Linkage

We set speed limits, we put them on signs, and we expect people to follow them. But in reality, it plays out a little differently. People don’t really drive based on what a sign tells them. So if signs don’t work, what does?

Two students at the University of Melbourne could be expelled and two others suspended for participating in a pro-Palestine protest last year, in what rights groups are calling an unprecedented crackdown on political activism in Australia.

All four students plan to appeal the penalties if they are enforced, according to a report by The Guardian.

The protest took place in October 2024, when demonstrators briefly occupied the office of a university academic allegedly linked to partnerships with Israel's University of Jerusalem. Protesters called for the university to disclose and divest from collaborations with Israeli institutions, citing Israel’s human rights record and occupation of Palestinian territories in alignment with the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

One student, reportedly facing expulsion, told The Guardian they were present for "no more than 10 minutes" and had not engaged in harassment or intimidation. Nevertheless, the university pushed for expulsion, citing the "seriousness of the breaches" and the student's prior conduct record.

Funny 'cos it's true:

“We are more dedicated than ever to the American people,” said Schumer. “We have always fiercely combated fascism. Remember that time I kneeled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds? That ended racism for Biden’s entire term. But it’s back now because of Trump. Along with all those other isms. Which is why we are rolling out a plan to relentlessly send out fundraising emails and nothing else. That’s our promise to the American people. You give us $5, we will never give up on doing nothing for you.”

A top political analyst who has been studying the Democratic Party for decades weighed in on the bold new strategy.

“Based on the plans I’ve seen, this really is a big deal and it’s going to create a lot of change. I mean, it’s a huge step up from their past policy of doing very little for $5,” said Maria Devenzo, who runs the left-leaning think tank Moving Progess. “They used to occasionally pass legislation. To promise to continue relentlessly ask hardworking citizens for money while making absolutely no concrete promises in return is a bold new era.”

In the first week of January, I received a letter from the Berlin Immigration Office, informing me that I had lost my right of freedom of movement in Germany, due to allegations around my involvement in the pro-Palestine movement. Since I’m a Polish citizen living in Berlin, I knew that deporting an EU national from another EU country is practically impossible. I contacted a lawyer and, given the lack of substantial legal reasoning behind the order, we filed a lawsuit against it, after which I didn’t think much of it.

I later found out that three other people active in the Palestine movement in Berlin, Roberta Murray, Shane O’Brien and Cooper Longbottom, received the same letters. Murray and O’Brien are Irish nationals, Longbottom is American. We understood this as yet another intimidation tactic from the state, which has also violently suppressed protests and arrested activists, and expected a long and dreary but not at all urgent process of fighting our deportation orders.

Then, at the beginning of March, each of our lawyers received on our behalf another letter, declaring that we are to be given until 21 April to voluntarily leave the country or we will be forcibly removed.

The letters cite charges arising from our involvement in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. None of the charges have yet led to a court hearing, yet the deportation letters conclude that we are a threat to public order and national security. There has been no legal process for this decision, and none of us have a criminal record. The reasoning in the letters continues with vague and unfounded accusations of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” – referring to Hamas – as well as its supposed “front organisations in Germany and Europe”.

This is not the first instance of Germany weaponising migration law. Since October 2023, the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has unlawfully frozen the processing of all asylum seekers from Gaza. And on 16 April 2025 a federal administrative court in Germany will reportedly decide on a case that could set a precedent for the German state to increase deportations of asylum seekers to Greece.

These extreme measures are not a sudden shift or solely a fringe rightwing position. They are the result of a more than year-long campaign by the liberal Ampel coalition – the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party (FDP) and the Greens – and the German media, calling for mass deportations, widely seen as a response to the growing pro-Palestinian movement, and targeted predominantly at the Arab and Muslim German population.

Legal experts agree that sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador would be flagrantly illegal under both U.S. and international law — and that the idea itself is shockingly authoritarian, with few parallels in our nation’s history.

The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.

“You can’t deport U.S. citizens. There’s no emergency exception, there’s no special wartime authority, there’s no secret clause. You just can’t deport citizens,” says Steve Vladeck, a legal commentator and law professor at Georgetown. “Whatever grounds they try to come up with for denaturalization or expatriation, the one thing that is absolutely undeniable is that people are entitled to individualized processes, before that process can be effectuated.”

[…]

 Trump, for his part, suggested Friday evening on Air Force One that he would follow the Supreme Court’s ruling to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that,” Trump said. “I respect the Supreme Court.”

To this point, his administration has not yet followed the high court’s order to “facilitate” return of a man whom, by the government’s own admission, it wrongfully deported and imprisoned in a foreign gulag.

“The problem that we’ve seen over the last week is a series of Supreme Court rulings that have gone out of their way to not endorse what Trump is doing, but also created these procedural artifices that have in some respects thwarted what the lower courts are doing,” Vladeck explains. “At this point, what is it going to take for a majority of the Supreme Court to treat the government’s behavior with the kind of contempt that the government is treating the lower courts?  

Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

And so we have the Trump administration’s dedication to releasing its steady stream of real and AI-generated propaganda designed solely for these pornographic purposes. Footage of shackled immigrants being loaded on to deportation flights, set to the sounds of clanking chains and locking cuffs, which the official White House X account labeled “ASMR”, a reference to audio designed to calm the nervous system. Or the same account sharing news of the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident who was active in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment, with the gloating words: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD.” Or any number of homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s sadism-chic photo ops (atop a horse at the US-Mexican border, in front of a crowded prison cell in El Salvador, slinging a machine gun while arresting immigrants in Arizona …).

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.

Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.

Democracy, we are told, allows people a voice in politics. But only, it seems, if they have a few million to give to a political party. As the political scientist Prof Martin Gilens notes in his book Affluence and Influence: “Under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.” GDP growth was strong under Joe Biden, but as the economics professor Jason Furman points out: “From 2019 to 2023, inflation-adjusted household income fell, and the poverty rate rose.” GDP and social improvement are no longer connected.

All those good things? Sorry, they’re not for you. If you feel an urge to tear it all down, to burn the whole stinking, hypocritical, exclusive system to the ground, Trump is your man. Or so he claims. In reality his entire performance is both a distraction from and an accelerant of spiralling inequality. He can hardly lose: the more he exacerbates inequality, the more he triggers an urge for revenge against his scapegoats: immigrants, trans people, scientists, teachers, China.

But such killer clowns can’t pull this off by themselves. Their most effective recruiters are centrist parties paralysed in the face of economic power. In hock to rich funders, terrified of the billionaire media, for decades they have been unable even to name the problem, let alone address it. Hence the spectacular uselessness of the Democrats’ response to Trump. As the US journalist Hamilton Nolan remarks: “One party is out to kill, and the other is waiting for its leaders to die.”

In recent weeks, Homeland Security’s requests shifted, according to the former senior Social Security official. Immigration agents began meeting with DOGE representatives at the agency to discuss how they could achieve their larger goal of pushing out tens of thousands of migrants that ICE was struggling to apprehend and deport, the official said.

That request soon morphed into the idea of placing immigrants into the deaths database, the official said.

Leland Dudek — the acting commissioner who was elevated from a low-level position after displaying public loyalty to DOGE — had qualms about the task, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking. He thought it was illegal, the people said.

Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem intervened — and Dudek agreed to move forward.

On Monday, according to four people familiar with the matter, Dudek signed two memorandums with Noem allowing the database action. Dudek declined to comment on the episode.

The next day, 6,100 mostly Hispanic names and their attached Social Security numbers were added to the Death Master File, according to records reviewed by The Post.

The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list.

The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment.

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.

“The danger,” one senior intelligence official told us, is that the team preparing the strategy are all warfighters, seeing America as no different than the Middle East.

When then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in 2021, it was a response to January 6, basically casting the MAGA rioters as terrorists threatening the very survival of American democracy.

Biden’s 2021 strategy was itself alarming, casting as threats all kinds of Americans, including social media users, gamers, and students. In fact, the strategy led to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security establishing a backchannel with social media and gaming companies like Roblox, Discord and Reddit in order to monitor communications and map networks, approaches it had long used overseas.

[…]

Now, the rewrite of the National Strategy document is shaping up to comport with Trump’s view of the country, the GAO hints and others say, rescinding the previous approach and altering the focus of counterterrorism actions over the next four years. That includes focusing more on Trump’s political opponents and framing petty crimes taking place at day-to-day protests as terrorism.

Counterterrorism is a fancy way for the government to refer to the business of pre-crime. Designed to prevent attacks before they happen, counterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack. This process of divination partially relies on so-called “mobilization indicators,” characteristics that could move people to carry out acts of extremist violence.

Ever had a heated argument expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione or HAMAS? Or bought military-style tactical equipment? Or withdrawn from family? If so, you meet the government’s criteria listed in its 2021 “Mobilization Indicators” booklet, a document intended to help local and state police to spot a terrorist.

These criteria might strike you as creepy because, as the booklet itself concedes, “many of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.”