs here) the freedom of speech that is their right,” Young said, adding that “the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”

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“I gasped when I saw the front page of this decision,” posted American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on X.

Politico Senior Legal Affairs Reporter Kyle Chaney called it “the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era,” on X.

Read a PBS article on the news at this link.

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1,000 student visas revoked 4 25

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pete smothered

https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B0F92SZPQ4&ref_=dbs_t_r_khbodl

ppl’s park cops beat RR meese

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an 4 25

The global human rights group Amnesty International on Tuesday called on supporters of the United States' core constitutional rights to write to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding that the Trump administration stop its campaign to strip foreign students of their right to be in the country for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.

As Common Dreamsreported Tuesday, since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accosted former Columbia University student organizer Mahmoud Khalil, forced him into an unmarked vehicle, and took him to a detention center in Louisiana thousands of miles from his pregnant wife in March, the administration's attacks on international students have only intensified.

Seven identified students have had their visas revoked, while the administration is pushing to revoke the residency status of at least two students who protested the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on Gaza.

The White House is using a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act to claim that certain students including Khalil pose a threat to U.S. foreign policy and should be deported.

"At least 1,300 additional students are known to have had their visas revoked," reads a letter template provided to supporters by Amnesty. "However, many of these students never received notice of the revocation, nor did they participate in any protest or expressive activity on campus. Some students may have been targeted due to having committed minor crimes such as traffic violations. According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of students, many were targeted because of their country of origin, particularly those from African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian backgrounds."

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Supporters who send the letter can urge Noem to "restore the visas and immigration status of these students and visitors, release all students from immigration detention, refrain from deporting any of them, and end the targeting of students based on their immigration statuses and for exercising their human rights."

"According to a lawsuit filed on behalf of students, many were targeted because of their country of origin, particularly those from African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and Asian backgrounds."

As Common Dreamsreported, President Donald Trump's attacks on foreign students' First Amendment rights and his threats to universities' funding if they don't comply with his policies aimed at rooting out criticism of U.S. policy in Israel and Palestine, which both Republican and Democratic politicians have claimed is synonymous with antisemitism, have pushed schools to notify hundreds of students that their visas were revoked.

Trump's attacks on international students have shocked several federal judges, and one judge in Georgia on Friday ordered ICE to restore the legal status of students whose visas were revoked due to DHS' termination of their records in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS).

DHS admitted in a court filing last week that it does not have the authority to change students' visa status via SEVIS.

"These repressive tactics and the summary revocation of people's immigration status," said Amnesty, "whether due to their speech and protest activities or their country of origin, demonstrate an utter lack of respect for their human rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, due process, and to be free from discrimination."

Steve Bannon suggests the Trump administration “immediately revoke” all Chinese student visas

04/10/25 mma

Colleges in Nazi Germany thought giving in to government demands would save them

an 4 25

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mma

Right-wing media baselessly promoted claim that Tufts student was associated with Hamas — an internal State Department memo said otherwise

In the weeks after a video of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest was released, figures across the right-wing media landscape parroted the administration's false claims, frequently accusing Ozturk of being “pro-Hamas”

Written by Harrison Ray & Noah Dowe

Published 04/16/25

Following the arrest of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, right-wing media were quick to cast her as a “pro-Hamas radical.” According to new reporting, however, the State Department had determined ahead of her arrest “that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization,” despite the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.”

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an 3 25

Since March 8, Mahmoud Khalil — a 30-year-old Columbia University student — has been held in a federal detention center in Louisiana for, Trump Administration officials allege, expressing sympathy to the terrorist group Hamas during protests on the campus.

Khalil, who was born in Syria to Palestinian parents, is a legal resident of the United States and is not accused of any acts of violence. And his wife is a U.S. citizen. But Khalil is at risk for deportation, and critics of the Trump Administration and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi are arguing that his detention is an example of thought policing — not an action based on legitimate national security concerns.

Two of those critics are attorneys Thomas Anthony Durkin and Bernard Harcourt (a law professor at Columbia University in New York City).

READ MORE:Sabotaging Social Security: Behind the leaked memo to cut agency staff and critical services

In an op-ed published by The Guardian on March 21, Durkin and Harcourt argue that the movement to deport students for saying controversial things recalls the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy's (R-Wisconsin) witch hunt of the 1950s.

"The legal risks are real," Durkin and Harcourt warn. "They are perilous, and they are alarming. Where a designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO) — such as Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or related organizations such as the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network — is concerned, the line separating political advocacy from material support to terrorism can be razor thin, and any doubt tends to be resolved against those engaged in the political advocacy. FTOs are foreign organizations that the Bureau of Counterterrorism in the U.S. State Department designates as terrorist entities under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act."

The legal scholars add, "Once such a designation is made, it becomes unlawful for a U.S. person to knowingly provide that group with 'material support or resources.'"

According to Durkin and Harcourt, the "questionable legal strategy" being used against Khalil and other student protesters raises major civil liberties concerns.

READ MORE:'Clear and present danger': Experts alarmed at 'insanity' of Musk getting secret war plans

"Legal jeopardy for political advocacy has long existed in this country despite its storied embrace of the First Amendment," the attorneys explain. "But the Justice Department's new taskforce and threatened anti-terrorist prosecutions reach deeper into policing political dissent than anything seen since the McCarthy era. The consequences could be far more draconian than the usual campus risk of a misdemeanor civil-disobedience arrest or student discipline. The threat to the values of free speech and open debate on college campuses could hardly be more consequential."

READ MORE:Trump official urging Fox viewers to buy Tesla stock decried as 'abuse of power'

*Thomas Anthony Durkin and Bernard Harcourt's full op-ed for The Guardian is available at this link.

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an 3 25

Another academic has been arrested by President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on legally dubious grounds, according to a new report.

Politico reported Wednesday that Indian national Dr. Badar Khan Suri was recently arrested outside of his Virginia home by "masked agents" who said they were with the DHS. Suri — who is in the United States legally on a student visa and who is married to a U.S. citizen — was not charged with any crime and has no criminal record, yet he is being targeted for deportation and awaiting transfer to Texas.

Suri is being put into deportation proceedings under the same vaguely worded statute that the Trump administration invoked after it arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil (a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests last year). That statute claims that an administration has the authority to deport any foreign-born resident who it suspects could be a threat to U.S. foreign policy.

READ MORE:Justices' 'cozy ties' to right-wing kingpin sparks outrage as critics demand recusal

“We’re trying to speak with him. That hasn’t happened yet,” Hassan Ahmad, who is Suri's lawyer, told Politico. “This is just another example of our government abducting people the same way they abducted Khalil.”

Ahmad is alleging that Suri is being targeted because his wife, Mapheze Saleh, is of Palestinian heritage and that the couple have been outspoken about the United States' continued support of Israel. He also told Politico that the two have been repeatedly doxxed on far-right websites over their criticism of the Israeli government. The Hindustan Times (one of the largest English-language newspapers in India) reported in a 2018 article that Saleh's father, Ahmed Yousef, was once a "senior political adviser to the Hamas leadership."

According to his faculty page on the Georgetown University website, Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His LinkedIn profile shows that he has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from an Indian university. A Georgetown University spokesperson told Politico in a statement that Suri was "duly granted a visa to enter the United States to continue his doctoral research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan."

“We are not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity, and we have not received a reason for his detention," the spokesperson continued. "We support our community members’ rights to free and open inquiry, deliberation and debate, even if the underlying ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. We expect the legal system to adjudicate this case fairly.”

READ MORE:French scientist denied entry to the US because he 'expressed a personal opinion' about Trump

Click here to read Politico's article in its entirety.

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mma

Right-wing media cheer Trump administration’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil

The Trump team is trying to deport a permanent resident of the United States and revoke his green card, and right-wing media are celebrating the effort

Written by Gideon Taaffe & Jack Winstanley

Published 03/13/25

Legal resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement following his activism for Gaza at Columbia University, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a story about him online, writing, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported."

Such arrests are a policy goal of the Heritage Foundation and Khalil's arrest reportedly followed some online targeting of him. Right-wing media have responded to his arrest by calling for more arrests and deportations, arguing that the administration needs to “send a message” and that students are “going to lose."

ICE arrested Khalil after the Trump administration cracked down on college protests

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  1. ### Pro-Palestinian student protests have been largely peaceful. Right-wing media want to call in the National Guard.

04/25/24

  1. ### Far-right media figures with extreme ties are planning a “United for Israel” march at Columbia to counter peaceful pro-Palestinian student protests

04/24/24

  1. ### Right-wing media equate Palestinian flag with Nazism and support for Hamas

12/14/23

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an 3 25

One of the purposes of “flooding the zone,” as the Trump regime is trying to do — shocking and awing us with its blitzkrieg of bonkers orders — is to make it almost impossible to sort out what we should be incredibly freaked out about from what we should merely freak out about.

I’m incredibly freaked out about the regime grabbing people from their homes who are legally in the United States, with permanent status — not just visas permitting them to work or study here but green cards —and then whisking them away to prison because they’ve engaged in constitutionally protected speech that the regime doesn’t like.

You think I’m exaggerating? This is exactly what happened to Mahmoud Khalil on Saturday night. Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December, has a green card. His wife, who is eight months pregnant, is an American citizen.

Immigration agents appeared at his apartment building and told him he was being detained. He now appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.

Khalil did nothing illegal. He has not been charged with a crime. He expressed his political point of view — peacefully, non-violently, non-threateningly. That’s supposed to be permitted — dare I say even encouraged? — in a democracy.

So why is he in jail?

Khalil was one of the leaders of last year’s peaceful pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump conceded Khalil was snatched up and sent off because of his politics. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Where, may I ask, are the “First Amendment absolutists” such as Trump First Buddy Elon Trump when it comes to protecting speech that the Trump regime finds objectionable?

Where are all the Republicans who for years have accused liberals of “cancelling” their views?

Where are the conservatives who have claimed for even longer they only want to conserve traditional American values?

Nearly 13 million people in the United States hold green cards. Tens of thousands more are here temporarily as foreign students and professors. Apparently all are now in danger of being arrested if they speak their minds.

If this assault on civil liberties stands, Trump could just as well arrest and expel permanent residents who voice support for, say, transgender people or DEI or “woke” or Ukraine, or anything else the regime finds “anti-American” and offensive.

If it stands, what’s to stop the Trump regime from arresting American citizens who support any cause the regime doesn’t like — such as, say, replacing Republicans in Congress in 2026 and putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028?

Does anyone remember Senator Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts? I do. They weren’t pretty. Careers were ruined; reputations, destroyed. They remain a stain on American democracy.

American democracy. That’s what’s at stake. The Trump regime is out to trash it. The regime doesn’t believe in the First or any other amendments. It doesn’t believe in the Constitution.

Let’s commit to ending Republican control of Congress in 2026 and sending this regime packing in 2028 — if there’s still a democracy that enables us to do so.

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RUBIO PULLED GREEN CARD FOR COLUMBIA STUDENT GAZA 3/1025

AN 3 25

Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump reportedly aims to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation by up to two-thirds. And he’s instructed the National Institutes of Health to no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on grants that it administers — money that universities use for laboratory space and research equipment.

In defiance of court orders, Trump has largely maintained a freeze on NIH funding.

As a result, many of America’s great research universities have stopped hiring and are cutting Ph.D. programs — in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students.

Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.

Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.

Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.

China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.

Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind.

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MMA

March 7, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Breaking news, everybody. Trump has canceled 400 million dollars to Columbia University over rising antisemitism on campus. That is just the start. For all these campuses that don't treat us well at Turning Point USA, and you guys restrict freedom of speech, your funding might be cut soon.

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OMG

an 3 25

Hours before delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress in his second term, President Donald Trump issued what some legal experts quickly condemned as an attack on the First Amendment—a statement threatening imprisonment or deportation for certain forms of campus protest. The order, seen by some as authoritarian, targets students and faculty and raises questions about whether he anticipates resistance to the announced theme of his speech, “The Renewal of the American Dream.”

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump declared at 7:30 Tuesday morning. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Legal experts and historians swiftly condemned Trump’s threats, arguing they were intended to suppress free speech and, if enforced, could constitute a violation of the First Amendment.

READ MORE: ‘Will Be Big’: Trump Faces Dangerous Warning Signs Ahead of Address to Congress

Larry Sabato, the well-known University of Virginia professor of politics and founder and director of the Center for Politics, had already written remarks about Trump’s theme for his address to Congress.

“You must admit, #Trump 2.0 has exceeded expectations. In both foreign and domestic policy, it’s far worse than most critics had predicted. You might call it the Renewal of the American Nightmare,” Professor Sabato observed.

NCRM asked him to weigh in on the President’s latest statement.

“My response is the First Amendment,” Professor Sabato replied.

READ MORE: White House Is Demanding ‘Explicit’ On-Camera ‘Public Apology’ From Zelenskyy: Report

Former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, a professor of law and NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst, said, “Peaceful protests, of course, are not ‘illegal.’ A government ban on peaceful protests would violate the First Amendment. The goal here seems to be intimidation and fear to chill free speech.”

Journalist and historian Paul Brandus, author of books on the presidency and the White House, asked: “The president – who swore to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution – is accelerating his attack on the First Amendment. Protests are ‘illegal?'”

Immigration attorney Eric Lee offered this response: “Only in a dictatorship can the president deem protests against his government and its policies ‘illegal.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Constitutional attorney Casey Mattox, vice president for legal and judicial strategy at the conservative Americans for Prosperity, served up this detailed response:

“1. ‘illegal’ would have to do a whole lot of work here for this not to violate the 1st A. Enough that it would have been better to not even bother using the ‘protest’ word. So let’s assume that.

  1. The President can’t expel students from their colleges.
  2. Good morning.”

Joe Walsh, the former Tea Party Republican congressman turned independent talk show host blasted Trump, who just last week declared himself a “king.”

“‘Illegal protests?’ He’s not a king,” Walsh exclaimed. “He doesn’t have the authority to stop protests. Or expel students. Or tell protestors not to wear masks. He’s not a king.”

Attorney and editor-in-chief of MediasTouch, Ron Filipkowski, slammed Trump: “Presumably, this government by Truth Social posts will define exactly what an ‘illegal protest’ is, and that definition will not be so broad that it encroaches on free speech guarantees we’ve enjoyed for two centuries.”

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As lawmakers across the country consider requiring documented proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, Arizona’s voter roll provides clues as to which voters will struggle to provide it.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Voters living on Native land, on college campuses, and at the state’s main homeless campus are all disproportionately represented among voters in Arizona who haven’t provided proof of citizenship, according to a Votebeat analysis of the list of eligible voters who hadn’t provided proof of citizenship for the presidential election. Such voters also were three times less likely to vote this past November than voters who had provided proof of citizenship, the analysis found.

The data shows that, while GOP lawmakers pushing for a documentation requirement say they are attempting to prevent noncitizens from voting — a rare occurrence, according to all available evidence — the requirement in Arizona appears to be disenfranchising some Americans.

Arizona is the only state in the country currently limiting voting for those who don’t prove citizenship by providing a birth certificate or another qualifying document. Such voters can cast ballots in federal elections, but not state and local elections.

The voters who don’t provide such documents are marked as a “federal-only” voter and receive a ballot with just presidential and congressional contests. This applied to less than 1% of the state’s voter roll, or 34,933 out of around 4.4 million active voters eligible for this past November election.

In all other states, voters simply attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. They don’t have to provide documents proving it.

Voters living on tribal land, college campuses, and at the state’s largest homeless campus frequently tell advocacy organizations that they aren’t able to provide documents proving their citizenship because they don’t have easy or immediate access to them when registering. And many college students and Native voters first register to vote at third-party registration drives away from home when they hadn’t necessarily planned to do so, and don’t follow up later to provide additional documentation.

Allie Redhorse Young, director and founder of Navajo advocacy group Protect the Sacred, said it’s just another barrier for Native voters who have long faced challenges voting.

“It’s pretty outrageous for the first people who lived in this country to have these challenges trying to vote,” Young said.

Here’s everything we know about who Arizona’s federal-only voters are, and where they live.

Federal-only voters are unlikely voters in Arizona

The vast majority of federal-only voters are on the list because they didn’t provide documentation of citizenship. But a minimal number are on the list because they haven’t provided proof of residency required under a new state law.

Together, the voters in Arizona who haven’t provided proof of citizenship or residency make up a tiny portion of the state’s voter roll.

These federal-only voters also voted far less often than registered voters in general.

Turnout from active voters who hadn’t provided documents proving citizenship in Arizona was about 19% in the November presidential election, compared to 79% turnout among other active registered voters.

Federal-only voters are spread out pretty evenly across the state with the vast majority of precincts having just a dozen or fewer.

But there are some places where they are more concentrated.

Many federal-only voters live on tribal land

Voters living on tribal land are more likely to find themselves on the federal-only list.

Of all active federal-only voters, 7.3% live in precincts on or close to reservations, whereas voters on tribal land make up only 2.5% of all registered voters, according to a Votebeat analysis. And only 3.6% of the voting-age population in the state is Indigenous, according to U.S. Census voter population estimates. Many of those people do not live on tribal land.

In particular, some precincts on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona saw higher per-capita rates of federal-only voters, compared to precincts in the rest of the state.

There are a few reasons why Indigenous voters may not provide proof of citizenship as often, according to Native voting advocates.

For one, there’s been a big push in recent years to get Indigenous voters registered to vote, so many organizations host voter registration drives at community events or at chapter houses on tribal land. If the voter doesn’t have documentation with them at those events, Young with Protect the Sacred said, it’s a long way back home to get it.

Young’s group hosts voter registration events on the Navajo Nation, including her highly publicized get-out-the-vote horseback rides.

“If they show up without this documentation, it’s likely they aren’t going to drive the 40 minutes and back again,” she said.

Young said the organizations hosting the drive must be clear to residents, before and during the event, that they need to provide this documentation. But she said she knows that some groups conducting voter registration drives on the Navajo reservation turn in incomplete or inaccurate forms.

Young also said many elders living on the reservation may not have documentation proving citizenship at all. Votebeat’s analysis confirmed that the federal-only voters in precincts containing tribal land are generally older than those elsewhere. In fact, 16% of federal-only voters on precincts containing tribal land were 65 and older, compared to 10% in the rest of the state.

Some of these older residents may not have an Arizona driver’s license, which can be used to prove citizenship if issued after 1996, and also may not have a birth certificate. They could potentially have a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, which can also be used to prove citizenship. But, Young said, “it’s one of those documents you don’t have in your wallet.”

Of the federal-only voters who cast ballots in November, at least 8% live on or near tribal land, according to the analysis.

Many federal-only voters are on college campuses

There are just seven precincts, out of roughly 1,700 in the state, where more than 5% of voters cast federal-only ballots in November. They all either include parts of, or are adjacent to, college campuses.

At least 6% of people relegated to the federal-only voter roll live in just three precincts at the center of each of the state’s three public universities’ main campuses. That percentage doubles if expanded to include nearby precincts that include student housing.

Federal-only voters make up 29% of the voters in those three precincts, compared with 0.8% of the overall voter roll.

Student advocates believe they know why college students are landing on the list: Like tribal land, college campuses are targeted by organizations trying to register new voters in the state.

Kyle Nitschke, the organizing director of the Arizona Students’ Association, helps run some of those voter registration drives. Data from his past registration drives found that around 1 in 3 of the students registering have not been able to provide an in-state driver’s license or other form of citizenship proof on the spot at such events.

Nitschke said that’s because many students are originally from out of state, and these drives take place when they first move to Arizona to attend college. So they’re eligible to vote there, but may not have an Arizona-issued driver’s license or have their birth certificate handy.

Changes that went into effect this summer, under a new law requiring proof of residency and requiring state registration forms to be rejected outright if citizenship is not provided, made it even more complicated to get a new student full ballot status, Nitschke said.

Nitsche cautions other states against passing proof of citizenship laws, because he’s seen its impact on the college student population.

“It’s not about citizenship, like they say it is,” he said. “It’s an attack on student voters, and voters from out of state. It just doesn’t solve a problem.”

In the November election, around 7% of federal-only voters who cast ballots live in the three precincts at the center of the main college campuses.

Federal-only voters are often young and unaffiliated

In a potentially related finding, the data show that federal-only voters are generally younger than the voting-age population in the state.

People 18 to 24 years old are roughly 3.6 times as likely to be federal-only voters than people 25 and older.

The federal-only voters who voted in November also followed this pattern.

They’re also more likely to not belong to a political party, compared to all registered voters. That makes sense because these voters are younger, which means they are newer voters, and newer voters are generally less often affiliated with a major party.

But unaffiliated voters, generally, vote at lower rates, and the same was true for those on the federal-only list. Therefore, the political makeup of federal-only voters who actually cast ballots in November looked more like the political makeup of the general voting population.

Arizona doesn’t collect race or ethnicity information from voters when they register, so Votebeat was unable to analyze either.

But in testimony given during a trial on Arizona’s citizenship laws in 2023, Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida, told the judge that his analysis found that federal-only voters live in communities that are more diverse, compared to full-ballot voters. The average community for a registered voter in Arizona is 62.9 percent non-Hispanic white, he said, but the average community of a federal-only voter is 47.3 percent non-Hispanic white.

A hot spot on a homeless campus

The other hotspot precinct in the state containing a larger number of federal-only voters includes the state’s main homeless campus, Keys to Change, in downtown Phoenix. The campus has mailboxes that people can use as a mailing address.

There are 510 voters registered at the address, and around half of them, or 269, are federal-only voters, according to Maricopa County data.

Those 269 voters make up 40% of the 669 federal-only voters in the precinct.

Rick Mitchell, executive director of the Phoenix-based Homeless ID Project, said there are several reasons why someone experiencing homelessness might not have a state ID or birth certificate. His organization helps people get new documents, and store them.

Mitchell said people who have recently been evicted, who are aging out of foster care, or who are fleeing domestic violence are among those he helps obtain new identification. He also sees some people who have lost their documents as they move around or live on the street.

In 2023, his organization helped around 20 individuals a day get a birth certificate, and around 40 a day get a new state identification card.

When people come looking for help, they are often trying to get a new job, get housing, or get into school. While getting an ID, they will be asked through the Motor Vehicle Division if they want to register to vote.

Those people might then land on the federal-only list.

But only 19 people of the 669 on the list voted in the November election from the precinct where the homeless campus is located. It has one of the lowest federal-only voting rates in the state, despite having the fourth highest share of federal-only voters.

The people who Mitchell helps have other priorities, he said.

“If I have nothing, and I’m trying to get reestablished, voting isn’t one of them.”

Kae Petrin is a data reporter for Votebeat. Contact Kae at kpetrin@chalkbeat.org.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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Voting rights groups are sounding the alarm about anonymous text messages allegedly sent to college students in Wisconsin, threatening them with prison if they vote, according to CNN.

"The unsolicited text, sent from at least one 262- number to cell phones of people in their early 20s on University of Wisconsin campuses and elsewhere, says: 'WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible,'" reported Katelyn Polantz.

Those statutes prohibit someone from voting by mail in a Wisconsin election if they have moved out of Wisconsin. They do not apply to students who moved to Wisconsin for school.

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Voting rights groups fear that students could be intimidated out of voting by the message, with Free Speech for People's Courtney Hostetler warning, “It’s trying to convince students living in Wisconsin they don’t have a right to vote there.”

ALSO READ:Busted: Armed man arrested at rally tied to Trump's 'secretary of retribution'

The groups have sent a report about this incident in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, urging them to investigate the matter.

Lying to voters about election procedures with the intent to trick or intimidate them out of voting is a crime, and cases of this sort have resulted in convictions in recent history.

Doug Mackey, a far-right social media influencer who went by the name "Ricky Vaughn," was jailed over a 2016 scheme to misinform Black voters that they could cast ballots for Hillary Clinton by text message. And a the pro-Trump duo of Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman agreed to pay $1.25 million in penalties over an illegal robocall scheme that falsely warned Black voters in the Midwest that voting could re-activate outstanding warrants and debt collection against them.

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reckon

basseema Abouassaad thought they had finally landed their dream job. Fresh out of college, Abouassaad, who uses all pronouns, was hired in April by an environmental conservation organization. It seemed like the perfect start to their career – a stable position aligned with their values. But their elation was short-lived.

By June, Abouassaad found themselves unemployed, caught in the crossfire of one of the most contentious global conflicts of our time. The reason? An article surfaced, listing Abouassaad as providing off-site legal support for pro-Palestine protesters. Abouassaad requested that their name be removed from the article for their safety, but the measure came too late.

“Two days later I was fired,” recounted Abouassaad, already widely recognized as co-founder of Red Star Texas, a mutual aid group that provides food, anti-overdose medication, and contraceptives. “They said it was so that I could ‘engage in my passions’ without any issues or barriers.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Abouassaad. The environmental organization, funded by Valero, an oil company producing ethanol, petroleum, and “green diesel,” seemed more concerned about Abouassaad’s political stance than the studies showcasing the “massive” carbon emissions resulting from Israel’s military actions since Oct. 7, 2023.

Abouassaad’s story is not unique. Across the United States, young activists are discovering that their support for Palestinian rights is clashing with the status quo, and it’s costing them job opportunities. In the wake of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, which have sparked nationwide protests, a disturbing pattern has emerged: many companies are punishing Gen Z organizers for fighting for what they believe in.

From Yale to Gallaudet University, the only U.S. higher education institution specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing, student protests have returned to decry the violence, which UN officials say there are “reasonable grounds” to believe constitutes genocide. Many students have organized through the National Students for Justice in Palestine collective. The resulting backlash has been severe.

“I think right now we are seeing a resurgence of repression on campuses that we haven’t seen since the late 1960s,” said Risa Lieberwitz, a Cornell University professor of labor and employment law who serves as general counsel for the AAUP, told the Associated Press.

Several universities have defended the crackdown on students, citing campus safety concerns or older policies that prohibit the occupation of an admin building or the obstruction of pathways.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the U.S.’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization, has documented instances of Islamophobia on campus, including the destruction of Quranic artwork, harassment and threats, and even a “doxxing truck” on Harvard’s campus. Doxxing—the non-consensual publication of someone’s private information like phone numbers or home addresses—can have devastating consequences, especially for marginalized activists. Doxxing can often lead to a flood of threatening phone calls, emails, letters, physical harassment at home, and even the doxxing of loved ones.

A recent study by Intelligent paints a stark picture: nearly 30% of students who participated in pro-Palestine protests reported having job offers rescinded. Even more alarmingly, 70% faced questions about their activism during job interviews, a practice that skirts the edge of employment discrimination laws.

“Companies have taken a particular way of getting rid of people,” said Mahir Nisar, principal attorney at Nisar Law Group. “It’s necessary to raise the concern that this is not okay. They actually may be engaging in unlawful activity.”

Personal accounts highlight the severity of the situation. Ridikkuluz, a Palestinian-Jordanian student in Berlin, was fired from a finance job for refusing to write a pro-Israel statement.

“I knew that wasn’t the case,” they said, noting the immediate shunning by coworkers. Financial hardship now looms. “I would sell my work about Palestine but that wouldn’t sit right with me,” Ridikkuluz said.

“There is a level of ‘you did something wrong for this to be happening to you, you did commit some kind of crime and you are deserving of this happening to you,’” a Harvard student protester told ABC News in October.

Legal experts are raising concerns about the potential illegality of such hiring practices. Nisar, whose law firm specializes in employee discrimination, argues that pro-Palestinian activism does not pose a “legitimate business concern” to employers. “The laws basically protect people from discrimination based upon their identity,” Nisar added. “When somebody is speaking up on this particular issue, that [person] is protected against being discriminated against if you are speaking up on behalf of Palestinians or Muslims being slaughtered at this time.”

Tracing anti-Muslim bias from universities to the job market

CAIR’s Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor highlights the majority of university administrations for enabling this anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence, which has ranged from withholding degrees to deploying aggressive police responses against peaceful protesters.

Saylor cited George Washington University as an example after they canceled a trauma support program for Palestinian students within 24 hours of its launch. “After the raid of the encampment, we were sent pictures of Islamic prayer mats being thrown in the trash,” Saylor recalled. “I’ve had several people report Qurans being trashed.”

The anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence and punishment towards pro-Palestine advocates on campus isn’t confined to university grounds, but also extends to the job market.

Experts suggest that this repeated cycle of anti-Palestinian discrimination, both in academia and the job market, persists due to outdated legal frameworks in the United States. The law has failed to keep pace with evolving understandings of Islamophobia and its impacts on Palestinian, Arab and Muslim Americans.

“The law does not possess the language we desperately need to accurately capture the totality of Palestinian subjugation,” Palestinian American human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah writes in his article “Toward Nakba As A Legal Concept,” which was published, removed, and later reinstated at the Columbia Law Review. “There is a dire need for a new approach.”

Palestine Legal, which supports the Palestine solidarity movement, saw a 400% increase in requests for legal aid between Oct. 7 and Dec. 31, 2023.

CAIR also reported a 56% increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents nationwide in April 2024, with 44% of those occurring in the last three months of 2023. And from January to June 2024, there was a 69% jump in reported incidents compared to the same time period the prior year.

Legal strategies to hold employers and universities accountable

As campus protests have returned, backlash continues towards pro-Palestine students, faculty, and staff. While some administrations have reached tentative deals for divestment, several others have revised their protest policies. Indiana University forbids protests after 11pm. Emory University prohibited protests from midnight to 7am and enacted a total ban on encampments and building occupation. Police violently dispersed a die-in at the University of Michigan in August. In a public statement, the institution said “we are prohibited from interfering with lawful speech and are also required to intervene when anyone attempts to substantially disrupt or interfere with the lawful speech of others.”

“There’s also very reasonable concern about schools overreacting,” said Saylor. “With arrests and schools asking for prosecutions and pursuing disciplinary measures.”

In response to the escalating discrimination, legal advocates have taken rigorous action to protect students’ job prospects and hold universities accountable. Palestine Legal and CAIR have filed a series of Title VI civil rights complaints, alleging racial discrimination against pro-Palestine students. These legal efforts have prompted the Department of Education to launch federal investigations into high-profile institutions like Columbia, Emory, and Northwestern.

The catalyst for these probes was the universities’ authorization of forceful police crackdowns on student protesters. At these schools, campus security arrested peaceful demonstrators, only for the situations to devolve into violent chaos due to the outsized law enforcement response.

In the workforce, some states already carry a legal framework protecting pro-Palestine employees. Federally, all employees are protected by the First Amendment, therefore any firing can result in legal consequences to the employer. Several states also have varying laws protecting workers specifically from political discrimination, such as California, North Dakota, New Mexico, New York, Washington, and Washington D.C.

In 2021, Palestine Legal wrote a letter to Google regarding retaliation towards workers protesting Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion digital cloud deal with Amazon and the Israeli Defense Forces. Palestine Legal wrote that such treatment of employees violates Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which “gives applicable employees the right to “engage in . . . concerted activities for the purpose of mutual aid or protection.”

Political affiliation is not a protected class under Title VII, but as advocates suggest that identity on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., may be used as a strategy in the workforce. Nisar, who provides legal education on his TikTok account, stressed the importance of documenting everything for everyone. “Always develop a paper trail,” he said. “Make sure that it’s done in a written fashion. Specify that it discriminates upon your identity. You want to do it via email. You are always making sure that when you’re speaking up you’re raising your identity [in relationship] to discrimination towards Palestinians or Muslims. This requires that you preserve evidence.”

Nisar also emphasized that one be careful to not engage in anything that could constitute discriminatory practice as well. “Whenever they’re speaking up it’s important that they don’t engage in discrimination of their own. A lot of people get caught up in these situations. You can’t fight hate with hate. You have to remember that you’re fighting for a greater principle.”

While filing a lawsuit in these states or situations may seem logical, processing the ongoing conflict alongside legal battle can prove emotionally and financially taxing for many. Some might lack the resources to hire a lawyer. Others, like Abouassaad, opt for severance packages instead of lengthy legal battles. “One way to advocate for myself is continuing to be able to survive,” they said. “I accepted that money because f*ck them, pay me.”

For others like Abouassaad, the bigger picture matters more than personal grievances. “There’s a genocide happening,” they said. “I’m not at the capacity to deal with an entire lawsuit…. It still doesn’t address the overall issue of censorship against Palestinians and the ways corporations can use their access to capital to enforce their world views on other people.”

While the federal probes mark an important accountability milestone, legal experts emphasize that addressing the deeper systemic issues will be a protracted battle. They say updating anti-discrimination laws to better reflect modern understandings of Islamophobia remains a pressing imperative.

To guide students facing discrimination, CAIR has released an employee rights guide. Recommendations include setting social media accounts to private, avoiding publicly identifying employers, thoroughly documenting any problematic interactions, and demanding written explanations from HR about policy violations.

Despite ongoing repression, Saylor believes that the organizing skills and advocacy experience these young people are developing will serve them well for long-term careers.

“As this generation graduates, and hopefully come into the advocacy space, they’re going to deliver some really powerful stuff,” said Saylor.

Across the pro-Palestinian community, the legal recognition of theNakba vid]—the violent displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians for the creation of Israel instituted by Britain and the U.S.—is seen as critical to accountability. Eghbariah wrote, “Recognition of Nakba as a universal concept, one acknowledged and prohibited by international norms, is therefore the first step toward a just and lasting solution in Palestine.”

This could prove not only a first step towards just global accountability, but also a subsequent end to the anti-war protests and thus work discrimination. “The U.S. can totally stop sending weapons,” Abouassaad said. “After that, everything else will follow.”

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Violent arrest of Emory professor spotlights brutality of police crackdown on campus protests](https://www.alternet.org/violent-arrest-professor/)

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5/15/24 kpfa 7 am BET ucla gaza students coord attack threat 2 days before GUK ; leave our kids alone anti drag; kkk pol pro zion but anti-semite

4 Bruin student journo targeted /hurt

April 30, 2024 rww

Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.

It is a popular quote and many people still attribute it to Bonhoeffer; but it can’t be found in any of his writings, nor is there a record of it in his sermons or speeches.

President Joe Biden’s eating habits are no longer just the subject of Fox News host Jesse Watters’ invaluable scrutiny, after Newsmax host Eric Bolling grew increasingly angry Monday with the president eating salad at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend.

Randall Terry, the founder of the far-right group Operation Rescue, has been chosen as the Constitution Party’s presidential nominee for the 2024 election.

Over the weekend people gathered at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs castle to attend a conference held by VDARE — a white nationalist hate group. Speakers at the event included well-known white nationalists and antisemites such as Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, and Kevin DeAnna. It also included former Department of Justice official John Lott.

Conservative activist and author Christopher Rufo declared in his Substack newsletter that pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses are a “disaster” for the left that conservatives should “exploit.”

In arguing to the Supreme Court that he cannot be charged for acts while in office, Donald Trump has asked the justices to enforce a norm that he has long threatened to shatter.

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gaza protests columbia etc USC palestine valedictorian gagged 4 24 arrests

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when David Dzul approached his principal about setting up a voter registration drive on campus in 2019, he quickly realized why voting participation rates are so abysmal among his peers.

Texas high schools have long been required to distribute voter registration forms to older teens twice a year. But Dzul said that wasn’t happening at Houston’s DeBakey High School, and he initially couldn’t nail down who the school’s designated voter registrar was — or if the school was even complying with the decades-old state law at all.

*Get the data and visuals that accompany this story →

Dzul was trying to galvanize civic engagement after hearing about low participation rates among young voters at a meeting of Mi Familia Vota, a group that encourages Latinos to cast ballots. He eventually organized a group of peers to track classmates when they turned 18 years old, help them register and follow up with a link to confirm they could cast a ballot in the next election.

“I don’t think the administration supported the initiative so much as they tolerated it,” Dzul said. “They weren’t actively setting up tables and telling students to register, but they allowed us to occupy space and get volunteer deputy voter registrars into the schools.”

Texas is home to about 409,000 18-year-old U.S. citizens, according to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 39.6% of Texans ages 18 to 24 were registered to vote in November 2022. And that was the biggest decline in voter registration for any age group compared to the previous midterm election in 2018.

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And even once younger adults are registered, they cast ballots at lower rates than other age groups. During the 2022 midterms, only 49% of registered Texas voters between 18 and 24 participated. That compares to 86% of voters 65 and older.

Research has found that voting is habit-forming, and high schools are a critical training ground to initiating that pattern. The 2023 Harvard Youth Poll found that two-thirds of 18-to-29-year-olds who definitely plan to vote said their high school education made voting feel important. But only 47% of less committed voters in that age group feel that way about their high school education.

“Starting that habit early is a predictor of lifelong voting,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “We want the students to start this process early and then bring that forward through their civic lives.”

The 1983 law requiring high schools to distribute voter registration forms to students who are 17 years and 10 months old or older was intended to boost turnout among young voters. But the secretary of state’s office, which was charged with creating the instructions to implement the law, doesn’t track compliance. And schools that fail to distribute registration forms to eligible students aren’t penalized.

The University of Houston’s Election Lab estimated in 2021 that only a quarter of schools were complying with the law, though that number is not conclusive. Some high school seniors told the Tribune they had never been given a voter registration form at school, and nonprofit leaders said they have spoken to school administrators who are unaware of the law.

https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/Ju_c3l31PGJEbF6O9deLLFuU4io=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/083e5d01308f5e953fdc0f1750f0059f/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2003.jpg)}:

Tania Cora, left, education coordinator at the Harris County Elections Department, provides guidance on how to use a voting machine at DeBakey Civics Club’s voter education conference in Houston. Only 49% of registered Texas voters ages 18 to 24 year old participated in the 2022 midterm election. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune

And many critics of Texas voting laws — including new limits passed in 2021 — say getting registered outside of school isn’t very friendly to teenagers. While other states have online voter registration, Texans must complete a paper application, creating a possible barrier to young people who do everything — from shopping to banking — digitally.

State lawmakers in 2021 also restricted how educators can teach current events and history. The law, designed to keep “critical race theory” out of Texas public schools, also prohibits teachers from discussing “a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” Without defining “controversial,” the law created widespread confusionabout what topics teachers could and could not legally cover.

“It’s not enough to just tell people, ‘voting is important,’” said Maggie Stern, who promotes youth civic engagement through the nonprofit organization Children’s Defense Fund Texas.

“Young people are motivated by the issues affecting their community, so as they understand the ways elected officials have power over those issues, they are more motivated to vote — that piece of civics education is really lacking in Texas.”

:{*:{[How a fraction of voters decide who runs Texas]}:

Efforts to change Texas’ legal landscape

Kevin Brown can still vividly remember learning how to vote in his government class as a high school student in San Marcos in the mid 80s. A nonprofit brought a voting booth into his classroom and taught students how to punch in their selections. Students ran a mock election, and the tally was shared the following day in the morning announcements.

Brown, who now serves as the executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators, said administrators took civics education seriously when he later became a public school teacher. They wanted to develop citizens who would be engaged with the world and the issues around them.

Now, he has trouble imagining a school running a mock presidential election without raising concerns that doing so might create controversy. Senate Bill 3, the same 2021 law that limits lessons about racism in American history, also prohibits teachers from giving students class credit for any public policy advocacy.

“That produced a really big chilling effect on anything related to civics education,” Stern said. “It has really deterred a lot of schools who used to be doing this work from having any sort of conversation with students around voting and civic participation.”

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/dUhBbm3g9u9iuePFpM3pa-Wf8lU=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/9e3b4d04e4c8158c4986b03909ec2a0a/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2010.jpg)

TaKasha Francis, who won the Democratic nomination for judge of a state district court, speaks to DeBakey Civics Club students on the importance of voting. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune

SB 3 requires the Texas Education Agency to create a civics training program that will outline the knowledge and skills students are expected to have. The program is supposed to be implemented no later than the 2025-2026 school year. A TEA spokesperson said the agency is in the “planning phase” for developing the program.

:{:{Although public school students in Texas are required to take a government class to graduate, many students say they do not learn about civic engagement or voter registration in the course. That’s despite the fact that the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills states that students who complete the class should be able to “describe the voter registration process and the criteria for voting in elections.”}:}:

“It’s a daunting task to learn what is a primary, what is a general election and who are all the candidates running,” said Ashton Sanchez, a senior at Sam Houston Math, Science and Technology Center High School in Houston. “We need to find a way to integrate that into the classroom.”

Voting rights advocates argue that the state should do more to ensure students are registered to vote, for example, by documenting compliance with the high school voter registration law.

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas, noted that some states reward schools that register students. Tennessee acknowledges schools that reach a certain voter registration threshold, and Pennsylvania has a governor’s civic engagement award to celebrate schools that register 85% of eligible students to vote, for example.

:{Common Cause also recommends that the secretary of state’s office mail each school voter registration applications, instead of requiring schools to request them twice a year. Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, introduced a bill in 2021 that would require the secretary of state to mail the applications directly to all high schools, but the bill never got a hearing before the House Elections Committee.}:

Alicia Pierce, spokesperson for the secretary of state, said mailing applications is expensive and that it might not address noncompliance.

“I’m not sure you would get much better results,” Pierce said. “If it just shows up at their door and they weren’t already planning to use them, then you just have these registration forms sitting there.”

Student action

Some students have taken matters into their own hands. Rice University has partnered with the League of Women Voters to create an internship program where students, most of whom are in the Houston Independent School District, organize voter registration drives at their high schools. The goal, according to Rice University professor Melissa Marschall, who leads the program, is to get students to take ownership of the activity and encourage their friends to register.

“I’ve never heard of a school where the principal takes charge of the event, because technically, most of them are not trained as deputy voter registrars,” Marschall said. “We prioritize events with peer to peer civic education.”

About 130 students applied to the internship and 10 are participating, Marschall said. She said she hopes the program makes it easier for organizations like the League of Women Voters to enter schools. The organization has historically relied on relationships with administrators, who are not always amenable to welcoming outside organizations. Administrator turnover, which has increased this year due to the state’s takeover of HISD, creates additional hurdles.

![](https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/0qUjbEZzLRYowg4L4pxlLaJ-onY=/1200x804/smart/filters:quality(75)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/660305a9d339f3b5a26576fc65e72db5/0405%20DeBakey%20HS%20Voting%20JB%20TT%2017.jpg)

DeBakey Civics Club Vice President Mihir Relan fills out a voter registration form. Some Texas high school students have organized voter registration drives to increase the participation of younger voters. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune

At Round Rock High School, a student chapter of Junior State of America has taken the lead on organizing a voter registration drive. Junior Indira Moparthi recalled an uphill battle to create a drive during her freshman year. She said administrators rejected the idea because they thought the event would be partisan.

“Seniors and parents got involved, and a petition went around saying we weren’t supporting a particular political party,” Moparthi said. “Finally the administration signed off.”

For some students, school is the only place where they can gain critical information about voting. Among immigrant families who have historically been marginalized for voting, civics participation is rarely talked about in the household.

For Dzul, whose parents did not grow up voting in the U.S., it was frustrating to see 18-year-olds who could vote fail to take advantage of their right. That motivated him to create a civics club, which has continued to hold registration drives since he graduated.

“We need to get more power to marginalized communities, and voter registration is the first step to getting people that power,” Dzul said

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GOP senators Hawley and Cotton call for 'National Guard' deployment against student protestors - Alternet.org

SOME RUBBER GLUE DEFLECTION FROMTRUMP COUP J6?

TRUMP SPUTS bs W/ [SOME]PPL ARE SAYING? SHE GOES WITH UNNAMED REPUBLICANS

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Fox News Business host Maria Bartiromo is promoting the thoroughly debunked claim an executive order signed by President Joe Biden allows “illegal immigrants” and “felons” to vote.

Bartiromo, in pushing the false claim, told Fox News viewers, “Republicans are warning that there’s a Biden order, executive order, which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote.”

There is no such order.

“It doesn’t appear that Joe Biden can win on his policies,” Bartiromo said Wednesday. “A Wall Street Journal poll this morning shows Trump leading Biden in six out of seven swing states, that’s Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, the two are tied in a head-to-head matchup. So how does Biden win? Republicans are talking about the potential of an election that is tampered with. Republicans are warning that there’s a Biden order, executive order, which allows illegal immigrants and felons to vote.”

READ MORE: Jack Smith’s ‘Blistering’ Response to Judge Cannon Could ‘Remove Her From the Case’: Experts

The conspiracy theory appears to have come from Mississippi’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson three years ago, a conspiracy theory Watson himself resurfaced last month.

Fox News several weeks ago reported Watson had sent the U.S. Dept. of Justice a letter “asking it to stop enforcing a Biden executive order that he warns is being used to attempt to register ineligible convicts and illegal immigrants to vote.”

“As you are aware, on March 7, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order No. 14019 which sought to turn the Department of Justice agencies from their historical missions of law enforcement to voter registration and get out the vote operations,” Watson wrote, according to Fox News. “These efforts are an intrusion into state matters and are a misuse of federal revenue and resources. In addition, it appears that these efforts have led to agencies under your charge attempting to register people to vote, including potentially ineligible felons and to co-opt state and local officials into accomplishing this goal.”

The fact-checking website Verify makes clear: “No, Biden’s executive order doesn’t allow ineligible people to vote.” It also says it’s “not true” that Biden’s order “would make it easier for ineligible people to vote.”

READ MORE: ‘Says You!’: Kirby Smacks Down Doocy

A USA Today fact check arrives at the same conclusion: “No, Biden didn’t (and can’t) allow immigrants in US illegally to vote.”

“Experts said the claim is nonsense. Biden has issued no such order, and he does not have the power to decide who votes.” Also, the paper notes, “in 1996, Congress made it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.”

When he was a state lawmaker Watson voted against making it easier for college students to register to vote, and in 2021, as Mississippi Secretary of State, Watson said “he is worried that the nation will suffer if more ‘woke’ and ‘uninformed’ college students become registered voters,” the Mississippi Free Press reported at the time. The news outlet took a deep dive into Watson’s extensive claims, also debunking them.

MSNBC’s Ari Melber in 2021 highlighted Watson’s remarks, and called them, “just one of many occurrences of GOP officials unintentionally revealing they don’t want everyone to vote.”

Watch Bartiromo below or at this link.

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university-of-pennsylvania-affiliates-face-mccarthy-style-treatment

Student groups across the country have beentargeted for their political leanings these last few months. Their universities have labeled the coalitions formed in the name of Palestinian liberation, critical of Israel's policies and concerned over human rights violations, as "anti-Semitic". This label of anti-Semitism has in turned been used to justify suspension and internal policies and actions reminiscent of the McCarthy era.

In fact, a group at the University of Pennsylvania issued a lawsuit making just such a claim. They've argued that the school's collecting and potential turning over of documents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in the name of combating anti-Semitism is both a violation of free speech and a modern reimagining of McCarthyism. Just sub "communism" for "anti-Semitism" and the comparison is easy, you can do it from the comfort of home!

Criticisms of the nation-state, Israel, including statements of anti-Zionism, are First Amendment-protected speech. The new McCarthyism has, since long before October 7, been highly successful at getting individuals fired from jobs, expelled or suspended from universities, denied tenure or advancement, demoted from prominent media roles, and dropped by entertainment agents, as well as successfully obtaining the rescission of offers of employment, and of invitations to participate in conferences and workshops, speaking engagements and numerous other opportunities. The new McCarthyism, which was growing slowly before the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023, but is surging up very rapidly now, has already been hugely successful at ending careers and blighting lives, just like its predecessor.

LAWSUIT PENNED AGAINST PENN, PLAINTIFFS HUDA FAKHREDDINE, TROUTT POWELL, AND PENN FACULTY FOR JUSTICE IN PALESTINE

The Penn faculty group said, "The Committee is engaged in a partisan witch hunt by seeking syllabi, academic papers, and other material from Penn faculty of all ranks, with the search highlighting keywords like Jew, Israel, antisemitism, Palestine, Gaza, resistance, settler colonialism and diversity, equity and inclusion, to name most of their criteria."…The "would-be McCarthyesque House of Representatives is behaving as if it never heard of the First Amendment," the complaint continues. The faculty members cited the passage of House Resolution 894 — which equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism — and the fact that the committee is seeking to obtain student information deemed confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

PREM THAKKER, THE INTERCEPT

Highlighting "equity and inclusion" as a keyword in an investigation to stop anti-Semitism seems like a stretch. UPenn has seen its president resign over allegations of anti-Semitism, following a hearing conducted by the House Committee.

Plaintiff Eve Troutt Powell, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Penn, told The Intercept that the university was in a difficult position, being under attack from Congress and donor pressure, but that the school should have stood firm. "We have been doxxed and we have been harassed and the university has promised it would protect us," she said, "but we now understand that the university has been giving over documents, perhaps in hopes that this congressional committee will not subpoena the university, and we don't accept it."

PREM THAKKER, THE INTERCEPT

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historically, 50-and-over voters have been the most likely to show up on Election Day in the United States. But when younger voters do show up in big numbers, they can play an important role in an election's outcome.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on December 18, Campaign Legal Center President Trevor Potter laments that Republicans have been going out of their way to make voting more difficult for younger voters — a move he slams as "cynical and shortsighted" and bad for democracy.

:{"Legislation enacted this year in Idaho and Ohio dropped student photo IDs — including even those issued by state institutions — from the list of acceptable voter identification," explains Potter, a former Federal Election Commissioner (FEC) chairman. "

In Texas, a Republican lawmaker even tried to remove all polling places from college campuses. These efforts to stifle the voices of young voters aren't isolated, and no amount of lip service from the former president, (Donald Trump) can change that. They are a part of the modern anti-democracy playbook promoted by a coordinated and well-documented project."}:

Potter stresses that the U.S. needs to make it easier for Generation Z to vote — not more difficult.

"Embracing young voters is also the morally right thing to do," the former FEC chairman argues. "Young people go to school or work, pay taxes, need healthcare, and drive a car or use public transport. They deserve a say in how their communities are governed…. If our democratic republic is to survive this current authoritarian challenge — and not just survive, but thrive afterward — young voters need to know they belong in our democracy, too."

READ MORE:'Holding things together by a thread': PA county election officials quit after 'being abused'

*Read Trevor Potter's full article for The Bulwark at this link.

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america’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.

A degree from Harvard, Penn, or M.I.T., to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.

But as America becomes increasingly stratified by wealth, those tickets are easily abused.

Universities that give preference in admissions to the children or grandchildren of major donors serve to widen inequality even further.

Universities that allow major donors to influence what is taught or expressed on campus could be seen to suppress ideas that threaten the wealthy — which could chill freedom of expression and fuel social resentment.

Which brings us to the latest imbroglio.

Last Tuesday, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and M.I.T. tried to give precise answers to questions from members of Congress about whether their university cultures had encouraged hostility towards Jews — hostility that has surged since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s attack on Gaza in response.

In their opening remarks, all three denied it, and repeatedly condemned antisemitism.

Then Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York (and herself a Harvard graduate) asked a yes or no question: would calls for genocide of Jews on campus violate their codes of conduct or harassment policies?

The presidents hedged. “If the speech turns into conduct, yes, it can be harassment,” Penn’s president, M. Elizabeth Magill, a former dean of Stanford Law School, replied in lawyer-like fashion.

“I’m asking if specifically calling for the genocide of Jews — does that constitute bullying or harassment?” Stefanik pressed her point.

“If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment,” said Magill.

“So the answer is yes?”

“It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman,” Magill said.

Faced with the same question, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, also temporized. “It can be,” she said, “depending on the context.”

The university presidents should have answered unambiguously and unequivocally that calls for genocide of any group are intolerable.

Their failure to do so has fueled a firestorm.

Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager, said he would withdraw a $100 million gift to Penn. Other wealthy Penn donors called for Magill to resign.

Even prior to the hearing, a campaign had been launched by some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures to oust all three university presidents for failing to adequately condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The influential board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton School’s, chaired by Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, called on alumni to withhold donations to Penn.

The billionaire investor Bill Ackman, Harvard alumnus and head of New York hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, called for the three university presidents to be fired.

The day after their testimony, Magill and Gay issued statements in efforts to contain the damage.

But on Saturday evening, after an emergency meeting of Penn’s board of trustees, Magill resigned under pressure.

Over the weekend, calls from donors for Harvard’s Claudine Gay to resign grew louder, as prominent donors demanded her ouster, too.

I can well understand the anger and frustration of these donors. In their congressional testimony, the university presidents should have been clearer that their institutions do not tolerate calls for genocide. Period.

But to use their power as major donors to force or seek the ouster of these presidents is almost as repugnant as the failures of these presidents to unambiguously condemn calls for genocide. It endangers the autonomy of America’s universities.

Who’s kidding whom? Those of us who have spent our lifetimes teaching in prestigious universities are well aware of the influence of big donors. The major job of today’s university presidents is to solicit money, and their largest targets are typically denizens of Wall Street.

For the same reason, boards of trustees are packed with wealthy alumni, often from the Street, who routinely veto candidates for university presidentships harboring views they find offensive.

But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression.

As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose — based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.

*Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

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G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election

A legal campaign against universities and think tanks seeks to undermine the fight against false claims about elections, vaccines and other hot political topics.

By Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel

June 19, 2023

On Capitol Hill and in the courts, Republican lawmakers and activists are mounting a sweeping legal campaign against universities, think tanks and private companies that study the spread of disinformation, accusing them of colluding with the government to suppress conservative speech online.

The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money,according to several people involved.

They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise— and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

“I think it’s quite obviously a cynical — and I would say wildly partisan — attempt to chill research,” said Jameel Jaffer, the executive director ofColumbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute,an organization that works to safeguard freedom of speech and the press.

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The House Judiciary Committee, which in January came under Republican majority control, has sent scores of letters and subpoenas to the researchers — only some of which have been made public. It has threatened legal action against those who have not responded quickly or fully enough.

A conservative advocacy group led by Stephen Miller, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, filed a class-action lawsuit last month in U.S. District Court in Louisiana that echoes many of the committee’s accusations and focuses on some of the same defendants.

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Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online.

In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful.

A House subcommittee was created to scrutinize what Republicans have charged is a government effort to silence conservatives. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The committee’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a close ally of Mr. Trump, has accused the organizations of “censorship of disfavored speech” involving issues that have galvanized the Republican Party: the policies around the Covid-19 pandemic and the integrity of the American political system, including the outcome of the 2020 election.

Much of the disinformation surrounding both issues has come from the right. Many Republicans are convinced that researchers who study disinformation have pressed social media platforms to discriminate against conservative voices.

[The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods

The Titanic Truthers of TikTok: On the app, long-established facts about the 1912 disaster are being newly litigated as musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content.

A Global Effort: A group of scholars introduced an international panel to study online misinformation, inspired by the way scientists documented the global effect of carbon emissions.

A Hub for Conspiracy Theories: The Denver airport is a magnet for tall tales inspired by the paranormal — and an experiment into whether, sometimes, institutional fabulism can just be fun.

Climate Lies: In 2021, Google said that it would stop running ads alongside content that denied climate change. But a report shows that one of its platforms, YouTube, has continued to profit from videos pushing misinformation on the topic.]

Those complaints have been fueled by Twitter’s decision under its new owner, Elon Musk, to release selected internal communications between government officials and Twitter employees. The communications show government officials urging Twitter to take action against accounts spreading disinformation but stopping short of ordering them to do, as some critics claimed.

Patrick L. Warren, an associate professor at Clemson University, said researchers at the school have provided documents to the committee, and given some staff members a short presentation. “I think most of this has been spurred by our appearance in the Twitter files, which left people with a pretty distorted sense of our mission and work,” he said.

Last year, theRepublican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, arguing that government officials effectively cajoled or coerced Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms by threatening legislative changes. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, rejected a defense motion to dismiss the lawsuit in March.

The current campaign’s focus is not government officials but rather private individuals working for universities or nongovernmental organizations. They have their own First Amendment guarantees of free speech, including their interactions with the social media companies.

The group behind the class action, America First Legal, named as defendants two researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos and Renée DiResta; a professor at the University of Washington, Kate Starbird; an executive of Graphika, Camille François; and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, Graham Brookie.

If the lawsuit proceeds, they could face trial and, potentially, civil damages if the accusations are upheld.

Mr. Miller, the president of America First Legal, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, he said the lawsuit was “striking at the heart of the censorship-industrial complex.”

The researchers, who have been asked by the House committee to submit emails and other records, are also defendants in the lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. The plaintiffs include Jill Hines, a director of Health Freedom Louisiana, an organization that has been accused of disinformation, and Jim Hoft, the founder of the Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site. The court in the Western District of Louisiana has, under Judge Doughty, become a favored venue for legal challenges against the Biden administration.

The attacks use “the same argument that starts with some false premises,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, which is not a party to any of the legal action. “We see it in the media, in the congressional committees and in lawsuits, and it is the same core argument, with a false premise about the government giving some type of direction to the research we do.”

The House Judiciary Committee has focused much of its questioning on two collaborative projects. One was the Election Integrity Partnership, which Stanford and the University of Washington formed before the 2020 electionto identify attempts “to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters or delegitimize election results without evidence.” The other, also organized by Stanford, was called the Virality Project and focused on the spread of disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines.

Both subjects have become political lightning rods, exposing the researchers to partisan attacks online that have become ominously personal at times.

In the case of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the requests for information — including all emails — have even extended to students who volunteered to work as interns for the Election Integrity Partnership.

A central premise of the committee’s investigation — and the other complaints about censorship — is that the researchers or government officials had the power or ability to shut down accounts on social media. They did not, according to former employees at Twitter and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, who said the decision to punish users who violated platform rules belonged solely to the companies.

No evidence has emerged that government officials coerced the companies to take action against accounts, even when the groups flagged problematic content.

“We have not only academic freedom as researchers to conduct this research but freedom of speech to tell Twitter or any other company to look at tweets we might think violate rules,” Mr. Hancock said.

The universities and research organizations have sought to comply with the committee’s requests, though the collection of years of emails has been a time-consuming task complicated by issues of privacy. They face mounting legal costs and questions from directors and donors about the risks raised by studying disinformation. Online attacks have also taken a toll on morale and, in some cases, scared away students.

In May, Mr. Jordan, the committee’s chairman, threatened Stanford with unspecified legal action for not complying with a previously issued subpoena, even though the university’s lawyers have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers over how to shield students’ privacy. (Several of the students who volunteered are identified in the America First Legal lawsuit.)

The committee declined to discuss details of the investigation, including how many requests or subpoenas it has filed in total. Nor has it disclosed how it expects the inquiry to unfold — whether it would prepare a final report or make criminal referrals and, if so, when. In its statements, though, it appears to have already reached a broad conclusion.

“The Twitter files and information from private litigation show how the federal government worked with social media companies and other entities to silence disfavored speech online,” a spokesman, Russell Dye, said in a statement. “The committee is working hard to get to the bottom of this censorship to protect First Amendment rights for all Americans.”

The partisan controversy is having an effect on not only the researchers but also the social media giants.

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Twitter, under Mr. Musk, has made a point of lifting restrictions and restoring accounts that had been suspended, including the Gateway Pundit’s. YouTube recently announced that it would no longer ban videos that advanced “false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. presidential elections.”

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation for The Times. He has worked in Washington, Moscow, Baghdad and Beijing, where he contributed to the articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2021. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.” @stevenleemyers • Facebook

Sheera Frenkel is a prize-winning technology reporter based in San Francisco. In 2021, she and Cecilia Kang published “An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.” @sheeraf

https://www.alternet.org/scott-walker-meltdown-gen-z/

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former Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker (R), recently suggested Republicans are losing significant elections because of Generation Z voters and "years of radical indoctrination," Media Matters for America reports.

During a Thursday, April 6, interview with Fox News, host Trace Gallagher asked the former governor, "The Wall Street Journal says the following here, 'the left wins big in the midwest elections.' Quoting again, 'Progressives had a banner day in the midwest Tuesday with victories for Chicago mayor and a swing seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The results will energize the left within the Democratic party and the badger state results are a five-alarm warning to Republicans about 2024.' Is it? We said this before in the intro. Is this a five-alarm fire for the Republicans?"

Walker replied, "To me the larger issue here, we've seen it particularly in Wisconsin but across the country, is younger voters. In Wisconsin, last fall, we saw about a 40-point margin that younger voters gave to the Democrats running for senate and governor. We saw similar margins in Pennsylvania."

READ MORE: 'Don't underestimate the power of a pissed off generation': Young voters overwhelmingly turned out for Dems

Reiterating his point, the GOPer tweeted a clip from the interview, writing, "Younger voters are the issue. It comes from years of radical indoctrination - on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture. We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again."

During the interview, he insisted, "Part of the reason why you have John Fetterman in the U.S. Senate in Arizona and Georgia and elsewhere. And just this week in Wisconsin, we don't yet know the numbers by age, but we do know that Dane County, which is where the University of Wisconsin's flagship campus is at, about 50,000 students are enrolled there, Dane County cast more ballots in the race for the Supreme Court than the largest county in the state, Milwaukee County. And in Dane County, 82% of those votes went for the radical. So unless we turn young people around -- and it's not as simple as one campaign ad or some sort of a coalition. This is years of liberal indoctrination coming home to roost. And we've got to turn it around if we're gonna win again."

The Hill reports, "Generation Z voters overwhelmingly align with Democrats on issues like gun control, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ issues, posing a challenge for the GOP as it looks to appeal to the younger demographic," adding, "Seventy-seven percent of Generation Z voters said they voted for a Democratic candidate for Congress, compared to only 21 percent who said they voted for a Republican, according to a Pew Research study released late last year."

Walker added, "I can't blame a lot on this generation. Because all they've heard are radical ideas and climate change and defunding the police,on abortion, and all these sorts of other issues. And so they have never heard the opposing viewpoint. And so if that's all they hear in college and high school and social media and culture, you can see why they've gone so lock step in that regard. We've got to turn that around."

READ MORE: 'Nicer rhetoric': Young GOPers feel a 'pang of embarrassment' when their elders use the word 'woke'

The former governor's comments backfired significantly on social media.

@GoodPoliticGuy: "Republicans are incapable of understanding the reality of how their economic and political agenda has f**ked my generation. It's not indoctrination, it's capitalism and corruption."

@AOC: "If your assessment is that it's 'radical indoctrination' to not want some creepy legislator to control one's uterus, your problems are way bigger than voting. You will never win the argument that you should have more power over a woman's body than she does. That's a promise."

Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta: "'Young voters are the issue.' This is giving real Scooby-Doo villain energy. We would have gotten away with it without those meddling kids."

Heather Cox Richardson: "Did it ever occur to you that your people are the ones who have been indoctrinated with a false and radical worldview by right-wing media, while younger Americans are seeing the world for what it really is?"

READ MORE: 'Gen Z don’t play': AOC says Tennessee’s 'fascism' is firing up young people

Neil Hopkins: "Our policies suck and are super unpopular to educated young people - so we should get rid of education and stop young people from voting."

Kelly AuCoin: "Maybe they're sick of people like you poisoning the Earth they'll have to live on long after you’re gone. Maybe they'd rather not be shot in school. Maybe they reject your religious indoctrination. Maybe they want control over their own bodies. Maybe it’s you, Scott."

Mitch Dyer: "Young people participating in democracy is a problem for you huh"

Bradley P. Moss: "It can't be that they hate your policies. No, it has to be indoctrination."

Olivia Julianna: "Hey @ScottWalker my American Dream is being your worst nightmare. There are MILLIONS of young people exactly like me. I hope that fact haunts your every waking moment."

READ MORE: 'Furious' Gen Z lawmaker delivers blistering remarks to GOP following Nashville school shooting

Watch the video below or at this link.

Media Matters for America's full report is available at this link. The Hill's report is available here.

READ MORE: 'They ruined everything': Jake Tapper tears into boomers during interview with Gen. Z candidate

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https://www.alternet.org/terrified-of-gen-z-voting/

no lnx twt

republican attorney, Cleta Mitchell, urged fellow GOP members to join together in an effort to "limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters," The Washington Post reports.

:{

}:

Mitchell encouraged a room of conservatives to unify under enforcing these restrictive voting measures in a presentation titled "A Level Playing Field for 2024," during a recent Republican National Committee donor meeting in Nashville.

Executive Director of America Family Voices, Lauren Widsor, tweeted, "EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Trump coup attorney Cleta Mitchell wants to 'combat' voting on college campuses, citing North Carolina and Wisconsin, and says that when Republicans win the state Senate in Virginia, they can eliminate 45 days of early voting and same day voter registration."

READ MORE: These GOP-sponsored bills would 'restrict voting' by imposing harsh 'criminal penalties': report

According to The Washington Post, which obtained audio from the attorney's presentation, the lawyer's report "focused on campus voting in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin — all of which are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations."

In the audio, Mitchell can be heard asking the audience, "What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed."

The MAGA lawyer added, "The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs. Our constitutional republic's survival is at stake."

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias, who The Post reports "has sued Republicans over their efforts to tighten student and youth voting laws," argued, "Mitchell's efforts appear aimed at making it harder for young people, who tend to vote Democratic, to cast their ballots."

READ MORE: Georgia GOP admits its voting restrictions 'backfired' and helped Dems win Senate runoff

Elias told The Post, "Imagine if in every place in this presentation where she references campuses, she talked about African Americans...Or every place she says students, she instead talked about Latinos. There is a subtle but real bigotry that goes on when people target young voters because of their age."

The Post reports:

Mitchell told her RNC audience that her organization, the Election Integrity Network, 'is NOT about winning campaigns,' according to the text of the presentation. But the slides gave little other rationale for why campus or mail voting should be curtailed. At another point in the presentation, she said the nation's electoral systems must be saved 'for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.'

Mitchell became known for supporting former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election by joining "the ["perfect?] call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 when Trump asked Raffensperger to 'find' enough votes to overturn the result."

Social media users shared their concerns regarding Mitchell's speech.

READ MORE: The Republican voter suppression nightmare

MeidasTouch: "The Republican Party is terrified of Gen-Z. And they should be."

Gavin Newsom: "The @GOP don't even try to hide their voter suppression goals."

clinton williams: "So the GOP don't want early voting, absentee voting and now they don’t want college kids to vote…. Soooo, they are actually afraid of ppl voting.. I wonder why?"

Markos Moulitsas: "Republicans hate democracy"

@TheSGTJoker: "The @GOP plan to engage voters under 65yo is to block them from voting."

Rex Chapman: "They're terrified of young voters."

@DempseyTwo: "Nothing quite says Election Integrity like doing everything you can to disenfranchise those who would vote. Also, listen for the slight, yet still perceptible, disdain she has in her voice for young voters in a recent Supreme Court race in Wisconsin."

READ MORE: 'We can do better': Raphael Warnock schools Brad Raffensperger on voter suppression

Jamie Lockhart: "Quite the admission that the Republican Party is out of touch with voters and needs to restrict access to the ballot to win elections and advance their extreme agenda."

Stu: "This is unbelievably corrupt GOP recognizes it isn't viable in the future as it's structured unless it essentially cheats"

@SpaceForceCad: "I hope #GenZ is paying attention. #MAGA does not want you voting. They know their days are numbered."

Watch the video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Republicans are bleeding voters who helped Trump break the 'blue wall' in 2016: elections expert

The Washington Post's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/26/penn_state_cancels_gavin_mcinnes_speech

maced

student/activist suppression, not 1st

an ah 4 22

since its formation 29 years ago in 1993, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has consistently fought against gay rights — often equating anti-gay discrimination with religious freedom. When Kristen Waggoner, legal counsel for ADF, spoke at Yale University on March 10, about 120 students protested her appearance. And in Utah, two well-known Republicans — Sen. Mike Lee and State Attorney General Sean Reyes — have added their names to a letter demanding punishment for Yale students who **protested**:{the March 10 event:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Bryan Schott explains, “More than half of the school’s students signed an open letter critical of the decision by the Federalist Society to invite Waggoner to speak and condemned the presence of armed police at the protest. Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said the protest was ‘unacceptable’ behavior from the students, but they had not violated the school’s free speech policy.”

Co-founded by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the ADF (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) represents a far-right form of White evangelical Christian fundamentalism and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

“In addition to Lee and Reyes,” Schott reports, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, several U.S. House of Representatives members, five governors, and more than two dozen other state attorneys general also signed on. The letter was drafted by the same group responsible for the Philadelphia Statement, a document that decries the persistence of ‘cancel culture’ in American society. More than 1400 people signed the letter to Yale.”

The letter reads, “Instead of engaging with the panelists, a shocking number of Yale Law students hurled constant insults and obscenities at them.” But according to Schott, “The letter’s depiction of the event is primarily based on an initial report from the conservative Washington Free Beacon. That reporting has been credibly debunked by other publications, multiple videos and the school’s official account of the incident.”

Some of the debunking came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. On March 18, Stern reported, “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began. Their exercise in free speech, however rowdy or distasteful, did not prevent the panelists from expressing their views. And their demonstration did not — contrary to the Free Beacon’s reporting — require administrators to summon the police.”

3 22

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/jack-petocz-florida/

suspended for handing our gay flag

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/

Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys

Raw Story June 23, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.

Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.

Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM

— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0

Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN

— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0

DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI

— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0

Our new authoritarian overlords like @RonDeSantisFL (who is a smart version of Trump)are coming for the universiti… https://t.co/Wupp1WG0Y9

— Rachel Bitecofer ?????? (@Rachel Bitecofer ??????)1624450474.0

Florida is becoming too dangerous full of right wing extremists. Floridians are shooting each other every day whil… https://t.co/bTj5qSkwJq

— Natives&ImmigrantsAreUS (@Natives&ImmigrantsAreUS)1624454706.0

Fascist authoritarianism takes another step forward in Florida.https://t.co/aRnOdvOQvS

— Rusty Cannon (@Rusty Cannon) 1624454946.0

The Florida education “intellectual diversity,” survey is one question - it’s a picture of Reagan with the caption… https://t.co/a9WS5fdp0h

— Eldritch Millennial (@Eldritch Millennial)1624451688.0

@TeaPainUSA Since the survey is not anonymous and since results will not be aggregated without identifying informat… https://t.co/CGTr7rYUMt

— Mary Buggie-Hunt ?????????? (@Mary Buggie-Hunt ??????????) 1624454430.0

Also if you don’t think they’ll sell your survey answers connected to your ID to the highest bidders, well, perhaps… https://t.co/uKBiKSSf7U

— Heather Flyte (@Heather Flyte) 1624456751.0

@GinnyMcDonald8 I raised two smart-asses. If they were going to be in a Florida University, they would find great p… https://t.co/rTTgKo8nXJ

— Israel Jablonski (@Israel Jablonski) 1624454688.0

Defending liberalism from illiberal wokeness by *checks notes* administering ideological tests and threatening budg… https://t.co/FwnsHBe1KA

— Zack Beauchamp (@Zack Beauchamp) 1624455675.0

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Former Associated Press reporter Emily Wilder was fired from the international media company late Thursday following a pressure campaign by right-wing media, including publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon working in tandem with the Standford College Republicans. Wilder was "canceled," if you will, for pro-Palestinian activism during her years in college — not at the AP.

The campaign to have Wilder fired started on Monday with the Stanford College Republicans taking to Twitter to bill the reporter's past pro-Palestine demonstrating as controversial, coming to the verdict that she would never be able to be impartial while covering national news.[twt pix]

"Recently, we discovered that theAssociated Press has hired former Stanford anti-Israel agitator, Emily Wilder, who referred to the late Sheldon Adelson as a 'naked mole rat' as one of their 'journalists,'" the college Republican organization tweeted. The series of tweets from the Standford Republican chapter went onto claim that the reporter, who is Jewish, during her college years belonged to a "Students for Justice in Palestine," on-campus group. The college Republicans — who appear to have their own questionable Twitter activity — also took offense to Wilder calling right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro a "little turd" and Sheldon Adelson a "naked mole-rat."

From there, the right-wing outrage machine got ahold of the story, including The Federalist, The Washington Free Beacon, and Fox News, which billed the reporter as being "anti-Israel." Notably, the Free Beacon ran their hit-piece with no attached byline and didn't return Salon's request for comment as to why.

On Thursday, an all-staff email from AP News director Peter Prengaman to employees read: "A note to say that news associate Emily Wilder is no longer with the AP[twt pix]

but the Associated Press claims it wasn't her activism in college. "While AP generally refrains from commenting on personnel matters, we can confirm Emily Wilder's comments on Thursday thatshe was dismissed for violations of AP's social media policy during her time at AP," an AP spokesperson told The Wrap.

"Amazing how quickly a talented young reporter's career can be snuffed out by a Twitter mob that decided to feign outrage over some college tweets. And if @vv1lder somehow violated @AP's social media rules, the solution is to offer guidance, not termination, to a new reporter," TheWashington Post's Glenn Kesslerwrote on Twitter following the ouster.

[twt pix]  responding to her firing, Wilder told SFGATE that her firing was nothing more than a right-wing outrage mob that reportedly disdains "cancel culture," doing what they claim to resent.

"There's no question I was just canceled," told SFGATE reporter Eric Ting on Thursday following the news of her firing. "This is exactly the issue with the rhetoric around 'cancel culture.' To Republicans, cancel culture is usually seen as teens or young people online advocating that people be held accountable over accusations of racism or whatever it may be, but when it comes down to who actually has to deal with the lifelong ramifications of the selective enforcement of cancel culture — specifically over the issue of Israel and Palestine — it's always the same side."

in her interview with SFGATE, Wilder noted an "onslaught of absolutely vile messages" she received after right-wing media began running with the story. Wilder didn't immediately return a request for comment from Salon.

While The Associated Press might have folded to the demands of the right-wing mob, many journalists on Twitter voiced their support for the young journalist. "Shame on @AP @peterprengaman. I stand with Emily. Her reporting at our newspaper was excellent. Reverse your decision NOW," The Arizona Republic's reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote. The Washington Post's Dave Weigel responded: "'Hire @vv1lder' is something more and more people are saying."

"Every journalist should be outraged about @AP firing [Wilder] over college activism in favor of freedom for Palestinians. The industry is rife with clear double-standards on this," Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Adam Elmahrek commented on the firing. The Daily Beast's senior politics reporter Will Sommer replied, "It's crazy that editors are still falling for these bad-faith campaigns from right-wing media."

The decision to out Wilder comes on the heels ofright-wing pundits cheering the Israeli airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza on Saturday, housing several international news outlets, including The Associated Press.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

an 920 

why younger voters are the most likely to have their absentee ballots rejected

Steven Rosenfeld, Voting Booth  September 17, 2020

As half or more of the 2020 presidential election’s votes will be cast on mailed-out ballots, a new study on why absentee ballots were rejected in three urban California counties in 2018…

ggl doc 919 acad supprr: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ia-WxlyySRX9Lkm8wAu08rJIZcKJfvX0NphamPnwzsI/edit?userstoinvite=pmmckerc%40ucsc.edu&ts=5f17300d

UC IRVINE: CAS wrote to Orange County DA Anthony Rackauckas: [In February of 2010 at UC Irvine a well organized group of Muslim students attempted to prevent the Israeli ambassador from giving his scheduled talk on the campus. But in this case, not only did the campus administration take action against the students—the local DA also prosecuted them, and he obtained a conviction.

Actions like these are long overdue, and accordingly, the board of the CAS wrote to Orange County DA Anthony Rackauckas to congratulate him on a much needed prosecution. ]

{ Rackauckas has been criticized by Public Defender Scott Sanders for his office's purported mishandling of jailhouse informants which has created difficulties in convicting and sentencing defendants due to the violations of defendants' constitutional rights. This resulted in the "taking off the table" of the death penalty for Scott Dekraai, who had pleaded guilty to murdering eight people and wounding another in a Seal Beach massacre. }

400K$ yacht club?

==

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https://www.salon.com/2020/05/18/emails-show-uc-santa-cruz-police-used-military-surveillance-to-suppress-grad-student-strike/

Emails show UC Santa Cruz police used military surveillance to suppress grad student strike

UC police used "friendly force trackers" and FBI tech to surveil grad student strikers protesting for a living wage

NICOLE KARLIS
MAY 18, 2020 11:45PM (UTC)

The University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Police Department, with assistance from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office and the California National Guard, used military surveillance to suppress the UC Santa Cruz graduate student wildcat strike earlier this year, according to emails acquired through the California Public Records Act.

Vice first reported the content of the emails on May 15 which provided insight into the coordinated efforts between the UC Santa Cruz Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff's Office, and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, to police the protests. As Salon has previously reported, police and campus officials reacted to the nonviolent labor action with threats, arrests, firings, and violence from the police with batons, according to grad students at the strike, for months as grad students demanded a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) to help alleviate the rent burden of living in a pricey coastal California town. 

The new emails, which have been reviewed by Salon, dive deeper into the efforts to police the protests that went beyond what the grad students observed on the picket line. They show the UC Santa Cruz Police Department requested mutual aid from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office to police the protests as early as December 31. Notably, UC Santa Cruz is located in Santa Cruz County, not Alameda County — which is about 40 miles north.

"It's disturbing to be part of a labor action like this and to see the militarized nature of the university's response," Will Parrish, a PhD student in UCSC's History of Consciousness program, told Salon in an interview. "I felt disturbed to see both the level of militarization and the casualness of their discussions in their email threads."

Specifically, the UCSC Police Department requested deputies, trucks and vans in the case of arrests. All expenses, including food and lodging, were paid for by UCSC police for at least 65 officers. At the time, grad students were on a wildcat strike, withholding final grades for the fall quarter until their demand for a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) was met. Withholding grades evolved into a full wildcat teaching strike in February, meaning they withheld teaching, grading, and office hours, as their demands continued to be dismissed.

According to emails dated February 11 and 13, the California National Guard provided "friendly force trackers," which is a military surveillance technology, as part of the effort. Police also had access to a federal surveillance portal operated by the FBIcalled LEEP, an acronym for "Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal." The FBI's page on LEEP describes it as "a secure platform for law enforcement agencies, intelligence groups, and criminal justice entities" that "provides web-based investigative tools and analytical resources" to help said groups "collaborate in a secure environment, use tools to strengthen their cases, and share departmental documents." Some of the sample use cases for LEEP that the FBI cites include "active shooter incidents," "child abductions" and "takedown operations."

The emails don't specify exactly how these technologies were used, nor do they specify the amount spent on the efforts. However, grad students believe that it could be in the millions.

"Rather than meet us at the bargaining table the UC instead spent close to five million dollars in deploying dozens of UCPD from across the state, California Highway Patrol, and Alameda County sheriffs, and even solicited assistance from counterterrorism intelligence agencies," UCSC Literature PhD student Hannah Newburn said in a statement. "Since when did asking for a raise become a threat to Homeland Security?"

Carlos Cruz, a UCSC PhD student in the history department, told Salon he was given evidence, and an audio clip that Salon listened to, to add to speculation that he was being surveilled by police during the protests. In the audio clip, presumably a police officer is stating Cruz's whereabouts and said his name "Carlos." He also had an alarming in-person encounter with a sergeant.

"I had a sergeant who was able to identify me by first, middle and last name and date of birth," Cruz said, adding there were racist undertones to the exchange. "It's really scary to see how they got my info and knew who I was."

In an emailed statement to Salon, Scott Hernandez-Jason, the Director of News and Media Relations at UC Santa Cruz, told Salon: "Throughout the strike, UC Santa Cruz police officers were focused on supporting the safety of our community on and off campus and protecting the rights of everyone in our campus community, including those engaged in expressive activity."

Hernandez-Jason said the department used the trackers "to know the location of on-duty officers who were helping keep people safe."

"To infer anything else about the use of the trackers would be erroneous. UC Santa Cruz is built across 2,000 acres of hilly land with two entrances, so understanding the location of officers was vital to coordinate their efforts," Hernandez-Jason said. "There was no tracking of students or strikers."

The emails also revealed that after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) :{tweeted on February 19:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in support of striking graduate students at UC Santa Cruz, an officer from the Governor's Office of Emergency Services emailed the California State Threat Assessment Center commander Eli Owen to request assistance to "verify/validate Mr. Sanders schedule." The email referred to the tweet as "intel" that Sanders might appear on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Hernandez-Jason said about this email that "UC Santa Cruz was paying attention to his publicly posted campaign schedule so that it could begin planning in case he chose to visit the campus."

This isn't the first time military tactics have been used to spy on protesters. The Intercept previously reported on how FBI emails and intelligence reports suggested federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests. Similar surveillance happened in the 1960s and 1970s during anti-war protests. Sara Hinkley, a Policy Research Specialist at :{UC Berkeley Labor Center:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, told Salon in an emailed statement that whether such a move was worth it for UCSC will be calculated by how tarnished its reputation is for the handling of the wildcat strike.

"In the case of UC, the loss of reputation and academic stability will likely have repercussions for many years," Hinkley said. "It's unfortunate that they chose to treat their own students and employees as an enemy meriting military surveillance."

Hinkley added: "I think it's likely that decision will end up costing them much more than if they had recognized the students' demands and fairly bargained a solution to the real financial stress that graduate students are experiencing."

NICOLE KARLIS

Nicole Karlis is a news writer at Salon. She covers health, science, tech and gender politics. Tweet her @nicolekarlis.

==

==

Student vote: court ruled in favor of voting on campus, but negated by a state law that requires easy parking (non-existent almost by definition on a college campus, similar to TRAP laws that require hospital standard for clinic that offers aborts, though needless].

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/don-jr-and-kimberly-guilfoyle-received-50000-for-university-of-florida-speaking-event-at-trump-campaign-officials-request-student-newspaper/

no lnx

Don Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle received $50,000 for University of Florida speaking event at Trump campaign official’s request: Student newspaper

Written by Alex Henderson November 1, 2019

During an October 9, 2006 appearance on Larry King’s show on CNN — ten years before he was elected president of the United States — Donald Trump declared, “I like nepotism.” That is among the most honest things Trump has ever said; he likes nepotism a lot — so much that, according to the student newspaper at the University of Florida, his reelection campaign urged the student body to bring in his son, Donald Trump Jr., for a paid speech given on October 10.

Trump’s fondness for nepotism has been impossible to miss. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are both senior advisers in his administration — and Donald Trump Jr. is a prominent figure on his 2020 reelection campaign. And as affluent as Trump Jr. is, his father’s campaign was happy to help him earn thousands more, according to the University of Florida’s student newspaper, The Alligator.

Trump campaign official Caroline Wren, The Alligator reports, directly e-mailed the University of Florida’s student body president, Michael Murphy, in September and asked him to bring in Donald Trump Jr. to speak along with GOP operative Kimberly Guilfoyle (who previously co-hosted “The Five” on Fox News), and Republican National Committee (RNC) official Tommy Hicks. Although Guilfoyle has been very involved in Republican politics, she was once married to a prominent Democrat: California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

@radleybalko

Student newspaper finds evidence that the Trump campaign arranged for Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle to speak on the UF campus. Which means that Trump Jr. got $50K in mandatory student dues to come campaign for his dad.

https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/status/1189746365745770497?s=20 …

Adam Weinstein

?

@AdamWeinstein

“Emails show a Donald Trump re-election campaign official personally asked UF Student Body President Michael Murphy in September to bring Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus the following month.”

Get yourself an indy school paper like UF’s https://www.alligator.org/news/emails-released-between-student-body-president-and-donald-trump-campaign/article_7dad41f0-fb7a-11e9-9b4f-3795b8d7df23.html …

@AdamWeinstein

“Emails show a Donald Trump re-election campaign official personally asked UF Student Body President Michael Murphy in September to bring Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle to campus the following month.”

Get yourself an indy school paper like UF’s https://www.alligator.org/news/emails-released-between-student-body-president-and-donald-trump-campaign/article_7dad41f0-fb7a-11e9-9b4f-3795b8d7df23.html …

Emails released between Student Body President and Donald Trump campaign official

Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle spoke at UF on Oct. 10

alligator.org

Brad Po-sometimes-scum-BOO??

?

@brad_polumbo

I feel like Don Jr. isn't the best guy to make the case against nepotism... https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1189896064486252546 …

The Hill

?

@thehill

"I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could go abroad, make millions off my father’s presidency. I’d be a really rich guy." http://hill.cm/gndFg4I

53

6:25 AM - Oct 31, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

See Brad Po-sometimes-scum-BOO??'s other Tweets

The $50,000 payment for Trump Jr., Guilfoyle and Hicks (described by The Alligator as a “joint payment”) for the October 10 event was funded by student tuition.

In a September 10 e-mail, according to The Alligator, Wren told Murphy, “We met at my house on the 4th of July. I wanted to follow up with you regarding a speaking engagement at the University of Florida for Donald Trump Jr.” And on September 11, Murphy responded and said he would to “love to hop on a phone call” to discuss bringing Trump Jr., Guilfoyle and Hicks to the campus.

Wren told The Alligator that, in her e-mails to the University of Florida, she used a Trump campaign-related e-mail signature by accident and that she was communicating “via my private e-mail in my personal capacity and mistakenly forgot to remove my Trump Victory signature.”

1019

youth v apoc

 less than 11 years to get the world off fossil fuels, and yet California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), still has more than $6 billion dollars invested in fossil fuels. Most teachers have no idea about these destructive investments! A coalition of active and retired teachers, elementary through junior college, and concerned citizens, have been speaking for the last five years at CalSTRS meetings. However, the Board members have yet to change their allegiance to the fossil fuel industry. They have even been censoring the youth testimonies so you are not able to find students’ voices included in the public record.

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/students-could-be-a-major-force-in-2020-but-not-if-republicans-can-help-it/

no lnx

Students could be a major force in 2020 — but not if Republicans can help it

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019

Republicans are always looking for ways to find people likely to vote for Democrats and keep them from voting, and that’s putting a big voter-suppression target on college campuses, where one poll has found45% of students to be Democrats and just 24% Republicans.This is where Republican creativity truly flowers—not in the arts or music, but in finding ways to keep students from voting.

Voter ID laws are always fruitful, with state after state passing laws making it anywhere from confusing to completely impossible to use a college ID to vote. That’s the case in Wisconsin and North Carolina and Texas and Tennessee. In New Hampshire, legislators jumped over that and required out-of-state college students to get New Hampshire drivers licenses and auto registrations, effectively a poll tax. This stuff can make a big difference, reports The New York Times: “Nationwide, student turnout in the 2016 presidential election exceeded that of the 2012 presidential vote — but according to the Tufts institute, it fell sharply in Wisconsin, where the state’s voter ID law first applied to students that year.” Donald Trump prevailed in Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes, and there are more than 170,000 students in just the University of Wisconsin system

In Texas, in case a punitive voter ID law wasn’t enough,Republicans passed a law against polling places that are only open for part of the state’s 12-day early-voting period. That affects a significant number of college campus polling places. Florida Republicans, too, took aim at early-voting places on college campuses, and when their first effort was struck down by the courts, they found a backdoor way to revive it.

Students can also run into trouble knowing at what address to register to vote, with some campuses spread across multiple precincts and elections officials not always sympathetic to helping them figure it out.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Tom Steyer was investing the tens of millions of dollars he’s currently spending on ads for his own presidential campaign in helping make sure students are able to vote?

ref

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/civil-rights-group-challenges-rejection-of-george-mason-student-voter-registrations/2019/10/24/10e27f60-f66e-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html

Politics

Civil rights group challenges rejection of George Mason student voter registrations

By

Amy Gardner

Oct. 24, 2019 at 4:06 p.m. PDT

Elections officials have tossed the voter registrations of George Mason University students who used a general campus address in their applications, prompting complaints from voting rights advocates.

The Fairfax County registrar rejected 171 registration applications last week, citing invalid residential addresses. The registrar, Gary Scott, said the students listed campus mailbox numbers and a general university address, making it impossible to know where they live and which county precinct, if any, they are eligible to vote in.

But lawyers with a national civil rights group accused Scott of running afoul of state regulations — and said his actions all but guarantee that most of the 171 students will be unable to vote in Virginia’s Nov. 5 elections.

The dispute highlights the difficulty college students often face when they try to vote while living away at school, with idiosyncratic campus mail systems often contributing to the confusion. Protecting that fast-growing slice of the electorate has become a major priority for voting rights groups, which are expanding their legal staffs and scouring the country for potential barriers to challenge as they prepare for the 2020 presidential election.

To unlock the youth vote in 2020, Democrats wage legal fights against GOP-backed voting restrictions

While most of the legal challenges are being made in Republican-controlled states, both Virginia’s and Fairfax County’s governments are controlled by Democrats.

“We take any policies or practices that might have the effect of suppressing student votes very seriously, and we’ll be working tirelessly to protect their rights in the 2020 election cycle,” said John Powers, a lawyer with the D.C.-based Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has challenged the 171 application rejections in Virginia.

Scott, the Fairfax County registrar, said the origin of the problem is that GMU — a sprawling state university of more than 25,000 undergraduates about 20 miles west of Washington — allows any student to have a campus mailbox, whether they live on campus or not.

That made it impossible to discern eligibility for the students who listed their post box number with the school’s main campus address, rather than their dorm name or off-campus residential address, Scott said.

At least three of the 171 students actually live in neighboring Prince William County, meaning they’re not eligible to vote in Fairfax, he said.

“The point is, unless we know where on campus you reside, we can’t register you,” Scott said.

Powers said his primary objection is to Scott’s decision to send a “notice of rejection” to each of the 171 students. Virginia election law prohibits local registrars from rejecting an application because of insufficient address information. In that case, the registrar is supposed to send a request for information — not a notice of rejection.

Scott said that after mailing the rejection letters, his office sent follow-up letters to students specifying how to fix their application: by providing either a dorm name indicating that they live on campus, or a private residential address indicating they live elsewhere. The office initially gave students until Oct. 26 to act, then moved the deadline back to Nov. 2, three days before the election.

But Powers said the initial rejection letters could dissuade the students from fixing their registrations.

“To some extent the damage may have been done,” Powers said. “Some of these students may be first-time voters. Essentially what’s happened is, they’ve gotten a letter saying, ‘We rejected your application.’ There’s no mention of Oct. 26 or Nov. 2 or any kind of cure period.”

Scott conceded that students do not often check their campus mailboxes and may not have seen the correspondence. He said it’s too soon to say how many students will successfully fix their applications, as he just sent the most recent letter this week.

Carson Heisel won’t be one of them. Heisel, 18, a freshman studying forensic science at GMU, said he’s too busy with school to redo his application.

“I was definitely planning to vote, but I was not interested enough to go back and take the time and fill everything out,” he said.

If the students don’t fix their applications, they will be unable to vote in a momentous election on Nov. 5 in Virginia, the only state in the country where contests will determine the legislature’s balance of power this year.

Republicans are defending thin margins of 51 to 48 in the House and 20 to 19 in the Senate, with one vacancy in each chamber. With Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam in the Executive Mansion, a Democratic sweep of the legislature would give the party its first consolidated hold on power in a generation.

The Lawyers’ Committee is one of numerous national civil rights groups monitoring election practices across the country as the 2020 election approaches.

Kristen Clarke, the group’s president, said the goal is to increase the staff, now featuring about 35 attorneys, by about 50 percent in the coming months.

“There’s a larger threat, a greater need, more complaints to resolve and cases to be filed,” Clarke said. “We want to meet the demands that we face in this era.”

GMU is not the only university with addresses that can present complications to students seeking to register to vote. James Madison University, another state school in Harrisonburg, Va., is so large that it is divided into two precincts, meaning students must include their dormitory name when they register to vote.

In the city of Prairie View, Tex., which doesn’t have its own Zip code, students at Prairie View A&M University are sometimes assigned addresses listing the name of the neighboring town, prompting some of them to go to the wrong voting location.

One factor at GMU is the level of training of those working on registration drives. Maya Castillo with the New Virginia Majority, which conducted registration drives at GMU this year, said: “We’re generally aware of some of the issues around student voter registration. It’s something that we try as much as possible to train our team on. We want to make sure when we turn in voter registration applications they get registered. Sometimes that can get complicated.”

A GMU spokeswoman said the university has worked with the county registrar for years to “convey accurate information to students about voter registration.”

Rose B. Pascarell, the school’s vice president for university life, said once officials learned of the issues this year, they notified students to check their registration status.

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texas:

https://www.alternet.org/:{2019/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:05/texas-republicans-double-down-on-voter-suppression-push-as-session-ends

Texas Republicans are pushing two new bills that critics say are aimed at suppressing voter turnout after a similar bill died days before the end of their legislative session.

On Sunday, a State Senate bill that was passed with only Republican support, which would have increased criminal penalties for voter registration-related crimes and made it harder for volunteers to help elderly and disabled voters get to the polls, effectively died after it missed a legislative deadline in the House, The Texas Observer reported.

With the legislative session drawing to an end, Republican lawmakers have passed two more bills that critics say are intended to reduce voter turnout.

House Bill 1888 would ban mobile polling stations, which help college students, the elderly and low-income residents cast ballots, from being mobile. The bill would require these temporary branch polling places to remain in just one location for the duration of the early voting period. Mobile polling stations are currently used as a way to address demand and wait times for groups that may have difficulty getting to a polling location, like rural voters, college students and residents at long-term care facilities.

State Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who sponsored the bill, said that the mobile polling places were being abused by “targeting desirable voting populations at the exclusion of others.” She rejected concerns from Democrats about disadvantaged groups being hurt by the move, saying that those who need to make arrangements to vote “have time to do that.”

But Charles Mario Henry, a San Antonio U.S. Army veteran with impaired mobility, said the move would also hurt vets.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/

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The voting wars come to campus

Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly August 27, 2019

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texashas no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.

That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back....

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no lnx 919

REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER SEEKS TO MUZZLE STUDENTS CRITICAL OF ISRAEL

Josh Ruebner

9 August 2019

Misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act introduced in US House of Representatives just before summer recess.

REPUBLICAN LAWMAKER SEEKS TO MUZZLE STUDENTS CRITICAL OF ISRAEL

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/josh-ruebner/republican-lawmaker-seeks-muzzle-students-critical-israel

The misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 has been introduced to the US House of Representatives shortly before its summer recess.

Republican lawmaker Doug Collins, who proposed the bill, is portraying it as “an effective tool for investigating whether prohibited discriminatory actions have become a barrier to learning” in universities.

As the legislation notes, however, the Department of Education already is empowered to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism as a form of discrimination.

A careful reading of its text suggests that its real intent is to muzzle students and teachers who oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

The bill had earlier this year been introduced in the US Senate by Tim Scott, another Republican lawmaker.

It embraces the working definition of anti-Semitism approved in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a body bringing together 33 governments.

That definition is accompanied by several “examples” of anti-Semitism. They include claims that Israel’s foundation was a “racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel by requiring from it “behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

These examples affect political speech clearly protected by the First Amendment of the US constitution.

For example, students could run afoul of these examples by advocating for a one-state solution in Palestine, by hosting a speaker addressing Israel’s separate-and-unequal policies which discriminate between Jews and non-Jews, and running campus campaigns to boycott Israeli products or divest university funds from corporations profiting from Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

If the new bill were to become law, then the US Department of Education would be required to “take into consideration” these types of examples when assessing if an incident reported on US campuses was “motivated by anti-Semitic intent.”

A university which does not take action against students or teachers accused of anti-Semitism – based on their advocacy for Palestinian rights – could potentially lose federal funding.

New power to stifle activism

With passage of this bill, the US Congress would provide the Trump administration with powerful new statutory authority to further police and crack down on campus speech for Palestinian rights, a process well underway already.

When Donald Trump was running for president ahead of the 2016 election, his campaign team pledged to stifle campus activism for Palestinian rights. Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, who at the time served as the co-chairs of Trump’s Israel Advisory Committee committed the future Trump administration to “ask the Justice Department to investigate coordinated attempts on college campuses to intimidate students who support Israel.”

Greenblatt now serves as Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, while Friedman is the US ambassador to Israel.

The Trump administration has delivered on its threat. Last year The Intercept published an exposé on the FBI’s use of the Canary Mission – a shadowy pro-Israel group – to question college students advocating for Palestinian rights.

The Trump administration also has attempted to crack down on Palestine activism on campus by nominating Kenneth Marcus as the assistant secretary for civil rights for the Department of Education.

Previously, Marcus was president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

In that capacity, he filed or otherwise supported complaints against Palestinian rights campaigners by alleging that their activities violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That provision bans discrimination based on race and national origin in all bodies receiving federal funding.

Last year, Marcus wrote a letter to the Zionist Organization of America announcing that the Office of Civil Rights was now using the controversial IHRA definition and examples of anti-Semitism to guide its investigations. He had not given any prior notice of that decision to the public.

The organization Palestine Legal argued at the time that Marcus was “sending a clear signal that attacking free speech for Palestinian rights is at the top of his agenda.”

The so-called Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is a dangerous attempt by Congress to retroactively provide Marcus with the legal authority to justify his use of this controversial definition to further muzzle campus criticism of Israel.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/secret-files-reveal-how-north-carolina-gop-operative-helped-systematically-stopped-black-people-and-students-from-voting

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Secret files reveal how North Carolina GOP operative helped systematically stopped black people and students from voting

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon September 11, 2019

Secret files found on a longtime Republican operative’s computer after his death revealed that he compiled racial data to help his party draw new political maps and impose voter ID laws.

Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.

Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.

The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.

Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”

A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.

Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.

Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.

Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”

Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.

Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.

The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.

Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.

“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”

Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina’s previous map as a racial gerrymander.

The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.

The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”

“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”

The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.

The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.

“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”

The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-voting-wars-come-to-campus/

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The voting wars come to campus

Written by Daniel Block / Washington Monthly August 27, 2019

Texas: home of corn dogs, Matthew McConaughey, and some of America’s most restrictive voting laws. To register yourself, you have to print out a form and deliver it to the county clerk, because unlike most states, Texashas no online voter registration. To help register others, you must be certified as a “volunteer deputy registrar,” a process that requires either taking an exam or attending an often long and awkwardly timed training session. Your certificate is only valid in the county where it is obtained.

The state has also made it harder to cast a ballot. Between 2013 and 2016, Texas eliminated more than 400 polling locations, the largest drop in any state during that time. In 2013, after years of litigation, it implemented a strict voter ID law. The law, which lists seven kinds of acceptable IDs, became infamous for its brazenly partisan implications—handgun licenses are okay, for example, while student IDs are not.

All of which makes the following statistic so surprising: at the University of Texas at Austin, the state’s flagship university, undergraduate turnout increased from almost 39 percent to 53 percent between 2012 and 2016. Over that same time period, national youth turnout stayed roughly constant. The National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement at Tufts University, which calculates campus voting rates, has not yet released numbers for last year’s midterms. But at UT Austin’s on-campus polling locations, the number of early ballots cast was more than three times higher than it was in 2014. (Travis County only provides polling site specific data for early voting.)

The state of Texas is not alone in seeming to apply tougher voting rules to college students, who as a group are more left leaning than the overall electorate. In New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, and Arizona—all presidential battlegrounds—Republican-controlled legislatures have created particular obstacles for college voters. And yet, in the midst of this clampdown, there are clear signs that students and schools are surmounting voting barriers and countering their impact—and not just in Texas. At Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, despite a restrictive voter ID law and new limits on mail-in ballot collection, student voting rates went up by double digits between 2012 and 2016.

That’s because at institutions like UT Austin and ASU Tempe, students and staff work to make registering and voting as easy as possible, even as Texas and Arizona have made it harder. They find new, creative ways of registering students. They explain complex voting requirements. They work with local officials to increase polling access on campus. In doing so, they are supported by a growing network of national organizations that provide funding, share information, and help schools develop plans to simplify getting out the vote. (The Washington Monthly incorporates data from these organizations in its college rankings. Both UT Austin and ASU Tempe received perfect scores.)

These efforts appear to be making a difference. Nationwide, college voting rates increased by more than three percentage points between 2012 and 2016, more than the overall turnout increase. Between 2014 and 2018, youth turnout rose by nearly a third.

In an era of high partisanship and close contests, student voting can make a tremendous impact. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won her U.S. Senate seat by 55,900 votes, roughly the size of ASU Tempe’s student population. In Texas, youth turnout tripled between 2014 and 2018, and Democrat Beto O’Rourke overperformed in counties with a high percentage of young voters. That means that UT Austin was at the vanguard of a trend that helped bring O’Rourke surprisingly close to unseating Ted Cruz from the U.S. Senate.

The increase in student voting is counterintuitive, but it fits a broader pattern. Even as franchise restrictions target certain communities, political scientists have found that they do not usually result in lower proportional turnout. There is little evidence that voter ID laws have led to markedly less voting among racial minorities, even though minorities are far less likely than white people to possess the kinds of identification these laws require. Researchers aren’t quite sure why. But several have suggested that the reason is counter-mobilization: the harder a state works to suppress turnout, the harder people fight back.

This, of course, doesn’t stop legislatures from passing even more restrictive measures. Texas, for example, recently passed a law that will limit early voting, and it is considering implementing harsher penalties for registration mistakes. Arizona is adding restrictions on early voting. The result is a game of whack-a-mole between lawmakers and voting activists. As the former find more and more ways to limit the franchise, the latter create more and more tools to get out the vote.

There are twenty million college students in the United States. They are younger and more diverse than the country as a whole. The result of the 2020 election could hinge on who wins this turnout fight.

On August 5, 2015, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas’s voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act. The state’s attorney general vowed to enforce it anyway.

Later that month, a friendly and fast-talking former journalist named Kassie Phebillo arrived in Austin to begin a PhD in political communications at the University of Texas. To support herself financially, she took a job overseeing TX Votes, the nonpartisan organization charged by the university with increasing turnout. At the time, the group barely existed. It had just one returning member, and both of Phebillo’s would-be supervisors had left the school before she even showed up.

Still, Phebillo was drawn to the opportunity to learn more about her field and to mentor students. “I’m a first-gen college student,” she said. “Having those relationships changed my life, and so I try to do that for others.” She sat down with the sole returning TX Votes member—then senior Zach Foust—and began discussing how to restructure the group. They studied how other schools worked to get out the vote and found themselves particularly interested in colleges where students partnered with diverse groups to boost registration and turnout. The two decided to establish a civic engagement alliance and began recruiting a host of student clubs, political and nonpolitical alike, to come on board. By the end of the 2015–16 school year, a small but eclectic group of campus organizations had joined—from the Longhorn League of United Latin American Citizens to the chess club.

Phebillo and Foust asked that clubs in the alliance have one member become a volunteer deputy registrar, part of a broader strategy to create a network of students who could register voters across campus. To accomplish that, Phebillo brought county officials to campus to hold registrar training sessions and asked TX Votes members to bring their friends. Like any good college event planner, they provided free pizza to attract a bigger audience. The events were popular. Between September 2015 and the 2016 election, TX Votes helped train well over 100 volunteer deputy registrars. Together, they registered more than 17,000 voters.

I met Phebillo at UT Austin in early July 2019, in the middle of one of the university’s many freshman orientation sessions. She gave me a partial tour of campus. Inside the offices of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, she showed me a shelf stocked with national turnout awards and trophies won by TX Votes. One award was for having the most improved undergraduate turnout rate of any college in the country.

Later, I joined Phebillo at the student activities fair, where representatives of TX Votes were trying to recruit new members. Rising sophomore Janae Steggall was especially busy, hustling for the attention of what seemed like every incoming freshman who passed by. “What’s your major?” she would shout. Whatever the reply, Steggall would motion the student closer and deliver her pitch: “Awesome! We’re TX Votes, a nonpartisan organization on campus focused on voter registration and education.”

As I chatted with Phebillo and her team, it became clear that TX Votes has developed a sizable footprint on campus. Phebillo told me that during the 2016–17 school year, TX Votes deepened its involvement in the network of national organizations that help universities bolster turnout. It participated in both the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge and the Voter Friendly Campus program, drawing up a detailed plan that both created new initiatives and evaluated past work. After the 2016 election, the group further expanded its civic engagement alliance, which now has more than 100 organizational members. In March 2017, Phebillo became certified to train volunteer deputy registrars herself, allowing TX Votes to increase its training output.

One year later, in March 2018, several TX Votes members successfully campaigned to get the county to open a second polling place on campus. The group also devised a new strategy for registering students: visiting classrooms. Class, they reasoned, is where college students go (or, at least, are supposed to go), and students might be more tempted to register if everyone around them were registering as well. But to take advantage of this, TX Votes first needed permission from the university’s faculty.

“We emailed every single professor teaching a course at this university in fall 2018,” Anthony Zhang, the group’s incoming president, told me. “We had to manually compile that list, starting with accounting and going all the way down to Yiddish.”

I asked how long it took to get contact information for the school’s roughly 3,000 faculty. Zhang shook his head. “I honestly don’t even want to think about it,” he said.

Enough professors got on board to keep TX Votes busy throughout early fall 2018. In total, they visited 264 classrooms before the midterm election. The group trained hundreds of new registrars. Collectively, UT Austin volunteer deputy registrars signed nearly 14,000 people up to vote. Phebillo told me that she spent weeks shuttling back and forth from UT Austin to the Travis County tax office carrying thick stacks of registration forms. She even postponed her honeymoon by a week to make sure TX Votes submitted all its forms before Texas’s October deadline. “Note to self,” she recalled thinking. “Don’t get married right before the deadline to get registered to vote.”

The ten days vacationing in Colorado, however, were only a temporary respite. On election day, Phebillo had to solve problems involving Texas voting requirements. The ID law, she said, causes confusion among both voters and poll workers. During the 2018 elections, for example, Phebillo heard that UT students were being turned away at the polls because they had Texas IDs that listed addresses outside of Austin—which is legal under Texas law. So she called the county clerk’s office.

“I had to make this call and say, ‘This is happening on campus, and people are posting about it on social media already,’?” Phebillo told me. She warned the county that if the problem wasn’t resolved, it would be on the front page of the campus newspaper the next day. “It was fixed immediately,” she said.

Janae Steggall said this kind of advocacy was critical in helping overwhelmed young voters. “I know that as a student and as a young person, when a person—especially in a voting station—says no and they turn you away, you feel hopeless,” she said. “If they don’t know about TX Votes, if they don’t know about Kassie [Phebillo], then they don’t vote.”

Much of Phebillo’s success stems from her good relationships with officials in Travis County—one of the islands of blue in red Texas. She knows both the tax assessor, who is charged with overseeing voter registration, and the county clerk very well. Both have proven willing to partner with students. They endorsed and helped champion the students’ proposal for a second on-campus polling site. The tax assessor, Bruce Elfant, is an alum of UT Austin. “We know we’re privileged to be in Travis County,” Phebillo said.

When it comes to student voting, Arizona has a lot in common with Texas. The state’s voter ID law excludes student IDs. Between 2012 and 2016, the number of polling places across the state fell by more than 200. And in 2016, the state’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a law that made collecting and turning in another voter’s completed ballot, even with the voter’s permission, a felony. This meant that Arizonans could no longer rely on friends or community groups to help them vote.

But students and administrators at ASU Tempe, which comprises more than half of the total ASU student body, managed to overcome these impediments. Between 2012 and 2016, ASU Tempe’s voting rate increased by 11 percent. Like UT Austin, the school conducts widespread voter registration drives. The university works to get students registered when they move into dorms and reminds them to vote on its online portal. But the most important part of ASU Tempe’s voter engagement work was expanding polling access on campus. And that was not easy to do.

That’s because, unlike Travis County in Texas, Arizona’s Maricopa County is not known for being voter friendly. Until 2017, the county’s chief officer for registration and voting was Republican Helen Purcell, whose twenty-eight-year tenure as county recorder drew controversy. In 2012, Purcell became nationally infamous when her office put out Spanish-language voter flyers with the wrong election date. Then, during a 2016 special election, the office misprinted Spanish-language ballots. Between 2012 and 2016, Purcell reduced the number of primary election polling places in Maricopa County by 70 percent, and on primary election day, many voters were caught waiting in five-plus-hour lines.

Purcell told me that she regretted the errors. She felt especially bad about cutting the number of polling sites. “It was my decision,” she said. “It was not a good decision. I took responsibility for it and apologize for it.”

Before 2016, ASU Tempe had an early-voting site on campus, but students had to leave campus to vote on election day. This was a longtime point of contention between Purcell and the university’s student leaders, who campaigned year after year for that to change. Eventually, Purcell agreed to move a polling station onto campus. Beginning on November 8, 2016, students who registered at their university housing could vote on campus on election day.

That was also the day that Democrat Adrian Fontes defeated Purcell. The campaign was high profile, dominated by controversies over Purcell’s elections management. Once in office, Fontes took steps to make voting easier. Starting in 2018, any resident of Maricopa County could print and cast their ballot at the ASU Tempe campus site on election day, even if they lived in a different precinct. This was significant, because Maricopa County is enormous: it’s home to more than half of Arizona’s population and is geographically larger than New Jersey. The change meant that many ASU students who grew up in other precincts in the county no longer had to re-register or travel home in order to vote on election day.

At ASU, students are still struggling to overcome some of Arizona’s more burdensome voting requirements. Victoria Ochoa, a recent ASU graduate who worked to increase the school’s turnout, told me that the ID requirements have sown confusion among students, many of whom come from out of state and are afraid that obtaining some kind of Arizona ID might impact their access to financial aid. That isn’t true, Ochoa said, but “there’s been no easy way to explain that.”

To solve this problem, the student government is working to get administrators to provide students with zero-fee utility bills, which would provide proof of address to students and could potentially be used as voter IDs. It’s a technique they learned about from a national democratic engagement conference. The ASU students and staff I spoke with are optimistic that it will work.

The fight to increase student access to the franchise will not be easy. Many states continue to make voting laws more restrictive. In 2019, for example, Texas passed legislation that effectively bars “mobile voting”—early-voting sites that move from place to place. The law is expected to hit Travis County especially hard. “Travis County cannot afford to replace all of those mobile voting locations with permanent voting sites,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the county clerk, told one Austin news outlet.

Arizona, meanwhile, just passed a new law that extends its ID requirements to early voting. This will create headaches for students at Arizona State. Of the ASU students who cast ballots in 2016, more than 50 percent did so before election day. Elsewhere, voting is becoming even trickier. Iowa recently passed legislation requiring voter IDs and imposing a variety of new burdens on registration, early voting, and absentee voting. In the 2018 elections, Arkansas enshrined voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution. And in 2018, New Hampshire’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill that appears surgically tailored to prevent students from voting. As of this past July, New Hampshire residents who want to vote need to register their vehicle in the state, or risk paying a fine. In an interview with NBC, a Dartmouth student who spent $300 re-registering his car described the law as a “poll tax.” (New Hampshire Democrats, who took control of the legislature last November, passed legislation to repeal the law, but it was vetoed by Republican Governor Chris Sununu.)

In other words, the game of whack-a-mole continues. University students and staffers find new ways to surmount obstacles to voting rights, and legislators find new obstacles to put up. This helps explain why Democrats have increasingly pushed for nationwide measures to protect voting rights. The first bill Democrats introduced upon assuming control of the House of Representatives would require all states to implement automatic voter registration for federal races. Separately, several Democrats have introduced legislation to allow any voter to cast their ballot by mail, prior to election day.

But, to state the obvious, those bills are going nowhere as long as the GOP controls the Senate and White House. Until that changes, it’s up to turnout activists to overcome whatever barriers are put in their path. “I really see my role as constantly thinking about how we can do what we can do better, and always within the letter of the law,” Kassie Phebillo told me. Back at the University of Texas club fair, Janae Steggall was still busy trying to get new students to join TX Votes.

“Hi! What’s your major?” she said to an incoming freshman wandering by the booth. “Business,” he replied. She motioned him in. “Awesome!” she said. “We’re TX Votes, a nonpartisan organization on campus focused on voter registration and education.” The student listened carefully as Steggall made her pitch. “You sold me,” he said when she finished. Then, he signed up.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/floridas-gop-governor-approves-repugnant-new-law-that-could-ban-up-to-1-million-from-voting

Florida’s GOP governor approves repugnant new law that could ban up to 1 million from voting

Floridians voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights for as many as 1.4 million citizens who had fully completed their felony sentences by a 65-35 landslide last year, but on Friday, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantishas signed a new lawthat will keep the vast majority of those citizens disenfranchised and also bans early voting on college campuses. Republicans also recently passed another law to stymie similar ballot initiatives in the future that DeSantis has already signed.

To thwart the will of Florida voters, Republicans are imposing a measure straight out of the Jim Crow playbook: poll taxes. This new law would require the payment of all court-ordered restitution as well as any court-related fines or fees before voters can regain their rights.

​Florida’s felony disenfranchisement system itself is a remnant of Jim Crow: It was given its modern form shortly after the Civil War as part of a series of changes intended to disempower black citizens in a state that was nearly one-half black at the time. Before 2018’s ballot initiative passed, the Sentencing Project estimated that one in ten Floridians were disenfranchised, including one in five black voters—five times the rate of those who aren’t black.

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https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/trump_students_press_media.php

islamophobe horwitz canary mission

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-march-20-2019/

bs

ADL smears Canary Mission as “Islamophobic” for exposing Islamic anti-Semitism

APR 29, 2018 3:30 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER

Canary Mission, an estimable group, is not the first supporter of Israel to be smeared by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL has likewise defamed Pamela Geller and me for standing against jihad terror and Sharia oppression. The ADL has also libeled the preeminent lawyer and orthodox Jew David Yerushalmi as an “extremist,” an “anti-Muslim bigot” […]

https://www.jihadwatch.org/tag/canary-mission

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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/7/1840193/-Students-Suspended-Expelled-and-Arrested-for-Refusing-to-Recite-the-Pledge-of-Allegiance

fits here? debt?

The War Against Students Is Pushing Us Toward a Global Education Crisis

The project of higher education as the great instrument for social mobility is no longer in place, nor is the assumption that a degree will earn you a better life.

By Vijay Prashad / Independent Media Institute

September 18, 2018, 9:31 AM GMT

A slogan adorned the walls of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France: The Natural Disorder of the Youth. Another announced, Don’t Mourn ’68, Organize 2018. I had come to Paris to join in commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the events of 1968—the student and worker uprising that was part of a global upsurge from Mexico to Pakistan. Françoise Vergès, the scholar from Réunion, and I were to speak in the morning. It turned out that the students of Paris were on strike—fighting for their lives to protect education and to build a better society. They insisted that we do our talk for them—in their occupied buildings. And that is what we did.

Somewhere, in the old buildings of Paris’ universities, came the sound of the slogan of 1968—Deboutlesdamnés de l’Université (Arise you wretched of the University). What the students of 1968 fought for, the students of 2018 are fighting for—and for more. In 1968, the French students said that they would not exchange death by hunger (mourirdefaim) for death by boredom (mourird’ennui), suggesting that hunger was a thing of the past and boredom their fate in the present. But, today, hunger returns. Students are not only frustrated by the lack of opportunities before them once they graduate, but they—buried by debt—are also no longer able to eat or to find shelter. Students from South America to East Asia live in conditions of near poverty, borrowing money to cover fees and working impossible hours to cover their living expenses.

IT is hard to be a university student these days. Public finance has dwindled, with state-owned universities under pressure to raise fees, cut benefits and open up sections of their campus to private enterprise. The decline of the state-run university has allowed private-owned colleges to appear, which demand high tuitions in return for a better life. Frederick Brooks De’Poet of Ghana writes of this condition in several of his poems dedicated to the unemployed student:

He is unemployed.

And he is without freedom….

He is the unemployed graduate

The man whose four years have been wasted on a useless school.

Waste is a strong word. Many students feel close to the subject of the poem. But others want more. They have been on the streets to defend public education and to demand a greater commitment to both public education and to a humane society. Few of their protests are reported in the world’s media. It is as if the media looks at the agitated students and sniffs—your protests are not serious. But, these are some of the most important mobilizations across the planet.

Recently, students took to the streets of Bogota, Colombia, and Mexico City, Mexico. You would not have heard of these demonstrations. The students in Mexico taped their mouths in protest against two silences: silence over the murder in 1968 of three to four hundred student activists at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco, Mexico City) and silence over the disappearance in 2014 of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College (Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico). “Being a student in Mexico is more dangerous than being a criminal,” they chanted. In Colombia, 40,000 students protested the cancellation of a program (Ser Pilo Paga, Pays to Be Smart) that brought students from rural areas into the university of their choice. Teachers joined them and held their own demonstration against the evisceration of funding for public higher education. Protests on this same issue run down the edges of South America—from Argentina to Chile.

Unemployed Graduates

It has become a cliché of our times—governments, under pressure from bankers, cut the budgets of higher education institutions, which then put the burden on already impoverished students. The project of higher education as the great instrument for social mobility is no longer in place, nor is the assumption that a degree will earn you a better life. Education today would be unrecognizable to people such as John Dewey and Nadezhda Krupskaya, theorists of learning for the greater good. From their very different perspectives—Pragmatism for Dewey and Marxism for Krupskaya—they were united in the hope that education would enhance the social life of human beings. That was the goal. Not to make better workers for the shriveled tentacles of capitalism.

Across the Global South, students with degrees have for decades organized themselves into platforms to campaign against their joblessness. These groups have variations on the same name: Union for Unemployed Graduates (Tunisia), National Association of Unemployed Graduates (Nigeria), Unemployed Graduate Students’ Union (Sri Lanka) and Coalition of Unemployed Graduates (Zimbabwe). These militant students make their desolation into a political fact. Not for them, the self-doubt. They know that their joblessness is beyond them. In Algeria, I learned the word hittiste, a word from wall (hit) that refers to the young men who lean against the wall during the day, many of them with degrees in their back pockets. There is simply no work for them, which means that there is no way for them to pay back the debt that financed their education.

Passion for Education

In Santiago, Chile, in 2011, the students put up a sign that acknowledged their own views about education—Con Pasiónporla Educación (Passion for Education). But, these days it is hard for students to study with passion—terrified as they are by the drive to make their university education a pathway to a job that does not exist. Government policy,massaged by the World Bank and think tanks funded by corporations, seeks to make education an arid affair, vocational and professional with little allowance for the development of human beings.Fear of debt and unemployment pushes students toward areas of study that they are told will produce lucrative jobs, which are increasingly unavailable. Governments—bullied by the World Bank and these foundations—have failed their citizens. They can only imagine a world where education is subordinated to the world of jobs.

What does it mean in our time to be young and hopeful? Where can young people talk about ideas and imagine better worlds? Public spaces have increasingly been taken over by corporations, while colleges have been transformed into job factories. This is the enclosure of the mind, the suffocation of humanity. More needs to be fought for—more colleges, more imagination—the natural disorder of youth, a yearning for a world without want.

This report is for Miranda Mendoza Flores (age 18), who was abducted on her way to the Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades (Plantel Oriente, La Paz, Mexico) on August 21, 2018. Her body was found on the México-Cuautla roadway, burnt. Her death is part of Mexico’s ongoing femicide. It is part of the war against Mexico’s students. It is part of war against young people. The crushing of another flower ready to bloom.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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democ chains

ch 7 A world gone mad --

ends up at UCLA with Angela Davis?! biggest class at school (sorbonne train)

problem with univs: students do not pay full cost 2 those who make it (fac) do not sell it 3 those who pay/tax) do not control it 104

thus board shd control, eg expel students who protest;

seeds of current efforts to change college  to non dissent labor, no fac on governance, lowest cost to taxpayers 105

Academia in Anarchy book sez blacks manip by Commies 106 vs authentic gripes like Vn war;

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https://theintercept.com/2018/03/14/campus-free-speech-bds-israel-boycott/

POLITICIANS AROUND THE country are seizing upon highly publicized episodes of conservatives faced with harassment and heckling on college campuses by responding with a wave of legislation supposedly aimed at preserving free speech rights for campus speakers. But that commitment, while draped in the mantle of a principled defense of the First Amendment, does not always extend to speakers who criticize Israel and its policies.

This renewed concern about free speech comes after a number of high-profile incidents in which students interrupted conservative speakers, and in a few cases, even used violence at protests. At a hearing on campus free speech in October, U.S. senators expressed bipartisan support for the First Amendment on college campuses, but lawmakers around the country are demanding free speech with one hand, and passing laws that punish boycotts of Israel with the other.

One of the most prominent examples comes from Wisconsin, where Republican state Sen. Leah Vukmir has used the issue of campus free speech to launch a campaign for U.S. Senate this year, challenging the incumbent, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

Vukmir is the original sponsor of “free speech” legislation that calls for a strict disciplinary system for those who infringe on others’ free speech rights on college campuses in her state. “Students, professors, and administrators are using intimidation tactics to silence those they disagree with,” Vukmir said, after unveiling her legislation last May.

She went on to launch a campaign with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, for lawmakers in other states to duplicate her campus free speech efforts. “Senator Vukmir is a champion of free speech issues,” reads a press release from ALEC, which awarded Vukmir its “Iron Lady Award” for taking tough stands as a legislator.

But Vukmir, a strong supporter of Israel, is apparently selective in her championing of free speech.

Just months after sponsoring the free speech legislation last year, Vukmir sponsored a so-called anti-BDS law in Wisconsin, prohibiting the state from entering into contracts with businesses that choose to express themselves by engaging in a boycott to protest Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Gov. Scott Walker signed an executive order establishing the anti-BDS policy in October.

BDS refers to the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that advocates for economic pressure to force Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories. BDS campaigns have gained traction across the United States in recent years, particularly on college campuses. Palestine Legal, a nonprofit advocacy group, notes that boycotts have long played a significant role in U.S. history, and that the “Supreme Court has held that boycotts to effect political, social, and economic change are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.”

But pro-Israel advocacy organizations, including the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, known by its acronym AIPAC, have spearheaded an aggressive campaign to encourage lawmakers to stifle BDS activism. Twenty-four states have now passed legislation designed to penalize or prohibit BDS activity.

Rather than focus on the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism, legislators have almost singularly focused on a string of high-profile attacks on right-wing speakers on college campuses. One example is Milo Yiannopoulos, an “alt-right” provocateur who has collaboratedwith white supremacist figures. He was a relatively obscure figure until left-wing activists protested violently when he came to the University of California, Berkeley campus, elevating him as a national figure. At the October Senate hearing, Allison Stanger, a Middlebury College professor, testified about her experience moderating a talk with American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, whose book, “The Bell Curve,” on IQ as a determinant of socioeconomic status has been criticized as being racist. The protesters disrupted the speaking engagement, assaulting Stanger and leaving her hospitalized.These laws have been used to suppress the speech of a wide range of people and businesses. In Kansas, a star teacher was denied payment to train other teachers because she was following her church’s guidance and boycotting Israel. (A federal court struck down the Kansas law following that controversy.) In Texas, a town seeking contractors to rebuild after a devastating hurricane mistakenly used an anti-BDS clause to prevent the hiring of anyone who also boycotted Israel.

ACROSS THE COUNTRY, politicians are hoping to harness the outrage over such incidents into political benefit, supposedly in the name of securing free speech.

...

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https://www.nas.org/articles/will_the_other_claremont_colleges_defend_free_speech

A version of Rachelle Peterson's article originally appeared on Campus Reform. The full article is below.

When Claremont McKenna College announced it would punish seven students who blockaded the entrances to Heather Mac Donald’s speech in April, it did something few colleges have shown the backbone to undertake. It enforced campus policy in defense of free speech. In April President Hiram Chodosh said protesters had engaged in behavior that “violates College policy” and promised they “will be held accountable.” In July, the College suspended five students and placed two on conduct probation.

Claremont McKenna deserves some credit. I recently offered one-and-a-half cheers; to earn all three, Claremont should have prevented the blockade in the first place and kept order during Mac Donald’s talk. But at least the college followed through on President Chodosh’s vows to hold some students accountable.

We should now turn our attention to the other six institutions that, along with Claremont McKenna College, make up the Claremont University Consortium: Pitzer College, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate University, Keck Graduate Institute, Harvey Mudd College, and Scripps College. One hundred seventy students participated in the protest against Mac Donald. Claremont McKenna identified twelve of the 170 as Claremont McKenna students, of which it punished seven. The other 158 protesters either could not be identified, or were not Claremont McKenna students.

Where did these other speech obstructers come from? According to Claremont McKenna, some are students at the other Claremont consortium colleges. CMC claims to have sent the deans at these colleges “evidence of policy violations” by their students, and asked them “to review this evidence under their own conduct processes.” Claremont McKenna has banned four non-CMC students from visiting campus, on the grounds that they “played significant roles in the blockade.” But it is up to the administrators of the other colleges to take steps to suspend, fine, or otherwise punish students who broke college policy by disrupting Mac Donald’s talk.

Whether the other Claremont colleges follow President Chodosh’s lead in executing punishments will be a serious test of their commitment to free speech. A mob of protesters, many of them students, tore down a fence, swarmed police officers, and formed human chains across entrances out of spite for Mac Donald’s right to speak. Suspected policy-breakers should be given a fair investigation, with an opportunity to present any exculpatory evidence. But breaking college rules should come with consequences—especially when those rules concern a central purpose of higher education, the protection of intellectual freedom.

I asked each of the Claremont Consortium institutions whether they have investigated their students’ behavior during the April blockade. Three have begun reviewing evidence, and one plans to wait until the fall to investigate. Two believe none of their students participated or violated policies.

Here are the responses from each of the Claremont institutions.

Pitzer, Pomona, and Scripps are currently looking at evidence of potential student policy violations.

Pitzer CollegeVice President for Student Affairs Brian Carlisle:“Pitzer is in communication with Claremont McKenna College. We are currently reviewing all information provided.”

Pomona CollegeDean of StudentsMiriam Feldblum, via Marylou Ferry, Vice President, Chief Communications Officer:“We did receive photographs and information from CMC to review, as referred to by CMC in their recent statement, and that is in process of being reviewed with Dean Townes and Dean Waugh, who are the deans who oversee judicial affairs, and advise Judicial Council.

“With regard to our approach, this past spring, we had conversations in our campus Student Affairs Committee (SAC), which is a faculty committee, currently chaired by Prof. Paul Cahill, and SAC oversees the student handbook and can make changes to student judicial council processes and with ASPC student government, that our usual process when there are complaints about general behaviors during a demonstration (such as the use of bull horns in buildings or some disruptive behavior during a demonstration) often involve a dean's warning regarding the demonstration policy, whether to specific students or more generally when we cannot identify specific students, and that future violations could be addressed by the Judicial Council or a Dean's Sanction.

“With regard to an investigation, our general process with regard to claims of policy violations is that Dean Townes and Dean Waugh will determine the need for an investigation, oversee the investigation if appropriate, and then proceed from there, again, as appropriate.”

Scripps College Director of Media and Public Relations Karen Bergh:“Your query to President Lara Tiedens was forwarded to me as per our protocol for such inquiries. The statement you can use for Scripps regarding the student issue at CMC is that ‘we have received information from CMC and are reviewing the matter.’  There is no additional information at this time.”

Harvey Mudd College will review the evidence in the fall, when classes resume.

Harvey Mudd College Communications Officer Timothy L. Hussey:“In regard to your emails to President Klawe and Dean Jacobsen, the chair of our Disciplinary Board will follow up with CMC in the fall, when students return to campus, to discuss any allegations of HMC students violating the Demonstration Policy and any subsequent Honor Code actions.”

Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute believe none of their students participated in the protests against Mac Donald.

Claremont Graduate University President Jacob Adams:  “To the best of the university’s knowledge, no Claremont Graduate University (CGU) students were involved in the April 6 protest at Claremont McKenna College (CMC), and CMC has not turned over any evidence that CGU students were involved in the matter.”

Keck Graduate Institute Dean of Student Engagement and Enrollment ServicesSofia Toro:“We have reviewed the information by CMC and did not identify any KGI students.”

This means at least four of the Claremont institutions may have students who violated college policy. Harvey Mudd College President Maria Klawe, Pitzer College President Melvin L. Oliver, Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr, and Scripps College  President Lara Tiedens, we’re watching you. Whether you investigate fairly and promptly, enforce order, and punish policy-breakers will show whether you respect free speech.

see earlier art'l

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date?

MADISON, Wis. — During an interview this morning on WisconsinPublic Radio’s “Joy Cardin Show,” Republican Rep. Jesse Kremer admitted “I agree” with critics who call his Campus Speech Suppression bill unconstitutional. His scheme could expel students who exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize racists, sexists and homophobic provocateurs brought on campuses. In addition, the bill could restrict faculty from doing research and discussing research on public policy issues facing the state and the nation.

“The Republicans’ Campus Speech Suppression bill is worse than big government, it’s Big Brother,” said Scot Ross, One Wisconsin Now Executive Director. “Jesse Kremer admitted the bill is unconstitutional and has shown this is about the Republican legislature further eroding the voices of students on campus and suppressing faculty from scientific discussion.”

After seizing control of state government in 2011, Robin Vos and Republicans passed a series of unconstitutional attacks on student votingby severely limiting the way in which students could access the polls — moves that were thrown out by a federal judge in 2016 in the case One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen. Next, the Republicans killed the funding for the United Council of UW Students, because the non-partisan group focused on registering and mobilizing students to exercise their right to vote.

The Kremer, et al, Campus Speech Suppression bill would also restrict the ability of University of Wisconsin faculty and professors to comment on public issues, which One Wisconsin Now called “the kind of speech suppression reserved for dictatorships.”

“Not only would this bill expel students for using their constitutional right to free speech, but also it could inhibit professors from conducting research and releasing research on critical public policy issues,” said Ross. “The Republican authors of this scheme want to turn the University of Wisconsin into island around the state where the U.S. Constitution no longer applies.”

Several times during the show, Kremer claimed Democratic legislators would be cosponsoring the bill and voting for it if it comes to the floor. Ross said that was preposterous and that any Democratic legislator who supported the bill would likely face enormous backlash.

“Progressives will stand up to any elected official who threatens free speech in Wisconsin,” said Ross. “Kremer and his Republican co-authors are going to cost the taxpayers of Wisconsin a fortune in legal fees and damages if they are power hungry enough to actually try and ram this bill through.”

# #

One Wisconsin Now is a statewide communications network specializing in effective earned media and online organizing to advance progressive leadership and values.

http://onewisconsinnow.org/press/new-republican-safe-spaces-for-racists-legislation-threatens-students-with-expulsion-for-declaring-hate-speech-not-welcome-on-campuses/

MADISON, Wis. — Republican efforts to create “safe spaces” for conservative provocateurs to promote racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic ideologies on university campuses hit a new low today with a bill authored by State Sen. Leah Vukmir. According to the provisions of the proposal unveiled today, students could be expelled from a state university or technical college for organizing a protest to “dissuade” speakers from appearing on campuses. Administrators would also be prohibited from speaking out to support or oppose public policies that affect the University of Wisconsin System or state technical colleges.

“Leah Vukmir is apparently trying to prove that she can take a bad idea and make it even worse,” commented Scot Ross, Executive Director of One Wisconsin Now. “This scheme literally threatens students with expulsion from school for publicly declaring racism has no place on campuses and gags administrators from advocating for their schools.”

Among the egregious provisions of the bill is the requirement that, “No person may threaten an invited speaker or threaten to organize protests or riots or to incite violence with the purpose to dissuade or intimidate an invited speaker from attending a campus event.” The language is so broad that it could even cover student social media posts or attempts to persuade that are clearly protected by the First Amendment.

The bill further declares that, “… administrators must remain neutral on public policy controversies.” Controversies regarding the university in recent years have included state funding, campus sexual assault, and campus speech.

For violators of the provisions, the bill mandates that the Board of Regents overseeing the University of Wisconsin and Technical College System Board impose a disciplinary process that includes suspensions or expulsion for students and pay cuts or termination for administrators.

An earlier proposal being circulated for legislative sponsorship by Rep. Jesse Kremer along with Speaker Robin Vos, Rep Dave Murphy and Sen. Sheila Harsdorf could expel students who exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize racists, sexists and homophobic provocateurs brought on campuses. In addition, the bill could restrict faculty from doing research and discussing research on public policy issues facing the state and the nation.

In a radio appearance the primary author of the bill, Rep. Kremer, agreed with critics that hisproposal, originating from a right wing think tank in Arizona, is likely unconstitutional.

Ross concluded, “Banning students from using their First Amendment rights to create safe spaces for racism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia on campuses is flat out unconstitutional. It should be the legislators promoting these ridiculous bills who are threatened with expulsion.”...