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How Trump Got Rich
It had nothing to do with brains!
President Trump’s executive order sent a signal to Republicans that the administration was serious about winding down the Education Department. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesSome excerpts from Wikipedia:
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire at age eight by contemporary standards. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade.
He was a difficult child and showed an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, to complete secondary school. Trump considered a show business career but instead in 1964 enrolled at Fordham University. Two years later, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics.
He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels. …Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at his father’s real estate company, Trump Management, which owned racially segregated middle-class rental housing in New York City’s outer boroughs.
In 1971, his father made him president of the company and he began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella brand. Roy Cohn was Trump’s fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $708 million in 2024) over its charges that Trump’s properties had racially discriminatory practices. Trump’s counterclaims were dismissed, and the government’s case was settled with the Trumps signing a consent decree agreeing to desegregate; four years later, Trumps again faced the courts when they were found in contempt of the decree.
Before age thirty, he showed his propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone’s services to deal with the federal government.
Between 1991 and 2009, he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company.
In 1992, Trump, his siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, and his cousin John W. Walter, each with a 20 percent share, formed All County Building Supply & Maintenance Corp. The company had no offices and is alleged to have been a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump’s rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with markups of 20–50 percent and more.
The owners shared the proceeds generated by the markups. The increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. …Trump has said he began his career with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest.
He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, largely did not repay the loans, and received another $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father’s company.
Posing as a Trump Organization official named “John Barron,” Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthy Americans. Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range: from a low of minus $900 million in 1990, to a high of $10 billion in 2015. In 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at $2.3 billion and ranked him the 1,438th wealthiest person in the world.
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky
In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries.
Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin:
“To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?”
Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine.
A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism.
To sign the online petition at freeboris.info
—Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024
https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine.
Petition in Support of Boris Kagarlitsky
We, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison.
Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles.
The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested.
On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release.
The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison.
The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences.
There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering.
Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course.
We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally.
We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Trump’s Fight Against Antisemitism Has Become Fraught for Many Jews
American Jews have watched with both alarm and enthusiasm as strong-arm tactics, including arrests of activists, have been deployed in their name.
By J. David Goodman, Published April 2, 2025, Updated April 3, 2025
Rabbi Sharon Brous was growing increasingly alarmed at the Trump administration’s strong-arm tactics, like its attacks on higher-education funding and bullying of law firms, all in the name of protecting Jews.
So early last month, she delivered an impassioned sermon titled “I Am Not Your Pawn” to her Los Angeles congregation. Hours later, the next shoe dropped. Immigration agents began detaining activists and foreign students who had been involved in pro-Palestinian protests.
“This is not going to protect Jews,” Rabbi Brous said in an interview. “We’re being used.”
Across the country, American Jews have watched with alarm or enthusiasm as an effort to address campus unrest over the war in Gaza has transformed into a campaign to deny elite universities billions of dollars in funding, to press major law firms into pro bono work on “antisemitism” and to deport foreign students even tangentially involved in the protests last spring.
“We have to combat antisemitism as vigorously as we can,” said Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, adding that with President Trump in office, there is “a new sheriff in town.”
The divisions mirror those that have long split Jewish communities and have grown deeper since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the broad campus protests that followed Israel’s devastating response in Gaza.
But where most Jews share concerns about antisemitic speech in some of the protests, many within the community have become convinced that things may have gone too far.
A video of plainclothes immigration agents surprising and arresting a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University on the streets of Somerville, Mass., had particularly disturbing resonance for some in the Jewish community. The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, had co-written an opinion essay for a student newspaper demanding the university take a stand against Israel’s war in Gaza.
For many in a community that has suffered more than its share of unjust arrests, disappearances, deportations and deadly violence over the centuries, the video evoked painful memories from Jewish history. That it was done in the name of defending Jews made it worse. Two pro-Israel groups, Canary Mission and Betar, have even been involved in singling out pro-Palestinian protesters to target.
“I stood up. I was sitting down. I stood up involuntarily,” said Orna Guralnik, an Israeli American clinical psychologist and therapist, describing her reaction to watching the video. “It’s outrage and fear.”
Such arrests have “woken people up to the cynical way that the fight against antisemitism is used,” added Dr. Guralnik, who has gained fame with her television show “Couples Therapy.” “It contrasts everything that a liberal person believes in.”
In her practice, she said her American Jewish patients were “confused and really conflicted.”
Though the federal crackdown has so far targeted critics of Israel, some think the Trump administration’s actions uncomfortably echo previous eras of bigoted nationalism that gave way to overt antisemitism.
“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression,” wrote the journalist Matt Bai in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday. “You’ll be looking awhile.”
By saying that the harsh actions of the federal government have been in the name of protecting the Jewish community, the Trump administration has, intentionally or not, put a spotlight on Jews that makes many uncomfortable.
“Anytime you put Jews in the middle on an issue, it’s not good for the Jews,” said Jonathan Jacoby of the Nexus Project, a progressive Jewish group that has been searching for a way to combat antisemitism without suppressing political debate. “That’s a classic antisemitic position that antisemites like to put Jews. So they can be scapegoated.”
At the same time, the Trump administration continues to enjoy the backing of many Jewish groups, including those in the mainstream of social and political life.
The Anti-Defamation League, which for more than a century has worked to combat antisemitism, quickly put out a statement in support of the arrest last month of an activist at Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil, saying his detention “serves as a deterrent to others who might consider breaking the law on college campuses or anywhere.” The statement said it assumed Mr. Khalil would be given “due process.”
Mr. Khalil, a legal permanent resident from Syria with a pregnant American wife, has not been charged with a crime. He has been held for nearly three weeks in a facility in Louisiana, where he was taken after his arrest on March 8 in New York.
The Orthodox Union, an umbrella organization representing religious Jews, has been broadly supportive of the Trump administration’s actions. In a statement, its executive vice president, Rabbi Moshe Hauer, called for the fight against the “anarchy, hate, intimidation, and violence that have infected the campuses” to be carried out “the American way, firmly, resolutely, legally.”
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Brooks, of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that the answer to antisemitism cannot be doing nothing and called the notion that the federal government’s actions put American Jews in any greater danger “absolutely absurd.”
On the streets of American cities with large and diverse Jewish communities, feelings have been much more ambivalent.
Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, who leads a socially progressive but religiously Conservative Jewish synagogue in Manhattan, said he had been stopped days ago on the sidewalk by a congregant who expressed how distressed she was that “people are being disappeared from street corners in the name of fighting antisemitism.”
“My community is very, very skeptical of the genuineness of the administration’s antisemitism rhetoric,” Rabbi Kalmanofsky said.
“I think that the Jewish people are the worse for the wear if the foundations of a constitutional order and civil rights and civil liberties and higher education are diminished,” he said, referring to attacks on the legal system and universities.
Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a pro-democracy group, said she also doubted the motivation behind the push to combat antisemitism because it has involved the selective application of due process rights based on people’s identities and beliefs.
“It’s about exploiting concerns about antisemitism to undermine democracy,” she said.
But saying so publicly has been an occasionally fraught experience.
Rabbi Kalmanofsky posted on Facebook his objection to the treatment of Mr. Khalil, not because he agreed with the activist’s views on Israel, which he said he finds objectionable, but because his arrest represented a potential threat to everyone.
“If this legal resident can be arrested and deported for exercising First Amendment rights, then anyone can,” he wrote, offering “kudos” to the federal judge in the case who blocked the deportation and is also a member of his synagogue.
The at-times heated discussion over his post surprised the rabbi.
“The correct question is does America benefit from him being here,” one commenter replied, speaking of Mr. Khalil. “If the answer is no, then he should be deported.”
In Los Angeles, Rabbi Brous of IKAR, a nondenominational Jewish congregation, lamented that for many people, Jewish or not, it has become difficult to hold two competing ideas at the same time, and far easier to retreat into defined ideological camps.
She said she wanted to be clear that two things were true: “There is a real antisemitism problem in our time and the universities have become very fertile ground” for its normalization. And, she added, this administration’s attacks “do not emerge from a genuine desire to keep Jews safe.”
“What may feel today like a welcomed embrace is actually putting us at even greater danger,” she said in her sermon on March 8.
One of her congregants, Shifra Bronznick, watched online from New York, and it resonated deeply with her. She said she told dozens of people about it, telling them: “You must listen to this sermon.”
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2) N.Y.U. Langone Cancels Doctor’s Speech, Citing Anti-Government Tone
Dr. Joanne Liu, an N.Y.U. graduate, said the cancellation of her presentation on humanitarian crises was a sign of the climate of fear at U.S. universities.
By Jenny Gross, April 2, 2025
"Dr. Stanley said in the interview that by cracking down on universities, ostensibly in the name of protecting Jews, the Trump administration was fomenting antisemitism among the public. 'It’s going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people,' he said. 'If universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.’”
Dr. Joanne Liu said she was told that her invitation to speak at N.Y.U. Langone was being rescinded because her presentation could be perceived as antigovernment and antisemitic. Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times
The night before Dr. Joanne Liu was scheduled to deliver a long-planned speech at N.Y.U. Langone Health, the hospital affiliated with her alma mater, she received a call that stunned her. Her presentation on humanitarian crises was being canceled, the university official on the other end of the line said.
The reason, Dr. Liu said she was told, was that her presentation could be perceived as antigovernment and antisemitic.
To Dr. Liu, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and a pediatric emergency physician at Sainte-Justine hospital, the cancellation underscored the fear among leaders of U.S. universities of upsetting the Trump administration amid its crackdown on higher education.
Dr. Liu had already traveled to New York from Montreal for the speech, scheduled for March 19, when she got the call, she said in an interview on Monday. After she arrived, a university official raised concerns about the presentation’s reference to U.S.A.I.D. cuts and about the inclusion of a chart that detailed the number of aid workers killed around the world, including in Gaza, South Sudan and Sudan, she said.
The official, whom Dr. Liu declined to name, said that the slide “could be perceived as antisemitic” because it mentioned aid worker casualties in Gaza but not in Israel, said Dr. Liu, who was international president of Doctors Without Borders from 2013 to 2019.
Dr. Liu offered to change the three slides that posed concerns, she said. But three hours later, she was told the speech would be canceled.
The incident unfolded against the backdrop of a slew of executive orders and policy dictates from President Trump that have set off self-censoring at institutions fearful of government funding being revoked. The president has targeted universities early in his second term, pushing a vision for higher education that he says defends “the American tradition and Western civilization” and prepares people for the work force while limiting protests and research.
With threats of targeted executive orders and canceled funding, Mr. Trump has extracted concessions from elite universities, as well as law firms and other institutions that he perceives as his enemies.
The Trump administration has, in recent weeks, pulled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. On Monday, the administration said it would review about $9 billion in contracts and multiyear grants at Harvard University, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students and promoting “divisive ideologies over free inquiry.”
And in late February, lawyers for NYU Langone Health, where Dr. Liu was set to give her speech, proposed eliminating references to “diverse students” and removing the word “marginalized” from websites and policy statements, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The New York Times.
A spokesman for NYU Langone Health, a leading hospital system in Manhattan with an affiliated medical school, did not respond to questions about why Dr. Liu’s speech was canceled last month.
The spokesman, Steve Ritea, said in a statement that guest speakers are given clear guidelines. “Per our policy, we cannot host speakers who don’t comply,” he said. “In this case, we did fully compensate this guest for her travel and time.” He did not provide any details about the guidelines when asked.
Dr. Liu, who said she had been invited to give the speech at N.Y.U. a year ago, described the official who rescinded her invitation to speak as emotional and apologetic. She said the cancellation of her presentation was a reflection of the climate of fear inside U.S. universities.
Dr. Liu said she had sympathy for the struggle of faculty members to maintain their funding, adding, “At the end of the day, that’s their job, their teaching, their life, their research.” She said she was speaking out about what happened to her, including in an essay in Le Devoir, a French-language newspaper in Montreal, to “tell people where we are going.” Universities, she said, should remain sanctuaries of knowledge and places where students go to be exposed to different ways of thinking.
Mr. Trump’s pressure on universities has led at least one professor to leave the country. Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University, said in an interview with NPR that aired on Tuesday that he was leaving to take a position at the University of Toronto. Dr. Stanley, a philosophy professor, said that the Trump administration was following a classic fascist playbook in targeting intellectuals, and that concessions by elite universities set a dangerous precedent.
Dr. Stanley said in the interview that by cracking down on universities, ostensibly in the name of protecting Jews, the Trump administration was fomenting antisemitism among the public. “It’s going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people,” he said. “If universities want to fight antisemitism, they need to stand up and say, ‘No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.’”
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3) Trump Administration Threatens to Withhold Funds From Public Schools
State education officials will be required to verify that they have eliminated all programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion that the administration deems unlawful, according to a new memo.
By Michael C. Bender, Reporting from Washington, April 3, 2025
“State education officials will be required to verify that they have eliminated all programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion that the administration deems unlawful, according to a new memo. …‘Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,’ Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. ‘When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.’”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon at the White House last month. Her department has said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.” Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.
The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.
At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.
“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”
More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”
Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.
“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.
It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.
The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.”
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4) Israeli Military Expands Ground Operations in Gaza City
Israel said the operation had killed a militant who was “likely personally involved in the abduction” of the Bibas family on Oct. 7.
By Adam Rasgon, Reporting from Jerusalem, April 4, 2025
Palestinians fleeing the Shajaiye neighborhood of Gaza City after the Israeli military issued evacuation orders on Thursday. Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times
The Israeli military pressed deeper into northern Gaza by ground on Friday after issuing a series of evacuation orders calling on Palestinians to flee, part of its escalating offensive against Hamas in the war-battered Gaza Strip.
The expansion of ground operations came after the Palestinian health authorities said on Thursday that dozens of people, including children, were killed in Israeli strikes on a school turned shelter in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City. On Friday, the Israeli military said the strikes were targeting well-known militants in a Hamas command and control center, without naming them.
The evacuation orders have brought renewed hardship to Palestinians who had already endured displacement from their homes and miserable conditions during the first 15 months of the war. A shaky two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March after the two sides failed to reach an agreement to extend it, ending a brief respite for Palestinians in Gaza.
The Israeli military has since embarked on a major bombing campaign and seized territory in Gaza in a tactic that Israeli officials have said was intended to compel Hamas to release more hostages.
As the Israeli military operation expanded, Hamas’s military wing on Friday appeared to threaten the remaining Israeli and foreign hostages held in Gaza. In a statement that did not mention the plight of its own people, Hamas said its fighters were holding some captives in the evacuation zones under “strict security measures that are extremely dangerous to their lives.”
The armed group has in the past threatened the well-being of hostages in the face of Israeli bombardments.
The military said its recent campaign had dismantled weapons infrastructure, including a Hamas command and control center and killed militants, including Mohammed Awad, who it described as a senior military commander in the Palestinian Mujahideen.
The military said that Mr. Awad had taken part in Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and was “likely personally involved in the abduction and brutal murders of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas,” though it did not explain how it had come to that conclusion. Mrs. Bibas and her two young children became symbols for many Israelis of their suffering on Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 abducted to Gaza
Avichay Adraee, the military’s Arabic-language spokesman, said in a post late Thursday on social media that he was providing a “final” warning before a new attack, urging people to relocate southward. Mr. Adraee suggested that militant groups were operating among civilians.
While many people have complied with such evacuation orders from the military during the most recent Israeli campaign, others have chosen to stay in their homes or shelters, saying they could not bear being displaced or that they have nowhere else to go.
On Friday, the military said its troops began operating in the neighborhood of Shajaiye in eastern Gaza City in order “to expand the security zone,” referring to what it has characterized as a buffer zone next to Israel’s border with Gaza.
. During the first 15 months of war, much of Shajaiye was transformed into a wasteland as the Israeli military fought Hamas, with buildings demolished, roads ripped up and utilities infrastructure ruined.
Palestinian health authorities — who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants — said the bodies of 27 people killed in the Tuffah strike had arrived at the hospital.
Multiple videos verified by The New York Times show an explosion and its chaotic aftermath at the Dar al-Arqam school, where civilians were sheltering. The strikes were followed by a chaotic scene at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, where dust-covered and bloodied children were rushed from vehicles.
Khamis Elessi, a volunteer doctor at the hospital, said successive waves of wounded people arrived in the emergency room, overwhelming medical staff.
“It was a terrifying scene,” he said in phone interview. “People were thrown on the ground.”
Dr. Elessi, 56, said he was stunned by the number of wounded children. “I was brought to tears,” he said. “One boy kept asking me: Why did they hit me?”
One of those killed was the grandson of Khalil al-Hayya, Hamas’s top negotiator based in Qatar, the Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV channel reported.
Israel has previously targeted schools being used as shelters, contending that Hamas militants were operating command centers in them. Hamas has denied such claims in the past. The United Nations has said that Israeli strikes on schools probably violated the law by causing disproportionate harm to noncombatants.
More than 1,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the collapse of the cease-fire on March 18 and more than 50,000 people have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Gaza health ministry. The bodies of 86 people killed by Israel arrived at hospitals across Gaza on Thursday, according to the health ministry.
Nader Ibrahim, Ameera Harouda and Aaron Boxerman reporting.
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5) Columbia Displays More Aggressive Posture in Dealing With Demonstrators
Students chained to a gate were removed by security officials. It came as the university planned to deploy 36 officers empowered to remove people from campus.
By Sharon Otterman and Troy Closson, April 4, 2025
Columbia University students protesting Wednesday at the school’s campus in Upper Manhattan. Credit...Marco Postigo Storel for The New York Times
Columbia University students have long had a basic understanding about their relationship with the school’s Public Safety Department. Unlike at most American universities, which employ a full-fledged police force, Columbia’s public safety officers rarely, if ever, touch students.
No longer.
A new, more assertive stance was on display on Wednesday, as the university’s officers intervened to stop a daylong demonstration of students, most of whom were Jewish, who had chained themselves to the campus’s wrought-iron gates. Their demand: that the school’s board of trustees tell them who provided the federal government with information that led to the arrest last month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and recent Columbia student.
Moving to end the protest, public safety officers cut or untangled the students from their chains at about 11:15 p.m., and then physically picked them up before escorting them from campus. The officers carried at least one student off the lawn, according to video posted on social media and student interviews.
“I yelled out in pain that they were cutting off the circulation to my wrist, but they ignored me and proceeded to drag me from under my arms before I had the chance to stand on my own,” said Maryam Alwan, 22, a protesting student whose chain was cut Wednesday night. “And then they fell on top of me, and I was pushed to the ground.”
Even at the height of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement last spring, Columbia public safety officials did not intervene to physically remove students, instead calling in the New York Police Department when force was required.
That has changed, reflecting an evolution in how Columbia administrators think about the use of force and a demand by the Trump administration that the university implement “full law enforcement authority, including arrest and removal of agitators” if it wants the restoration of $400 million in federal research funding that the White House cut.
In a statement, Columbia said that protesters at the gate on Wednesday night were warned that the space had been declared closed by the university and that they would face disciplinary consequences if they did not disperse. Three demonstrators remained.
“They were asked for identification, which two provided, informed of rules violations and informed they would be escorted off campus by public safety if they did not disperse,” the statement said. “Following these repeated warnings, the chains were removed by public safety and the individuals were escorted off campus.”
The university said it was investigating what rule violations had taken place.
Columbia, which has roughly 300 public safety officers, pledged in a March 21 letter responding to a Trump administration demand to do more to fight antisemitism that it would add 36 “special patrol officers.” The new officers will have additional training and, unlike the existing force, have arrest powers.
The new officers will be a mixture of contracted officers employed by Allied Universal, a private security company already on campus, and in-house officers who pass a 162-hour training course, Columbia officials said. Unlike police forces at many other universities, the new officers will not be armed and will bring anyone arrested to a Police Department precinct for processing. The officers will be identifiable by a special badge and patch on their uniforms, officials said.
“One of the overriding goals we have is to handle as many situations on campus as we possibly can on our own,” Cas Holloway, the university’s chief operating officer, said. “Our objective when it comes to things like protest activity and other student-related activity is for our own public safety officers, and ultimately these special patrol officers, to be able to handle it.”
Wednesday’s protest took place just before the new officers were expected to be deployed. The first 20 officers, who work for Allied and have completed a peace officer certification course and been sworn in, were not yet active.
The public safety officers involved on Wednesday were instead operating under a 2019 policy stating that campus officers “will only use physical force that is reasonably necessary to bring an incident under control.” In practice, however, that has meant that force is rarely used against students.
Ms. Alwan, a Palestinian American comparative studies major, was one of the student leaders of last spring’s encampment movement and said she could not recall a response last year similar to what unfolded Wednesday.
“The most aggressive they were, that I can remember, was when they injured a few students by forcefully grabbing tents from them,” she said. “But they have never picked students completely off of the ground and then pushed us onto the ground like that before.”
Earlier Wednesday, Israeli American undergraduate Aharon Dardik said that public safety officers had grabbed his shoulder and arm as they cut his chain off a campus gate during an earlier stage of the same protest, surprising him.
“They didn’t inflict bodily harm, but for me at least, it was just a show of like, oh, this is one of the first instances of Columbia changing how it treats students,” he said. “One of the things you know as a Columbia student is that public safety officers are not allowed to touch you.”
Columbia’s introduction of officers with arrest powers comes as American universities have dramatically expanded their campus police teams during the past several decades. At four-year U.S. colleges with more than 2,500 students, campus law enforcement departments employed nearly 36,000 full-time personnel in 2021 — a 43 percent increase from 2004, federal data shows.
The use of campus police forces can be traced to the late 19th century, when Yale University hired two officers to patrol its grounds. But most schools didn’t have campus police officers and relied on local law enforcement until after the 1960s.
Violent clashes between student activists and outside police officers during protests in the ’60s prompted many administrators to seek legislative permission to create in-house forces, said John J. Sloan III, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has studied campus policing. Schools wanted to make sure that the billions of dollars invested in their campuses were protected.
At Columbia, however, the reverberations of protests in 1968, when New York City police officers flooded campus to rout protesters from buildings, had the opposite effect. Shocked by the violence and more than 100 reports of injuries, faculty members took greater control over the rules for student conduct and discipline. During the ensuing decades, the university came to bill itself as a place where political protest was respected and tolerated.
Last year, Columbia’s pro-Palestinian movement challenged that understanding. With some Jewish students saying they felt threatened and harassed by the protests, which were disruptive and violated many of the university’s rules, the university found itself under heavy pressure to enforce and tighten its rules on demonstrations. Unable to enforce those rules with its own security force, Nemat Shafik, Columbia’s president at the time, called in the Police Department twice, leading to hundreds of arrests and inflaming campus tensions.
Some faculty members now support introducing an unarmed campus force that can better enforce rules in the hopes that it will obviate the need to call in the police.
“A lot of things would go a lot more smoothly if in fact we could physically control our campus space in the event of disruptions,” said James Applegate, a professor of astronomy on the executive board of the university’s senate, a policymaking body.
Other faculty members are concerned that Columbia is signaling a diminished tolerance for protests and political speech. Wednesday night’s demonstration, for example, was stopped by public safety officers even though it was peaceful and students said they had received permission to protest in the area until midnight.
Columbia administrators said they started planning for a peace officer force last summer and through the fall, and that they had consulted with a campus advisory committee. But it was not publicly announced until the Trump administration demanded that the university adopt further measures to control what it described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The timing left some on campus questioning whether Columbia was caving to White House pressure to rein in pro-Palestinian protests.
“Whether police or public safety, security personnel should only be putting their hands on members of our community if it’s absolutely necessary,” said Joseph Howley, a Columbia classics professor who supports the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and visited the protest Wednesday night.
“The real question is: How are we determining the circumstances in which it is necessary to physically touch or move people who are engaged in political protest?” Mr. Howley said. “Last night, I saw students sitting in an area that was not obstructing or interfering with anything. It didn’t seem to me that they presented a danger to anyone.”
Anvee Bhutani contributed reporting.
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6) Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On
The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events, which said the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals.
By Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl, Published April 4, 2025, Updated April 5, 2025
A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.
Officials from the Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a news conference on Friday at the United Nations moderated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that they had presented the nearly seven-minute recording, which was obtained by The New York Times, to the U.N. Security Council.
An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said earlier this week that Israeli forces did not “randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot. Colonel Shoshani said earlier in the week that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants.
Israel did not respond to a request for comment on the video in time for the first publication of this article, but on Saturday, it issued a statement to The Times saying that the episode was “under thorough examination.”
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it said.
The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information.
The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.
The convoy stops when it encounters a vehicle that had veered onto the side of the road — one ambulance had been sent earlier to aid wounded civilians and had come under attack. The new rescue vehicles detour to the side of the road.
Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side.
Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out.
A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy.
The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.
The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the “shahada,” or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. “There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,” the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.
“Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,” he said. “Allahu akbar,” God is great, he says.
In the backdrop, a commotion of voices from distraught aid workers and soldiers shouting commands in Hebrew can be heard. It is not clear what they are saying.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, said in an interview from the West Bank city of Ramallah that the paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a bullet in his head in the mass grave. His name has not been disclosed yet because he has relatives living in Gaza concerned about Israeli retaliation, the U.N. diplomat said.
At the news conference, held at the U.N. headquarters, the president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Dr. Younis Al-Khatib, and his deputy, Marwan Jilani, told reporters that the evidence the society has collected — including the video and audio from the episode, and forensic examination of the bodies — contradicted Israel’s version of events.
The deaths of the aid workers, who went missing on March 23, has drawn international scrutiny and condemnation in recent days. The U.N. and the Palestine Red Crescent said the aid workers were not carrying weapons and posed no threat.
“Their bodies have been targeted from a very close range,” said Dr. Khatib, adding that Israel did not provide information on the missing medics’ whereabouts for days. “They knew exactly where they were because they killed them,” he said. “Their colleagues were in agony, their families were in agony. They kept us for eight days in the dark.”
It took five days after the rescue vehicles came under attack and fell silent for the United Nations and Red Crescent to negotiate with the Israeli military for safe passage to search for the missing people. On Sunday, rescue teams found 15 bodies, most in a shallow mass grave along with their crushed ambulances and a vehicle marked with the U.N. logo.
The area where the convoy stops in the video was captured in a satellite image a few hours later and analyzed by The Times. At that point, the five ambulances and the fire truck had been moved off the road and clustered together.
Two days later, a new satellite image of the area showed the vehicles were apparently buried. Next to disturbed earth are three Israeli military bulldozers and an excavator. Additionally, bulldozers erected earthen barriers on the road in both directions from the mass grave.
One member of the Palestinian Red Crescent is still missing, and Israel has not said whether he is detained or has been killed, Dr. Khatib said.
Dr. Ahmad Dhair, a forensic doctor who examined some of the bodies in Gaza’s Nasser hospital, said four out of the five aid workers he examined were killed by multiple gunshots, including wounds to the head, torso and joints. One paramedic employee of the Red Crescent in the convoy was detained and then released by the Israeli military and provided a witness account of Israeli military shooting at the ambulances, the U.N. and Red Crescent Society said.
Dylan Winder, the representative of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to the U.N., called the incident an outrage and said it represented the single deadliest attack on Red Cross and Red Crescent Society workers anywhere in the world since 2017.
Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the council that an independent investigation must be conducted, and that the episode raises “further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military.”
Neil Collier, Sanjana Varghese and Ephrat Livni contributed reporting. Natalie Reneau contributed video editing.
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7) New York Warns Trump It Will Not Comply With Public School D.E.I. Order
New York’s stance differed from the muted and deferential responses from other major institutions to the administration’s threats.
By Troy Closson, April 4, 2025
A 12th grade Black studies classroom in Harlem, last month. Credit...José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
The New York State Education Department on Friday issued a defiant response to the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding from public schools over certain diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a remarkable departure from the conciliatory approach of other institutions in recent weeks.
Daniel Morton-Bentley, the deputy commissioner for legal affairs at the state education agency in New York, wrote in a letter to federal education officials that “we understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion.’”
“But there are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of D.E.I.,” Mr. Morton-Bentley wrote, adding that the federal government has not defined what practices it believes violate civil rights protections.
The stern letter was sent one day after the federal government issued a memo to education officials across the nation, asking them to confirm the elimination of all programs it argues unfairly promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Title I funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students was at risk pending compliance, federal officials said.
New York’s stance differed from the muted and often deferential responses across academia and other major institutions to the Trump administration’s threats. Some universities have quietly scrubbed diversity websites and canceled events to comply with executive orders — and to avoid the ire of the White House.
A divide emerged last spring as the presidents of several universities, including Harvard and Columbia, adopted cautious responses when confronted by House Republicans at congressional hearings regarding antisemitism. In contrast, K-12 leaders, including David C. Banks, chancellor of New York City’s public schools at the time, took a combative approach.
The latest wave of pushback is spreading. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, told reporters on Friday that the city would take the Trump administration to court if it snatched away funding, according to The Chicago Tribune.
“We’re not going to be intimidated by these threats,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s just that simple. So whatever it is that this tyrant is trying to do to this city, we’re going to fight back.”
Unlike universities that rely on federal funding for medical and scientific research, public school districts are more insulated from threats to their bottom line because 90 percent of their funding comes from state and local taxes.
The Trump administration’s memo used a broad interpretation of a Supreme Court decision in 2023 that declared race-based affirmative action programs were unlawful at colleges and universities. That ruling did not address issues involving K-12 schools.
The expansive reasoning did not sit well with New York. The state’s letter argued that the case did “not have the totemic significance that you have assigned it” — and that federal officials were free to make policy pronouncements, but “cannot conflate policy with law.”
Mr. Morton-Bentley also called out what he described as an about-face within the top ranks of the administration.
He pointed out that the education secretary in President Trump’s first term, Betsy DeVos, once told staff that “diversity and inclusion are the cornerstones of high organizational performance.” She also said that “diversity and inclusion are key elements for success” for “building strong teams,” he wrote.
“This is an abrupt shift,” Mr. Morton-Bentley said, adding that the federal government has “provided no explanation for how and why it changed positions.”
The Trump administration’s memo included a certification letter confirming compliance that officials must sign and return to the Education Department within 10 days. New York indicated that it would treat the demand as a request rather than a requirement.
“No further certification will be forthcoming,” the state’s letter said.
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8) What Is Elon Musk’s IQ?
The questionable measure of intelligence has now been uncoupled from any test and loosed into the discourse to justify Silicon Valley’s power.
By Amanda Hess, April 5, 2025
Photo illustration by Jason Allen Lee
For months, an internet-wide guessing game has swirled around the question of where Elon Musk’s intelligence falls on the bell curve. President Trump has called Musk a “seriously high IQ individual.” Musk’s onetime biographer Seth Abramson wrote on X that he would “peg his IQ as between 100 and 110,” and claimed that there was “zero evidence in his biography for anything higher.” The economics commentator Noah Smith estimated Musk’s IQ at more than 130, a number gleaned from his reported SAT score. A circulating screenshot shows Fox News has pegged the number at 155, citing Sociosite, a junk website. The pollster Nate Silver guessed that Musk is “probably even a ‘genius,’” and theorized that he may not always appear that way because, as he put it on X, “high IQs serve as a force multiplier for both positive and negative traits.”
When we speculate about Musk’s IQ, what are we really talking about?
Not his score on an intelligence test; if he has ever taken such a test, its results have not been made public. His “IQ” is instead extrapolated from his success, his wealth, his biography and his personal presentation. Assigning him a high number serves to explain his vertiginous rise in the technology industry and, now, the government. The reasoning circles around and around. He has money and power, so he must be smart; he has a lot of money and power, so he must be very smart.
When Trump posed with Musk outside the White House in March, a makeshift Tesla dealership assembled on the lawn, the president implored Americans to buy the cars and secure the relationship between Musk’s intelligence and his success. “We have to take care of our high IQ people,” he said, “because we don’t have too many of them.”
For more than a century, psychologists have debated the extent to which an IQ test is capable of measuring a person’s inherent intellect (and if such a thing even exists). Now, “IQ” has been uncoupled from the test itself and loosed in the discourse to lend a scientific sheen to the consolidation of a new political elite.
IQ is the term of choice for the man who doesn’t just think he’s smart, but thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Americans have long been obsessed with IQ, and the human rankings it facilitates, but rarely is that fixation stated so plainly, so incessantly, and at such high levels. To some of our most powerful people, IQ has come to stand in as the totalizing measure of a person — and a justification for the power that they claim.
Trump has spent much of his second term sorting humans into “low IQ individuals” (Kamala Harris, Representative Al Green) and “high IQ individuals” (cryptocurrency boosters, Musk, Musk’s 4-year-old son).
But a wider public fascination with IQ is in the water. (Sometimes literally: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opposed the fluoridation of tap water, claiming that it causes a decrease in IQ.) Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is seeking “super high-IQ” applicants. Vice President JD Vance has insulted the British former diplomat Rory Stewart on X, writing that “he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.” In February, a senior Trump administration official asked employees of the CHIPS Program Office to supply their SAT or IQ scores.
An interest in juicing IQ through training and supplements bridges the manosphere and the parenting internet. Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “misogynist” and online masculinity idol who faces human-trafficking charges in Britain and Romania, claims an IQ over 140 and preaches on a podcast about how to “rewire your brain for relentless success.” Nucleus, a genetic testing start-up backed by the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, made a stir last year with a test that supposedly calculates an “intelligence score based on your DNA.” As the writer Max Read pointed out recently, some X users have begun asking, apparently earnestly, how “low IQ” people experience the world, as if they are fundamentally less human.
Such fixations are a long American tradition, and they are cresting again now at a key moment in history — at the consummation between Silicon Valley capitalism and right-wing political power.
A Human Ranking System
Intelligence testing would not arise until the 20th century, and the abbreviation “IQ” in 1922, but an early metric of intelligence was established by Francis Galton in his 1869 book, “Hereditary Genius.” Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a leading proponent of social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific effort to organize human society around the promotion of the “survival of the fittest.”
Galton founded both the ideology of eugenics and the field of psychometrics — the application of objective measurement to the study of human psychology. In his book, he attempted a statistical analysis of human intelligence and argued that it was a heritable trait. He claimed that men who are “naturally capable” are nearly identical to those who “achieve eminence,” and charted dense genetic connections among various illustrious English judges, statesmen and artists. Nepotism was laundered into evidence of inherent superiority.
Then along came the IQ test, which formalized the scientific nature of the inquiry — or at least its scientific feeling. In 1905, the French psychologist Alfred Binet, with the psychiatrist Théodore Simon, developed the first intelligence scale in order to identify schoolchildren in need of remedial instruction. In 1916, the American eugenicist Lewis Terman adapted the test to create The Stanford-Binet scale, named after the university that employed him.
Terman’s initial tests, organized by age, were overt in their cultural biases: 7-year-olds were asked to describe an illustration of a crying Dutch girl in wooden shoes; 14-year-olds were asked to list three differences between a president and a king; adults were asked to interpret the implied lessons of fables. Though “IQ” suggests that human intelligence is a singular and fixed genetic quality, like height, what the test most reliably determines is how well a person performs on an intelligence test.
The results “have always produced a kind of photograph of the existing class structure, in which the better-off economic and ethnic groups are found to be more intelligent and the worse-off are found to be less so,” the journalist Nicholas Lemann writes. The current version of the test aims to measure fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory and accumulated knowledge — perhaps not coincidentally, the same forms of intelligence that are prized in the technology industry.
In his 2023 history “Palo Alto,” Malcolm Harris writes of Stanford as an institution built on eugenic thinking. Before Leland Stanford founded Stanford University, he established what he called the “Palo Alto System” to classify, train and breed superior racehorses at an intense pace of production — a system that sometimes resulted in the snapped tendons of weaker colts but had the benefit of weeding out inferior horses before investing too much in their development. Once Stanford applied this punishing system to human achievement, it seeded a century-long obsession with intelligence scoring in Silicon Valley — and in the America that it increasingly shaped.
The Binet-Simon test had an inclusive aim: Disabled children in France were at risk of being removed to asylums; by charting all students on the same intelligence scale, those children could instead be kept in schools and recommended for adaptive education.
But the Stanford-Binet scale was generalized into an intelligence test that could be used to measure and rank all humans, and assign them a score relative to a norm of 100. Soon Terman had enrolled his own son Frederick in a study of child “geniuses” and shopped his findings to the U.S. military.
It was America that pioneered the use of IQ for punitive ends, using low scores to deny certain immigrants entry to the country, to forcibly sterilize disabled people, and to push low-ranking soldiers into the line of fire while elevating high scorers to officer positions.
Though the crimes of Nazi Germany compromised the global popularity of eugenics, and encouraged the disavowal of the word, the British and American victories in the World War II also worked as an endorsement of the use of IQ testing in organizing war and, more generally, identifying elites.
In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young used the term “meritocracy” to describe an emerging society organized around “merit” as the new justification for hierarchical power, which he defined as a combination of IQ scores and effort. His satirical work, “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” was written from the perspective of a future sociologist (also named Michael Young) who wished to preserve the meritocracy against its critics.
But the real Young was more skeptical. “If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become,” he wrote, “how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.”
Young suggested that the meritocratic idea was tantalizing to parents who had been denied the pleasures of success, but could nevertheless invest in the possibility that their children, or their children’s children, might be judged smart and effortful enough to claim them. The more frustrated they were in their own life outcomes, the more maniacal they became about ensuring their children’s chances.
When Intelligence Is a Commodity
I see echoes of Young’s insights in the modern parenting internet, which is seized by its enthusiasm for supposedly brain-building supplements and granular child-development tips. As soon as I gave birth to my first child, I was inundated with parenting advice and Montessori-inspired toy brands on social media. They punctuated their sales pitches with little pink brain emojis, as if to suggest that their products could be infused into the organ itself.
The Baby Einstein videos of the 1990s, in which puppets and toys were set to classical music, look totally mindless in comparison. Conceivably any life activity — weaning, feeding, massage — can now be leveraged to optimize the toddler brain, assuring smart parents that, with enough effort, their children can be molded into little geniuses.
Young described midcentury parents who tried to prevent “downward mobility” by obsessing over amplifying their children’s IQs. It makes sense that millennials — an American generation for whom downward economic mobility is likely — would take to the project with a particular zeal.
As parents scramble to hoard the last scraps of meritocratic advantage, the very discourse around intelligence is adapting to the brute power plays of the Silicon Valley elite. The new, sneering invocation of IQ announces, perhaps, that the meritocracy has reached a breaking point. Earnest, nose-to-the-grindstone effort is out. So, too, is the IQ test. The number of an imagined IQ score refers back to nothing, but it’s a fitting signifier for the confluence of political and technological power — the place where political posturing meets capitalist production.
Trump echoed the Palo Alto System (and the eugenic programs it engendered) at a January victory rally, where he declared Musk’s 4-year-old son to be highly intelligent — not because he has any particular insight into early child development but because he knows who the child’s father is. “If you believe in the racehorse theory, he’s got a nice, smart son,” Trump said.
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9) Why Measles Outbreaks May Be the New Normal
Recent Trump administration actions are setting the stage for a measles resurgence, experts fear.
By Teddy Rosenbluth, April 5, 2025
A sign in Seminole, Texas, in February. The current measles outbreak that began in West Texas shows no signs of slowing. Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
As the Trump administration moves to dismantle international public health safeguards, pull funding from local health departments and legitimize health misinformation, some experts now fear that the country is setting the stage for a long-term measles resurgence.
If federal health officials do not change course, large multistate outbreaks like the one that has torn through West Texas, jumping to neighboring states and killing two people, may become the norm.
“We have really opened the door for this virus to come back,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In order for an outbreak to occur in the United States, the virus must first be imported into the country, and it must reach a large, unvaccinated population.
Recent events have made both conditions seem increasingly likely, said Dr. William Moss, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Efforts to control the spread of measles internationally have been disrupted by the Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, which runs a network of more than 700 laboratories that track measles cases in 164 countries.
The program — which helps to ensure prompt public health responses to emerging outbreaks — relies on the United States to fund its entire $8 million annual budget.
Administration officials also have signaled that they intend to end U.S. funding for Gavi, an organization that help purchase vaccines, including those for measles, mumps and rubella, in developing countries.
The funds for Gavi were not included on a list the State Department sent to Congress last week of programs it intends to continue to support. But the organization has yet to receive a formal grant termination letter, and its leadership is lobbying the administration to preserve the funding.
Both the W.H.O. withdrawal and the possible loss of Gavi’s funding are likely to cause a surge in measles cases overseas, increasing the likelihood that a U.S. traveler will bring the virus back into the country, said Dr. Walter Orenstein, a professor emeritus at Emory University and the former director of the National Immunization Program at the C.D.C.
“People don’t understand that supporting global immunization not only is good for their countries, but for our country,” he said.
This week’s layoffs at the C.D.C. included staff members who communicate with the public during infectious disease outbreaks and help craft campaigns to encourage vaccination.
Now communications will be centralized at the Department of Health and Human Services, under the control of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic. The department did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, described the cuts as “a recipe for disaster.”
The national immunization rate for measles, which fell during the Covid-19 pandemic, has not rebounded to the 95 percent required to stem the spread of the virus in a community. That raises the odds that an imported case will land in a vulnerable population and ignite.
Roughly 93 percent of children in kindergarten had the M.M.R. shot in the 2023-24 school year. But vaccination rates are unevenly distributed; some communities have rates around 80 percent, offset by others where the figure is closer to 99 percent.
Now that H.H.S. has moved to cut billions of dollars to local health departments, they may struggle to quash outbreaks early on, allowing the virus to hop to other unvaccinated communities. (A judge temporarily blocked the funding cuts after a coalition of states sued the Trump administration.)
During infectious disease emergencies, it is local health departments that investigate the source of the pathogen and track down anyone who might have been exposed so they can be quarantined.
The contact-tracing process is time consuming and resource intensive, especially for a virus as contagious as measles.
“A fire is burning and we are at the same time shutting down all the fire departments,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.
The current outbreak that began in West Texas shows no signs of slowing. There have been more than 480 cases in the area and 56 hospitalizations since late January. The outbreak has also spread to bordering states, sickening 54 people in New Mexico and 10 in Oklahoma.
Genetic sequencing has suggested that the outbreak is also linked to 24 measles cases discovered in southwest Kansas.
Measles was officially eliminated in the United State in 2000. But the speed at which the Texas outbreak has grown and the fact that it has already jumped to other, under-vaccinated communities makes it very likely that the United States will lose that status, Dr. Nuzzo said.
Measles is no longer considered eliminated if a chain of infections continues for more than twelve months. Public health officials in West Texas have predicted the outbreak will continue for a year.
A large measles outbreak that spread through parts of New York State for nearly 12 months nearly cost the country its elimination status in 2019. The outbreak was contained in large part because of aggressive vaccine mandates, which helped substantially increase childhood immunization rates in the community.
“We just missed it by a hair,” Dr. Nuzzo said. “Where we are now is worse than that.”
Mr. Kennedy has offered muted support for vaccination and has emphasized untested treatments for measles, such as cod liver oil. According to doctors in Texas, his endorsement of alternative treatments has contributed to patients delaying critical care and ingesting toxic levels of vitamin A.
Mr. Kennedy recently tapped a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism.
If the country does lose elimination status, Dr. Moss said, its unlikely that infection rates will resemble those of the pre-vaccine era, when measles infected nearly every child by age 15.
But it would be likely to mean more frequent and larger outbreaks that make life riskier for society’s most vulnerable: babies too young to be vaccinated, and immunocompromised people.
“There are direct consequences — the health tolls, the long-term health impacts,” Dr. Nuzzo said. “Measles outbreaks are like just incredibly costly and disruptive.”
“It’s also just an embarrassment. It puts the United States on par with some of the most resource-constrained settings in the world, and out of step with most high-income countries.”
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10) The Trump Administration’s Department of Homeland Publicity
A cabinet member’s social feed is one example of the administration’s turn to reality-TV tactics — slick, showy, sometimes cruel — as a means of government.
By James Poniewozik, April 5, 2025
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He has written about the connection between television and political messaging since the Clinton administration.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has served as the face of the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement project in a series of social-media videos. Credit...via X
Some days the show is a prison drama: A mass of prisoners assemble under the watch of an authority. Some days it’s a police procedural: Protagonists in uniform conduct raids on dark city streets. Some days it’s a western: A figure in a cowboy hat patrols on horseback, keeping an eye on the wild frontier.
The show has many forms, but it is all one production — the social-media feed of the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. Since she took office in January, the secretary’s online video presence has been helping a media-minded administration broadcast images of unsparing domination with a telegenic face.
Ms. Noem’s social feed drew wide notice last week when she posted a 33-second video from a Salvadoran prison where the administration has been sending detainees. Dressed in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement cap and active-wear, a $50,000 Rolex watch on her wrist, she warns that “if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”
There are other people in the video too. Though Ms. Noem uses the word “terrorists,” we do not know their history; legal cases and reporting have questioned the charges of gang membership against some El Salvador detainees, and the administration has acknowledged deporting at least one man in error.
The figures behind Ms. Noem are not so neatly or expensively styled but they also convey an aesthetic message. The men, many of them shirtless, are crowded, teeming, sitting and standing, seemingly at attention, to face the camera from behind bars. Ms. Noem, the image says, is literally standing between them and you. They are objects, warnings, a forbidding wallpaper of fear and subjugation.
The video sent a stark message, if not a universally lauded one. As with all things Trump, however, the video seems meant to appeal to one viewer above all. Before he took office for his first term, President Trump, the former host of “The Apprentice,” told top aides that they should approach every day as if it were an episode of a TV show, in which their goal was to win. He also had a preference, then and now, for underlings who perform well on camera and “look the part.”
The secretary’s videos take care to make her look the part, dress the part and play the part against scenic backdrops. Long one of the G.O.P.’s most camera-ready stars as governor of South Dakota, she changed her manner and even her look as the MAGA movement took over the party. Now, as the face of its immigration-enforcement project, she wears and is framed by accouterments of inviolable authority.
She goes out with ICE, wearing a police vest and declaring, like Andy Sipowicz in “NYPD Blue,” “We are getting the dirt bags off these streets.” She dons a U.S. Customs and Border Protection hat and jacket in a post announcing “America is CLOSED to law breakers.”
Ms. Noem is only one of the administration staffers carrying out the president’s combat-by-video mandate. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox TV host, loads his X feed with images of himself working out in the gym and meeting with the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor, underscoring his feed’s recurrent theme of politicized hypermasculinity.
The official White House account is rife with boasting and taunting posts, many drawing on meme formats from the dank corners of the internet. One post mimicked “A.S.M.R.” videos, luxuriating in the sounds of chains and whirring jet engines as it showed a deportation flight readying to depart. The Republican-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee joined in as well, posting a takeoff on a long-lived meme, depicting Mr. Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk as dancing pallbearers carrying a casket marked with the logo of the United States Agency for International Development.
Ms. Noem’s department is at the center of one of the administration’s most visible publicity pushes, on the issue — immigration — on which Mr. Trump currently polls best. Her account often posts clips from conservative-media outfits including Fox News; her own in-house videos, in turn, provide fodder and B-roll for the same such segments.
Her feed deploys the tropes and techniques of various TV and social-media genres in miniature. In the horseback video, she is shot from ground level, speaking over her shoulder with mounted agents in the background, calling on an entire library of filmic images of cavalry and posses riding off to tame lawlessness.
In another set of posts, Ms. Noem sits and rifles through printed mug shots of people she calls “scumbags” — mostly men of color — arrested on charges of violent and sexual crimes; it’s as if “America’s Most Wanted” were remade in the form of a YouTube unboxing video. Another produced clip, with intercut black-and-white arrest images and an ominous soundtrack, could come from a true-crime documentary.
The message is of ubiquitous danger. The videos collectively say that criminals, gang members and other predators want to slip in through every crack, and that Ms. Noem and the administration are here, there, everywhere — the border, back alleys, a Coney Island subway station — to stop them.
The images speak of a dramatic enforcement blitz and a stark turnaround at the border, though the number of crossings had been dropping before Mr. Trump took office. The Biden administration sometimes posted enforcement videos, too, but it was not as ubiquitous in publicizing its border policy.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it may be that a picture also conveys the impression of a thousand arrests. The aesthetic of the Trump administration’s videos borrows from terrorism dramas, crime dramas — the kinds of stories, like “24,” that have in the past suggested that personal liberties and due process can get in the way of safety.
Sometimes the images are grim, sometimes chipper, often a disconcerting blend of the two. There is a stylized dystopian vibe to the project overall — though whether Ms. Noem is fending off a dystopia (of swarming invaders who want to attack and plunder America) or ushering in a dystopia (of airbrushed propaganda and cheerful brutality) is in the eye of the beholder.
But the secretary’s publicity efforts so far show how she, like other members of the administration, has internalized the key elements of the Trump media ethos. First, that governing and power require potent images that end-around analysis and go for the primal. Second, that those images require a camera-ready presenter.
And finally, that in the rolling TV production that is the Trump administration, there is one protagonist, executive producer and star who must get top billing. When you go through the Ms. Noem’s feed, there is one repeated message that cuts through as much as any about arrests or threats or “dirt bags.” It is this: “Thank you, @POTUS.”
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11) Mass Protests Across the Country Show Resistance to Trump
Demonstrators packed the streets in cities and towns to rail against government cutbacks, financial turmoil and what they viewed as attacks on democracy.
By Shaila Dewan, Minho Kim and Katie Benner, April 5, 2025
The crowds stretched for nearly 20 blocks in Manhattan. Credit...Adam Gray for The New York Times
They came out in defense of national parks and small businesses, public education and health care for veterans, abortion rights and fair elections. They marched against tariffs and oligarchs, dark money and fascism, the deportation of legal immigrants and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Demonstrators had no shortage of causes as they gathered in towns and cities across the country on Saturday to protest President Trump’s agenda. Rallies were planned in all 50 states, and images posted on social media showed dense crowds in places as diverse as St. Augustine, Fla.; Salt Lake City and rainy Frankfort, Ky.
“Pouring rain, 43 degrees, biting wind, and people are still here in Albany in the thousands,” said Ron Marz, a comic book writer who posted a photo of the crowd at the New York State Capitol on X.
While crowd sizes are difficult to estimate, organizers said that more than 600,000 people had signed up to participate and that events also took place in U.S. territories and a dozen locations across the globe.
On Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the protest stretched for nearly 20 blocks. In Chicago, thousands flooded Daley Plaza and adjacent streets, while, in the nation’s capital, tens of thousands surrounded the Washington Monument. In Atlanta, the police estimated the crowd marching to the gold-domed statehouse at over 20,000.
Mr. Trump, who was playing golf in Florida on Saturday, appeared to be largely ignoring the protests. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some of the demonstrators waved American flags, occasionally turned upside down to signal distress. Many, especially federal workers and college students, did not want to speak on the record for fear of retaliation. Right-wing slogans like “Stop the Steal” were co-opted in defense of Social Security, medical care and cancer research.
“I’m tariffied. Are you?” one placard read. Global financial markets tumbled this week at Mr. Trump’s announcement of tariff increases, which many economists warned would raise prices for U.S. consumers. Republicans in Congress wrestled over budget proposals that included cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food benefits.
Rob Ahlrichs, a Baltimore resident who attended the protest in Washington with his two sons and his wife, Katherine Sterner, put out a sign with a graph depicting stock market indexes plummeting that read, “Did you vote for this?”
In Chicago, Marilyn Finner, 65, who works in customer service, said she had never attended a protest but that she felt compelled to take part on Saturday because she was concerned about threats to retirement benefits.
“Eventually I want to receive my Social Security that I paid for,” she said. “I’ve been working since I was 13 years old. I’m fighting for my Social Security and everybody else’s.”
The mass action, with the deliberately open-ended name “Hands Off!,” was planned at a time when many Democrats have bemoaned what they see as a lack of strong resistance to Mr. Trump. The president has moved aggressively to punish people and institutions that he views as out of step with his ideology.
Don Westhoff, a 59-year-old accountant, was another first-time protester. He voiced outrage at the administration but had words for Democrats as well, saying they needed an infusion of younger leaders to oppose the president.
“We want to let the elected Democratic officials know that good is no longer good enough,” he said. “They need to fight.”
Multiple concerns prompted Katrin Hinrichsen to drive six hours from her home in Tolland, Conn., to Washington to attend. She held a sign with names of legal residents with foreign passports whom the Trump administration has moved to deport for allegations of antisemitic speech and gang activities.
Her 18-year-old son is transgender, she said, and she feared his losing access to gender transition care. “Now suddenly he’s a hate object, just because that’s politically convenient,” she said. “I’m just furious.”
The rallies were organized by Indivisible, MoveOn and several other groups that led protests about abortion rights, gun violence and racial justice during the first Trump administration. Organizers said they hoped to shift the emphasis to pocketbook issues like health care and Social Security, with the message that Mr. Trump is making life harder for the average American while benefiting his richest allies.
They also moved away from focusing on massive demonstrations, like the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, to instead plan hundreds of local gatherings in communities large and small.
Concerns varied by location. In Ketchum, Idaho — population 3,555 — cuts to the Forest Service generated deep concern, said Fiona Smythe, 56, a resident who attended a protest that she said drew more than 500 people. One sign showed Smokey Bear and read, “Only you can prevent forest fires. Seriously. We’ve been defunded. It’s just you now.”
Some demonstrators had specific issues, while others opposed the Trump administration and MAGA movement in general. “Hands off my money, rights, democracy,” one sign proclaimed. “Make lying wrong again,” said another. Elon Musk, the billionaire heading Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn attack on the federal bureaucracy, was a popular target.
“I feel like the MAGA people have corrupted and co-opted the American flag and the idea of patriotism,” said Barbara Santarelli, 77, a retired health care worker draped in a flag who participated in the New York City rally. She described herself as a Jewish centrist who was concerned about her retirement benefits, attacks on universities and freedom of speech, the war in Gaza, and due process rights.
Before the event, she recounted, her daughter expressed concern for her safety. But she said attending the protest was something she had to do. “The soldiers, they go to war to defend democracy,” she recalled saying. “At my age, this is how I go to war to defend democracy.’”
In Chicago, Glynn Tipton, a 45-year-old pharmaceutical professional, said he was attending to make friends feel safer.
“I’m a generic white guy, so they aren’t coming for me,” he said. “There’s a lot of my friends who are Jewish, trans, in the military or sick, and they’re not doing OK. It’s OK for me to stand out here, so I should for the ones who are afraid.”
Many protesters said they had been directly affected by cuts to federal jobs and grants. In Atlanta, Johnny Johnson, 34, said he had been hired by the Internal Revenue Service, moved, fired and rehired in a matter of months.
“I dipped into my 401(k) because I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said.
In Denver, veteran Trump protesters said there was a noticeably smaller Latino presence on Saturday than there had been at demonstrations during the first Trump term. “You notice there’s not a lot of Chicano people out here? It’s because people are scared,” said Brian Loma, 49, an environmental organizer who set up a tent in the snow selling hot chocolate. The government seemed to be “ripping up green cards,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
Among the demonstrators in New York City was Melissa Jackson, 41, a former special education teacher and the mother of a 3-year-old on a specialized learning plan for students with disabilities.
“I think it’s ridiculous. New York, the United States, is the melting pot. Like, what do we want? Like, not diversity, not inclusion?” she said, adding that she was also concerned about cuts to public education. “We’ve come too far to take so many steps back.”
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12) A Different Kind of Anti-Trump Resistance Is Brewing
By Micah L. Sifry, April 5, 2025
Mr. Sifry writes a newsletter about democracy, organizing and tech.
Tara Booth
Ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House and turned Elon Musk’s chain saw on longstanding federal programs and agencies, Democratic voters have been asking: Where is the opposition?
Democrats are still furious at Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, for helping Mr. Trump keep the government open; many find the public style of Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader in the House, too buttoned-up to meet the moment. And while more Democratic politicians are jetting to town hall meetings and rallies, list-building and maneuvering to run for president in 2028 aren’t the same thing as organizing. Even Senator Cory Booker, who took to the Senate floor this week with a 25-hour speech, capped his heroic effort with a volley of texts and emails asking for money. That’s not how you build a movement.
Democrats have been looking for the next resistance in all the wrong places. Instead of waiting for some politician to say the right words and catch fire, they should look to the people who are already on fire: federal workers.
America’s 2.4 million civilian federal workers are, by their nature, generally patriotic and politically moderate. Nearly 30 percent of them are veterans. They all take an oath to defend the Constitution. Also, unlike many politicians from both parties who went to elite schools, are worth millions and have to talk about their parents’ or grandparents’ humble beginnings to claim a connection to their constituents, most federal workers are just like the people they serve: working and middle class.
All this makes them uniquely well positioned to lead a new kind of resistance — more mainstream and grounded than the last one, and powerful enough to mobilize millions of Americans under its banner.
It’s a truism that Americans do not realize how much good the federal government does in their lives. But now there’s an army spreading out to remind them. In March, off-duty park rangers led demonstrations in more than 100 locations, from Abraham Lincoln’s home to Zion National Park. Postal employees, who work for an independent federal agency and number about 635,000 nationwide, held similar rallies in more than 200 places.
Federal workers are also protesting inside the U.S. Capitol, testifying at community impact hearings and speaking up at town halls. On Saturday, groups such as Indivisible and MoveOn, which helped lead the resistance to Mr. Trump during his first term, are staging their first big national demonstration in Washington, and federal workers and their unions have a significant role. Satellite rallies are happening in more than 1,000 locations around the country.
Why is this new defiance emerging from this corner of the political landscape? Many Democrats accepted Mr. Trump’s re-election with a kind of stunned resignation — it’s hard to argue with a popular and electoral vote victory. But hardly anyone expected Mr. Musk’s rampage through the heart of the federal government with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint prepared for Mr. Trump’s new term, called for tightening government hiring and retention standards, and for making it easier to fire low-performing civil servants. They did not recommend giving an unelected mega-billionaire super-bureaucrat the power to demolish whole government agencies and programs overnight by deleting their budgets, firing many of their employees without cause or due process and badgering the rest with mass emails demanding they prove their value on a weekly basis.
Human beings also don’t like being told that their life’s work is being fed “into the wood chipper,” as Mr. Musk gleefully described DOGE’s destruction of agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
It’s still early days. Many government workers are keeping their heads down, hoping to avoid attention and keep their jobs. Some are doing what they can to throw sand in the gears, by leaking damning news to reporters. Many of their unions — who just had their longstanding contracts canceled by Mr. Trump — are fighting back in the courts. And every week, more of the rank and file are speaking out, sharing their stories and organizing.
Rosa Lafer-Sousa and Matt Brown are postdoctoral research fellows at the National Institutes of Health, doing cutting-edge work in neuroscience. They’re both officers in the fledgling union of N.I.H. fellows. Despite their prestigious jobs, most of the fellows live paycheck to paycheck, Dr. Brown said. After 10 years of academic study, he makes less than $70,000 a year.
DOGE’s firing spree is breeding a heightened political awareness in them. “I spend a lot of time on TikTok,” Dr. Lafer-Sousa said. “Very early on, seeing videos in my feed of veterans who had just been illegally terminated, seeing scientists who had just been illegally terminated, seeing park rangers,” she said, she realized that “this is our coalition. We are now all experiencing the same cruel treatment, and we can work together to fight back against this.”
“What unites us is we all took an oath,” she added. “We all chose, at least within the federal sector, to serve our country.”
An Army Corps of Engineers worker said something similar when we met in March at a weekly picket outside the office of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Lower Manhattan. He described how the day he was hired, he stood by a flag, put his hand on a Bible and took an oath to defend the Constitution. He had come out on his lunch break to support fired bureau workers. “They keep Wall Street in line,” he explained. “This is all crucial to the way we live our lives, the way we protect our homes and the way the American system has worked.”
As we talked, protesters of all races and ages marched in circles, waving American flags and chanting things like “2-4-6-8, Dodd-Frank is pretty great!” One woman held a sign that read, “Credit card late fees? Hidden charges on auto loans? Mortgage lender ‘loses’ your payment? THE C.F.P.B. HELPS YOU.”
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, dozens of clinical drug trials have been halted, cancer research programs have been shut down, commercial fishers in the midst of updating their boats have lost thousands of dollars, food banks have gone into panic mode, veterans have lost mental health counselors, parents of kids with special needs have been told to expect fewer school aides, and the Social Security website crashed four times in 10 days.
As the blast radius of Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk’s cuts and chaos spreads, federal workers and their message will only resonate further. It’s like the Joni Mitchell lyric: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The health workers, scientists, park rangers, veterans care providers, letter carriers, air traffic controllers and many others who are speaking out aren’t just trying to save their jobs — they’re trying to save programs and investments that were providing irreplaceable services to regular Americans. By going after the federal work force, Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are radicalizing the very people who can best explain how the government does so much good for so many.
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13) Sudanese Refugees Flee to Chad Amid Deadly Airstrikes
As a civil war enters its third year, it only seems to be getting worse.
By Alex Pena, April 6, 2025
The first stop for many Sudanese refugees fleeing deadly ground attacks and airstrikes in Sudan is a remote mobile medical clinic along the border with Chad, operated by Doctors Without Borders. Sudan’s civil war is entering its third year, and increasing airstrikes have been a driving factor for many refugees now fleeing the country for safety in neighboring Chad.
“I’m always afraid of the planes,” said Kubrah Abdullah Dawood, 25, a Sudanese refugee who had just crossed the border alone with her 11-month-old daughter. Doctors Without Borders staff members quickly ushered her into a makeshift tented clinic just steps from the border, where she told them that she fled Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after an airstrike killed her brother. She said it had been a drone attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the R.S.F.
“As the Sudanese Armed Forces have made progress in Khartoum, we’ve seen more [R.S.F.] moving towards Darfur,” said Kate Hixon, advocacy director for Sub-Saharan Africa Amnesty USA. “Wherever the R.S.F. is, we’ve seen burning of villages, blocking of aid, conflict related sexual violence, and we expect an increase in that in the coming weeks.”
While Ms. Hixon notes an expected increase in ground attacks as the R.S.F. regroups in its Darfur stronghold, she said airstrikes from both sides of the war had been a driving factor of recent displacement.
In recent months, the influx of refugees to the region prompted Doctors Without Borders to scale up its services along the more rural northern border regions of Chad. Survivors who recently fled the Darfur region described to The New York Times how airstrikes by Sudan’s military would follow shortly after R.S.F. fighters infiltrated their villages or marketplaces.
“The R.S.F. would raid the village, [and then] the [Sudanese military] would strike,” said Fayza Adam Yagub, 38, from Saraf Omra, at a refugee camp in Adré, Chad. “But the R.S.F. would manage to escape, and the poor people were the ones getting hit.”
As recently as March 25, a Sudanese military airstrike in the small village of Toura in North Darfur killed at least 54 people and wounded dozens more, according to local monitoring groups, which called the attack a war crime — an accusation the army has denied. The R.S.F. fighters, and their allied militias, have also been accused of targeting civilians.
Sudan’s military and the R.S.F. have been embroiled in a brutal civil war that has killed nearly 20,000 civilians and displaced over 12 million people, according to the United Nations, which noted that the situation was only getting worse.
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14) ‘0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain
Humor and art have been used to mock the powerful in Britain for centuries. Now Elon Musk is on the receiving end.
By Michael D. Shear, Reporting from London, April 6, 2025
A fake advertisement on a bus stop in London last month. Credit...Leon Neal/Getty Images
The mischievous posters began appearing all over London in the past two months.
On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”
Another mock ad shows Mr. Musk and President Trump in front of a red Tesla with the words: “Now With White Power Steering.” In North London, a fake movie billboard blares: “The Fast and the Führer,” with a picture of Mr. Musk saluting beside a Tesla with a DOGE license plate, a reference to the budget-slashing federal agency he currently leads on behalf of Mr. Trump.
“Parental Guidance,” warns the billboard, put up by a group calling itself Overthrow Musk. “Tesla’s CEO is a far-right activist. Don’t give him your money.”
Across the British capital and in several European cities, Mr. Musk’s signature business has become the target of the same kind of political anger that has fueled vandalism of Tesla cars in the United States and sometimes violent protests at his dealerships.
There have been some instances of unruly protests and vandalism in Europe. But much of the anti-Musk sentiment has taken the form of political satire, of the kind that has flourished in Britain since at least the 18th century.
Just outside Berlin, a group called the Center for Political Beauty used high-power lights to project the word “Heil” onto the side of a Tesla factory so that it read “Heil Tesla,” along with a picture of Mr. Musk saluting during a speech in Washington. In Italy, street art depicts Elon Musk taking off a mask to show Adolf Hitler’s face underneath. The words “Elon Mask” appear above the picture.
“There’s never been a target exactly like this,” said John Gorenfeld, a software engineer who helped start a London-based group called “Takedown Tesla.” The group has organized protests of several dozen people for the past several weeks. They hold posters along freeways that say “Honk if you hate Elon.” And they have printed bumper stickers for Tesla owners with phrases like “Don’t make the same mistake” and “Pre-2020 Model.”
“Nobody who is that rich and powerful has behaved that outrageously,” Mr. Gorenfeld said. “There’s something campy and ridiculous about Musk’s brand of toxicity. And it opens up a real space to ridicule.”
In Europe, Mr. Musk is not just a faraway example of American wealth and power. Over the last year, he has become a frequent political meddler, often weighing in on behalf of far-right causes on X, his social media platform, where he has 218 million followers.
In Britain, Mr. Musk is known for sharing misinformation about a child rape scandal and calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be jailed. He has called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator who is in prison for contempt of court. And he criticized the seven-year sentence of a neo-Nazi who incited and took part in anti-immigrant riots last summer.
The small anti-Musk groups that have popped up around Europe have the same basic goal: Tank Tesla’s stock price and sales as a way of sending a message to Mr. Musk and other super-wealthy people who are thinking of promoting far-right politics around the world. Some groups declined to be interviewed about their actions, citing concern about becoming a target of Mr. Musk’s ire on social media. But others were more open about their aims.
“The point of this is to show Musk and other billionaires that they are vulnerable and can’t act with impunity,” said Ben Stewart, a founder of a British satirical activist group called Led by Donkeys, which worked with the Center for Political Beauty to project Mr. Musk’s image on the Berlin factory. “We have to harness global public opinion to push back.”
Organizers think it’s working. Tesla’s stock price has almost halved since its high in December, around the same time that Mr. Musk began his high-profile role overseeing the firing of government workers and slashing federal agency budgets. This week, Tesla reported a 13 percent drop in sales compared with a year ago.
“What they’re trying to do is put massive pressure on me, and Tesla I guess, to you know, I don’t know, stop doing this,” Mr. Musk said last week in Wisconsin where he was campaigning for a state supreme court candidate.
And yet, he added with a shrug, “Long term, I think Tesla stock’s going to do fine, so maybe it’s a buying opportunity.”
The protesters who spoke about their aims said they wanted to challenge Mr. Musk’s influence without resorting to the vandalism that the billionaire has called out in the United States as “coordinated violence against a peaceful company.”
Theodora Sutcliffe, a London resident who helped organize Tesla Takedown, said none of the people she works with are participating in violence. Instead, they have sought to find other ways to capture public attention.
At one of their protests, a wavy, 20-foot balloon man who vaguely resembled Mr. Musk saluted into the air. At other times, Ms. Sutcliffe and her fellow protesters have left fliers on the windshields of Tesla cars.
“Once upon a time, Teslas were cool,” one flier says. “Now, sadly, that’s not the case. Driving a Tesla and using Tesla chargers means you’re propping up Elon Musk, a man who promotes climate deniers and fossil-fuel junkies.”
“If you want to go viral in the U.K., you have to be smart, I think,” Ms. Sutcliffe said. “That’s our sense of humor normally.”
The anti-Musk efforts in Berlin were led by Philipp Ruch, the artistic director for the Center for Political Beauty, a German activist group. In an interview, he said that much of the anger at Mr. Musk in Germany stems from the billionaire’s support for the country’s far-right party, the Alternative for Germany.
“The first day that the administration comes in, he does the Hitler salute,” Mr. Ruch said. “This is something we couldn’t tolerate, politically and artistically.”
Mr. Ruch performs many of his protests by “overwriting” one image with another. At the Tesla dealership, he used lights to superimpose his words and images of Mr. Musk to create a new artistic creation. (He said the police are now investigating his efforts, which were visible for about an hour.) Pictures of the building were spread widely on social media.
Other efforts have gone viral, too.
There are mock car air fresheners called “Musk-B-Gone” that promise to cover “the stench of fascism.” And cardboard cutouts of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, thanking Tesla owners for their support when they top up their cars at the company’s supercharger lots.
“There are some people who are coming at Musk as though he’s some sort of passive agent of Trump and that really, this is just another way of getting to Trump,” said Ms. Sutcliffe. “There’s other people who perceive Musk as somebody who’s a unique type of threat that we really haven’t seen before in terms of his economic control and control of the information space.”
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