I haven't written about Trump's fascist attempts to exert control over Harvard University primarily because after making a great fanfare of announcing they intended to fight back against the regime's ideological policing, they quietly walked back their resistance posture, repurposed their diversity, equity, and inclusion office, and shockingly agreed to share information on foreign students with DHS. For all intents and purposes, Harvard's actions represented a complete capitulation to the fascist regime's agenda, with some posturing thrown in that allowed Harvard to save face in a way for example, Columbia had not. As we've noted many times in this thread however, appeasing fascists doesn't work and once you agree to obey Trump's authoritarian edicts, you're essentially property of the regime going forward.

Harvard is now learning this lesson the hard way because despite all their cowardly bootlicking, Trump is still openly announcing the regime's intention to revoke Harvard's tax except status; something he has literally no legal authority to do according to most experts.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-seeks-to-revoke-harvards-tax-status-despite-numerous-concessions/

Trump Seeks to Revoke Harvard’s Tax Status Despite Numerous Concessions

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

In response, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) and three other Democratic senators have demanded that the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) internal watchdog investigate whether the Trump administration is unlawfully pressuring the agency to target Harvard.

Just weeks ago, Harvard was celebrated for resisting the Trump administration’s threats to withhold $2.2 billion in federal funding, positioning itself as a defender of academic freedom by filing a lawsuit challenging the funding freeze. But recently, the university has quietly reversed course, rebranding and altering the mission of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) office, announcing that it will no longer fund affinity group celebrations during commencement, and sharing international student information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“You mean to tell me banning affinity group graduations, handing over school records to the DHS gestapo, cracking down on protests, and dismantling DEI didn’t appease this fascist dictator?! I’m shocked I tell you,” Harvard Law School instructor Alejandra Caraballo said on Bluesky."

I think the facts of this story speak for themselves; Trump's war on higher education to enforce a white nationalist ideological framework on American life is clearly fascist, Harvard put on a brave face but ultimately chose craven collaboration with the regime's fascist agenda, and surprise, surprise, Trump has continued to threaten the University and demand further concessions. Trump is a fascist bully hellbent on controlling every aspect of our society and you don't ever stop a bully by appeasing them.

There is however a deeper layer of fascist fuckery going on here, because Trump's war on higher education also aligns perfectly with noted fascist theorist Curtis Yarvin's proposed "Butterfly Revolution" to transform America into a fascist dictatorship under Trump; part of which revolves around destroying or taking control of "the Cathedral" which Yavrin defines as the mainstream media, prestigious American universities, and important cultural institutions. I doubt Trump has ever read The Butterfly Revolution, but his Vice President, JD Vance, certainly has. He's a devote follower of Yarvin's expressly "neo-fascist" teachings, as are key billionaire TechBro Trump donors and supporters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Now whether or not Trump understands that all of this is part of a plan by his nazi billionaire buddies to shatter the American nation state and create techno-feudalist "Patchwork" or "Network State" city-state dictatorships out of the smoldering ashes is more debatable; but either way, all of these guys are clearly working on the installation of a fascist political, social, and ideological framework on our society that will last decades beyond Trump's own miserable existence.

I think at this point you have to be using some kind of motivated reasoning to pretend a Trump regime full of literal nazis who're kidnapping anti-genocide student protestors legally living and studying in the United States, is doing so to fight "antisemitism." This regime doesn't care about antisemitism, it cares about its genocidal settler colonial client state in the Middle East, Israel, but the administration, which frequently dabbles in open antisemitism, is happy to use the fight against really existing hatemongering against Jewish people as a cudgel to accomplish its fascist goals; namely allowing Israel to complete its genocide in Gaza, purging student dissidents with experience fighting the regime, and seizing control of higher education as part of a Yarvinite scheme to create a fascist dictatorship under Trump. As many, including some of the students quoted in the article I'm about to share have noted, weaponizing antisemitism to do fascism is in and of itself a form of antisemitism, and it's certainly not doing anything to help keep Jewish American students safe.

If any of that seemed controversial to you, I'd ask that you please consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Colombia student organizer who was lured in for seizure by the promise of a citizenship interview after being marked out by fascist, pro-genocide doxing groups Canary Mission, and Betar for having the nerve to go on 60 Minutes to talk about the occupation of Gaza and why the fight for Palestinian liberation and the fight against antisemitism "go hand-in-hand."

https://zeteo.com/p/jewish-students-slam-trump-arrest-moshen-mahdawi

'New Kind of Antisemitism': Jewish Students Slam Trump's Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi

"Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.

The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.

“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them."

I think one of the students quoted in this article summed up the situation best when he pointed out that Palestinians shouldn't have to be model minorities in American society for folks to treat them like human beings and care about their rights, but by all accounts, including those from school faculty and Jewish students who knew him, Mohsen Mahdawi was in fact that person. Indeed at the time of his kidnapping Mahdawi was actively working to bridge whatever rift exists between Palestinian and Jewish students at Colombia and in the surrounding community; so to claim you're fighting antisemitism by confining and attempting to deport such a person is a particularly crass and odious weaponization of one vulnerable minority to persecute another; which is probably why it appeals so much to a fascist regime full of imperialist Islamophobes and antisemites.

Look, as much as the regime (and society at large) wants to divide us all and put us into little boxes, the reality on the ground is that none of this serves the interests of everyday people in our society, be they Palestinian, Jewish, or neither. Weaponizing Jewish students and the safety of American Jews to install fascism *is* as one student put it, "the new kind of antisemitism." Targeting foreign students legally studying in the United States for opposing a genocide the regime wants to profit from, *is* fascism in action. Using foreign policy as an excuse to expel non-white people *is* part of a fascist project to establish a white ethno-state in America. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we all have a vested interest in stopping the persecution of folks like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil; not just because we could be next, but because a failure to do so will be a terrible stain on our common humanity, and diminish all that is worth saving about our shared society.