Trump told the Conservative Political Action Committee that he would issue an e ecutive order barring federal funding for research at universities that restrict “free speech.”
Apparently he was thinking of campuses where student protestors have barred hate speech from far-right provocateurs. Speakers who advocate racial hatred and bigotry have not found a hearty welcome on such campuses. Trump promises to intervene.
“A new executive order from the White House will aim to make federal research funding for colleges and universities contingent on their support for “free speech,” President Trump said Saturday.
The announcement, during Trump’s address to the Conservative Political Action Conference, appeared to target complaints by some university critics that institutions of higher education stifle right-wing viewpoints.
“If they want our dollars, and we give it to them by the billions, they’ve got to allow people like Hayden and many great young people, and old people, to speak,” Trump said, bringing onstage a young conservative, Hayden Williams, who was physically attacked last month while tabling for a conservative organization at the University of California at Berkeley…
”The executive order, Trump said, would “require colleges to support free speech if they want federal research” money. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump told the CPAC crowd, meeting at National Harbor, Md., that he planned to sign the order “very soon” but did not provide specifics or say whether a draft has already been prepared.
The federal government distributes more than $26 billion a year to colleges and universities for research purposes, according to the National Science Foundation. The vast majority of that money is assigned to projects for the Pentagon, NASA, and the departments of Agriculture, Energy, and Health and Human Services…
”Somebody would have to decide which universities were not supporting free speech on campus,” said Catherine Ross, a professor in constitutional law at George Washington University. “Some group of Washington civil servants — or maybe even worse, political appointees — would be looking at charges of speech discrimination at various colleges and universities, and labeling them as either acceptable in terms of free speech or not acceptable. And that … is a government interference in speech.”
“What’s more, she added, Trump’s policy could inadvertently disqualify many religious academic institutions from receiving federal research funding, to the extent that their religious beliefs prohibit certain views or speakers on campus.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trump’s definition of “freedom” is the freedom to rob and/or murder anyone that he doesn’t like or approve of and that’s …. everyone but him.
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Right again, Lloyd.
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Trump is highly sensitive to a single far-right conservative being roughed up at UC Berkeley.
At his own rallies, he ENCOURAGES the roughing up.
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He is really sliding down the slippery slope of crazy. He should go ahead and try to do this. This would finally be the end of him. Un-Koch ALL the college campuses!!!
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Right wingers only want free speech for right wingers. The far right/libertarian GOP tea party propagandists want to intimidate and bully universities into accepting a speech by any right wing nut that walks off the street. For the most part, universities already do allow for differing opinions and differing political points of view; there already is dialogue and discussion between left and right but that’s not good enough for these right wing snowflakes. What about talk radio which is 99% far right wing flame throwers; when do liberals and left leaning talkers get their chance on talk radio (or Sinclair Media for example)? This is a manufactured crisis by the right wing to further infiltrate universities with anti-science garbage and anti-progressive ideology. They say that the universities lean left. Good! Tough luck to the right wing snowflakes.
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“Right wingers only want free speech for right wingers…” I am reminded of hearing male students fussily argue that their voice is now being ignored and stifled in the curricula….where the percent of female voices included has moved up from about 2% to 12%.
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”Somebody would have to decide which universities were not supporting free speech on campus,” said Catherine Ross.
I’m sure Trump has Limbaugh, Hannity, Mike Savage, Dennis Praeger, Glenn Beck or Anne Coulter lined up to be the death panel for universities and their federal funding.
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Why bother when you can do to universities exactly what has been done to the press in the US–you can buy them–in the case of schools, by endowing programs and professorships with right-wing agendas.
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Frederick Hess of AEI advised the donor class to do what Bob states. It’s in an article Hess co-wrote with an employee of a Gates-funded ed organization, “Don’t Surrender the Academy ” (Philanthropy Roundtable).
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Is this the same champion of free speech who encourages people to beat up protesters at his rallies?
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Yes.
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And, we know, that that is the tip of the melting iceberg or fetid fatberg.
There is absolutely no question that if he could reasonably get away with it he would have thugs out roughing people up and threatening people daily like any scumbag “strongman”. The truth is that he is a whitecollar crook and would-be mob boss of some kind. In a different time or place, who knows, maybe another dictator, maybe another actual gangland boss. He sees himself crossing that border.
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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/opinion/rudy-giuliani-trump.amp.html
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Without equivocation, executives of the Gates Foundation have no place giving commencement nor graduation speeches at public universities. Gates and his Microsoft co-founder spent $500,000 to defeat judges who rendered verdicts favorable to public schools. The founder of Gates-funded TFA, Bellwether, New Schools Venture Fund and Aspen Pahara, when promoting charter schools in an interview, said the goal was “….brands on a large scale”. Citizens built public universities as quality alternatives to legacy admission schools. They did not sacrifice so that an oligarchy could take the asset and make money on corporate education brands.
When the Gates Foundation appears at a public university event, Bill Gates’ image as a “philanthropist” is burnished. It makes a mockery of America’s citizens and their democracy..
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Now we will see if libertarians are really advocates of free speech. Any person who advocates the purity of freedom trumpeted from the libertarian right should be preparing to introduce articles of impeachment at the mere mention of such policy. But soft! A peal of silence from these mountebanks. They would rather have freedom for the few at the expense of the many.
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You’re not doing my Trump derangement syndrome any good.
There may be a free speech issue in itself here as Private Universities are Corporations.
Well, it would be interesting to see how the Court twisted itself in a pretzel to not apply Citizens United.
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I am told, Joel, that I, too, have a very severe case of this. Primary symptoms: horror, utter disbelief, hallucinating that the President of the United States is actually John Gotti
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Gotti would have been less of a buffoon
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C’mon, Joel. It’s friendly fascism!
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It will not be friendly if he wins again.
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Friendly, for now. And it makes no difference that Trump supporters are the minority. I believe Göring.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
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Sheesh, Joel. Try to inject a little dark humor and you completely excise the humor! Also, did you write John Oliver’s rant last night?
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On Oliver’s video: I think he missed the single most important point (which I do not recall he ever did in the past). This point is articulated by a commenter called Hero of the Beach, and who simply quoted Steve Hawking
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
One commenter said this less abstractly
And because even though productivity constantly rises, we still insist on 40 hours week as a full time job. Cut every job down to 20 hours with the same pay, eliminate jobs that just exist because they were artificially created, lean full-on automation and we’d be better off as a society. Fewer hours worked means even more productivity (because you’re fresh, you can concentrate, you don’t check social media every 5min), it means being healthier and having fewer sick days, it means spending more time with your kids helping them to become better people.
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GregB
So how can I disagree with that? I actually had it taped but didn’t watch it till you forced me to.
I am glad that he points out that automation since 1984 has displaced… I would trace that back a bit further to the early to mid-70s. As American industry abandoned the Unionized North for the Right to Work South and state of the art facilities (for the time) and Detroit in competition with newer plants in Germany and Japan retooled.
As I have pointed out many times, go to the pop culture Allentown and My Home Town highlighting the displacement by the mid-80s.
However, the cry that automation has taken all these jobs since the mid-90s is bunk. Trade took those Jobs and the data is undeniable.
But like automation that doesn’t have to be negative.
There are no free markets we(Government / Politics) pick the winners and losers all the time and as I heard a minister of the EU/EC say a while back ” In the aggregate trade has been very positive; however, we forgot that people were not aggregates”. So, of course, Velshi replies we have to retrain. I think that Oliver is more correct on what that training is. We don’t have to retrain we have to devise ways to redistribute the fruits of productivity. The same for immigration if you are a worker displaced by immigration you are not very pleased. but it is not the immigrant you should be venting on but the employer undercutting wages.
Of course, none of this explains the Trump voter. They are not angry populists voting for a billionaire fraud.
But my funk since the election goes deeper. Realizing that the nature of our Republic makes any progress almost impossible without a black swan moment of biblical proportions. Lawrance O’Donnell pointed the same conclusion right after the election.
Our system was built to preserve slavery and the Republicans have figured out how to use the US Senate to do so.
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BREAKING NEWS: 40 percent of Americans suffer from severe emotional and cognitive deficits!
According to an NBC/WSJ poll today, 4 out of 10 Americans would reelect Vlad’s Agent Orange.
It’s a National Emergency!!!
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It the 6 in 10 who don’t vote as frequently that worries me.
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It is
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I, of course, don’t believe a word WSJ says.
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Yes. I used to subscribe to it, but since Morlock Murdoch bought it, it has become just another extremist right-wing rag. Murdoch–if that’s not a great name for some comic book ghoul, I don’t know what is.
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The US is no longer a democracy. It is an oligarchy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
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This free speech crap is an ALEC bill.
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/forming-open-and-robust-university-minds-forum-act/
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Not surprising
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